I’m not going to spend ages writing a review; I’m just going to say one thing: it is awesome. That is all

Regardless, I guess I’ll keep everyone up-to-date.

I’ve moved in with a friend of mine in a nice two bedroom flat near the center of town, which is really nice. It only takes me 5 minutes to get to and from work every day, and with the high street on my doorstep, meeting people for drinks or inviting people back isn’t too much of a workout.

Work is going great. I’m working on Toshiba technical support; so if you have a Toshiba laptop (or video camera), you may get through to me if ever you need to call tech support. Believe it or not, it’s actually great fun working in the call centre. Everyone there is a complete geek, and when we’re not answering calls or absorping fantastic amounts of coffee into our bloodstreams, we’re talking about videogames and putting the laptops through benchmark tests. I love it.

For about a year now, I’ve been following the iPhone. I’ve followed the hype and the let downs, and through it all I’ve wanted to buy one. This time last year I had come out of my full-time job, and didn’t have any money to my name. So I anticipated.

Now, 12 months down the line, I finally thought I had gathered enough money to purchase the phone and actually go and get it. Each week that I have been paid before now I have done something, or something has come up, causing me to not be able to purchase it.

So, with my £100 in hand, I walked to the o2 store, after waking up all excited this morning. I started processing the contract with the lady, and it got to the point where they do an address and credit check, and the results came back showing I’d have to pay a £100 deposit, which I would get back in 3 months.

See, due to the backwards way England is, I should actually already have a credit card and everything, so that I actually have a credit rating. As I’ve not had a phone contract before, I don’t have one, and therefore need to pay a deposit.

Naturally, through me being my pessimistic self, I had already anticipated something getting in the way and me not actually going home with an iPhone today. So, I left the o2 shop, sighing slightly, deposited my money in the bank and mumbled “next week…”.

I suppose I did have the option of picking the £45/month tarrif, and getting the handset for free, but I just couldn’t justify spending that much on an 18 months contract, especially as for £10/month extra, you only get extra minutes, which I just won’t use.

The money is reasonably good, at £7.56/hour, which goes up after 6 months. I’ll be working on a monthly time rota, so one week I’ll do 9-5, then another 8-4, then another 10-6, then another 2-10, with one weekend per month in exchange for a Wednesday and Thursday, I believe.

Anyway, hopefully it’ll be fairly enjoyable, and I’ll gather the cash to sort a new place to live, as well as study the MCDST.

They have a pool table and a machine that dispenses chocolate milk, which I can’t wait to check out.

I start tomorrow.

Kudos to the designer.

http://exeter.gumtree.com/exeter/86/26166086.html

Idioms. I fucking hate idioms. Even the definition of the word idiom is stupid:

“An idiom is an expression, that is a term or phrase whose meaning cannot be deduced from the literal definitions and the arrangement of its parts, but refers instead to a figurative meaning that is known only through common use.”

When someone is explaining something, and they finish with “it’s easy as pie!”, it just makes we want to destroy their teeth. How is pie easy? What about pie is easy? That doesn’t even make sense!

If you have been reading for a while, you’ll know that I had a couple of job interviews lately at some website development companies. One of them was fantastic, and unfortunately I didn’t get it, which I was a little disappointed at. The other, however, was a complete shambles. My input was fine, the interview went well. However, the manager completely forgot I was coming, so I had to sit around for thirty minutes and wait for him to prepare some work for me to do, and nobody else in the sausage-fest office even bothered saying hi.

At one point I called one of them over to ask him a question, and he was a complete condescending prick. One of the other guys actually lost his arse in the abnoxiousness. Seriously, he was about eleven feet tall, and if you stood him against a wall you’d be able to draw a perfectly straight line. Man, they were a bunch of idiots. I didn’t even hear back from the agent who was obsessing over the position. Fuck them.

I was contacted about a technical support position earler, by one of those typical over-bubbly females that works for a recruitment agency. You know, the kind that wake you up at 10am with a “HELLO THIS IS MARY SPEAKING, I AM CALLING WITH REGARDS TO THE POSITION YOU ENQUIRED ABOUT, DO YOU HAVE A MINUTE!?” that has every inflection known to man and cat. After the delightful phone call we had, she e-mailed me about the position, and I replied. Amongst my reply was the following:

“Also, what sort of technical support would the successful candidate be offering? I’m assuming it’s IT support, but it appears to be a little vague.”

To which she replied:

“Dealing with technical support from Toshiba customers.”

I sat there thinking “did I not just say that it was vague!? You could have at least said you don’t know instead of repeating what your stupid Word document says, you idiot. Can you actually read, or are your eyes just engulfed in that mocking happiness you spew down the phone to unemployed people who were happily sleeping? In fact, do you even know who Toshiba are? In fact! Your reply is completely illegitimate! I’m going to be dealing with technical support from Toshiba customers? What!?”

Is not being able to use a camera part of the job requirement to work at a letting agency? Have you ever looked for properties online? Not only do all of letting agents’ website developers completely suck, and restrict image sizes to stupid dimensions, but nobody can even take good photos of properties anymore. I’m half tempted to make a website titled “Exeter Property Pictures” and offer to go around and take pictures of all of the properties available to rent or buy. I mean, for fuck sake, Google will give you however many gigabytes of free space. What’s with all of these 300×300px images of the outside of a property that might not even be the one available? Idiots.

Why do people feel the need to touch a monitor when they’re pointing at something? If anything it makes the thing you’re pointing at harder to see, because your fucking finger is covering it! IF I TOUCH IT THEY’LL KNOW WHAT I MEAN SMUDGE SMUDGE SMUDGE.

The things people say and do on Facebook make me wonder how people manage to butter their toast in the morning. I’m not going to go into a huge list of stupidity, but this is something that one of my friends wrote on another of my friends’ wall:

Im guessing your not Gyming it with me 2nite? Il be there at 6.10, see you there!!!!

I’m not even going to bother taking that apart. Just reading it makes me want to tear off my eyelids.

Due to various complications, my cat has been taken back to the old house, and it’s with this that I have come to understand why that is said.

When I was 9 years old I bought my cat, Barney, with my own £15. I went to a house where the owners had a litter of kittens, and chose that cat. I wonder what happened to his brothers and sisters, and his Mother and Father too. Through ten years, Barney has never betrayed my trust or let me down, like humans have the tendancy to do. We’ve never had an argument, or fallen out. Through ten years, if ever I needed a hug, he was there, and always enjoyed the attention. At times he could sense my emotions; he knew if I was happy or sad, and would often come over to me to play, or to cheer me up. Okay, so Barney is a cat, not a dog, and even though I can go and see him whenever I like, I now feel that I understand why people refer to dogs as “man’s best friend”.

On Tuesday the 8th I had a call from an agency about a web developer position at a company called Toucan Design. I said that I was interested, and 30 minutes later, they had hooked me up with an interview for Tuesday 15th. I attended the interview, and was told that I was one of five or six other interviewees, and that the agency would get back to me to see if I had made it to the final two.

I got an e-mail today saying that I have been selected as one of the final two, and that they would like me to come in next Tuesday from 2-5 to work with the team on a small project, and see how I get on. Whether or not the other interviewee will be there, I don’t know. It could be a little awkward.

However, I have also been in contact with another agency, who has put my CV forward for a similar web developer position at Organic Development. I told the agent, who has been a complete star through this, that I have been asked to go in for a second interview at Toucan Design, and that the first one went well. He spoke to the manager of Organic Development, who is very keen to meet me, and I have an interview pencilled in for Wednesday. The manager is apparently quite worried that I’m going to take the position with Toucan Design, if it’s offered to me, and is therefore attempting to clear his schedule. The agent started trying to persuade me to wait it out and see if Organic Development will take me on, but I told him that I’d go for the position that became available more immediately.

So, from the point of me applying for two completely different IT Technician roles, hearing nothing about them, but having the agencies that I applied for them through contact me about web developer roles, and now fight over me, it’s all quite fun.

The interview on Tuesday went well, and I hope that Toucan Design do offer me the job, but I’m also keen to see what is going on at Organic Development. Next week should be exciting. Hopefully, one way or another, I’ll end up with a job.

Today the Virgin Media idiots came over and sorted the internet connection, TV and phone line, and I have to say, this 20Mb connection is disgusting. People like me shouldn’t be let loose with 2.2MB/s download speeds; the consequences could be dire. It took a little while to set up the cheap Netgear cable router they sent, but me, being the genius I am, hacked the shit out of it and got it to work.

During my time offline everything felt somewhat incomplete. Even though lots of people came together, and we went from having a house with practically nothing, to a house with furniture and electronics from all over the place, the lack of internet connection made me feel like I had to find the last piece of the puzzle before I could frame it and put it on my wall. Needless to say I spent the 3 weeks offline leeching WiFi (out of my own freewill, not because of the landlord’s suggestion), but regardless of how much I changed router settings, the signal strength was terrible. The new house is brilliant though, and I really like the location.

I have a new desk, which is much nicer than my old desk, though still not quite big enough for my liking, but unfortunately my chair is a little too low, so it really hurts to type on it, and look at the monitor. Actually, aiding typing pain is the fact I have a nice grey, cheap keyboard, because my beautiful Enermax Aurora finally died. For the first time ever, I threw a full cup of tea all over my desk, and that was the end of it. Pressing B also caused a V and a 6 to appear somewhere on the screen, which became very annoying when I restarted my PC.

“Hey dude, could I borrow a keyboard off of you. I’ve managed to spill a cup of tea on mine and it no longer works.”
“Sure, but on-screen keyboard for the win!”
“Yeah, I’d use it, but I can’t login to Windows, because I can’t type my password in to the login box.”
“There’s a keyboard shortcut”
“…”

Is it just me that notices the fundamental flaw in having a keyboard shortcut for the on-screen keyboard?

Now that I have an internet connection I want to get a white board so I can have a to-do list. Ones on the computer just never seem to work for me. I have plenty of things to be getting on with, and plenty of things I’d like to do. I’m going to have to use the fantastic WordPress function that enables you to post BACK IN TIME to update my “Album of the Week” posts.

Anyway, I best head off to bed, as I have a fun day searching through 20,000 files ahead of me. I reinstalled Windows today and forgot to backup a folder on my C: drive, and therefore undeleted it from the disk format, which recovered lots and lots of deleted files, none of which have proper filenames. Joys!

Our internet connection.

Now, the landlord of the house asked that we don’t get a phoneline installed, and that if we want an internet connection, he suggests that we use an unsecure wireless network that we can find in the neighbourhood. He actually suggested we do that. I think we should request it in writing, so that we can show the estate agent, or the judge, or who ever. We went against that and called Virgin, as there was already a cable box in the house, and they could get us connected much quicker than having a BT line put in the house, and then contacting an ADSL ISP. So, we called Virgin on Saturday, and they said they could have us connected on Tuesday. Tuesday came, and UPS delivered the world’s biggest box, which contained the modem, router, TV box, etc. I plugged it all in, called them asking us to activate the modem, and sat and watched blinking lights… for hours.

We called them again, and after several “we’ll call you back”s, we discovered that a signal wasn’t being received at our end. I investigated the box on the front of the house, which is where the cable is fed from the CATV box on the pavement, and discovered that the cable from the street to the house had been cut. I was tempted to attempt a make-shift repair, but doubted it would work. So, this means that we have to have an engineer sent out to put in 3m of cable, and they’re not able to do that until the 10th of July, which is pretty damn poor service if you ask me.

Hopefully by the time that comes I’ll have a new desk sorted, my guitars will be on the wall and my clothes will be packed away. We’ll see, though.

We jumped on the train to Derby, which is home to every yellow car in the world! As some of you may be aware, us youths enjoy playing a game of “Mini” or “Yellow car”, where, upon seeing a mini or yellow car, you punch everyone else in the arm before they can do it to you. Fortunately I stepped in and shouted “I hereby ban the game ‘Yellow Car’ in Derby” and claimed that citizens of Derby are very bitter about the whole game and play “Pink Car” instead.

We jumped on the shuttle bus which would take us from Derby train station to Castle Donnington, where the festival is held. Naturally I jumped in and spoke to everyone as soon as I could, but unfortunately when the bus arrived, we all got split up. We carried our bags around for ages, through fields of thousands of tents, trying to find a spot to pitch ours. I think the whole camping aspect of the event could be a little better organised, but never mind. Eventually we found a spot in White Camp. I didn’t really get the opportunity to take a good picture of the sheer quantity of canvas housing, but it was truly epic.

As there weren’t any bands actually playing on Thursday, the campsite just opens early, we wandered around the fairground and gasped at the prices of food (£4 for a burger, £2.50 for a drink).

Unfortunately throughout the duration of the festival, we didn’t really socialise with anybody. I wasn’t overly bothered about that, because contrary to what I’d heard, the atmosphere didn’t seem that great at all. The entire place was infested with your typical loud, annoying teenager, with a few older people that clearly hadn’t grasped the concept of growing the fuck up, which really disappointed me. I didn’t go to Download for the line up, I went because the atmosphere was supposed to be really fantastic. There were a lot of thefts, a lot of loud, annoying people and there was a lot of violence. I think the entire experience would have been much nicer if more of my friends could have put aside their “I’m not going because the line up is shit” attitude, and come along. Never mind, there’s always next year.

Annoyingly a lot of the bands I wanted to see clashed with a lot of the bands that I’d not heard of, so I didn’t really get a huge opportunity to expand my listening taste. However, the bands that I did see (Seether, Disturbed, Motorhead, Judas Priest, Kiss, Alter Bridge, Biffy Clyro, Bullet for my Valentine, Incubus, The Offspring, Black Stone Cherry, Apocalyptica, Within Temptation, In Flames, Coheed & Cambria, Pendulum, Amon Amarth, The Wildhearts, Children of Bodom) were absolutely fantastic (with a few exceptions).

However, the entire festival ended with a huge anti-climax for me, because Jimmy Eat World and Lost Prophets were the two bands finishing on the main stage on the last day; two bands I absolutely loathe. I didn’t conform to the common activity of throwing bottles at bands I don’t like, instead I left Tallis to see the bands she really likes and went to see some of the other bands playing. I caught Children of Bodom, who were good, but I’m not a huge fan of them, and would have much preferred to see a band that I like on the main stage. Apparently Lost Prophets had quite a big firework display to finish off the festival, which I would have like to have seen had another band been playing. It’s nice that the people who do like those bands got to see them on the last night, but as I paid for both of us to go to the festival and everything, it would have been nice if I could have enjoyed the last night.

Monster, an American company were one of the sponsors at Download. They brought along a bike show, and the most fantastic energy I’ve ever had. It packs something like 35mg of caffeine per 100ml, in a 500ml can. It was so very nice.

The food, whilst expensive, was awesome. The large yorkshire puddings filled with gravy, sausages and mashed potato for £6 were extremely tasty. Pancakes with chocolate and marshmallows, falafels with salad and humous, burgers, chips, potato wedges, pasta, pizza, icecream, Belgian waffles; it was all so very good.

The journey home was a dull one. We woke up on Monday morning, got our tent packed and sorted by 9am, and got back to Derby train station for around 10. I had booked traint tickets with RailEasy, and because I didn’t have much money to spend, I got the really cheap ones, which meant that our train home wasn’t until 18:30. We decided to risk it and jump on the 10:24 train, but had to get off or be fined around £150 to travel to Exeter. We got off at Birmingham New Street and had a 7 hour wait in front of us, with 20p between us. Toilets cost 30p to use.  I actually recall lifting my head from my arm in the waiting room, looking at Tallis and saying “I’m hungry… and I can’t afford to poo!”, which is honestly something I thought I’d never say. Thankfully Tallis managed to contact her Dad, who wired £10 into her account, so Burger King was enjoyed, as was using the toilet facilities, which, I have to say, weren’t worth 30 pence. The 7 hours dragged as there is absolutely nothing to do at the train station. I didn’t much fancy hiking around Birmingham with all of the camping gear either. We were both tired and stressed, and looked awful because we’d spent 4 days at a festival, gathering a dirt tan, without showering. Eventually the train came and we got home, Subway in hand, anticipating the luxury of a shower and a bed.

Download was certainly a remarkable experience, though perhaps not the same as I was expecting. I suppose that’s the problem of imagining what the experience is like before you get there; even if it’s better, it’s not the same. I’m glad I saw the bands I saw, and I learnt a lot about going to a festival. Next year I’ll certainly go to another - whether it’ll be Download or something different, I don’t know.

More pictures here.

6 years ago, I think, I moved to the house I live in now with my Mum. I didn’t want to move here. Hell, I don’t think she wanted to move here, but we had no choice, we needed a house. Through the past 6 years I’ve lived here, and not really liked it that much, but, it has made me the person I am. I think that had I not moved, I wouldn’t have become anywhere near as creatively focused as I am now, and I doubt I’d have any of the computing skills I have now, had we lived somewhere closer to civilisation. So I’m not complaining, just setting the scenes.

Due to the kerfuffle that went on last night, it appears that we are moving house to somewhere closer to town - something I’ve wanted to do for far too long. Obviously this news has made me ineffably happy, but it has also made me realise how good things come in blocks. This morning I was contacted by somebody who has owed me money for two months, saying that he is just about to pay it.

In a way, it irritates me.

As somebody pointed out, it does sound like I’m saying “Good things are happening, for fuck sake!”, but that’s not what I’m getting at. Why do all of these good things have to happen at once, like you’ve just been shot in the colon by someone wielding the HAPPY FUN DAY gun? Why can’t they be spread out gradually? I suppose it does wonders for the mood you’re in, but honestly, life and karma has an odd way of treating people; or perhaps it’s just me?

Anyway, it would seem a lot of changes are afoot. I’m off to Download festival with my wonderful better half tomorrow, and when I get back everything might be in boxes. Hopefully including the cat. I really don’t want to leave him behind. In a way he’s one of my closest friends, and I bought him with my very own £15 that I saved when I was 9. He means a lot to me.

It was recently Tallis’ 18th birthday, for which, amongst other things, she got a laptop. It’s quite a nice machine, running Windows Vista, which, after the experience I had with my Vista laptop, I didn’t think I’d have a problem with. However, I bought an OEM Vista disk for my laptop, so I had my own install on it, which may have played a part in how well it worked.

Anyway, when Tallis was using my Vista laptop, I enabled sharing on her user folder (C:\Users\Tallis) so that I could transfer pictures and music from my XP machine to the laptop, so that she had them on the laptop. To do this I simply enabled the various file sharing preferences in the Network and Sharing Center, and then right clicked on “Tallis” in C:\Users\, clicked share, enabled sharing and allowed write access so that I could actually copy files. From then I could simply type \\Tallis in the run box on my XP machine, double click “Tallis” and then open Pictures/Music/whatever and copy + paste the files I wanted, no problem.

I was just playing with her new laptop, which has a fucking horrible Vista install on it, courtesy of HP. I followed the same procedure, but I was unable to access her user folder in the same way. When I disabled sharing on the “Public” folder, it disabled file sharing completely. Eventually I shared the Music and Pictures folders, and was presented with a completely different sharing window. When I did that I could access those folders on the network, and write to them perfectly. With sharing enabled on those two folders I tried enabling sharing on the entire user folder. That worked, and I was able to browse her user folders. With that working I disabled sharing on the Music and Pictures folders, but left it enabled on the user folder. When I did that I was unable to access the files.

So, on my Vista laptop (running Vista Home Premium SP1 that was installed by me) I was able to share her user folder in 5 simple clicks, and that was that. On her Vista laptop (running Vista Home Premium SP1 that was installed by HP) I was unable to share her user folder unless folders inside the user folders were shared, which seemed a little pointless. Why share folders twice?

Also, I noticed that the directory tree is completely different. Before, when I typed \\laptop (my Vista laptop) in the run box, I would see “Tallis”, which was her shared user folder. Now, when I type \\tallis, I see “Public” and “Users”. Public obviously displays the shared Public folder, but Users displays “Public” and “Tallis”. Public once more displays the shared Public folder, and Tallis displays the shared Music and Pictures folder that I shared before.

What a huge pile of shit. Why, oh why, is file sharing across the network this difficult and long-winded. On XP it’s not brilliant, but it is a simple matter of right clicking a folder, clicking share, and that’s it. No problems. No hassle.

On another note, the developers of the Creative website need to go through a similar procedure as the developers of Vista, with the whole barbed wire floss thing. Downloading software for their MP3 players is stupid. They have a search function, which allows you to “search for software”, yet when you type in the name of a piece of software they developed, such as “Creative Media Explorer”, you get no search results.

Dear lord I wish I could just recolonise this world with people who aren’t so ridiculously pathetic.

I bought a new tent, and made sure I had everything ready, and was greatly anticipating setting out to the camp site. Even after I had checked the weather forecast and learnt that the days were cursed with rain and wind, my spirits weren’t dampened.

It seems as if my time away from the Internet has damaged my writing ability. Stick with me.

I had a fantastic time when I was there. Everybody was very lovely. I made new friends, got to know new people, ate vegan food and was quite physically active; playing frisbee and football and such things. The days were nice, and the nights were nicer; sat around a camp fire, everybody with their musical intstruments which got more and more exotic. You could really feel that everyone was away from an urban society, and had a certain sense of freedom about them.

The campsite was rather quiet, to be honest. Not that I wasn’t expecting that, but it would seem that in May the site is filled with a rather clique group of people (the people who are dedicated to the event), where as in August, when the weather is nicer, more people turn up.

During my time there I didn’t really learn much, apart from a few amatuer camping mistakes (such as learning not to pitch a tent uphill), but I had a lot of time to reflect on the person I am and the things I do.

Right now I’m back in my chair, thinking to myself that I much prefer my tent, and if I could take my laptop with me to work, I’d happily be there all year round. Actually, that’s a lie, it was beautiful coming home to dry socks and a clean toilet, but a huge part of me much prefers the work that you put in to gain simple things, such as boiling water and keeping warm.

I’m aching a lot due to sleeping on a rollmat, but I had a fantastic time. Hopefully by August I’ll have the money to buy a few more essentials, but I can’t wait to break away and go back there again.

I’ve not yet sorted out an image gallery, so the pictures aren’t yet up, but when they are, I hope you look at them.

Language capability will catch up soon, I hope…

I am guessing this is just an overlook, or a bug, but currently there isn’t a variable you can define in the shortcode, or an option you can change to get the gallery shortcode to link thumbnails directly to files. This can be easily fixed by editing a file in the WordPress installation.

WordPress 2.5.1:

1. Navigate to your WordPress install.
2. Browse to /wp-includes/
3. Download/open “media.php”
4. Scroll to line 402
   $link = wp_get_attachment_link($id, $size, true);
5. Replace it with the following (or just change “true” to “false”)
   $link = wp_get_attachment_link($id, $size, false);
6. Save and upload the file

Obviously this edit will be overwritten if you reinstall or upgrade WordPress, but hopefully when 2.5.2 is released, this will be fixed and the edit won’t be needed.

Aside from the various spelling errors around, such as “By 3 classic PC games for only £10 including Theme Hospital, Red Alert 2 and Broken Sword 1 & 2″, there are various consistency errors. For example, clicking on the Xbox 360 bargains page takes you to a page where the first thing Xbox 360 related (the 360 console) is the 4th item down on a list made of large images.

I actually visited the website to check the price of a PS3. So, I hovered over “Games” in the navigation, clicked on “Sony Playstation 3″, ignored the new releases and top sellers and clicked “Hardware” in the side menu, then scrolled to the bottom of the page and browsed items 1-20, 21-40 and finally 41-54 before I found the actual PS3 console. The model I was looking for - the 60GB model - didn’t even have a price listed on the overview, because they had none in stock. Clicking the product revealed that there were various items available at playtrade for prices higher than I care to mention.

What a bad job.

Once again, stepping into the venue caused your entire existance to be engulfed in sweat and moisture, which was pretty gross, but none the less Skindred put on a fantastic show. Unfortunately, half way through their set the fire alarms went off, which was, needless to say, very annoying for all of us inside; it must have been a great anti-climax for Skindred as well. Thankfully not a lot of time spent outside, and we managed to get back in to the moisture zone of doom after a massive kerfuffle with 2,000 people and a small wooden door, which could have resulted in a much stickier situation. Skindred resumed the gig fantastically, but towards the end of the show I felt the room was getting a little too crowded and hot, so that ruined it a little for me.

Both Skindred and Pendulum are playing Download festival, which we are attending, later in the year, so hopefully I’ll get to see them both again. If I have to miss them, at least I’ll be able to do so with the experience of seeing them both earlier in the year. Unfortunately, once again I couldn’t buy a t-shirt. Dammit.

It’s very surprising actually, if you listen to the roots of their music before the keyboard player and the various other synth effects kick in, how influenced they are by progressive metal. Towards the end of the gig, they began one of their songs with just the two guitarists, bassist and drummer - and most people in the crowd were giving the horns and had a bit of a mosh.

Actually, if you spend a lot of time listening to their music, or any dance music, you realise how very simple it is, yet comes together so beautifully. I’m not usually one for dance/club music, but honestly, they were amazing. Their lighting technician, although he only had a small setup to play with, did a truly fantastic job, and all in all the show was amazing.

I think the thing I like most about the atmosphere though, is the fact that most people simply enjoy themselves and dance. When you go to see a heavy band, you have to be wary of the people around you, unless you’re really keen on getting involved with the fight pits. I think that sort of occurance spoils a performance for people who don’t enjoy that sort of activity, because they’re spending more time focused on their surroundings and not on the band. At the beginning, when the DJs were playing, a few kids were pushing each other around, and it looked as if it was going to be irritating, but when the place filled up it didn’t seem to happen again.

The Great Hall got absurdly hot, and the humidity was so thick you probably could have cut slices out of it with a glow stick, but it was a great night, and I think I lost half a stone through sweating and dancing.

