Archive for October, 2006

Gambling and a (strange) Vegetarian


17 Oct

Afternoon all

Well I went to Rileys on Friday afternoon with Dave and Matt for a few frames of snooker (I got very much beaten – embarrassing really). We ordered some food while we were playing and Dave (a vegetarian since kiddie-hood, and not through morals or anything just purely because he doesn’t like the taste) ordered a cheese and tomato melt – I had a big burger as did Matt, when the food arrived we all started “chowing down” or whatever those cool kids say! After a few mins Dave thought “hmmm… not much tomato in this” and decided to look inside it, SHOCK HORROR it was not a cheese and tomato melt but a cheese and Bacon melt! The strange thing – he enjoyed it until he knew what it was and after that he couldn’t eat it. He described it as “the weirdest feeling ever” So anyway we can all now train Dave to start eating meat, really he’s just a fussy girl and not a proper veggie person!

UPDATE: Dave was grumpy at me calling him a “fussy Girl” so I apologise (even if he is)

Oh and on Saturday I was talking to mother dearest and she pointed out that it was a triple roll over on the National Lottery/lotto/lucky ball draw or whatever it’s called so I decided to buy some tickets, which means I can now officially say my mum caused me to take up gambling!!!

Thats all for now!

 

Byeeee

Oh deary deary me England, what a performance


12 Oct

So England played Croatia last night and anyone who is anyone will have seen what happened! (I have chucked the vid in above more for comedy value than anything else). The game was poor the team was even worse, and I had to sit through all 90mins whilst only drinking Coke or J20 (i’m trying to get healthy) so I couldn’t even see the drunken funny side of it all! Well if you ask me, Lampard needs dropping, Crouch needs swapping for Bent or Johnson and we should all leave off Paul Robinson poor sod, if it wasn’t for him we would have lost a good 3 more goals if not more! That’s all I have to say on the matter – England – win Euro 2008, PAH utter rubbish 

A

Testing BlogJet


12 Oct

I have installed an interesting application – BlogJet. It’s a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://blogjet.com

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” — Albert Einstein

Well If this worked you are all reading it now! Let us see shall we!

To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade


10 Oct

So I was hit by the usual “oooooooh I want it I want it now” moment today. Anyone who knows me will know that I have many of these but this one in particular inspired me to blog about it!

    I own an MP3 player, no big shock there, but I do admit that it’s kinda old (I say old I mean it’s 4 years old which in tech terms is nearly OAP status). Now there is the latest version of my player out (the Creative Vision: M) which is not the most recently available from Creative but the rest are rubbish.* After getting stuck by my “moment” I decided to walk down the high street in Sheff and see if I could find it for the same price (or cheaper) as it was on Amazon.co.uk. By the time I had got to the bottom of the high street I had totally changed my mind and I am now not going to upgrade at all! I’ll tell you why:

Firstly my MP3 player works and as the saying goes “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, second it has a 20GB capacity, which Dave pointed out is more than enough (i currently have 2866 tracks on it, which is roughly 6 days of music) and he’s right. Third and most importantly is the battery life, because my Zen Touch has a non colour screen the battery life of the device is a very impressive 34 hours (I have actually proved that). I value this battery life highly as it means that I don’t have to charge it every night or every other night, in fact I can usually get through a whole week (Sunday to Sunday) without charging it! Now I use my player pretty much everyday (as I write this it is plugged into my speakers playing away) and if I had to charge it every night well I just wouldn’t I’d forget or whatever and then I’d be without my music! Ok so I can’t watch video on it and I don’t have a colour screen or somewhere to look at my photos! If I want to do that I’ll use my laptop not a silly 2.5″ screen where you need to have glasses to see what’s going on! So that’s my conclusion, the “moment” passed and I am sticking with my Zen and it’s lovely lovely battery!

 

 

 Oh and yeah Google announced yesterday that they are buying YouTube for $1.65 billion my view remains the same – “Good Luck Google” though there is an interesting article on possible copyright issues here and here (read them in that order)

Bye for now

A   

Football, Google, Big diggers and bad backs


08 Oct

Hi, I know I know the blogs a bit lame at the mo, I promise it’ll be better from now!

So I know I am a bit late on this one but there is a big rumor that Google is to buy YouTube for $1.6 billion dollars :o . Now that might sound like nutso price but just think about it for a minute, Google video has not really taken off, YouTube gets 100m video views a day (that’s a lot of viewings ;) ) but at the same time some industry commentators have speculated that YouTube’s running costs — specifically the bandwidth required — may be as high as US$1 million per-month, thereby fuelling criticisms that the company does not have a viably implemented business model – in fact in March they added advertising to their site as well as Google adwords. So it begs to ask why is Brin and Page are expressing an interest in the service. Recently Brin was quoted saying that his companies growth was so rapid that even he has lost track of everything and as a result has asked his engineers to stop developing new things and concentrate on improving existing services! Never the less they appear to be interested in YouTube and maybe because they do get 100m video views a day that they have put such a high price on the site!! The question remains to be seen if Google can use it’s expertise to convert that 100m people a day into revenue that will cover that hefty price tag!

Earlier this week I saw a big digger destroying this old disused building and boy did that look fun :) the man in the digger really looked like he was enjoying himself! If anyone owns a digger and needs something knocking down then PLEASE call me!!

So this week I put my back out and thus it’s been really rather painful but it is slowly getting better (I hope) should any nice female masseuse want to come and give me a massage please feel free to e-mail me!!

Lastly I will comment on the England football match this weekend - “Utter Utter Rubbish” Enough said

A

Small annoying Social Networks


04 Oct

Ok rant time,

So I got an e-mail today from someone who wanted to add me to their ”Bebo” friends and when I clicked the link, what did it do….. “Please enter your details here to register”  Now I am all for social networking, I even caved to the myspace craze a while back which I still think it is rubbish but I have created a place for people to look at :D. Now there are some main players and then there are some annoying places that are just determined to send you hundreds of junk e-mails from the site and all their 3rd parties. This is ridiculously annoying for everyone, for example I have 2 web based e-mail addresses both hosted by different companies and both of them get at least 40 junk mail a day to each and that’s not including the numerous e-mail accounts I have closed or ignored due to them becoming unusable through junk mail. Also more often than not these things are a fads as well, people sign-up because the service looks “cool” and then 3 months later they stop checking it and all those they enticed to join then continue to get the flippin junk e-mail. Those that have good financial backing are fine, the myspace’s the Linked in’s of the world are good, No junk mail, no annoying 3rd parties that “come across” your e-mail address and these services are actually useful tools in certain respects! but the other ones are just annoying un-useful, leeches on the internet society and people need to stop using them PLEASE unless these sites get good financial backing they will continue to use whatever method they can to make the money, be it selling e-mail addresses to companies or sending the mail themselves promoting businesses and offers which if taken up make money for the small firm at the expense of the users! My solution – Michael Birch (bebo CEO) and others pay attention - make a good, useful, effective, service that people will be happy to PAY for and you don’t need to use them and their e-mail address to create money!!!

Oh and the person who sent me that bebo e-mail – good to hear from you i’m just not going to use it! e-mail me at: andrew@aspiringgeek.me.uk

Head meet Hangover, Hangover meet head!


03 Oct

Ug……. What a morning, got up at 11am and all I could muster to say do or think was “need coffee” and then wobble to get one! Yep I went out last night, after some dithering around by Claire we decided to go meet Dom (Matt’s mate) and his mate in the graduate! So Claire, Matt, James and myself all jumped in a taxi and went over to the pub. Dave, Jamie and Al (and later the other Al) met us all there as well. Needless to say the whole idea of “just a couple” that Claire had come up with didn’t last more that ooohhh… 15 seconds. Anyway, come 12:30, 10 mins after drinking up time we got thrown outta the pub :( but that didn’t matter tooo much as by that point I think we had all had to much! Then came the …… argument/debate/pleading kinda thing, Claire wanted to go back to Dave’s house to continue on the night but Matt (the flat pet and keyless as he doesn’t pay to live here) wanted to go home. I was going to do whatever Matt decided cause he needed to get home and If I went to Daves an left him on his own he couldn’t have! Anyway Claire pleaded and begged and argued and moaned but in the end Matt and I went home for a rest while Claire, went to Dave’s. Matt did point out a funny thing though, Claire who has lectures at Collegiate Campus was going to Dave’s and most likely would end up on his couch and not coming home at 3am. Now Dave lives a) about 4 miles from my Flat and B) to get back to the flat (which Claire has to do) She has to walk past Collegiate Campus! So as she is in at 11 that means she’d have to be up at 8am to get back get washed etc etc and go out to lectures which is nearly all the way to Dave’s again :) ! So neway….. She didn’t go to her 11am lecture, in fact she just txt Matt and asked him to go pick her up and he has (nutter) so I think Matt and myself made a good decision would you not agree??

Oh and on the way back here last night I had a lovely kebab my first of the new uni year!

Right I’m off I have to be in Uni at 2 and need food, more coffee and a shower

Byeeeeeeeee

A post from Uni


02 Oct

Yep I’m in uni between lectures so I thought I’d use this time constructivly and write a blog. Ok ok i know I should be learning and enhancing my knowledge (isn’t that the same thing) but it’s the first day and I have very little to learn! Just had a lecture on the Fundamentals of Computer Architecture where our lecturer built a PC right infront of us just missing the case e.g. there is a motherboard and some ram etc etc put it all on a table plug it all in and see what happens! It worked great until he picked it all up and the PSU and the motherboard touched together and then there was a pop and some smoke and no more was it a working PC! Dave’s just sat down next to me HI Dave!!!! Jamie is to my left and Kev’s over there <--

I got a lecture at 5 till 6 then I am done and Matt is going to drive me home! Mainly because I have food at my house and he's hungry! He also seems to be the Flat pet which is nice, he needs a home! I am tryong to get some pictures from freshers week onto here at the mo but the technology is letting me down! I might have to put them up later when I am back in my flat and can use my phones data cable. Sying that I might get one in a sec hold on......

Bingo

Me and the Lovely Claire

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s me and Claire!!! More to come later

Right I am off now got a lecture with a woman called NOREEN!!!!

Office by Tesco!


01 Oct

Hi,
   So today Tesco’s have announced that they are to start selling their own software! Yep Tesco is taking on Microsoft, which has to be the STUPIDEST thing i have heard all year! They are going to deliver and office suite, a security package and a photo editor amongst others. Now ok they say they are going to offer the software for £20 or less but they are going to need to spend a lot of time and money on getting the software right and useable! With office 2007 coming out soon and having seen and used the beta I think they are going to be very hard pressed to beat the usability in the office package. Oh well I think it’s silly and to make their money back they will have to sell a lot of copies which, I doubt they will do! Good Luck Tesco, good luck Sir Terry Leahy but I think you’ll fail!!

Other news in the world of the Aspiring Geek, got dragged to the union bar last night by Claire, Will and Nicola but I must admit I had a good time! Town lost on Friday to Colchester, but I am not saying anymore about that! Lectures start tomorrow at 12 noon so that’s gonna be fun! and I have spent to much this week, but that’s not new!

Right off to make a cup of tea now

Bye Bye

The Musings of an Aspiring Geek

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