Here goes then, an attempt at regular updating

Using the little dashboard thingy on my MBP, now I bring it to work every day and hook it upto my phone, I have no excuse about not updating anymore.

So it's snowing again, it's really really cocking snowing. It's miserable, it's cold, and I don't actually know why I'm complaining cos I don't tend to actually see daylight very often anyway. Cooped up as I am in the situational purgatory that is the arrivals hall of Heathrow Airport.

Imagine being Tom Hanks in that film, but without his forehead, and instead of living in the airport, just being there, all the time, serving people lattes. Just imagine it.

Now imagine this, but with a prerecorded security announcement, every 5 minutes without fail. It is not just one announcement, it is in fact five, piggybacked on top of one and another, badly audiocropped and formulated in such a way that if you have to listen to it for 10 hours it WILL drive you slightly loopy.

I'm fairly sure the sounds of the airport are designed specifically to act as a neurodegenerative, to slowly but surely whittle away the sanity of any airport worker unfortunately born with ears.

To accompany the sound of the well spoken yet inherently dull man, is the sound of the adjacent games arcade. Now everything in this arcade is well behaved, peaceful but for the occasional sound of someone winning things. Except for the grabber machine.

Now the grabber machine is blessed with a soundbyte to alert you to its selfish presence. A High School Musical styled 1 2 3 4 'ahhhhahahahhhhh', it reads like a maniac, but it sounds like the start of a musical number.

It does this EVERY MINUTE. It is also sat next to a kiddies machine, it's a taxi.. every so often (thankfully not every minute) it goes TAXI. Should a kid go in it, it spouts random cockney cabby phrases. 'OI! NEARLY 'AD YA THEN!' and suchlike.

One day I'm going to drive that taxi right into that bloody grabber machine. Then they'll be sorry.

I'd write more but I seem to have ranted off my laptop screen. Oops.

I think I'm finally getting the hang of this..

I feel accomplished today. I jumped on the iFrame that was on my main website, ripped it into itty bitty pieces, and decided that my blog and my site should be two separate entities.

Why? Well it's because I plan to update my blog pretty damn regularly, whereas my site is unlikely to get the same treatment. Typing about stuff is easy, drawing things and making music requires me to use the desktop PC.

The desktop PC is not useable from my sofa, and so the laptop and its blogging ability win.

I'm rather impressed by this little widget I got for my MBP dashboard, rather than having to go to all the trouble of clicking Blogger on my Firefox toolbar, I only have to hit F12! That's gotta save at least quarter of a second.

Of course I might backtrack on these words when I go to check my blog and see this post formatted in a way jarringly different to the rest.

Also, I managed to put my latest Tweets in the sidebar. Isn't that just lovely?

Anyway, I have to up stupidly early to give the keys to my bloke's car to some garagey people. Can't wait!

Traffic Lights, The Stabilisers Of Learning To Drive

I'm fairly sure Leeds City Council are colluding with the Highways Agency in an attempt to deprive me of a car without massive bits missing, or indeed depriving me of my life.

What brings me to this conclusion? Well I'll tell you.

When you're driving along, minding your own business. Idly picking something out of your ear as you rest your arm on the window and flicking it somewhere over the horizon of the dashboard, you come to a junction.

Ooh it's a busy junction this one, but it's okay. This junction has a selection of ludicrously timed traffic lights to guide you, albeit slowly, through the hazardous intersection.

BUT OH NO THE LIGHTS ARE OUT.

Now, I don't know about you, but I find this occurrence exhilarating. It's like the road people are saying "oh go on, we trust you. Give it your best shot, what do a bunch of boxes with pretty lights on know? You make this, you're a real man, you've passed the REAL driving test."

So you man it up, you approach that junction, it doesn't look like there's going to be much of a gap. It's a bright day, and you didn't even notice the lights weren't on until you were far too close. Time for Matrix style 'shut your eyes, breathe in some sort of trancelike fashion and melt between the deathwagons' shenanigans. You drive, your manning up goes a bit limp, you whimper slightly, and somehow you pass out the other end without leaving your legs stuck to the front of a wildly careering Renault Laguna.

"Hurrah!" you think, "I win the road." Congratulatory heavy breathing and shaky arms ensue, and a flinch as you look in the rear view mirror as others attempt similar runs.

An interesting article cropped up recently, relating to Ealing Council in London, who have actually decided to start removing traffic lights on purpose. The amount of time spent waiting without any need at the lights in the area has proven so ridiculous, they believe that just letting drivers take matters into their own hands is going to be a more effective method of traffic flow. Naturally, unlike my crazy Frogger like attempts to cross a multi carriageway inner loop road, the roads they are going to de-lightificate are more likely to be junctions at fairly tame A roads. The exercise has already proven to have reduced drive-time, and due to people actually having to watch where they're going and watch everyone else with the other eye, accidents are down too.

So why am I fairly sure that Leeds City Council have it in for me? Perhaps because this has happened to me THREE times, in the last four days, at three different locations. At this rate I shall be looking into my rear view mirrors for shifty looking cars with some sort of signal blocking device strapped to the roof, waiting for me to approach nasty junctions, ready to flick the switch and get the popcorn out for the resulting Sean/Mazda/something explodey show.

So if you see a dark blue/green (bleen) Mazda driving about, approaching a junction, brake and just hold back a bit.

Hello beautifuls.

So I thought I'd just sit here and type about something I current embrace with both arms, and anything else that comes to hand that I can embrace with. That something being the wonder that is Twitter.

Okay so some people may have found themselves both wince and physically recoil at the T word, but likewise some people may have found themselves nodding and going "yes, it's rather good isn't it?"

So why do I love this silly thing that only lets you type about 30 words before it starts crying and doesn't let you send your message? I'll tell you why.

It's because it's quick, easy and keeps me in touch with pretty much everything ever... stuff I want to know, and stuff I couldn't give a damn about. Pretty much every news story I've had people talk to me about I've already picked up on Twitter several hours earlier.

An interesting extension to this is the fact I follow quite a number of UK comedians, writers and other such folk. For example, I follow Charlie Brooker @charltonbrooker and having watched NewsWipe on iPlayer last night, it was interesting to see the result of the thing Charlie had been tweeting about the few days prior to broadcast. He tweeted asking if anyone knew who had ownership rights to the "policeman clubbing protester" photo, and it obviously turned out someone did, as it made an appearance in the programme.

It's fantastic watching the comedy banter, ideas and games bouncing back and forth between the comedian community on Twitter, and exciting to know that some of these ideas might well crop up in future shows, routines or TV programmes. If I had to choose one Tweeter that people simply have to follow, it would be Peter Serafinowicz, that ridiculously tall man who seems to get typecast as a bastard in UK Comedy programmes and films, and the creator of his eponymously titled TV show, and Look Around You. He also holds regular pun contests and such with his followers, and it's always a good laugh.

Other reasons for liking Twitter? The fact that a fair number of my friends are on here, and it is fast becoming my preferred method of organising things with them. It's a great social interaction networking tool.

The Twitter Search tool is absolutely brilliant, something I've only recently started using. If you need to know anything whatsoever, you can generally type it into Twitter and get up to the minute information about it. There is also a brilliant add-in for Firefox that sticks latest Tweets relevant to your search term in Google.com.

I started out on Twitter in 07, didn't get it at all, and managed to let the thing collapse and die for a number of months. This was until I revived my interest in it with the brilliant Twitter app "tweetie" for my iPhone, and finding the various people I follow now were on the site.

Currently my set up is as follows:

Tweetie on iPhone (running three separate accounts.. including one I use for promoting deals at my place of work)

TweetDeck on the MBP, a brilliant tool for following and filtering a lot of people if you do track more than the average.

and a Twidget for my MBP dashboard which is useful when I'm not running TD.

If you haven't started using it, or like me you started then stopped... take some time to look into it further, I'm now a ridiculously regular user with quite a lot of followers and people I follow myself. It's a great community.

Get yourself tweeting!

Resurrecting a dead site like a particularly scratty half-worm eaten phoenix

Evening all.

So with a sudden urge to do something productive, possibly creative and mostly pointless, WTF is reborn.

Since these days I use a MacBook Pro with bugger all creative stuff on it, the focus of the site is mainly that of a blog and not of a virtual box to throw pictures and other such nonsense into.

All my oldie music craziness is still accessible at the lovely site my cousin made for me here.

I do have to say, I am completely out of my depth here. I'm accessing a site I haven't touched in two years, using an open source Mac web design thingy called NVu which up until ten minutes I didn't even own, or indeed had ever heard of. Not only that but I'm using an FTP client with a duck on it. This doesn't bode well.

The question on everybody's lips is of course "will he actually stick with it this time rather than updating once every year or so?" Well, let's keep everyone guessing. Including myself.

However, spurred into action given by the surprising number of people on Twitter who seem to find me vaguely interesting, I thought "sod it". Falling into the social networky thing without armbands on, my life seems to have drowned in updating nonsense to noone in particular. Glorious.

So settle down, enjoy the brown, and I'm going to run around this old site like a bunch of druggies in an abandoned warehouse, with a spray can, daubing this site with some sort of update, since half the links on this thing are pretty much dead.

Toodle piss darlings.

Okay so I'm delving even deeper into unknown territory.

If everything is sexy and ace, there should be a blog post, with these words on it, on my front page.

Yes it'll be formatted like a rubbish, but the fact is if I didn't set up an embedded blog, I'd end up with problems within three posts once I run out of room.

It makes sense, honest.