Unfortunately I couldn’t afford to buy a t-shirt, which goes against my goal of getting t-shrits from every band I see, but hopefully I’ll be able to get one online.

I’m looking forward to seeing Pendulum again at Download festival, but right now I’m sitting here with stage envy.

Skindred on Sunday!

This weekend just gone I spent in Luton, visiting my friend to celebrate his 18th birthday. It was fantastic to get away from Exeter, and it was brilliant to meet him and spend the weekend there. I had a great time.

Whilst sitting on the train travelling to Luton, with no WiFi to enjoy, I closed my eyes and thought quite deeply about what life is like here in Exeter, and the things I would change. I spent the majority of the journey being quite pensive actually. I thought a lot about my theroy of bubbles.

I see the world as a lot of bubbles that interconnect and join in various places. Bubbles are inside other bubbles. It’s probably quite confusing to picture unless you can see in my mind, but let me try to elaborate anyway. My bedroom is in a bubble. Outside of that bubble is my house, which is in another bubble. Outside of that bubble is Exeter. There are various other bubbles dotted around, but they are of no importance right now. Basically, when you go outside of one of these bubbles, various feelings in your heart and in your mind become more faint, and you notice them less. With each bubble you leave, more feelings become faint, but also others become stronger. As the train to Luton travelled further away from Exeter, I felt all of my stress, depression, anxiety and hatred slowly leave my body, and it felt fantastic. Almost as if the sun had come out - inside me. I didn’t feel anything bad. I knew that nothing was wrong, and everything that weighs on my shoulders when I am at home stayed back at home, waiting for a shoulder to sit on.

When I got to my friend’s house, I walked through the door of a very nice house. It was beautiful. Putting the size and excellence of the house aside, a whoosh of sweet-scented niceness consumed my entire body. It was one of the nicest feelings I have ever felt; walking into a house where the occupants don’t smoke. Not only that, though, but you can feel the atmosphere and environment of the house. When I walk into my house, I can feel the stress and unhappiness of the people inside it, because despite the smiles you might see in this household, nobody is really happy. It just seems to be an endless struggle through one problem to the next, with general dispute and arguments entwined with it all. I hate to say it, but that’s how it is. Walking into my friend’s house, I could feel the peacefulness and happiness. There was no ethereal presence screaming at you, begging you to be angry, and feeling that was such a huge climax that my smile spread from ear to ear.

After thoroughly enjoying my time away, I returned to Exeter. As the train approached, I felt the weight of everything returning to my shoulders. The gloom of being unemployed, still. Going back to a house that is filled with stress and arguments, and smokers. All the little niggly things that annoy me began to annoy me again, simply because being constantly stressed make my fuse so short that any small thing could make me snap. It was horrible. I got home and walked through the door, the house was quite dreary. The smell of cigarette smoke rushed through my body and there was no smile. My hatred returned.

I hate to say it, but I hate it here. I really, truly hate it. I can’t wait to get away. I can’t wait to be able to walk into my own house, where I have more than a room to myself. A place that I can call my own where the smell of smoke doesn’t linger on everything. I don’t think smokers truly understand how disgusting and horrible it is for non-smokers’ clothes to stink of smoke, and how irritating and shameful it is to have other people recognise it, and then ask if you smoke.

My Mum spends her working life cleaning and re-establishing houses, and therefore she has become a bit detached to what our house used to be like. It’s not messy or anything, but a couple of years ago she would feel uneasy if a cable was visible on the carpet, or there was a pile of something in a room, and now she doesn’t seem to mind as much because she can appreciate how tidy her house actually is. Though, I don’t have that appreciation and respect because I’m not in her position, and due to my upbringing with her, the house constantly appears untidy to me. That’s not a problem, it’s just something I felt like writing.

There are a lot of things that I could write about here about the various things that really get to me at home, but I’ll save it for another time. Problably when I move out (when ever the fuck that is), and have a clear mind as to what living here was really like. I just need to get out. I need to find a job and I need a house, before I either go insane or become stupidly stressed and depressed, and lose interest in the world.

I honestly dislike phones that have a stupid amount of features. When I have a phone I like to have a phone that makes it easy to call and text people, and store information. I’m not bothered about listening to the radio, having a camera or storing MP3s - all of that is functionality for a different device that I’d spend money on to get the quality.

Anyway, the 2760 seemed like a nice phone. It had an appealing battery life, and only set me back about £30 from O2, which was a nice deal. However, after using it for a while it has come to my attention that this phone was clearly manufactured for mentally and physically incapable bastards.

The amount of times I’ll be typing a text, and accidentally hit send or save because of the poor button layout, or I’ll be typing a text message and have to go back and re-type words simply because the software can’t keep up with the speed that I move my thumbs is unbelievable. Perhaps it’s because I type my texts in proper English, and the developers were incapable of forseeing that as a situation that would ever occur in SMS messaging.

Another thing that is really irritating is how it manages to fail at a simple task, such as the address book. A useful feature is to be able to have groups of contacts. I like my address book to be organised, and use it properly, so that contacts have multiple numbers, etc. I also like to use peoples’ full names so that I know exactly which Sam “Sam” could be. Obviously that level of organisation gets a bit messed up when you have contacts such as “Mum” and “Dad” amongst “Andy Williams” and other such people, so naturally you should be able to create a group of contacts. However, instead of simply having a group within your address book where you can store more contacts, the contacts have to exist in the address book and in the group, which practically renders organisation completely pointless.

I really don’t understand how a team of developers and engineers can work so hard on a product that is supposed to be simple to use and understand, and fail so hard. Why do these people come across as so detached from how people really are, and how they behave. Why are they so incapable of producing a product that is actually simple to use?

Fail.

Anyway, the day of its release my friend Josh came over with the copy he pre-ordered from HMV. We messed around, enjoyed the game and everything else, but I’ll save that for another blog post, or RewiredMind. Later that day I spoke to another friend, Andy, who said he bought a copy from Zavvi, who actually had games in stock on the day of release (probably because Zavvi is such a lame name and nobody wants to go in the shop).

After umming and arr!ing about it the next day, I decided to cancel my pre-order and strolled into town to pick it up from Zavvi. On my way, I decided to pop into the new Gamestation, which one of my friends recently used to manage. Due to that being the case, and hosting a few competitions with RewiredMind a little while back, a few of the Gamestation employees know me, and often greet me nicely when I enter the store. Naturally I partake in some idle chit-chat with them, and during that I happened to ask “Hey, do you guys have any copies of GTAIV in?”. Ten minutes later I walk out of GameStation with a copy of GTAIV, having handed over my card without even asking how much it cost. Not that I’m overly bothered by this, but it turned out that I paid £45 for GTAIV in Gamestation; I could have got it for £38 in Zavvi.

It just goes to show, really, that when you are in customer service, being inviting and friendly really can be the difference between a sale and an unsatisfied customer.

I’m taking Tallis and myself to Download festival this year. I hadn’t yet booked the train tickets, until today. I would have booked them on Saturday, as I got paid, but unfortunately my bank was closed and my account was overdrawn, so I couldn’t pay any cash in.

I went into town today to pay £200 into my account, which was a further £20 overdrawn than it was on Saturday. It’s annoying that money can be taken out of your account on a Saturday, but you can’t go to pay cash in. I asked the Chinese lady to tell me what my account balance was now that I had paid that in, and she told me it was around £120, which I knew was enough to buy train tickets for both of us (which I had previously looked at online, and calculated that they’d come to £110).

I went to the train station to book the tickets, and discovered that they don’t take Electron cards (fucking things; I want a credit card). So I walked up to the cash point, which I have to say is in a fucking stupid place, as it is 5 minutes away from the 30 million cashpoints on the high street, wondering why I bothered paying all of that money into my account in the first place. Checking my balance revealed that the transaction hadn’t yet processed, and I only had a small amount of money available (which was odd, because I was overdrawn and don’t have an overdraft). I withdrew £10 because I was stupidly hungry, and retired to the cafe for chips and a hot chocolate; it was raining.

I came home and went to purchase the train tickets online. I was going to use thetrainline, as I had seen the tickets on there, and knew how much they were, but I decided to type “cheap train travel” into Google anyway, which is when I stumbled upon raileasy. A few clicks on their fantastic website, which I am very pleased with, and the train tickets to Derby for Tallis and I are booked for £43.80, so I saved myself a good £65.

So, if you’re planning on travelling by train anywhere, do check out raileasy.

It’s odd though, isn’t it? How, at the train station I was ready to hand over £110, and would have done it if they accepted my card or if the money had been available at the cash point. Silver linings are nice.

It’s a funny story actually. I contacted Tiscali in March some time, requesting a connection upgrade. We were paying £15/month for an unlimited 1Mb connection. I noticed they were no longer offering that broadband package, but were instead offering an unlimited 8Mb connection for the same price, which made me feel as if we’d missed out on a connection upgrade. I was aware that we are living too far away from the exchange to receive a fast internet connection, but most line tests returned that we could receive up to a 3Mb connection.

Two months passed since the request for the connection upgrade, with little contact from Tiscali. It was only supposed to take 15 days. Eventually I heard from them saying that there was a problem with our account, and the transfer had been put on hold.

Being quite irritated, I finally decided to call the cancellations line and request the MAC code. I was a little hesitant to do this because I had heard that Tiscali often don’t release the MAC code, and I didn’t want to spend a long time offline, going through the disconnection and reconnection process with BT. However, I spoke to a delightful English woman who was very helpful, and after dribbling through the typical “Oh we can improve that now for you, and offer you this”, she got everything sorted very quickly. Our MAC code was e-mailed to us not very long after, and two weeks later we are connected to Sky Broadband.

I was unsure whether to go with Sky, as they’re one of the few ISPs who require you to use their own networking hardware. I am rather fond of the Netgear DG834GT that I usually use, and didn’t want to use their hardware. However, they were the cheapest, fastest option, and after a little research, it turned out that they use that exact model with their connection, which I was very pleased about.

When the router came in the post, roughly 5 days after we requested the transfer, I opened the box to see a horrible grey SAGEM box. Not what I was expecting. Apparently the Netgear routers were the version 1 Sky routers, and the SAGEM ones are version 2. Anyway, when the connection had been transfered I plugged it in and got it running rather smoothly, which was very surprising. The UI isn’t as nice as the one you find on the Netgear routers, but as a product, it seems to be working rather well so far.

So, I now have a 16Mb unlimited connection. We can only actually receive a 3Mb connection right now, but it only costs £10/month and I wanted the unlimited package. Hopefully as the exchange gets upgraded I will benefit from a faster speed, we’ll see. Currently I am very happy with it though. My transfer speeds both up and down have tripled, and I don’t have to deal with such a terrible technical support team anymore.

Part of me feels a little bad for getting rid of so many belongings, but at the end of the day, none of it was particularly sentimental, and the things that need replacing digitally will be. I am a technology enthusiast, and therefore I like to keep up with the way the industry is moving, and eventually digital distribution will take over. Also, by getting rid of physical posession, it frees up a lot of space, which is always a nice, comfortating thing.

When I can afford to, I intend on selling my books. I will keep some of them as pride posessions, such as my Lewis Carrol book, but most of them can be sold. I am doing this because I plan on purchasing an eBook reader. This is another technological development, and I think eventually it will kick off really well. Being able to minimalise all of that space taken up into a single device will be fantastic, and although books are really nice to own and read, I think I’ll rather enjoy the benefits of having a device that can store thousands of books quite easily. Then if there are any books that are precious to me, they will be appreciated as they should be, instead of sitting on shelves next to lots of other dead trees.

Perhaps it’s bad of me, to let technology become such a big part of my life, so that whether I am listening to music, watching a film, talking to a friend, playing a game or reading a book, there is something going on involving a computer of some kind, but it’s what I enjoy. I can truly appreciate the sentiment of actually owning something physically, but from an organised and upkeeping perspective, this is the right way to go.

I’ve not been to a huge amount of gigs, but I’ve decided to backtrack on the ones I have been to and attempt to buy t-shirts for them, such as the Placebo 2007 gig, and every event I go to from now on, I’m going to purchase a t-shirt for, just for the sake of having the memory. In 20 years or so, it would be nice to be able to look at a pile of t-shirts of various colours and reminisce over the various experiences they remind me of.

I bought tickets for Tallis and I to go to Download festival this year. Whilst the line up hasn’t gone down too well amongst the crowds of people that usually go, there are a few bands that I am looking forward to seeing (and more are to be announced). Generally though, I am looking forward to the atmosphere that everybody talks about. I can’t wait to be on a campsite with thousands of people who love music, and getting to meet lots of new people.

We’re also going to see Pendulum soon, which will be an interesting experience. Hopefully I’ll be able to get tickets to go to Beautiful Days as well. I’d love to see The Levellers live.

About a year ago, I think, I started a category on this blog named “Haunted by Coincidence”, the idea of it being for me to make posts detailing when I noticed or was victim to a really bizarre coincidence. I actually began to believe that I was haunted by coincidence - hence the title of this post. I can’t remember any of the particular occurances back then, but I do remember that they were quite frequent, hence me wanting to blog them in the first place.

Amusingly, as soon as I decided to start doing that, I noticed these coincidences less and less, and eventually gave up on the whole idea and forgot about it, and when I did that they started occuring again. I thought nothing of it, apart from the occasional speculation when I did notice something extremely odd and perhaps a little too coincidental, but now I have had enough.

I don’t know whether I am just really observant, or if I’m just living my life on a string of extraordinarily coincidental events, but about fifteen minutes ago I just signed into Facebook. I looked through the news feed on my home page and saw that somebody had joined a group called “Of course my bag of peanuts contains nuts!”, which I obviously knew would be a group where people pointed out the idiocy of warning labels on various consumer products. I furthered this by Google searching “peanuts may contain nuts” to see if there was a good reason for the warning label to be on there, other than, of course, obeying the laws of our very stupid health and safety regulations. I didn’t find any spectacular reasons to state something so fucking obvious.

I put the whole labels thing behind me, made a cup of coffee, and sat down to watch an episode of The Simpsons that I hadn’t seen before. Three minutes in, Marge opens a letter from Bart’s school, reads it, and says “someone at your school has a life threatening peanut allergy”.

Am I just being completely stupid and/or paranoid, or does that just seem a bit too much? It really freaks me out, and I really dislike noticing things like this.

It’s a bit odd, I know, to go with a very autumn theme when it is spring, but there you go, it’s how I was feeling and what came to mind. I know that the leaves won’t be liked by everyone. Regardless, please leave a comment and tell me what you think of the new theme. Any improvement suggestions are, of course, welcome; as is constructive criticism.

Thanks to Craig for the designer’s eye and suggestions.

Edit

I have just upgraded the website to WordPress 2.5, and it is fantastic. Definitely the best version of WordPress I have ever seen. I still need to finish the navigation and clear the website up a bit, but check out what I have done with images by clicking the thumbnails below.

My room isn’t particularly big, but then, what bedroom is when you are confined to one room at the age of 19, and have to make room for being a musician, a geek and somebody who likes a particularly large bed?

I’m fed up with this whole job hunt thing. It’s very hard to find a job as a website developer when you’re not a hugely talented website developer. It’s also very hard to find a job as a journalist. It’s hard to find a job in the technology industry in a rural city. Most of all, it’s hard to continue trying to find one of the previously mentioned jobs when you have been trying for nearly 8 months. It’s hard when you have finally given in and started to claim jobseeker’s allowance, and you go to sign on and see the sort of people that are there, and compare yourself to them. Most of them actually look as if they belong there; unemployable, obnoxious, stupid idiots, that really aren’t bothered with doing anything with their life. Then there’s you. Next to them. It’s quite hard not to speculate.

I’ve often wondered if I actually know what I’m good at. I know what I’m okay at. I’m okay at a lot of things. I don’t consider myself fantastically good at anything though, I just think I’m very adaptable. I’m an okay guitarist. I’m an okay website developer. I’m an okay cook. I’m an okay writer. Do you know what you are good at? If you do, I’m jealous.

It would seem that I am stuck in this circle. I want to move out, and to do so I need a job. I want a job, but to be able to actually sit down and study anything without feeling so unmotivated would require a new place to sit down in, which would mean moving out; but to do that I need a job. You can see how this repeats and goes on, can’t you?

I don’t want to get “any” job, because I don’t want “any” job. I want a job that I can enjoy, not a job that makes me feel like I’m working it because I have to, regardless of how temporary it is. Just something acceptable would do. Something slightly creative with a couple of nice people, where I get to learn things every day, and feel like I’m part of something.

I started writing a story earlier. I guess it’s kind of like a dream of the house I live in. I won’t finish it, simply because I’ll lose inspiration and motivation. I’ll sit here in my lightbulbless room, destroying my eyesight, browsing every job site I know of, simply hoping for some luck.

A thick, wooden black door stands in front of you. In some places the paint is scratched and chipped, and generally looks as if it has been on the door for a long time. Never the less, the door looks perfectly reasonable. A number 9, carved out of some sort of metal - you never were much of a metal specialist - is nailed to the door, level with your eyes. Level with your waist is an off-gold colour letterbox; you imagine it opens and closes respectably, but you feel no need to further explore this theory.

Opening the door reveals a hallway, the walls of which gradiate from pale blue to ocean blue. A scintillating floor of shiny, polished wood extends to the stairs at the end of the hallway, and under the doors on either side. A sweet smell of incense flutters past your nose, and generally gives the whole place quite an inviting feel.

Life really sucks at times.

Purely for recognition and appreciation, here is a live video of him playing the 7th song on the album, “Air Tap”.

First you’ll need to navigate command prompt the directory you want to list. If this is on the C:\ drive then you can simply type something along the lines of

cd C:\folder\folder\folder\folder

and hit return. You might need to do it one folder at a time, I don’t know. If the directory is on a different drive, simply type

#:\

and hit return, and then the above. Once you have navigated to the folder on your drive (which was E:\Audio\Music\ for me), simply type the following:

dir /b > C:\list.txt

and hit return. Open up your C:\ drive, there should be a text file called “list”. Open it, and with any luck it will have given you a basic listing of the files and folders in the directory you were in.

I can remember many of the April Fool’s jokes I’ve fallen to across the years, and the hundreds that I have sat back and enjoyed. Perhaps if my Mum feels like typing, she can explain about the time she convinced me there was a big whole infront of the door to our flat; I don’t much feel like typing it all.

However, if you missed any of the funnies, here’s a bit of a round-up for you.

• All of the featured videos on YouTube were linked to Rick Roll
• Google implemented a custom e-mail time
• Google invite you to join a Mars colony
• BBC made some fantastic footage of flying penguins

There were plenty of World of Warcraft and other such game-related pranks, but you can find those yourself. In honesty, it wasn’t a particularly eventful April Fool’s.

If you were being stubborn and refusing to believe anything you heard, BBC have rounded up 10 stores that could be April Fools, but aren’t.

Anyway, about 10 seconds after doing this, I turned a corner and saw a bin, which just made all kinds of proverbs pop into my head. See if you can think of any… you know, regarding throwing something away and then finding something more suitable 10 seconds later.

That is what is going to be written in big letters across the poster that I will eventually get around to designing. I’m going to stick said poster in the windows of places such as Mansons guitar shop, and various other places, and hope that I get some freelance website work in.

I’ve always wanted something to instantly send me to sleep, which didn’t have any side effects. Tallis suggested a simple button that sent you to sleep, which I think is a fantastic idea.

