#37: Untitled

I couldn’t think of a suitable title for this entry.

I’m only actually updating because I have very little else to do. I bought my brother the excellent Guitar Hero II for the Xbox 360 for his 18th birthday and we’ve been playing it non-stop - I’m all guitared out for the moment though, so I came to the PC. Unfortunately I am encoding a DVD for a friend at the moment and so my PC is unusable for games - this is very annoying because all I actually want to do at the moment is play World of Warcraft, and I can’t because my CPU is busy being abused by FFMpeg.

I do have one more episode of last week’s Hollyoaks to watch though. I’m not sure I like the whole “who shot Phil Mitchell” style they’re going for at the moment (basically someone is in a coma as a result of being pushed from a balcony and there are five possible suspects) but I will continue watching as always.

Marthe’s visit last and this week went well, we all took lots of pictures and I’m sure some of them will find their way onto this blog sooner or later. She’s left the UK now and is currently in Finland visiting some more friends, I believe she returns home to Norway on Monday.

Bollocks. I just looked at the clock and realised it’s just gone 11pm. That means that the nearby BP garage will have now closed and I won’t be able to go and buy the chocolate buttons I’ve just developed a random craving for.

The worst part of having to make this DVD is that I’ve had to boot Windows XP to do it. Ack!

#36: Time off

Today is my last day of work for 7 days. I’m having tomorrow and Monday-Thursday next week off, which is brilliant news.

This is mainly because my friend Marthe (Shy^ from Managerleague) is coming over from her home country of Norway to visit England for a week. Myself, Kloopy and his girlfriend Charley are going to look after her for a week, take her to all the touristy places in London and make sure she has a really fantastic time here. She’s going up to Kloopy’s parents’ in Suffolk too, which should be quite an experience - they live in a lovely seaside town, surrounded by brilliant English countryside.

I also have plans to take her to a castle, which apparently they don’t have in Norway… I hope she likes it. I’ll post some pictures and stories during the week to keep you updated.

In other news - I auditioned for a play on Tuesday evening. I didn’t really expect to get anywhere, I just went along because Xsara was auditioning and said that I should go along and try for one of the male parts. There are in fact only two male parts, and they are both parts for older men (a schoolteacher and a father) so I wasn’t very hopeful, but they asked me to go back this evening for the second lot of auditions. It’d be quite nice to get a part - I’ve not acted properly since I was 18 - but I won’t be that gutted if I don’t. Rehearsals are always a lot of work and they can really take it out of you. There’s nothing like the feeling of being part of a cast though, and the adrenaline rush you get before you go on stage is fantastic.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

#35: Awesome

The subject is the best word I could think of to describe exactly what this weekend has been - “awesome”.

Xsara and I spent over 24 hours together on Saturday and Sunday, and it was the happiest I’ve been in quite a while. We did loads of coupley things - went shopping, watched DVDs, went to see a sketch show, ate takeaway pizza, cuddled, kissed, and did lots of other things… and it was absolutely brilliant. She stayed at my house on Saturday night and it was just incredible - to be so close to someone who you have such strong feelings for is amazing. Waking up with your arms around a beautiful girl who makes you smile and feel so warm inside is the one of the best feelings I’ve ever had.

If you could see the smile on my face at the moment, you’d be dazzled.

Don’t worry, I’m still a geek ;-)

#34: QRCode

My new phone (the delicious Nokia N95) has a feature on it called “barcode reader”. When I discovered this, I thought “great!” - although I didn’t see how scanning the back of a Nutrigrain packet to find out its barcode would be very useful at all, seeing as the number that the barcode represents is usually written across the bottom.

However, Kloopy also has an N95, and informed me this morning that the barcode reader is in fact designed to work with QRCode and Semacode instead.

I think this is a brilliant idea, although I can’t recall ever have seen one of these codes anywhere else. They can encode quite a lot of information for a small image. I encoded some of my important data as a QRCode…

#33: HashPHP meet

I went to London this weekend to meet a load of people from #php - it was great fun. It’s always interesting to put faces and voices to the people you talk to every day.

The photo was taken outside a Tescos near Hammersmith, where we went after the pub to purchase some beers before heading back to SIR-Millar’s flat for alcohol and Werewolf. Good times!

#32: News

I paid attention to two news stories in the past couple of days, due to being bored at work and using net surfing as a source of procrastination.

1) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6735631.stm
Paris Hilton got sent back to jail! I hope she does the female equivalent of dropping the soap in the shower and learns a lesson. She’s nothing but a deluded socialite who thinks that she can do anything she likes because Daddy has made a fortune, and she totally deserves to spend the time in jail. What sort of society are we living in where people can get out of jail after just three days and spend the time living in a cushy mansion somewhere under “house arrest”?

2) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6732873.stm
So a white middle class girl called someone a nigger? Big deal, it’s happened before and it will happen again. The fact is that racism is an integral part of British society. It might not be right, but it is just something that is true. Everyone tries to claim that they are bigger than it, or that they love everyone equally, but it just isn’t true.

Think of it this way. Anyone who gets even slightly worried when a group of black people walks towards them on their walk home is technically a racist. Anyone who sees an Asian man in the street and thinks “I bet he’s either a doctor or owns a corner shop” is technically a racist. There are many more examples of this.

Political correctness has gone too far, and in my opinion, we are at risk of losing our British identity in an effort to be too tolerant and multicultural. Is it any wonder that the BNP have a lot of support in northern English cities? A lot of people do literally see the world as black and white, and the media circus that is created whenever something like this happens is just serving to unsettle the country. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we see another civil war at some point in my lifetime.

The other reality is that Big Brother only booted Emily from the house because of the Shilpa Shetty race row that got them negative publicity last time. They got a slap on the wrist from OFCOM and now they have to make examples of anyone who uses certain words on the show.

I’d like to know what Endemol would do if everyone else in the house got involved in an absolutely huge row and used “racist” words, to the point where they had no alternative but to throw all the housemates out. That’d make their overtired show a bit more interesting, wouldn’t it?!

#31: Dates

So… I went on a date last night.

I know what you’re thinking - “OMG blogger in love life shocker”, right? Well, it was actually a second date, as the nerve-wracking “first date” was on bank holiday Monday a week and a bit ago. It all went really well, we went to the cinema to see “Zodiac” (there was a reason for that, but I won’t go into it) and cuddled and ate nachos, and generally everything was fantastic.

The film was good for about an hour and a half, then it just got boring. It lasted nearly three hours and that was a good hour and a bit longer than it needed to. It wasn’t so bad though, I was just glad to be there with my arm around a beautiful girl, giggling and whispering to each other. I’m not sure when we’ll see each other next, but it’ll definitely be soon.

At some point, I might post the story of how we met, because I think it’s quite amusing. I’ve promised myself that this is a geek’s blog though, and so it’ll stay geeky and not get all loved-up and sappy.

I promise :)

#30: Defined

I did a meme on Facebook this morning with the title “How will you be defined in the dictionary?”

Do they actually know me, or something?! :scared: