Category: just-plain-life

I've been on holiday recently, yep totally breaking myself off from work stuff for a short period. I actually been doing the boring stuff like shopping, cleaning and arranging. For the first time I've visited the Trafford Centre (outskirts of Manchester) and actually spent a good amount of time in the Arndale (central Manchester). Usually I'm in and out as fast as my legs can take me, but I did a proper look around last week.

Anyway I ended up in the Puma Store because I am looking for new trainers (sneakers, tennis shoes, whatever) and tried on a T-shirt. The T-shirt in question is a special edition which has the name of the city it was bought in on it. So as you can see above he's the Manchester one. I tried it on and thought it was a little too loud but what bugged me the most was the label.

MCN? Where's that then? The thing across the T-shirt is meant to be a airport sticker thing. So why has it got MCN on it instead of MAN which is Manchester's International and only Airport shortcode. So where on earth did they get MCN from? Me thinks someone was making this stuff up and screwed up. And for that reason I decided not to buy the T-shirt. Attention to detail Puma!

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All text for this frankly sad and hilarious video is taken directly from a online Christian fundamentalist forum. Just because you don't subscribe to religion doesn't mean your void of morals too. There are plenty of people who subscribe to a religion and are void of all morals…

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I tweet as I walk into the Accident and Emergency (or the Emergency Room for you Americans) of Manchester Central Hospital, thinking about the advice of my GP early that day, that I should go to A&E right away do not pass go and pick up 200 pounds. I could have a life threating blood clot in my left leg which could move to the heart, brain or lungs.

in manchester central A&E. my birthday weekender is off i'm sorry to say.say. will update why later

The feedback from Twitter followers was amazing and heartfelt. Thank you to everyone who replied, called and texted me. I had a schedule of things I was going to be doing this weekend and now that schedule is cancelled because the doctors have given me some drugs to stop the swelling in my leg, ordered me to not to walk on it much and finally keep it up. So I'm watching movies with my leg resting on a hackday beanbag. I'm meant to do this for the next 3-4 days.

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After the 16 hour flights I recently had to endure, having someone do something like this might have gone down pretty well.

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I love the taste of Pepsi Raw and Redbull Cola. Now to be fair neither Redbull or PepsiCo have claimed there drinks are (air quotes) Healthy so you can't really blame them if people who can not read the labels start chunking it down there throats like there going out of fashion. I actually like the taste of these drinks, they taste very watered down but in a good way. There's still caffeine included so you always get that slight pick me up too. What I don't like about these drinks however is the prices. I was traveling back from Bristol the other day and stopped in at WHSmiths in Bristol Temple meads for a drink for the journey. I kid you not the Pepsi Raw in a 250ml can was selling for 1.79. That is almost 3x the amount of a standard Pepsi 330ml can or in the same store 2.5x. Pepsi may claim Raw is a premium product but at that price its a total luxury. Redbull Cola isn't far off that price either I have to day. If your lucky you might find it in a supermarket for just over a pound but some places are add as much as 50 pence on top of the supermarket prices.

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Found via Imran Ali while we were chatting about late night working. I think we went from talking about Energy Drinks and Coffee into scales of measurements into the The Scoville scale.

The Scoville scale is a measure of the hotness or piquancy of a chili pepper, as defined by the amount of capsaicin, (a chemical compound which stimulates nerve endings in the skin) present.

Some hot sauces use their Scoville rating in advertising as a selling point.

The scale is named after its creator, American chemist Wilbur Scoville, who developed a test for rating the pungency of chili peppers. His method, which he devised in 1912,^[1] is known as the Scoville Organoleptic Test. An alternative method for quantitative analysis uses high-performance liquid chromatography, making it possible to directly measure capsaicinoid content.

Nice to know.

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I twittered this about 6hours ago – bbc manchester attack from gaza protesters. very loud and won't leave. So here's some of what was going on during that tweet and the retweets. Some video but nothing seems to play the audio because the whole thing was captured on my work mobile phone. Then there's a few photos I snapped with the same phone. I did record a much high rez video but haven't uploaded it yet because I was in a rush trying to get everything sorted for Werewolf.

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Yes I know Skins is made for 30 somethings who want to believe a teenagers life in 2009 is just like this. But you know what I kind of like it. Part of my enjoyment is it being set in Bristol and boy oh boy those 'cut your throat down after a bottle of cider at chasers' accents. Yes there really rough and some very ropey but they do remind me of home, specially now living in Manchester.

What I love about the Bristolian dialect is the interesting usage of words such as.

• A'write me Lover.
• Right you are my love.
• Gurt lush
• Smittin

There's a shop in Bristol where you can buy T-shirts with the interesting phrases on it. Actually looking at Wikipedia.

A dialect of English is spoken by some Bristol inhabitants, known colloquially as Bristolian, or even more colloquially as “Bristle” or “Brizzle”. Bristol is the only large English city with a rhotic accent, in which the r in words like car is pronounced. The unusual feature of this dialect, unique to Bristol, is the Bristol L (or terminal L), in which an L sound is appended to words that end in an 'a' or 'o'.Thus “area” becomes “areal”, etc. This is believed to be how the city's name evolved from Brycgstow to have a final 'L' sound: Bristol. Further Bristolian linguistic features are the addition of a superfluous “to” in questions relating to direction or orientation (a feature also common to the coastal towns of South Wales), or using “to” instead of “at”; and using male pronouns “he”, “him” instead of “it”. For example, “Where's that?” would be phrased as “Where's he to?”, a structure exported to Newfoundland English.