When ever I get into bed, my mind races and I think more than I do in the day, into the deepest depths of deepness. I go over memories to the finest detail, re-live situations in my imagination, and changing things so that I can fly or breathe fire or something. I remember lots of things people have said to me, and this often keeps me awake for hours. It would be so nice to just be able to get into bed and zone out, and would make life so much easier at times.

I want to write a book, but I’m having trouble getting pixels on the screen.

I just got out of bed at 12am, because my body clock is that messed up, and sat staring at words across the screen and saw everything that I haven’t seen before. Or, at least, saw it from an angle I’d rather not have. It made me realise that when practically everything is low in your life, you begin to lose touch with the things around you that should influence your mood. You begin to stop showing the smiles you would normally show for the things that, perhaps in all fairness, don’t deserve a smile, but because you’re in a good mood, you smile at them anyway, and there is a universal acceptance of people smiling unnecessarily, but nicely, in a very gentle waves brushing the shoreline manner.

I have been unemployed for six months now, something that usually shouldn’t and wouldn’t bother me, simply because I’m not hugely fond of who ever suggested that English people should have to work 40 hours per week to make a decent living. However, being unemployed really puts you at the bottom of the totem pole, and if you have nothing else going on in your life, it really begins to detract from your social life, your mental capabilities, your passion, imagination, and everything else that is beautiful about who you are and the way you think.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I could afford to go out and have a few drinks with my friends, and get happily drunk. I can’t remember the last time we happily sat down together in a circle, thinking about old times and not caring about the things that I care about now, and that is really quite soul-sucking. Perhaps I have gone on too long about this whole depression thing, but honestly, I’m struggling to find a way out of it, and that is affecting those around me, which I don’t like to see.

When I do… eventually… come out of the other side of this, which I will, there’s no doubt about it, I’m certainly going to make the effort to make the effort, because so many seconds pass where people don’t take the advantage of the moment they’re in, and they live to regret it. I just wish that the end of the tunnel, as it were, would quit getting further away, and that the sunlight would once more shine on my face.

Radiohead’s latest album, In Rainbows, is fantastic. It’s very different to their normal work, but very samey at the same time. Generally their older stuff varies quite a lot in the mood it portrays, whether it’s depressing or agressive. In Rainbows is a very wispy, dreamy album, that plays in the background very nicely. Everything about it is very soft, and it doesn’t really draw a lot of attention to itself; but you can easily sink into it and drown in the full spectrum of beautiful sounds. I have listened to it a few times now, and I have never appreciated it as much as I did, lying on my bed, very warm and completely relaxed.

You read the article and guess what sort of clothes they were wearing.

Also, just as motivation began to return to me, I was given the plague, so I have been doing nothing but wallowing and rediscovering how bored I am with my life, reminiscing over the days in 2006, not because they were particularly good or anything, but simply because when I woke up I had something to do.

Found a few more interesting people by exploring blogrolls, and have left a few comments, so hopefully they will come back and leave some words for me, what ever they might be. Hopefully nice ones. I’ll try to finish off my new template sometime soon. I don’t really have much else to say.

Meh.

As soon as I can afford to purchase the domain name, I am going to be recording videos and putting them on a new website I am going to make called iamtheguitarhero.com. Basically this idea gives me a learning plan that I can schedule myself to for playing the guitar, and the concept is that I work through the Guitar Hero games, playing the songs that are in them on a real guitar. It should be fun.

The last few days have been rather hectic, in a rather bizarre way. I had an interview in Torquay on Monday. I was feeling quite confident about the job, working for an SEO company. I had a map sorted, and directions, I knew the train times. Everything was sorted. Sunday night came, I couldn’t sleep. This is primarily because I have this whole comfort obsession going on now, where I feel quite comfortable when I get into bed and Tallis is there, but when she isn’t here it feels like something is missing, and that makes getting to sleep more difficult than it already is for me.

So, having been awake for over a day, I trundled down to the train station and drew £20 out of the cash point because it didn’t have any £10 notes. I put the £20 into the ticket machine to get my return ticket to Torquay, which cost £5, and got paid back £15 in pound coins. Yay.

I made it to Torquay on time, and knew where I was going, or so I thought. After hositing myself along the main road, and then up the world’s biggest hill, I walked past the community college and then came to the road that the office was supposedly on. I walked up and down this road a few times; the only businesses I came across were a nursing home and a nursery.  I asked a few locals and someone driving a car for a local taxi firm, none of them had heard of the building or the business. Great, I thought.

After an hour or so of walking around, trying to find this place, I gave in, feet bleeding, and retreated to the train station. Upon arriving there I discovered the next train wasn’t for another 50 minutes. It was cold, and dull. I was quite upset and very, very irritated. I walked up the steps to get to the side of the station I needed to be on, and went about counting the steps as I usually do when partaking in step-traversing activities, only to find that someone had counted them already and written the amount on the wall. Not bothering to doubt their mathmatical ability, I slouched off to the bench feeling quite depressed.

After about 45 minutes of waiting, the agency who first contacted me about the job called me, and asked where I was. I said that I couldn’t find the place, and informed them that I didn’t contact them because I didn’t have their number on my mobile (stupid, I know). The agency made a few calls and the business contacted me, and kindly gave me directions to their office, even though I was over an hour and a half late. Another 20 minutes went past as I trundled back the way I went previously, ascending up the world’s biggest hill once more, passing by all the community college idiots, I got to where I was. I called the business back, and finally managed to find the place, which wasn’t sign posted, and was actually around the back of a rather large building that appeared to sell curtains. A thorough “how to find us” on their website is certainly something I’m going to write if I get the job.

Anyway, the interview went very well, and they were very forgiving that I was late. I seemed to answer all of the questions they asked quite well, and they will contact the agency, who will contact me by the end of the week. Hopefully I’ll get the job.  If I do, I can approach my wishlist and start buying nice things again. I’ll certainly be taking a look at driving lessons as well, as there’s no way I’m walking to and from train stations every day.

I’m still fiddling around with WordPress templates. I’ve got an idea, kind of, for what I want to do with the one for this website. The Zetzio one I’m working on is coming along nicely, though I’ll be waiting for Nemphtis’ graphical input. I’m also working on one for a rugby team, which is almost finished.

It has become almost impossible to walk into a café in Exeter now, without being blinded by your own reflection upon the cum-polished Apple logo of some teenagers Macbook. It’s even more irritating because I want one.

Don’t you just hate it when somebody uses the last of the conditioner and leaves the bottle in the bathroom, resulting in you standing naked in the shower, shaking and squeezing the bottle like a fucking weirdo, awaiting for the white substance to appear in your hand. Yes, that was intended. You know.

Here is a screenshot of the template I am building, which is still a long way from completion: