myspace, myspace… oh god, myspace <p>I’ve never been the biggest fan of myspace, as anyone who’s had to listen to me would know. Still, it is THE biggest social networking site on the internet with over 85million ‘users’. So in view of this I’ve finally given in and set up an oonagi myspace. If you want to visit it you can, the URL is myspace.com/thanetrocks. A friend of ours is doing a zine of the local scene called Thanet Rocks. As this is also the tagline for oonagi it only seemed sensible that we combined forces, so this myspace thing is a combo of the two. We’re also planning on a load of story sharing between the site and the zine. Paper and online, how about that for coverage and appealing to all sorts. A thought, there really should be a Thanet Times/Gazunder website.</p><p> </p>
The Marxmen <p>My g/f came down from East Gringstead to visit me yesterday. It was great to see her and as a treat I took her on a Marxist tour of Ramsgate as run by Simon Mores(?) who is running the Magical Marxist exhibition up at IOTA. I really never knew how much time Marx spent in Ramsgate. About ten visits in all and a couple more than that by Engles. We did have a fun time… well, I did.. my poor girl puts up with all sorts for me. The tour itself was wittily called Land Marx and finished at the Churchills for a quiz called Top Marx. We even got Karl Marx masks to wear at the end. I’d hoped to pick up all the information for the quiz on the tour (plus a bit of skim reading before hand) but it didn’t actually have anything to do with Marxism. Shame really as I don’t know anything about Coronation Street. Still, he was a question writer for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, so I can’t really complain.</p><p> Don’t know how we finally did in the quiz. At half way we were third, but we left before the end to go to Balmoral in Broadstairs to try and catch some of the acoustic stuff that was going on there (a real jolly jaunt around Thanet). Shame really as I noticed a note behind the bar stating a £30 drinks tally for the winning team…. unused. Could that have been my £30 worth of drinks that I’ve missed out on by leaving?</p><p> Btw, I’m using a blogger plugin on my linux here that despite having a field for the ‘title’ of a post, doesn’t actually fill it in, but rather puts it as the first line of the post.</p>
I seem to have dropped of the local blogging radar of late. The circuit seems a little rife with attitude at the moment and isn’t the same one that I joined a couple of months ago. It’s nice to have some of the more prolific writers back but it would be even nicer if everyone got along with each other better. Due to the increased level of writing I’m now only able to get around a few of them now. Especially seeing as I also have to continue the work on oonagi and the local original music scene in general. This also means alot of time spent on myspac. I sometimes feel like I need more than one kevin at a time to spread around the place and do everything that I want to do.
Sunday the 25th of June is the biggest event in this years football calendar. We will be holding the interband 5-a-side football tournament in Dane Park Margate. This is the sixth year of this event and has become the original music scenes biggest community day. Of course, this year it seems to have ended up clashing with another football game of some kind or another which all sorts of people are banging on about. So we are going to have to hammer through our event quick smart so people can go watch TV! Would you believe it??!? Most of the time people don’t care about football, but when they hear the Ecuador are playing they get all excited. Curious. Anyway, I best sleep as I have to be up at some ungodly hour, like 9am! Btw, I’ve got my laptop back now, so am a happy Kevin again.
I often dream that when I grow up I’ll become a rock star. As time passes on though it seems less and less likely to happen. I came close to it this week though after I was asked to play as bassist in a currently running project for a young lad called Henry Johnson. Henry is playing the Eastcliff bandstand this Saturday along with some other bands which include ex-members of Primal Scream, Brand New Heavies as well as various other top quality professional musicians. While still pre-twenties, Henry’s talents were spotted by a local musician who offered to musically direct an album for him as well as sort out gigs (you can hear the drummer in the project talk about it on oonagi webcast 5).<p> So how did I end up being involved? Well, frankly they were at the eleventh hour and didn’t have a bassist. I certainly wasn’t the best person for the job being out of a band for several years, but I was there when they needed someone bad. The problem now though is that I can’t seem to get the time off work… and neither can the drummer. That’s the whole rhythm section they lost and we only knew yesterday. Still, the music is fantastic and I think it may sound even better in a stripped down fashion. Looks like I’ll have to wait a bit longer till I become a rock star though.</p>
Well, since the demise of my laptop (a tear begins to form) I have had to move back to my old computer as continued use of my mums wasn’t going to go down to well. The problem with my old machine is that it was a bit used and abused. Though still a fine piece of equipment with a more than adequate 2ghz processor, the big dell symbol always made me want to give it a hard time. So here is what I have done to it now to get it up and running… I’ve installed ubuntu linux on it. The poor thing, I’ve installed and re-installed various operating systems on it over time. Still, if I’m to achieve my goal of uber-web-geek I have to get to grips with what 80% of the internet is run on.
I’ve used GNU/Linux systems before but have always run into problems with them. This is probably the biggest issue that the open source community faces, thats noobs like myself continualy hit stumbling blocks each time we try to install it. There are linux based systems out there that do detect everything without a problem, but they tend to be live versions (boot and run off a CD without installation) like knoppix. It’s a shame the installable versions versions so often require you to be tech savvy.
This is what I found to be so good with ubuntu. It has had no problems thus far with the install. It even detected my TFT monitor without an issue, which commercial versions like Suse9.2 failed to do. I guess I’ll have to see what happens over time, nothing is fullproof.
Sorry guys, not been around much of late so I’ve not been blogging or reading others much.
It’s been a hell of a week. I’ve been visiting family in Wales. They have a beautiful B&B on the side of a mountain near Barmouth overlooking Cardigan Bay. It’s nice to just hide away sometimes. I stopped off at the girlfriends in East Grinstead on the way back. She’s been stressing about her upcoming exams for her masters, so I thought I’d try to help her chill out. Alas, she’s a stressed bunny so I’d like you to all send her calming thoughts.
I lost my phone while I was there. On a bus between there and Crawley. I called it a few times, but it was hung up a few times and then switched off. It didn’t take me long to put two and two together and come up with a crime report number and barring the phone. As it turned out though, a nice young skate lad had found it but just couldn’t answer it as he was at work. We arranged to meet up and I now have my blocked phone back.
When I got home I discovered the wireless in the house had broken, so I couldn’t access the internet from my laptop.. my pride and joy. I didn’t have time to mess around, I tried a quick wireless fix (turn everything on and off) but it wasn’t happening so I chucked the top into my bag and headed out to my favorite public hotspot to check my mail before I went to The Boss album release party that night.
I bought their album. I nodded my head to some tunes. The gig was cool. Hung out with my fellow geologist Jay where we talked geeky about things like css, ajax and Second Life. Life was sweet as we moved on to Broadstairs for late night hacky sack on the pier. I slept well that night.
I woke up the following (Saturday) morning and had a bit of time to sort out my wifi before I had to go to work for an 11 hour stint. I got out my laptop and… Horror struck. The screen was horrifically shattered and black ‘ink’ oozed outwards from every crack. It was ruined and I was crushed. I sat dazed, induced by the sense of loss at what had become a close and well modded friend. Appalled at the knowledge that I have no insurance since canceling it a few months back.
I couldn’t help but have a look at my now defunct policy to see how much I was missing out. The policy didn’t cover cracked screens, or theft, or anything from the looks of it. Memories came back as to why I cancelled the most pointless insurance I’d ever seen. I looked on the internet to see if I could find the cost of a replacement screen but for some reason or other I couldn’t find my model anywhere. I gave in and dropped it round at the local friendly computer shop safe in the knowledge that they’ll make my wallet a good £200 lighter. What a crappy day.
So how do you cheer someone up? I’ll tell you now, if the person serving you doesn’t seem to be too happy do not demand that they smile. The best you will get is a snear.
I’ll tell you what cheered me up. A local band called Waterhorse. They play such pretty music. By the end of the shift I felt almost relaxed and the 11 hours (all be it at minimum wage) will go some way towards the new screen and at least the phone is covered by insurance. I guess it will all be ok afterall.
I’m still stewing over not being valid. Word on the blogger circuit is that it is nigh on impossible to make your site valid without some serious grubby code work above and beyond the call of duty. For a start, the toolbar at the top of every blog is invalid (this is why sometimes it looks funny if your overloading you’re browser)! I can remove it (that’s advice that is given), but I don’t want to! It’s useful! ok… That’s enough exclamations for one post.
Even the basic templates aren’t valid. Google (who own blogger) should bloody well be more professional than this. Even the template that I am using now was designed by a worker at Google and it’s riddled with errors. Invalidation means frustration. It’s one of the main things that slows a web page down because it means the browser has to fix the problems in encounters on a page before it can display it.
It seems once you (well, me) start down this road of validation obsession, which covers others sites too, continued returning to the validator at W3C becomes tiresome. You want to be able to check validation of pages you come across on the fly. Here is where favelets (sic) come in. These little beauties are like clever bookmarks which you hit when you want to do something with the page you’re on.
Anyhows, now my exams have finished I’ll spend some time cleaning this blog up and probably telling you all about the troubles I’ll be having along the way.
Actually, I think it would be better to say that I’m copylefting my blog. While reading my Technology Guardian from yesterday I was reminded of a certain gentleman called Lawrence Lessig who set up the CreativeCommons.org. Because I can, I’ll copy + paste what they say on their site:
Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of freedoms and protections for authors, artists, and educators. We have built upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. We’re a nonprofit organization. All of our tools are free.
