Dag 516: worlds longest gmail conversation (abridged)

A couple of weeks ago my good friends and I had a gmail conversation (at least thats what us people with gmail accounts call them - if you just use email, you'd probably just say you sent some emails or something) which ended up reaching 94. As this makes it the worlds longest gmail discussion I thought I would summerise it here:

Pao: Lets go out on thursday night - dom can choose where
Al: Perfect
Air: I'm quorate
Me: Hope you feel better soon
Pao: Blue Blazer has Sailor Jerry
Al: So is it a date then?
Me: Who is that question aimed at?
Al: you - you fud
Me: yes its on then
Al: Is DJ coming or is he attending his basket weaving class?
Me: He is going to his Jenson Button adoration society meeting.
DDS: If you get fired you'll be playing guitar on the London Underground.
Me: No, It'll be the Stockholm underground.
Air: My quorates are now back down to size. And we could call DOminiC Doc because he knows a bit about Swedisk pr0n or something.
Al: WHAT!!!! I'm the only one with a doctorate in that subject!
Pao: Doc don't like shellfish unless they are queens.
Al: What are you rambling on about and why are you up so insanely early?
Pao: Who told you that? I thought that was between me and the webcam in the booth.
Al: http://paosbooth.com/ credit card required
Al: I want an electric guitar - anyone got any tips?
Me: Get a shergold.
DDS: Time to go electric man.
Al: Damn, I wish I had got to slate him first.
Me: It is an electric guitar actually.
Al: I've just been to Asda and bought ham and bread.
DDS: I just went to Tesco and bought a jerk chicken wrap.
Al: I had too much ham so am a pig. But you had jerk chicken.
Pao: I went to the livi inn.
Al: some joke about a frog and Mick Jagger. The punchline was "It's a knick-knack Patty Wack, now give the frog a loan. His old man's a rolling stone" - you had to be there.
DDS: I am an avian jerk.
Me: I had chile for lunch.
DDS: I want to be a moon - ommmmm.
Al: Incestuous Scatophilia - I win.
Me: Heavy wet and messy space feltching - no you don't.
Al: I feel queasy.
Me: So to sum it up: We meet at 19:30 in the blue blazer and then go on to the hard rock cafe.
Al: blank email (he still hasn't got the hang of these things - sigh)
Me: I just told Andrew to go and read his gmail to find out about tonight and he came back 5 minutes later asking what his gmail address was.
Al: That's hilarious, and believable.
Al: Anyone up for a beer in glasgow next week?
Air: Oh yes we can go to Waxy Baxy Chunky Clarty O'Connor O'Hartigan's
Al: Are we fuck.
Air: They have decent home-made pizza too. Duck pizza? You will.
DJ: Would you like me to go out with you and comment on your driving from an advanced drivers institute type perspective?
DDS: Fools.
Al: Fuds.
Air: Exemplary.
Guy: How are you keeping?
Pao: Plaid.
AB: Most adjacent.
Jonty: C*nts.
Andrew: gmail?
Me: Deck mockets rock.

If these words were people, I would embrace their genocide.

He means you.

Link Fest

Right, just a little experiment - links and only links for humour and knowledge.
Comments welcome, of course....

Dag 502: I want my Shergold back

In around 1978 I spotted a guitar in the window of my local music shop which looked like half of Mike Rutherfords famous dual neck guitar. It was a Shergold Meteor, and I would spend hours standing outside the window starring at it. My Dad must have felt sorry for me because some time later he took me into the shop and bought it for me. I couldn't believe taht I owned a guitar that was the same make as one used by Genesis (who were my fave rave at the time).

I used that guitar in my first band, a punk band called Cloud 9. We played a number of gigs at local youth clubs, church halls and even at the 'Folk and Blues' night at our school. I really liked the idea of throwing my guitar down on the floor at the end of our gigs, but didn't want to damage it, so I used to put a thick blanket down before each gig. Unfortunatley, it did end up getting quite a few dints in it, but it stil played fine.

Cloud 9 eventually went their separate ways and I had, meanwhile, bought a Korg MS 10 mono synth, and my Shergold ended up just beijng used for messing around as I concentrated on my synth playing. With my trusty MS 10 I played synth for Nova Grace, Neural Circus and then went solo. I ended up doing a solo 'Human League style' gig at another of my school's 'Folk and Blues' nights using my own MS 10 and one ownded by my, then, girlfriend (HJ - who stood at the edge of the stage playing tamberine). The backing track was on tape and I played and sang along to it. The show began with a drum beat and bass line while I waited off stage. At the double snare beat I walked on and began to sing. As soon as I started to play the synth I realised it wasn't tuned the same as when I had made the backing tape (in fact as each song went on I found that it had been tuned differently from the previous one). The whole concert was taped from the mixing desk and also from a pair of mics hanging from the roof. I still have a copy of the tape (now transformed into mp3 format) and you can hear me frantically trying to retune my synth during a few of the songs. In the end I ended up programming in a hand clap type sound and just playing along to the tape using that. For those recording enthusiasts amongst us, the recording from the mikes came out much better than the one from the mixing desk as it had more audience noise and atmosphere about it.

