Month: July 2004

I have hope.

I’m sorounded by people smarter than I am. I can’t even figure out how to get the bloody HTML to display in here to show you the answer I got in email this morning. Well that’s not entirely true. I don’t have the patience to make the tables work properly. I hate hate hate hate tables. I cannot stand them they never work right for me. Yes I know they are simple, they just don’t like me and I don’t like them much.

Is Motley Crue’s Bitter Pill one of the greatest songs of all time? Why yes, yes it is.

I had planned on going to bed early this evening. That was about two hours ago but after talking Hebe for a walk I seem to have been sat at my computer for about 90 minute with nothing to show for it. Primrose Hill is really nice by night, especially on a clear night like tonight. It’s a damn pretty view. With the weather so nice these days and colleges being out, there are large groups of young people (I can’t believe I’m calling college students “young people”) sitting around talking and drinking. Ah good days.

Around this place has been entertaining today. I can’t really say I put much (read: any) effort into applying anything to me. Bee-loving little comment slag! is to blame for it all. (I really have to write something to automate that for me. Having to go check the html for style each time is getting old already. Tomorrow at work perhaps.) Blogger has a nice feature to prepopulate entries but I never really took to using that as I’d rather a selection of templates I can enter. I’ve never gotten around to using a LJ client, perhaps one of them can do it.

Oh in today’s news, the Mercury Music Prize nominations are particularly shit. Franz Ferdinand are acceptable but that’s about the best you can say about em. Decent fun live but nothing to really spend any money on. Speaking of live, the Barfly mail has just come in. Do I want to spend Friday night at a British Sea Power DJ set just down the road? I may well do. Hmm, now they are an excellent live band with a damn fine debut album under their belt.

Fuck it, going to sleep now. I’m tired.

I’d love to go and work for Google. They seem like a great company and still a good bit of that Dot Com sheen.

However I don’t think I’d have a chance in hell at even getting an inteview. Here is one of their recruitment ads and a little explanation with it.

Answer on a post card (comment) please?

I know I had seen something recently about a new Mull Historical Society album coming out soon. Metro had it listed a pick this morning, I hadn’t realised it was out so soon. So lunch in Hammersmith to pick it up. This coming weekend I’ll be back out for more music. Modest Mouse and The Hives need picking up but after payday. A quiet week ahead more or less. Big Wednesday night out for Patricks leaving do.

Anyway the new MHS album This is Hope. On first listen it’s not the staggering work of genius which the second album Us was. In places, it touches on it and indeed in some places it sounds just like a continuation of the previous albums. That’s perhaps just a trend within his music. Indeed having just read up the blurb on Amazon, the first song is indeed a continuation of a track from the first album. It has made me go back to the first two albums and they will be my soundtrack to the afternoon. There will have to be a few more listens to this one before I make up my mind.

Russian accents are really damn sexy. There was a really cute Russian girl I went to college with for a couple of years. Her name was Helen, I wonder whatever happened to her…and no of course I don’t remember her last name to google her.

I still haven’t managed to send an email back to a friend. I do know why. It’s more than just me being shit at email. I guess I just don’t want to stick the words down onto a page. Having said that, there is no reason not to. It’s just one of those barrier things. Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow.
 
Work tomorrow will be interesting and or hell. I really need something to do to keep me going.
 
Right sleep.

Hope of the States were excellent. Really great gig. Was up the front for all of it and the crowd were really going wild throughout. They looked a little taken a back at the reaction throughout. Realised that was my fourth time seeing em. Saw them on the NME tour last year then supporting the Spree a week later and Glastonbury a few weeks ago. When I get paid, I’ll be booking for the fifth time in the Astoria in late October.

Apparently City of Heroes has around 200k subs. That’s a pretty big number given it’s not the cheapest game to start playing. I guess it has a lot longer playability than I had originally thought. It’s been under a great bit of discussion over at the V and it struck me that if every player gets a free copy of the CoH comic, that makes it the biggest monthly comic, month in, month out. A big bit of proof that the superhero genre isn’t offputting?

These new desks have a few disadvantages. People like to slow down as they go past and read the screen. It’s annoying me. I may request one of those screen guards if it keeps up.

I want to go and see the Edward Hopper exhibt at the Tate before it leaves. I was just googling for it this morning to see how much booking really was required and it looks like a good bit. Pricy too but it’s got to be done.

Have to sort out getting back to Dublin too. Will be looking into that as soon as I get paid at the end of the month. May see if I can do a week. I have 15 days left to take by the end of the year, five of those to make eight days in Dublin would be really good.

Now that I’ve started using Firefox actively for a week or so, I really like it. It seems to loose the web connection on a regular basis which is annoying. I’ve had to jump into IE a few times today to get a page to load. I’d like a setting where I can restrict it only opening in tabs instead of new windows. Tis’nt too bad at home but I use a lot more in work and so XP grouping is on for more than one. Dead handy for IM but less so for more focused windows.

On my seventh or eight attempt at this sentence and I still have no idea how to phrase it. My brain just shut down. I was working away listening to some music when all of sudden boom. Everything was wrong. I wasn’t able to concentrate on the form, I was just incapable of looking at it. All there was for that single moment was the music, up as loud as possible drowning out everything around. Unfortunatly I know exactly what caused this one. I’m just glad that the awesome live version of Idioteque from I Might Be Wrong was kicking off and three button presses later was going at full volume.

Tonight I get to go home, sit down and do nothing. Looking forward to it. I’ll be playing some CoH and genereally doing nothing. May watch some stuff and that’ll be about that. Weekend is looking quietish. Going out Saturday evening and we’ll see how that goes but no plans for the rest.

Back in the mid 90’s Channel 4 had an interesting Friday night lineup. Leaving Eurotrash completly to the side, the was a late night youth culture magazine called Passengers. It was one of many replacements for The Word. Nothing about it stood out that much. It was pretty generic cult stuff. Except for one thing the theme music. It was probably my first introduction to Iggy Pop and it’s been one of my favourite tunes since then.

Quickly as I’m off to bed.

It’s fun, it’s put together pretty nicely. Somewhat overuse of CGI but nothing too noticeably bad.

However there is one minor problem with it, which is possibly more to do with expectations than the movie itself. It doesn’t have the heart of the first one. It has everything but that.

And now for sleep.

I’m pretty much unpacked and all set-up at my new desk. It is nothing like as bad as I expected. I’ve only a couple of problems and they should be sorted tomorrow. I do prefer the straight desk set-up, just the multiple keyboards get in the way unfortunately.

The weekend was long and messy. After all the plans for a quiet one, well it just wasn’t.

By 6.30 on Friday, I was 6 pints down and then I was off out drinking for the night. Got back to the Washington to meet a small number of the V for some drinks. At 4.30 the next morning we are sat around my living room still drinking. It was rather messy. I learnt a few things which I’ll list for your benefit.

– Rowers are cunts.
– Never mention Cambridge again. When it takes over an hour to get the conversation back onto comics, you know something is wrong.
– Choking on your beer because someone says something stupidly funny is not only embarrassing, it’s rather painful. I’m fairly sure I splurted some of it out too.
– Alex Maleev’s DD work may well be based on a book of poses but it does not matter, it’s still lovely artwork.

Saturday morning wasn’t too bad at all. The bastards decided to tear up the road right next to my bedroom but I was up before it anyway. Hebe was barking loudly so I dragged myself out of bed.

During lunch on Friday a few of us with no plans had planned to meet for a quiet beer and then go and see an early evening movie somewhere for Saturday night. So we met up in BRB’s at 5. The entire cinema thing got about 5 minutes consideration until we went for a pub crawl. Only the 7 pubs mind you and some decent food along the way so not too drunk. Cobweb joined us for the last couple, we were certainly not sober when we made it down there. It was a good good evening.

Out of it came plans for some drinks this coming Saturday. Going to drag some of the corp people out for a beer or two and hopefully it will be good.

Sunday was quiet. Met up with Ciaran and Neil/Dave/Deco for a couple of pints which ended the weekend rather nicely. And it was in Camden so just a few minutes walk to get there and to get back.

Hebe is still alive, I’m not quite convinced Alex believes that will be the case in a few weeks but right now she is still alive. She’s very lost without Alex and wanders around the flat looking for her everytime she gets in. It also means a lot less attention and she’s missing that too. Poor thing. She’ll have a tough few weeks ahead. If she’s lucky Cobweb or McKelvis will be around some weekend to spoil her rotten.

Metallica’s S&M is a truly fine album and is more than likely one of my most listened to albums.

Ah yes comics. Just the two but both are worthy of note.

Powers #1 from Marvel’s Icon imprint. Not that you can tell from the cover at all. First comic in a while to actually prompt a holy shit for the silent two pager. I wasn’t expecting that at all. It also felt like a cheap play to get some attention. It takes far more away from the book than it gives and is pretty much dismissed out of hand by the lead’s later. Meh. While I do think this is a great series, it’s starting to look a little past it’s prime.

Powerless #1. Good things been said about it online and I found out the artwork was Michael Gaydos and so it had to be bought. It wasn’t bad at all. Nicely executed throughout.

I’ve not quite managed to make a complete break and possibly won’t for a long time but I’ve started using Mozilla Firefox and I like it, I like it a lot. I use Thunderbird for my home email client and while it’s not bad, the spam filters are pretty shit. I check the same email account using AOL Communicator in work and it catches so many more pieces of spam. I’m almost tempted to start using it at home.

I see Hope of the States have announced some bigger gigs for later in the year, shall pick up a ticket once I get paid at the end of the month.

Oh yes, I watched Hellboy a few days ago. It was a whole lot better than I expected. Good fun pretty much throughout.

On a typical day I have to enter passwords 15 times just to get my two machines up and running everything. It is of course not the same password, I repeat some a few times throughout. I consider this to be ever so slightly overboard, at least I did until I was just told I need a password to get into the new room and will have to swipe twice to even get that far. Man my bank doesn’t ask me for this much!

Do you ever have someone that you just end up arguing with? No matter what is going on, anytime you spend anytime in each others company you just end up arguing? It’s annoying to say the least and indeed leads to avoidence.

Anyway Spider-Man 2 tomorrow night and Hope of The States on Wednesday. Cannot. Wait.