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It was hideous.

...if i knew that their mothers wouldn't cry

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL ON ICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Was where we went today, unfortunately last night we may have had a drink or two, resulting in me feeling like someone had birthed me in a vat of toxic death. No matter, everywhere was packed so we met them in a wandering type area, and possibly had a quick beverage and some food to help me relocate my brain focus. We then went into the chilly arena to see the much hyped, in my eyes, high school musical on ice tour. At the start there was some far to excited fool trying to make use dance and things, to a high school musical 3 song, which was cool, but no one could do efficiently do it as he taught us the whole dance, with about 40 moves in 1 go, at top speed. Though he got a cute girl to do it with him.

The main crux of the show was going through the first two high school musicals, which overall was good, great ice skating etc. However, most of the cast looked nothing like their on screen inspiration, and Troy didn't even have floppy hair, which was pretty foolish if you ask me. There was also a suspicious mobile phone related song. But I still enjoyed myself, and I got a cool wildcats flag, which made me happy.

Afterwards we celebrated Dan's forthcoming birthday, starting out in bar HAHA, where we gave dan his FUCKING HUGE box of presents, that took up way too much room, but was awesome, I do infact have photos that I may or may not post on it at some point. For food we went to the Thai that we had frequented once or twice before, and got some meal deal of lunacy. We left pretty late, and for some reason we were the only car left and the guy was very confused why we were still there. Rex drove home, what with my alcohol content and everything.

I'd drown all these cryin' babies....

So rex viciously made Shing and me meet up with him in Bromley, which is alright as Bromley has a surprisingly decent set of shops, and a closing down Woolworths, which was pretty poor to be honest. Though even when they were open they were normally poorly orientated towards my like organ. Not that one...

Obviously the draw of Nero sucked us in, and we had a nice coffee and possibly a snack for Tom, or I collapse, while we watched the world go by and thanked the stars that Christmas had passed. Perhaps. Our main task was to find Dan a present, and we pottered around buying a variety of witty, shitty and possibly excellent presents including an amazing dog called Dylan from BHS, who I voiced for a short while. I suspect I mainly ripped off his voice from my awful "eels up inside you" voice ala Mighty Boosh. Speaking of which, I bought it off rex for 26 quid, which was nice, all 3 seasons y'know. We also tried to recreate our days of chilling for hours in Virgin, however, with us not being 14, or it now being a Zavvi, or that there were 25,000 people, this failed, and they wouldn't let Rex use his voucher because of his views on the Irish nation....

As we're high flying professionals and all, we grabbed lunch at Cafe Rouge, which was nice, I think. After some more shopping we head home. To the home of kings. And stab victims. That's right, Stabford international house of cheese and racial tendancies.

Two fisted contact

Well yesterday was christmas, I can't remember what happened, but it was uninspiring to the max, check the facts on a b-bop flop tacts. I dunno. I got mum some epic presents, I got something of humourous dulldom. Tho I have bought a vast amount of DVDs with the money my Aunt gave me, do I have a list? possibly in my inbox? maybe? who knows....

I do

• Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back [2001]
• Eurotrip
• Kill Bill 1 and 2 (Box Set) [2003]
• Brick [2005]
• Hoodwinked [2006]
• Transformers [2007]
• The Nines [2007]
• Southland Tales [2006]
• Juno [2007]
• Definitely, Maybe [2008]

I did. That's how cool I am. Away now. Meeting up with the homeys on sat, yay. Today I think I've been showing mother the wonders of Australia.

Techie Splurge

Slow net on ubuntu/gOS? Disable ipv6 to get a bit of a boost. Also check your iwconfig that your wifi card is set to higher than 1MB/s. Mine wasn't, so u can either do:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 rate 54M

to bump it up to some cunning level, or put it in the file that makes it run at start up, that I can't remember off the top of my head, I hear google knows it.

You might as well forget it...

Only the promise of High School Musical on the beeb got me up.

Apparently I was going to rant about something today, not sure, possibly the boredom that is Christmas at home, or my face. Either or, the arguments are roughly the same. This is our tree:We never got a tree in Stabford, however, I did try to find you a picture of a tree made entirely of knives. Unfortunately I didn't try too hard, and have nothing of wit or good humour to show you. Bet you wish this blog was still powered by caffiene fueled coffee shop random happenstance? Maybe.

Go to the wellies....

Woke up at some hour, which was under 4 hours when I went to bed, which is great when I had to drive home, then drive 80 miles to my Aunt and Uncles. Followed by a varying amount of boring conversation, and dealing with my uncle who to be honest is a bit weird, has uninformed opinions and bit of a bellend really. Possibly over-dramatising it, but still, meh, they have a big house though we blew bubbles. On drive back, I stopped off in Folkstone for my mum and we walked along the Leas and high street, though I was epically shattered. So much so I had to grab a red bull in a service station to prevent crashing my lovely car. Went to bed at 8pm or something equally crazy.

All the lights are coming on now, How I wish it would snow now, I don't feel like going home now

Yesteday I woke up, blargh, ate many left overs, and then played lots of Call of Duty 4, before ppl started to go home. Drove home in the face, hardcore style. Ruffle was at home, and we all chatted for a while, which was dope sticks. Then played Prince of Persia that had come from tesco dvd rental (3 months free whoop - Bully and Mirrors Edge!). Seems a pretty good game, but could get boring quite quickly I do believe, still passes the time.

Today: oh.... I apparently completed Prince of Persia and then stayed up till 4/4.30am playing guitar hero 3, trying to do all songs, including bonus etc on medium. I can't do dragonforce. Stupid world. Argh I need to get up early.

It was just like christmas...

Woke up and went down to Dartford after a sequence of cleansing showers to bust out some huge greasy spoon breakfast, though was a bit cramped and I ate half my body weight in meat. Awesome. Then, after grabbing more supplies, we headed back, and chilled with various rockband/guitar hero shenanigans, followed by Tracey cooking half of Iceland. Awesome. In fact I even sang on rock band, which might seem to you like "whatever dude" but it was actually quite a large progression in tackling my singing in public phobia. Whatever.

We ate, lots other people arrived, drink was drunk and soon we were opening Secret Santa gifts, I got awesome High School Musical lunch box with cookies in, and a Jennifer Love Hewitt mouse mat AND Top Gear annual, with a awesome personalised pillow case with Troy on it. Bonus points. Trev seemed to like his retrosexual man book, spiderman shooter as well as his antlers with bells on and bondage gag....

More merryment was had, and some fools started playing poker which lasted until the wee hours, one of the reasons why I don't like, because I get easily bored with repitition. Some excellent cheesecake (by Shing) and Christmas cake (by Tracey) was had, and I exploded all my insides everywhere because I ate half of Canada. Sleep was had after a late hour, after some poor TV show watching.

For all you little Queens

Today we bust on down to Dartford, well at least Shing and I did, as Rex was faking illness once more. We got there in damn good time, and after a quick beer headed out into Dartford Taan, and after some indecision and realisation Shing had forgotten her ID, we wandered into the Yoe Bo, which was quite scrummy. We then met up with the twits and Tracey, but failed in our attempts to go to a pub, even though Tracey got a kebab for dinner! No matter, we trucked on home, and watched some hilarious IT crowd to the tune of a couple more beers, then all crashed out.

where is the fair

Today marfled about, did a few more cards, general hacking, gaming and flaming.

Some hot photos of Zac.

Some awesome photos of the How I Met Your Mother cast.

Scooters, Holidays, Autumn, Death

A Polish dude came today to fix my hole (Haw Haw). Sort of. Nice vent now though, which we can open and shut. As you should.

Also went on saw Slumdog Millionaire for free, with Rex, even though the free tickets were Shing and Boon's, but they failed to be able to go. Was a very good film, much better than I thought it would be, done by same guy as Trainspotting and 28 days later. There was apparently a satellite link up with him, but we went and met Boon and Shing in Pizza Express instead, for some yummy pizza based goodness. And beer. Good times.

Ham it up, Park it Down

Well, I was bored of having XP on my laptop, and felt like I should do something l33t, which I hadn't done a short while, and Stu or someone showed me gOS, which is a sort of gui/Google gadgets blend, that sits on top of the Ubuntu linux distro. Needless to say it was pretty and cool, so I wiped my laptop and installed it. Very cool, though the internet on my laptop has gone slow and I can't work out why. Postcards kids.

While fiddling, I discovered that Wine can't run the latest version of iTunes for windows, so couldn't access my desktops iTunes Daap sharing thanks to their new encryption. So I decided to switch to Songbird, which I may have mentioned before, is an open source iTunes clone, developed in a similar manner to Firefox, i.e. there are extensions etc. Well its very good so I've swapped it for iTunes on both PCs. Unfortunately, it won't share over network, so I had to get the Firefly Daap server thing, which is alright, though cos of the slow net on my lappy I'm a bit confuzzled. Still. Whoop.

In the back of the net, right between the EYES

Feb 16th: HSM 3 comes out on DVD. Blam!

We appear to have a 4-6 inch hole now in a kitchen, (not 10 inches as I originally remember), which appeared randomly one day. Odd. Needless to say I rang miss swallows, because I'm productive and excellent like that. She was rather too chirpy and wished me a happy crimbo in the thimbo. I was like "What? You are of the crazy persuasion!" to which she retorted "curse my Persian ancestory"

How often do Adobe have to update their frickin' products?!

Check out Anberlin: Cross between CKY and Lostprophets. Or actually like the old school band A, as Rex pointed out.

Want to race anywhere that google has mapped, check out this hammer in your brain, gammon on your train.

Panic attack. Nero doesn't work? Found this: ISOrecorder. Burns ISO's fine ass. Why are half my programs not in my start menu any more? Damn you bill gates and your devious sidekick, steve the pig.

Photograph Of Jesus by Laurie Hill - I want to work here! Sounds cool.

I also sorted our BT bill and High School Musical parking. Aren't I a useful member of society. Should that be 'an' or 'a'? Fuzz.

I wonder when, they'll come get me.....

Spent the evening with Shing, Boon and Saborna. Met up at exit 1, that no one but I could find, so eventually we got together, went to some crazy busy bar which was quite nice, then went to a "scary" bar, where we saw a guy with a cool scarf, dr who meets rupert the bear. Then we found a slug and lettuce, slid into an area partly reserved, and got a feast of platter, dips, chips etc. Awesome. Finally met up with Saborna's friends in a crazy bar called Bar 187 on Waldorf St, between Jerk City and Mr Jerk. Bar had bright red nets all over the walls, with lights hanging from the ceiling in nets as well. Pretty cool, and was just a door between those to fast food places. Surprisingly empty compared to everywhere else we had been that night, bit expensive, I had an Indian Runner, which was an absinthe based cocktail. Bottles of JD were 120 quid in there. Then tired.

Things I have done this week

• Played too much Force Unleashed and therefore completing. Good but frustratingly arcadey game.
• Bought Lego Mindstorms NXT, so I can build some AI based robot mastery. £150 rather than amazon's 250 quid! whoop.
• Mooched about like a mad man.
• Stayed up far too late every day. Kablam.
  

In related news

I appear to have spurious photos of stu on my camera, prancing around the Princessheyheyinthecoocay. This we can all establish was due to the frivolous amout of alcohol Stu and I both consumed on Sunday evening. Meeting up in the Impy at around 4.30 stank of error before we started, but this was soon strengthed with our large consumption of beer related merchandise. Namely lots of ales as the man made me look silly for ordering a lager, to which I replied, after being coaxed with various free samples, that I would indeed have a nice pint of cronwell please. Which to be fair wasn't too bad and led to a pedigree later, as well as the normal interspersals of lager and other hoppy goodies. By the end of the night, I was plastered, I rang Rex for an excessive period of time, gave away a pint of cider to a random girl I don't even remember, and then we decided the kebab shop was the greatest location for us next.

It wasn't. As I ate many unneccessary calories and fat and then wibbled home.

To wake today, in epic pain and drunkeness, and still had to get out for 10 am check out. And was then too drunk to actually drive home, so went into town, after consuming as much water as my soul could handle, utilise the public toilet in case I was going to throw up, and then sit on a sofa in Zavvi for an extended period of time. Not good. Next attempted fix was to have a hot chocolate in Ritazza and veg for a while. Eventually by 12.30 I decided was able to drive home, then had a horrendous drive back, where I still felt a bit shit, and roads were crap. Though I did have the greatest bacon roll ever.

On returning to london, I was destroyed by the traffic coming into Stratford, and to make matters worse, a HUGE truck/lorry rolled back onto the front of my car to a large amount of crunching. However, after much swearing, on my return to the house, Rex and I couldn't find any damage, apart from some dirt had been cleaned off. Well done car in conclusion. Time to play Star Wars Unleashed. Though Rex did make me eat some epically large curry from Muskaan, I got a Chicken Zerani, which was a two layer curry, and was extremely nice. Yum. I wrote a song:

Broccoli in the morning
Broccoli before noon
Broccoli as a warning
Of our impending doom

I'm already there...

Here is an example of how poor my wifi card is on my laptop. I'm currently in the Ritazza on exeter's campus (word up my raptors!), and I can see a wifi router but can't connect to it "well enough" to actually use the vast sprawling interwebs. However, my Nokia n810, which is only a bit bigger than the entire wifi card in my laptop, can not only connect correctly to it, but it can even detect another router my laptop doesn't even know exists. Maybe I should get a macbook.

Also Gemini FM sucks majorly. Argh scary man with an exeter FC scarf just came in and glared at me like I wasn't awesome or something. Lunatic (wasn't rex tho).

Okay, wait, turns out my nokia can't get the router to work either, but anyway, it's still better. Shut up ya mouth. Wait I got my laptop working, forgot to set automatic proxy settings, but now its asking for a uni username and password which I don't have..... Oh my God. I'm some sort of genius, I "hacked" around the password thingy, by pinging google.com, grabbing the ip, then just entering that. Though I can't do that for everything as it turns out my blog's ip goes to google as well, the fools. And other sites get screwed, but if you want to live within the Google domain, it be fine. *sighs* Though you can do the normal trick of translating a webpage from Chinese to English, and if you click cancel enough on the password screen it will eventually mostly load, without images. I wonder if numerous failed attempts will get noticed.

I remember how I got all my work done now, by sitting in this lovely cafe of ultimate concentration. The amount I'm blogging is phenomenal.

The blood in my legs, is starting to thaw

Sometimes its just nice to have a different bed, and a different shower, and a different european rave music club above your room.

There's a possible ghost with in the mirror as well, but only visible in my peripheral vision.

My final argument for getting a Desktop over a laptop, is the case study in the house, that out of the current 6 computers in the house, the two fastest/best are desktops, while the laptops trail behind like dilapidated dogs.

After trawling the high street like a drunk steamboat, I went round Claire and Dave's humble abode, and was treated to some extremely kind hospitality. Not only did they put up with my drivel, I played computer games with Dave while Claire prepared us an excellent prawn risotto. I like my friends, they are of the upmost awesome. We chatted a bit, more, then I let them get on with their lives, and I walked back to the hotel, through the coldest air known to man.

I swear, I'll come through

How auspicious, as usual, Exeter is a treasure trove of lovely. There's now a CEX and a gamestation to peruse, and there's no visible sign of the credit crunch effect around here. Unless everyone is window shopping like me, though I did spend an entirely ludicrous amount of money on what can only be described as a herd of underwear products. I also obtained a strangely over VAT discounted charger for my overly sensual Nokia N810. With humourous packaging by Virgin.

As with my strange compulsion of hating carrying shopping around, I dropped my loot back at the car and reventured in to town, and it soon became clear exeter was the home of street performance. Things that I saw:

• A roaming robot in the Harlequin Centre
• A collection of real owls in the Harlequin Centre
• A guitar driven orchestra
• A brass band
• A lone guitarist
• A town's crier advertising some event in the Guild Hall with the Lord Mayor.
• Another small musical act
• A dijareedo man
• A woolworths jammed with crazy shoppers and sparse stock
• A large collection of tinsel draped bicycles.
• Nearly every coffee shop except this one jammed.
• Too many hot girls of undetermined legality
• Many new locations of shops.
• The swish new entrance to the underground passages that apparently didn't collapse during the work.
  
• Up and down horses

No doubt I had something witty, humourous or observational to say, but I've forgotten amongst the caffeine rush. Hmm, turns out I was using my notepad back to front, so I viciously ripped loads of pags out that were job related. This is my crappy notepad I add, as it is small and portable.

witty, to shitty, in 5 minutes gritty

Aren't my witticisms still so witty?
My stick men emo and so pretty?
Is each post just a cognitive bore?
It's as if you don't love me no more.

Are my anecdotes too convoluted
Should my entire life be rebooted?
My hits have fallen through the floor
It's as if you don't love me no more

Does the orange clash with your eyes?
A lack of dog videos or recipes for pies?
Do you finally agree with the law
It's as if you don't love me no more

Am I always too far out of date?
Is there too much booty and poo to rate?
Is it because I went round you mother's house and explained about that time when we were both bored and got wacked out on acid, and begin creating a robot snail army using her vegetable collection, only to mistakenly use her recent ann summers order instead, which shook her to her core,
It's as if you don't love me no more
Love me no mooooooooorrrrrrreeeee
Owwooooo my arse is sore.

Give me your flan

Didn't do much yesterday, until young Colin came (all over the place) and bought me dinner romantically as he was working in the excel centre, so we got curry from the Spice Ville/Villa. Pretty good, though Muskaan is definitely better, meatier keema naans to start with, and we all know how I like to gobble meat. *sigh* Got Far Cry 2 as well, very GTA like, though in some crazy country.

Today I got up at some silly hour, like 7am, so I could drive to Woking, where I picked up the legend who is Icelandic Dan. From there we bust out, towards skies of blue and suns of scorching death. Got into Exeter surprisingly early, at around 12.40, so we had time pop in to chat with Jacq before meeting up with Stu, Zena, and The G-Man, in the Ram, for a swift pint or two, followed by Gordy and I wibbling up to Dan's lecture. Seriously good times being with the homeys again. Dan's lecture was extremely good, and interesting, especially when he was acting out the various actions of units. Chatted with everson and the gang for a bit, before Dan and I invade Ed's room and caught up with him. Will try and get the Edmeister out sometime over the weekend.

Was shattered by this point, so dropped Dan off, in the rain, at his friends house, and got myself checked into the Breaside hotel, which seems extremely good. Munched down some Fish and Chips, then fell asleep fully clothed on my bed, my bad, sorry Dan!

Caffeine Rambles #3

I'm desperately looking forward to Exeter this weekend, where I see Dan Dan Icelandic Dan's lecture, meet up with the AI homeys, including the G-man himself, but not Stu or Carlos. On the Sat I can see Claire and Dave, and then on the Sunday I can drink my rugged face off with the Stu I know and love. After which I'll meet up with Mr Drapier. HAW HAW. Good times. Though it does leave the house without a working laptop. Or Car.

Advice: If you ever book some rooms through LateRooms, and want to extend your stay, contact the hotel directly, they often still have room even if LR tell you they don't.

Hmmm, disappointingly I've run out of rambling and with an hour until I met Danu, I'm at a slight loss of what I should do. Maybe swapping music from Straylight Run to The Elected could possible help. But that will just encourage me to go to America. Ah well. I also have to walk around with a bright shiny purple bag with Tracey's present in. I also wrote a short poem for it:

To our celebratory Tracey,
To avoid gifts too racy,
or predictably of purple
enclosed is a pirate turtle

I'm quite excited that Dan will be waiting for me at the bar with 2 pints, and we'll be all professional like:

"Hello my old chum"
"Ah, my friend, cracking day to invest some stocks"
"I concur, the market looks particularly peachy"
"Couldn't have expressed it better, how's the BumFun accounts?"
"Dire I'm afraid, but I've rerouted power to the auxillery hooker factory"
"Make it so number one!"
"Rebranding concussion most likely"
"Oh FTSEing hell"

And so on. I'm sure you get the technicolour picture.

Joff reckons I need to do some exercise to prevent some form of Peter Petrelli explosion of frustration. Wouldn't mind picking up tennis again. I'm meant to help my mum take some dead bodies down the dump tomorrow, but I kinda want to catch up on my blog so 1) I can post this 2) I'm at peace before I storm the pearly gates of Exeter.

The RBS building across the street is very pretty, all glass with a glass lobby lift and palm trees. The trees aren't glass. I tried to ascertain if Dan works there, but I don't he knows himself where he works. Gonna wander->

Caffeine Rambles #2

As I was saying, your mum shouldn't touch me there, I'd prefer it a bit lower/deeper (delete as appropriate). Further more, I had lunch paid for by the agent dude, so we went to ASK and I burnt my mouth subtly on lasagna. When eating with someone you don't know well in a restaurant, I find it hard to know where to look when talking to them, especially if they are male (obviously if they were female you stare longingly at their soft velvety lips, wishing for the 2 feet and trillions of atoms between you to collapse onto themselves, bringing you together in a beautifully exquisite embrace. Or just at their boobies *gigglepops*.)

I mean, looking them in the eyes gets creepy after a few seconds, so do you just look in eyes, look away, then back, then away. I dunno. I'm sure most people don't think about this. Anyway, free food! Whoop. BRB, out of coffee, if I lose my seat everyone dies.

Fool be trippin' off green tea y'all!

And falafel. Yes, so I can go travelling. But where to? I only have 10 days or something? I was looking at some wonders of the world lists. Athens and Rome sound good, but I'm not sure. Maybe would like to do them with people. Scandi? Bit expensive but would be awesome. Morocco? I might just search for weird and bizarre holidays. Fingers crossed I end up in a bondage castle. I saw it on Eurotrash one. I miss eurotrash. So anyway, suggestions please. My hair is cool today, but it needs a trim.

Caffeine Rambles #1

You see, the plan that I had devised was to sit in this sinful supplier of caffeinated beverages and write about days gone past. However, the cognitive effort required to access such remote regions of my synapses is well beyond my warm sleepy state. I'm sure, however, I can come up with some form of babble with which you can improve your mood with, perhaps only in the thought that you're not trapped inside my mind like I am

For instance, I was pondering what speed my inner monologue is, not the subconscious number, logic and thought crunching brain activity, but the scrubs-esque layer of consciousness that ponders thoughts such as this. By which I mean, is it talking speed, or reading to myself speed or faster? Unfortunately, I forgot why this was necessary or interesting to conern myself or my lovely readers with.

I find it odd that my watch doesn't possess the functionality to keep track of the date. Then again, I rarely remember I have a watch that can supply me the time, so it's more a fashion accessory. Except I often am concerned I look like I'm showing it off as it's quite big and obstructs my sleeves, leaving it in full view. Then again I don't care too much.

My recruitment agent took me out for lunch, because he likes the bulge in my package. To clarify, that's Far Cry 2 and Star Wars Force Unleashed that I got far too cheap. And to clarify that, I mean my penis. There's some humour to be found in the "cheap" comment, but anyway. Yes, agent, lunch. He did this lovable gesture as I managed to get a job he flung me at.

*Waits for the gasps and fainting to subside*

That's right kids, your friendly neighbour hood bum has obtained some form of contractual obligation to provide a service in return for monetary compensation. And Bupa. And Life Insurance. And 23 days paid holiday. Unfortunately, it wasn't with the financial software house in the Gerkin, but with a really cool company near holborn. And I got them to let me start in Jan, so I can possibly travel for a couple of weeks. More later.

Jubilance in defeat

I'm in all sorts of moods and I'm not sure why. I don't really seem that generally happy. I'm happy in moment, whether insulting rex, drinking with peeps, etc, but general level just seems really low. I don't know if its the same old missing of traveling, suspecting that a life of working is a life wasted, or not knowing what I actually want. Now I have a job I should be more uplifted or excited, but everyone else seems more jubilant than me about it, even though it's a really good job. Luckily I'm enthusiastic in interviews. Maybe I'm just seeking attention, or I'm depressed at my lack of musical penmanship, or my perpetual laziness, or perpetual complaining about my laziness. Or my perpetual repetition. Who knows. Also the fact my blog is/was so far behind is getting me down a bit, which it shouldn't because it doesn't really matter and not many people check it these days. Just makes me feel fuzzy. And without it being up to date I can't write posts like this that pluck your heart strings, and touch your soul, even if its underage baby.

I'm also annoyed as I'm not as nice or kind as I used to be. I used to always be offering to do things, and giving things away and things, and now I just seem really terse and rubbish, and so many people are so awesome to me. It makes me emo.