The shergold never got used on stage again and I ended up signing up to do A level computer science at Harrogate College and a pre requesit was to own a computer. I didn't have one so I put my beloved bettered Shergold up for sale in the local paper. The first person that came to look at it (who, I remeber had long hair) said he was interested, but couldn't afford it until he had sold his sinclair spectrum. The outcome was obvious - we did a straight swap. I went and did my course, carried on playing synth, and that was that.

Until yesterday. Al sent me an email saying he wanted to buy an electric guitar and did I have any suggestions. I replied saying he should buy a Shergold and promptly did a search on google to see if I could find out if they still made them.
I found this site and discovered that they are no longer made.
I suddenly began to miss my guitar and I want it back.....

So, if you have long hair and you swapped a sinclair spectrum for a shergold sometime in the 1980s in Harrogate please can I buy it back from you? I'll swap it for a spectrum if you like.

Altenatively, if you have a Shergold Meteor in natural finish, can I buy yours?

Freddie

We went out last night. It was really good catching up with the guys, and it's wierd typing this since they all read/write here. So, I'll skip the report, since we were all there. I'm sure Dom can do it more justice anyway.
Only conspicuous absence was Danny boy. (DJ, etc. aren't expected). So Dan has some explaining to do.
Here's to Fredrik Butler, may all his days be long and happy *chink*.

Footnote - I hope Dom doesn't feel cheap and used. Waking in the morning and remembering the things you've done is always hard, but you just put it down to too much drink and the party atmosphere.

Wish you were here

It's tedious, sitting around, trying to figure out which sites to visit which will kill time without being entirely unprofessional. Given the plethora of web tracking tools, keeping your head below the parapet is another constant consideration. I figure that finding a nice long page of information is the way to go, maybe a big wiki entry or something.
I don't have work to do. I'm either really good at this, or there really is nothing to do. It's difficult to deny the urge to pull out the laptop and play a round on my new golf game.
Anyway, I have a few pastimes that you may be able to help with, or at least kill some of your own time with, if you're in a similar position (i.e. work in I.T.)
1 - Electric Guitar - I need something to start out with, but will be decent enough to use for a while if I enjoy it
2 - Acoustic Strings - Too many out there to count, and want to try a few
3 - Missed TV - I've downloaded the first series of 24, the whole of CSI and series 1 of desperate houswives (for the girl). Anything else I should be focussing on?
4 - Holidays - Something unusual, or something worth doing at the weekend in Scotland
5 - Streaming movies over wireless. New laptop does it...almost but why does it still stall? I'd have thought 2MB/s would be the requirement, so wireless (56MB/s?) shouldn't have a problem

Traffic News

I've been playing around on GMaps since it was released a while back. It's nice, it's got some features I really like.
It was updated a couple of weeks ago to include satellite images, although the level of detail is a bit strange.
The latest thing though, is the publishing of APIs that allow geeks to use the maps to overlay all sorts of information.
Clicking on the title of this post will take you to what I think is the best example of a UK based one that I've found. It shows speed cameras, weather reports, local news and a bundle of other things I don't really understand.
I like it when technology and innovation amaze me, it breaks through my cynical tendencies and makes me smile.

Dag 498: Det kallt är av

It has been a little quiet round here as I have been back in my normal home for the last 2 weeks and I don't get much chance to get on the computer there.

I still haven't done a posting about my trip to see Kent in Stockholm, which is now many weekends ago, but I still intend to do it. One of my excuses is that I have been trying to load all my photos from that trip onto my newly purchased .mac web space which I will then link to within the posting. Getting the photos on there was easy, it was when I decided I wanted to rename them that the problems started. With .mac you get a thing called an iDisk. This appears as a volume on your desktop and when you copy files onto it they will be automatically synced up to the iDisk you have on the web. This means you can do things to your local iDisk when you are not hooked up and next time you hook up it will get resynced. So the first problem was that I renamed all of the photos on my local iDisk whcih then got copied onto the web iDisk, ok so far, but then the original photos on the web iDisk got synced back to my powerbook so I now had to copies of the photos on both the web and my laptop. After various bits of messing around I deced to delet my iDisk and start again.

So now I had my iDisk complete with 1 set pf photos with proper names, rather than the numbers my camera had automatically given them. My next step was to create my .mac photo album to which I would be able to link from my soon coming kent concert weekend blog entry. This was easy enough to do, apert from the fact that the photos were sorted alphabetically so they were no longer in cronological order (which they had been on my first trial as the generated number were sequential). This is fixable though as the .mac website allows you to drag the photos around into the order you want. The problem is it is very slow and after dragging a random number of photos into the correct order you suddenly find that the descriptions that go with the photos have suddenly moved out by one place.

So if i can't swap the order of the photos without this happening I need to get the photos in the correct order to start with. So it was back to my local iDisk to rename the files to have a number at the beginning. So once I had done this (and deleted the iDisk again because I had ended up with 2 copies of the photos again and then recreated one with numbers at the start of the filenames) I recreated the online photo album. Unfortunately the sorting of photos was not exactly as I had thought so it went 1 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 2 20 21 etc...

Now it was nearly right, there were 9 photos in the wrong place. I tried moving these really slowly but, again, ended up with the descriptions getting out of sync. So I renamed the ones with a single digit to have a zero in front of them, which would solve the sorting issue, but of course I ended up with duplicates again.

At this point I ended up taking 2 weeks of work and have just returned today. I currently have an empty iDisk and I will try doing the whole procedure again in the near future. I will then do my blog entry for my weekend in Stockholm (if I still remember what happened by then).

After reading Al's eloquant and moving post I had a look at the stats to see if it had caused our ratings to soar through the roof and found that the share of languages on the computers that connect to this site are as follows:
English: 86.75%
Swedish: 10.84%
Russian: 1.2%
German: 1.2%

This is pretty pleasing to me as it means that as well as gaining a good international reputation for delivery both interesting and hard hitting blog enries, we are also finding that 10.84% of end users have there language set to Swedish. I wonder how many of those percentage points are attributable to that fact that my powerbook has it's language set to Swedish?

To our Swedish fans I would like to say "Tack", to our German fans I would like to say "Danke" and to our Russian fans I would like to say "My tap doesn't work". (ok that bit doesn't work that well on paper, but it is funny because one of the few things I can say in Russian is "my tap doesn't work" - the problem is that I don't know how to write it down. It sounds a bit like "my er cram nerra bootiette". I can also say "where is the map" in Russian. In fact I don't know how to say thankyou in Russian, but thanks anyway for making up 1.2% of our viewing figures.

Until next time, as always, dos vidanya.

The Heat Is On

Well well, it's quiet in here.

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."
Best.Opening.Line.Ever.
I was reading the latest one of this series of books (exercise for the reader) at the weekend. I was thinking about how the story has emerged and was trying to decide whether the plot had just disappeared up the writer's arse, or whether it was literary genius that I was just too intellectually immature to 'get'. As always, my mind decided it'd had enough of that pretentious nonsense and went off at a tangent. I tried to catch it, honest I did, but it was just too fast.
As always, the thoughts were linked, slowly but determinedly toward where the subconscious wanted the almost-conscious mind to be. I kind of like it when that happens, it feels like the mental equivalent of gravity, all the planets and stars being the thoughts, ideas and emotions swirling around in the immense darkness of our mental universes until the inevitable black hole appears to pull in the nearest ones.
Well, in this particular case, the black hole was pulling in the star that was 1982, with the planets that were my 11th birthday, the vast, alien world that was the move from the highlands of Scotland to the slumlands of Glasgow and the newly discovered world of adult books. Not those kind of adult books you filthy minded minx, the other ones.
My grandparent's (nana and gaga, would you believe) house was full of books. A strange collection of novels from god knows when, combined with large encyclopaedia-like tomes that contained all the wisdom of Victorian Britain about raising and entertaining children. Not in the self-help way that books are these days, more in a "books about children, for children" kind of a way. Obviously written by people with no idea of what children were. There were pages about origami, kite flying, counting raindrops and other such pure and innocent pursuits. I remember the melancholic way I used to read these, already allowing the little descriptions of innocent, happy pastimes supplant the memories of life up North. My recollections of playing in the street at midnight with my friends taking on a shade of brown and my cheap 70's clothing morphing into a Victorian schoolboy's uniform of shorts and blazer, with a little peaked cap. My idealistic memories were doubtlessly fed by the current environment of endless filth, the streets covered in empty crisp packets and cigarette ends, the kids with their dried in, snottery beaks running around and swearing before the inevitable fight broke out between a couple of the sorrowful latch-keys.
I started school after the summer. My parents must have felt sorry for us, or maybe just wanted us out of the way, because they'd shipped of the youngest (which included me) to nana's for most of the 7 week summer. I'd spent that time in the 5 house village of Kentallen, with loch linnhe across the road from the house and endless bracken-covered hills at the back. After a couple of months in Glasgow, it was a welcome release to come back 'home' and feel the sun, and run up the hills with the dogs and not have to worry about the big kids in the street picking on the new kid because of his weird accent and permanently startled look on his face. Reality, however, had to return.
The first day of school, and I was all dressed up with my brown satchel strapped in securely over both shoulders. The uniforms from my old school - which had been a little village one with two classrooms, one for primary 1-4 and one for primary 5-7 - weren't suitable attire for the new school, so I'd been dressed up in black trousers and white shirt in lieu of finding out the proper dress code. I should have sensed the difference immediately as I was being walked to school by mum. All the other kids were strolling down the road alone, some a lot younger than me, dressed in jeans and trainers, with their Nike and Adidas sports bags casually hanging from one shoulder. I was, however, still in startled rabbit mode, and took in none of this and all of this at the same time.
I was introduced to my classmates after registration, where we'd all stood in the sports hall and recited the Lord's Prayer. I stood at the front of the class as instructed by Miss Brown, or White or Turquoise or something, as she told the slack-jawed, uninterested throng of thirty other weans my name and that I was new here, which I'm sure they'd never have guessed if she hadn't mentioned it. I took my red, burning face to my new desk and sat down, hoping against hope that I was done, that I could just disappear into the quiet corners and be forgotten. The teacher was asking about something to do with something. I must have listened at the time, because when she asked me a question about it, I answered. I only did because that was what you did when teachers asked you questions. You did your best to answer in the hope that they didn't tell your mum you were misbehaving the next time she dropped in for a cup of tea on the way to the bus stop. I got the answer right. "Hey, we've got the Brain of Britain here!" exclaimed the helpful teacher, and moved on to a random selection of hard-nosed pupils. My face burned again, not sure whether I'd done well or badly, but sure that the attention was unwelcome and wanting to be left alone.
The fire alarm went. That meant it was 10.30am. That meant the washless throng moved out to the concrete playground for 15 minutes, when another alarm would go off and we'd troop back to the classroom. Just another little difference then, no more head teacher coming out with her church bell in hand, smiling and telling the kids is was 'time to come back in and learn children'.
I stood in the playground, trying to be invisible, as one of my classmates came over, trailed by 3 or 4 more of them. "So, where the fuck are you fucking from then?" he asked. "North Connell" I said meekly. "Where the fuck is that?" asked my new friend. "Up North." I replied. He turned to his friends - "Brain of fucking Britain is from fucking up North.", and turned back to me. "Do you want a square go?” I tried to translate this and failed. "What's that?" I asked politely. One of his friends interjected, "Just fucking deck him Jimmy!” The others joined in with a rhythmic "Fight. Fight. Fight. Fight" chant. The nearest other kids came over to the crowd and joined in. I stood, surrounded, with tears threatening to fall and a bladder desperate to unleash a torrent of hot piss into my new trousers. The boy swung at me, I saw the fist through blurry eyes and swayed a bit so it just glanced across my temple. The rage came upon me and I unleashed a torrent of blows, obviously using my brown leather satchel as my weapon of choice. He fell to the ground after the first couple of shots, as I continued to rain satchel laden terror upon him until a teacher ran over and dragged me away to the headmistress' office. "I hope you're not going to be trouble" she said "We already have enough of that". I answered that I wasn't and I was sorry and she guided me back to class. I sat back at my desk and continued learning, thankful that I had black trousers on, which didn't show the damp patch very well. And anyway, I'd only leaked a little bit, and my pants would have soaked most of that up.
So I started reading books, becoming the hero for a while as I immersed myself in these new worlds. And I read that opening line "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.", and was hooked. I wanted to be both men. I wanted to run away, but 'flee' just sounded much faster and more honourable. And I wanted to be the gunslinger, standing firm with no emotion in my eyes as I watched the fear in the face of those that had forgotten their father. As always, some middle ground was eventually found. I gave James a few bloody noses and we became friends. I tumbled around with a few other kids and won and lost. I found there were acceptable limits when I picked up the hammer in woodwork to subdue a particularly annoying boy and was sent home for a couple of days on 'suspension'. I never hit him, just scared him a bit. And I peeked over the changing room curtains when Debbie was changing for the end of (primary 7) year school play at which I was receiving the school Dux medal, and saw her rapidly developing breasts. I don't know where the medal is these days, or where Debbie is for that matter, but I know which one is my favourite planet in the Universe of my mind.