Do you know what I just realised? It’s 2005. Not scary, you say? Let me put it another way. It’s half-way through the decade already! I mean, it hardly seems any time at all since people were buzzing about ‘2000’, about the new millenium… I just can’t believe so much water has flowed under the bridge since then.
Ok, so it’s probably not news to anyone else, but I just found it a bit weird. As you were…
I’m currently 3/4 of the way through listening to “Out of Nothing”, last year’s album from Embrace. I have to say it’s one of the best albums I’ve bought in a long time… it’s really good!
I wasn’t sure whether they’d actually be able to top ‘Gravity’… I still think that’s probably the best song on the album from what I’ve heard, but all of the other songs are great as well. If you like quite melodic rock music, a bit mellow but uplifting (they sound a little bit like Coldplay, Travis etc…), you’ll like this.
I bought this because I need some good CDs to play in the car, and I think this fits the bill perfectly!
Well, my new site is almost finished! I’ve almost done every static section except for photos, all that’s left to do apart from photos is the blog… having said that, those two are going to be what takes the most time! Ah well.
I forgot to mention this, but I bought a new CD player for my car just after Christmas. I finally got it working the other day, so I’ve been able to listen to music whilst driving to and from work! Yay! I know that everyone these days has got one, but still… I find it quite helpful to listen to music whilst driving. When you’re in traffic, driving can be quite stressful – music’s relaxing, it does help!
Um, that was about as pointless a blog post as they come… ah well. Happy days.
What an incredible hue and cry! Wow. I heard about this from my Mum, who forwarded me on an email saying I should complain about it to the BBC. After having reading through some comments about it, here’s my take on the situation.
I’m not sure whether complaining about it is a great idea… I mean, I can see why the BBC are still showing it: a whole bunch of people who have never seen it write and complain… that’s not jumping on the bandwagon at all, is it? If you haven’t seen it, then if you complain you haven’t really got a leg to stand on. You’re just going by what other people have said, even if what other people have said is accurate it’s still not as convincing as complaining about something which you saw with your own eyes.
On the other side of the coin… I defend the right to free speech absolutely. But I think the people who say “Oh, it’s just the religious people trying to impinge on our freedoms”, or “you can always turn it off”, or something like that – I’m not convinced by that argument. Society always tends to place the burden of responsibility on the individual for things.
So, does that mean we should legalise everything, and let people be responsible for their own behaviour? No, because past experience has shown us that people cannot be trusted if they’re left to their own devices!
All those people screaming “I’m going to watch it! You’re denying my right to choice!”… etc. etc — they just remind me of infants who’ve been told that they have to have a bath, or have to leave the toy store, or … um… anything else which would cause an infant to have a tantrum. I think the burden of responsibility is on the provider of content (whatever form that may take) to provide content that is good for us. And I don’t think that the Jerry Springer is good for us.
This is because I think the more filth and junk we watch, the more desensitised to it we become. Yes, of course we are adults, and of course we are able to decide what is real and what is fiction. But I think there are things that go on without us consciously deciding to. For example, I think the news has desensitised us to world suffering — we just don’t care about it any more because we see so much of it. Surely, then, everything that we see or hear has an effect on us, whether we mean it to or not.
Ok, so perhaps everyone who chooses to watch tomorrow will think it won’t affect them… but just how much rubbish can we watch before it starts to affect us? If we were always watching good and wholesome things (man, I sound like I’m coming straight out of the fifties or something… just shows how sad it is if talking about “good” and “wholesome” things has become a bit of a joke) how much better would society be? If we had positive role models to look up to, if we were always striving to love our neighbour, to forgive each other, to make the world a better place?
Ok, I think I’ve rambled on long enough. Just in case you were wondering — I don’t know the answers to the questions I’ve posed. It’s just something to think about, something to ponder before you switch on tomorrow.
Well, after having used Microsoft’s tired old Active Server Pages (ASP) to code my website for the past… oooh, five years? – I’ve decided to make the switch to PHP. In fact I’ve been doing PHP for a while now (I think I’ve mentioned it) — but the key point here is that my own website is now coded in PHP! Not this one, but my test site is, and you can see it online 🙂
I’ve also thought of a rather elegant solution to that of blogs. Because blogger basically just generates text, and you can customise how it generates it any way you like, I’ve had a rather good thought as to how I can manage my blog: just generate an XML file using blogger, instead of HTML, and then read the XML in from the main page (or wherever you want to have it).
Simple, elegant, and gets round that nasty problem of page includes which I have at the moment… you know, I like PHP! Although I haven’t tried .NET, I have a suspicion PHP is a tad better…
If, like me, you use the excellent Mozilla Firefox for browsing the web, there’s a way of speeding it up a bit! — especially if you’re using broadband.
Visit this page for instructions. It’s not difficult, and it doesn’t mess around with anything particularly important (i.e., it’s definitely not going to break your browser! – it’s only a simple change)
Hello people. I just thought I’d make a quick update to let you know that I am actually alive, that I did survive Christmas, but I just haven’t updated because I’ve been out and about!
Christmas was good, it was nice to see family again 🙂 On Tuesday I went down to Philippa’s, and we went to the Apollo Theatre in London to see Bill Bailey’s “Part Troll” show. It was absolutely brilliant, well worth the money! I think a couple of highlights had to be the BBC 10 o’ clock News “Apocalyptic Rave” and the Kraftwerk version of ‘Das Hokey Kokey.’
Anyway. On Friday, we went to the chaplaincy for their new year’s party (it was very good) and afterwards to Phil B’s house for a cup of tea and some cheese on toast. Just the kind of thing you want in the small hours of New Year’s Day!
And… um… yeah, I don’t think there’s much else to say. I bought myself a new car stereo, but I’ve been having trouble installing it in my car… I think I need someone who knows a lot more about car stereos to come and have a look at it! Anyway, I think that’s just about it for now.
Over and out…
I probably won’t update here tomorrow, so I’d just like to take this opportunity to wish everyone who reads this a very happy Christmas!
Take care, and I’ll update in the new year. Or, um, even next week… 🙂
Simon’s only just found out about ‘French Military Victories’… for those of you who don’t know, this is an example of … um … I can’t remember exactly what it’s called, but manipulating the Google search engine. It works because of how the way Google indexes pages. If it finds quite a few pages linking to a certain page, all with the same text as the link (for example ‘French Military Victories’) than the URL that they link to will be indexed by that particular phrase. This is usually achieved by the use of blogs — they’re notorious for clogging up search engines (seriously, you should check out some of the random stuff people have come to this site from) — if you get enough of your blogging friends to put the link there, then it’ll be indexed by Google!
Anyway. Check it out if you haven’t already; go to Google and type in “French Military Victories” and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky”. There are also others you can try, for example “Miserable Failure”. There are more but I can’t remember them… um… yeah.
I won’t really say much about it, because I didn’t do much! On Friday, Philippa came to Ipswich, and … um … we watched some ‘Family Guy’ and stuff. Nothing exciting! Then on Saturday, we … um … went back to Colchester. And then on Sunday, we went to Fordham for Lessons and Carols, and then had a big Christmas dinner cooked by Paul. (it was great!) And then, we went round to watch Alex’s for “It’s a Wonderful Life”. That is a classic film… I haven’t watched it in a long time, watching it again I realised just why it’s on every Christmas! I think it’s very well written and acted, and they get the level of sentimentality just right (i.e., reserve it for the end of the film…)
I’m in my last week of work, and then I’ve got Christmas off, until the New Year. It’ll be good to have a break — I’m used to the early starts by now, but it’ll be nice to have a lay in for a while!
That’s it folks.