Stanley Ellis, a dialect researcher, found that many of the dialect words in the Filton area were linked to work in the aerospace industry. He described this as “a cranky, crazy, crab-apple tree of language and with the sharpest, juiciest flavour that I've heard for a long time”

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So I've already done a review of 2008 and I see everyone's doing there resolutions, so its time for my 2009 resolutions.

1. Go skiing on real snow

   Yeah believe it or not I can Ski, I learned over a summer holiday on a scheme called Splash in Bristol. Now to be fair that was like 12 years ago but I think I can still do it. But I've yet to try it on real snow, only dry slope. People tell me its easier on Snow, so I should be skiing down the black run before you know it.

2. Work and execute a Alternative Reality Game

   I'm still a fan of these things, and want to build upon what we already had last year but maybe change some of the goals to something much more local and spreadable.

3. Build up a better routine
   So as most of you know, I'm a night person. I tend to ponder, read and write at night and don't feel the effects of being tired till very late. So because of that I'm going to bed at times when people are starting to wake up. This isn't right and I'm now vowing to go to bed before 2am every night and get up before 10:30am every day. This means I should build up a good routine and people can start to expect to see me more often. I think its also about layering the routines on slowly one by one instead of making sweeping changes.
4. Work smarter, with less pace and less stress
   This is important because although the easy thing to say is I want to spereate my work and play life, I think thats frankly bull (as Nicky says its all very grey) and I enjoy doing what I do at work. So I want to find a way to do much less of the boring stuff in my own time. This is also a extension of Use the technologies around me better, because I want to start paying for more services which save me time or do good things for me. Currently I pay for Plaxo, Basecamp, Flickr and a few others. On the pace side I want to slow down less urgent stuff like replying to emails.
5. Go out more and be live more heathly
   So this time its not just about Comedy clubs but also about going out clubbing. My experience at Gatecrasher on new years eve reminded me how much I love Trance music. Man you can't beat that combination of rhythm, 4 on 4 beats and melodies. So I've decided I should try going to more, even if it means going alone (but if anyone wants to come along, give me shout).
   I'm also living more heathly, since I've moved to Manchester. Not only am I walking everywhere but I've never had takeaway delivered to my flat. If I don't feel like cooking, I'll go out to a restaurant instead and even after clubbing or a night on the town my flat is close enough to go home and cook up something quickly. I'm also playing Volleyball regularlly and hope to pick up Basketball again soon. So its all go on that front already.
6. Be more daring with matters of the heart
   I'm a confident guy but don't take enough risks, so thats going to change this year. Don't worry I'll be a perfect Gentleman. Sometimes…
7. Start organising Werewolf and Werewolf+ nights in the North
   Yep this one is simple but also it would nice to develop Werewolf+ as I'm coining it as. I got talking to Cristiano about my thoughts for extended Werewolf rules and between us we came up with something quite interesting but we never quite wrote it down or tried it out. So this year, I think we should actually develop it, write it up and let it spread.
8. Build a web application
   So theres a couple of small scale web 2.0 applications which I'd like to build, this was why I was trying to learn Python and even Air. But I've decided its not about the language. I think some of my realtime web mashups can be done using my existing knowledge in XSL. Plus I've been looking at Cocoon 2.2 and 3.0, its seems you can build very powerful apps which are deployed without the usual cocoon madness. Aka I can create little webapps using nothing more that XSL and XML.
9. Blog every film I watch
   I watch and own a ton of films, but I watch them like I chew bubble gum. So I'm going to try blogging each one even if that means mentioning them on a Microblogging service. I'll try and tag them with hashes or the like, so maybe I can later pull all my reviews together or see all the movies I've watched over the course of a month or year.
10. Read more
    So I bought a ipod touch for reading ebooks and RSS. And to be fair I'm reading a ton more RSS thanks to the ipod and Newsgator. Hopefully the ebooks won't be far behind, but I do need to find a good source for the latest stuff like the new Thomas Friedman book. I was going to suggest I read before bedtime but that never works. So when ever I got a spare moment, out pops the ipod and off I go reading, neato.
11. More Trance music
    I love trance music, I really love it. So it comes as no surprise that I'm thinking not only should I be out clubbing more but I should be listening and mixing more.
    I've recently found that almost every trance dj have there own podcasts, which is usually a mix. So its like getting a mix tape every week from the best djs in the world. For example here's Gareth Emery's , Armin Van Buuren's (currently number one dj in the world by the way) and Tiestos podcasts. I'm also thinking I could get back into djing live now I got the Pacemaker. So I'm hoping to play live in front of a clubbing crowd by the end of 2009. In the meanwhile I'm also looking into djing at smaller parties, festivals and online radio. I mean the pacemaker gives me huge flexiblity, I could dj out of a moving car if I wanted to.
12. Lots more graphics
    Believe it or not, I use to be a designer or am a designer. I find diagrams and visuals useful to understand and to communicate. I don't know why I've taken to writing a lot more over the last decade. Maybe its just the medium or something. Anyway, I'm going to do a lot more work in one of my fav open source app – Inkscape. And I've recently started playing with POV Ray again. POV Ray or Persistence of Vision Raytracer is a amazing piece of software. It uses text files to create scenes that are Raytraced not Rendered. (Theres a very important difference between the two). The best thing about Povray is that it runs on every system and I can render scenes of higher that HD rez in seconds on my 2ghz laptop (unfortually it still only supports single processors right now).

Technorati Tags: newyear, resolutions

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I was on a dancefloor in gatecrasher, dancing my heart out to some classic trance tunes. If you enjoyed the video above, there's more on blip.tv including lots of laser action, enjoy!

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