hey youguuuuys!

so yeah yeah yeah….missed uni today. i got up early to go..even got as far as brushing my teeth and washing my face then just had a mad coughing fit and could hardly speak so i thought “fuck this” and went back to bed. got up at noon. feeling a wee bit better but still a bit meeeh. Was supposed to have 2 Data Communcation lectures, a Java lecture and a Java workshop. i’m not too arsed about the Data Communication lectures..cos i spoke to my mate and it was just introduction stuff. but need to get this booklet. it’s the java stuff i’m worried about cos they’ll go straight into the new work, anyway i emailed my lecturer asking him if i can pick up the shit tomorrow. should be okee.

so anyway…what have i been upto? well before i got up i listening to QI. it’s class cos someone on UKnova made all the episodes into mp3s. mint listening to it. i’ve learnt that a normal graphite pencil will last 35 miles. and that earth has TWO moons. it’s called Cruithne, discovered in 1994, has a diameter of 3 km and orbits the Earth once every 770 years. But some say it’s an astroooid. and also asking the question if Pluto is a planet or not. it’s very sad, i know. but it’s ammunition for my chat-up gun. Anyway i got up, found oot Afiza has bought me some Cheerios ..she’s taken the day off too (toothache). just messed around here on the internet, then i was aksed to go out by my mum. so went to bank, to Boots and bought some nice SOFT tissues…not the sandpaper we pass off as tissues in our house, went round hyde looking for the new Wolstencroft book, but nobody had it. so went round the market. and bought another novel on my “to-buy-books” list. Killing Floor by Lee Child. only £1.50 so cheers for that. now i might end up waiting for Wolstencroft’s new one to go to paperback. also replace my missing glove with a pair of gloves. (if that makes sense) bought them for a £1. so all in all some bargains.

Anywaaaay, going to read that book, also downloading Indigo Prophecy. (that’s the edited version i’m getting) getting pretty good speeds, compared to the last two days. i should have it in 47 minuuuuuuuutes. Keep on reading DS reviiiews. so can’t wait for DS day. i keep on forgetting that i have Warioware Touched. lol. Confirmed games are: Mario kart, warioware, animal crosssssssinnng and ouendan!. have to order my wifi dongle. (mehdi says “don’t get wifi max. it’s shit”) i’ve written too much. talk to youguys online

sy <3 ds/indigo prophecy demo/cheerios/orange juice/animal crosssiiiing/books.

looking fucking class.

out on monday. i was going to wait for the paperback but not sure if i can. it depends on the “size” of the thing. i finish early on monday so i’ll go to waterstooones and see.

The Hunting Party - class episode. Didn’t find it that scary though (Zeke’s mouth is weird). Was just grinning through out it. Knowing all their names, brilllll.

Fire + Water - liked this one too, despite any negative reviews. It was ‘filler’, but necessary filler I thought, so in that respect it probably isn’t filler at all. Furthered the Claire/Charlie story well, Charlie is pretty much just an outcast. Didn’t think he was using, but had my doubts, they did it really well. What I DIDN’T like is the complete change in Locke. What happened to the ‘man of faith’? He didn’t let Charlie complete his ‘test’, and that beat down was so unnecessary. Sick. Was Locke holding something when he hit Charlie? Those were nasty gashes on his cheek.

Came up with a theory - faith is the key to survival. Hear me out.

Charlie was so desperate to get Aaron baptised. Why? Why would it be so important that he got dreams suggesting that it should be done? My idea is that religion/faith is the one thing that can protect people on the island fully somehow. People with faith are thought to be strong, and so could stand up against whatever is on the island. My basis for the theory is on the following points:

- Charlie was saved, resurrected if you will, after his death when he was hung.
- Locke stood up to the ‘monster’ fearlessly.
- Eko stood up to the ‘monster’ fearlessly. Whether this was a different ‘monster’ or not, we don’t know.

What do all these men have in common? They’re all religious, and they’ve all been ’spared’. Charlie was always religious despite his rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, thievery and heroin addiction, Locke is faithful, possibly due to the re-use of his legs but we’re not entirely sure yet, while Eko is religious despite the atrocities in his past. Could religion and belief be the thing that could ultimately save them?

Fancy beating this guy’s CV?

Click

I’m impressed, not even read most of it. This guy’ll probably be teaching me in 3rd year.

I’m going through all the lecturers at uni, trying to find out who’s teaching which of my courses. This time, work starts NOW.

soo…bit pissed off/cheered up again.

anyway this morning/afternoon was mint. lovely texts off kim *ahem* and mehdi playing me at my own game…he spied on me at Piccadilly. we went to the museum had a top laugh in there. even though the electricity building scared us. cos it was in a dark basement with brick walls and there was nobody there except us. scaaaaary. then we went to manchester he bought so stuff from Game. then we wanted somewhere to eat, spent ages looking for somewhere, we ended up going to the Rice place in Piccadilly Gardens. fucking well nice. the guy who served us was class to. defintely going back there again. we stayed in there for nearly an hour and a half. just sitting around, playing ds,laughing at the Palestinians and then waited for mason. before you came, mason. mehdi couldn’t keep still. “i’m too exciteeeeeeeed!”.Photos are on my flickr (i’m updating at the moment…and you might have to go a few pages back to see all of today’s pics)

anyway..on the way home i got a phone call from this guy who runs this online travel agency. he just got a new computer and wants me to set it up for him. said he’ll pick me up at 6. chatted to mason on msn for a bit, figured out what to get kim for the 14th of Feb. (i never say Valentines Day…dunno why i prefer using 14th of Feb…it’s less gay) bloke who was supposed to come at 6 came at 7. and fucking hell i set the computer up…backed up his data. and set up his printer, internet…and for his emails he couldn’t remember his password! and all his business comes through that. so he ended up panicking. and at that very moment a call came from a lady to book a holiday and he couldn’t find anything and was doing stupid things like typing in wrong URLs…i had to take over. “what site you going on?” “Travel..blah blah” “right, then go to google and type that” dont’ just fucking try different variations of URLs. :@ his whole business is a mess. i wanted to just go “just leave me to it, i’ll sort it all out..fuck off for a day and leave me to it!”..but i wouldn’t know where to begin. the business won’t last till 2007.

anyway when i got home at 10pm! just pissing around on the net. check that the Operating Systems exams results are up on the net…so let’s go have a look…guess which geek got 79%? guess which geek for the highest in the year?…YOUR geek. well pleased with that. i really thought it was an easy exam, the only reason why everybody else did pretty poor cos nobody put in any effort. anyway turon is complaining that i’m not talking to him on msn, so better go to hiiiim.

sy <3 ds/kim/chinese food/flickr/ebay buyers…(not in any order)

New version of the DS announced today, DS Lite.

DS Lite

Fucking class. I’ll probably be a Nintendo/consumer whore and get one at some point to match my white Revo when I get it.

£62 for Arctic Monkeys (plus the 2 quid p+p which I’m not counting in that). So about the same it is, told you.

Need For Speed just went for £18, so £80 altogether excluding p+p - NICE. And that pays for my albums I bought the other day.

sold my arctic monkeys for…(including p&p) £67.01!!!

- Heard Edan’s Beauty and the Beat. Fucking class. Love Torture Chamber.

- Bloc Party - Silent Alarm: good.

- Cat Power - The Greatest: ’tis indeed great.

OH GOD I CAN’T TAKE ANY MORE PURCHASES FOR NOW.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
The Strokes - First Impressions Of Earth
Arcade Fire - Funeral
Sufjan Stevens - Illinoise
Shortwave Set - The Debt Collection
Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not

£54 on Play.com

PLUS

Okkervil River - Black Sheep Boy
We Are Scientists - With Love & Squalor

£22 off HMV.

So that’s £76 gone there. Most of that should recouped by my eBay sales, so it’s alright.

im in my CSS mood, and got loads of free icons in png format. bloody loving it. except one browser doesn’t support it. png is a replacement to the copyrighted gif format. it has other benefits such as alpha transparencies, so you can change the colour scheme of your site and the transparent bits of the png will change too gracefully.

but…well let’s quote from an article in A List Apart : For People Who Make Websites.

So What About Browser Support?

By now, of course, we’d all be up to our ears in PNGs if browsers supported them reliably. But seven years after the format’s inception, you still can’t slap a PNG onto a web page like you can a GIF or JPG. It’s disgraceful, but not as bad as it sounds.

It turns out that most of the latest versions of the major browsers fully support alpha transparency with PNG – namely, Netscape 6, Opera 6, and recently-released Mozilla 1, all on Windows; and, for the Mac, Internet Explorer 5, Netscape 6, Opera 5, Mozilla 1, OmniWeb 3.1, and ICab 1.9. Incredibly, PNG even works on Opera 6 for Linux, on WebTV, and on Sega Dreamcast.

Now, what’s missing from that list?

IE5.5+/Win, bless its heart, will, in fact, display a PNG, but it doesn’t natively support alpha transparency. In IE5.5+/Win, the transparent area of your PNG will display at 100% opacity – that is, it won’t be transparent at all.

Bugger.

Bloody JavaScript is needed to make it show on IE…:P

Also slagging off IE…some guy on our forum posted a little thing about IE7. As i was expecting it’s a Firefox rip off. it even uses the same shortcut keys as firefox! grr

anyway that’s my slagging off IE finished.

Brilliant. I love Eko. Not in a gay way. The story kept me guessing, really good.

The ‘monster’ is clearly a surveillence system, and it seems to backup my theory of ’smartdust’. It was flashing and clicking - I’m certain it was taking pictures of and monitoring Eko.

Walt situation - it’s going to be a big twist either way. Either A) it’s not Walt and Michael got punked, or B) Walt is evil.

Claire and Charlie - Charlie, the dirty addict. He’s so going back on heroin at some point. I have a big prediction - sometime soon, something will happen to Claire (whether it be death, serious injury or even captured again for whatever reason; the latter isn’t as likely), leaving Charlie to look after Aaron. Traumatised by whatever happens to Claire, Charlie goes back on his magic powder and has to deal with looking after a kid and his newfound addiction. Oh yes, he’s going to get fucked up.

Locke - he has a big question mark in his past. Vikki noticed this, and I thought it was excellent and subtle - when Michael asked how he knew to shoot, Locke paused, looked away, rubbed his face and fiddled with his ear - all proper signs of lying, but it was done so subtly that I didn’t realise until she said, then it seemed so obvious. Predictions for Locke’s past start now. That’s two big blanks in his life then, the wheelchair incident and whatever he did with guns before, even before he met his dad. Army? Assassin? Fuck knows.

No spoilers for 11 please - I’ll be watching both 11 and 12 next Friday. I think episode 9 was the turning point, and if this week is anything to go by, they’re properly back on track now, especially since 11 was supposedly mint.

Just heard of a band called Cat Power. They’re mint. Gonna download the album when I’m home, probably buy if the rest is as good as what I heard (it’s on a myspace page, just search for ‘Cat Power’ on Google).

Sufjan Stevens - Illinoise. Fucking hell. I’ve not listened to it yet, but this album has the shittiest track names ever. Gonna listen now, the music better make up for it.

Update: It did.

We Are Scientists are pretty damn good.
Jose is a bit meh, wasn’t in the mood for it I don’t think.

Update 2:

- Jose is good.
- Okkervil River - Black Sheep Boy is fucking amazing. I’m getting serious Magic Numbers/Clap Your Hands Say Yeah vibes off it…yet it’s not really anything like them. I think the Magic Numbers vibe comes from the two singers.
- The Shortwave Set - similarly brilliant.

More soon…

I finished this book last night, and it was brilliant. Bit of a blurb from amazon.co.uk

Nick Stone undertook a mission to Afghanistan in the late 80s with a mysterious femme fatale, the posh Sarah; they had a fling and she promptly dumped him on her return. In 1995, they meet up briefly on another undercover mission to Syria which starts to go horribly wrong as Sarah appears to be working to a different briefing. Then, in 1998, Stone gets a summons on his pager to meet his bosses at Gatwick. Sarah has gone AWOL (Absent Without Official Leave) from her apartment in Washington DC and Stone’s job is to find her. This he ingeniously achieves quite quickly and there then follows a long, tense chase across the US. Sarah’s true past, and the secret that she holds, is gradually revealed and the ending is truly gripping.

The best thing about this book is the journey you undertake. After I finished it i flicked to the front of the book and thought “fucking hell!…what a class journeey..and only for 45p” it’s a long book ~550 pages and McNab describes everything so accuretley. There’s about 10 pages based on Nick Stone getting his mission breif in the back of a car. Then i started to think about the 24 novels and thought they’re sureley way too short. i’d be pissed off if they didn’t describe every detail of every hour. (that’s the whole point on 24) it just seems a bit too short. Anyway Crisis Four is book 2 in a long series. It was much better than the first book and the next one is called Firewall, i’ll get that off ebay. and you must be making it if…

Due to the extremely sensitive nature of his work with the SAS, Andy McNab is the only author who has to submit his fiction to the British Ministry of Defense for review, and he is still wanted by a number of the world’s terrorist organizations. He is therefore forbidden to reveal either his face or his current location.

So what have I picked up now? Mike Gayle’s My Legendary Girlfriend. It sounds a bit crap, yes. it’s about relationships and all that. hell, all of Gayle’s books are about that. But this one feels different. I’ve read all his other novels and i liked them. they were nice and quick reads, written ‘comfortable’ langauge. (i read his latest one on Boxing Day…start to finish) This is his debut novel and it just feels fresh and he uses language in a clever way. It almost feels like a different author. I thought Gayle was good with his other novels now i think he’s mint (on this book anyway)

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bought my DS today, turno got a good deal. DS, mario kart DS and Warioware Touched! for £115. wanna get ouendan! but might leave that for a bit and get the wifi dongle and mario kart ds, warioware and animal crossing (cheers ) should keep me busy for a while.

also been working on my CV tonight. redoing it all. using turon’s cv as a bit of a helping hand (hope you don’t miiind..you don’t anyway. i’ve asked you).

:D