The end of the first week of my new blog. Been an interesting experience bouncing round these blogger networks. Made a nice change from the immaturity myspace. Went to the girlfriends in East Grinstead last night, made her get a myspace, you can find it here and ask her to be your friend if your so inclined. For all it’s annoyances, everyone has a myspace so it’s a bit silly to avoid it. It’s like saying ‘we never needed roads before’, well, kinda like that. Of course, it’s mainly filled with under 25s and the under 25s at heart. The blogger networks seem to be more old dudes (could do with some dudettes) and I’m not sure exactly which catagory I’m fitting in these days… actually, I’ve been alot happier blogging than myspacing, so I think I know which one I am.
The oonagi webcast 5 was the first to recieve a vote on the site… 1 star out of 10. Not too hot but what the hell, I ain’t gonna let others negativity get me down. Alas, one thing that will slow me down is the essay due in on Monday and the huge amounts of revision I have to do for my exams coming up in June. Think I’m gonna try to re-focus with an image makeover, out with the mo-ho and goatee, in with the….. grade one I expect.
Oh the excitement of the internet! Drama at every turn. It seems ram-skate has declared that he won’t post again on Cliff Richards blog over a furore of loose lips. What is Tricky Dicky going to do now??? Especially now he’s admited to being the most infamous president of all time, surely he needs his shady associates to help gather info on any possible ‘opponents’ to avoid any challenges, or worse still….. impeachment!
Will this in future years become known as ‘Eastcliffgate’? Will ram-skate become know as ‘deep-scroat’? Guess we’ll just have to wait for the next thrilling installment!
I know it’s popular to call webcasts podcasts nowadays, but I’m not tempted to jump on the bandwagon. For a start, I don’t own an iPod and I never play them on iPods (I usually use songbird, a neat open source media player). I’ve also found that other people think you need an iPod to play them. So I’ll tick with good old ‘webcast’. When I get round to sorting out my syndication, I’ll call them ‘syndicated webcasts’. I know, I’m old fashioned, but what can you do.
My latest one on oonagi (webcast no.5) got picked up by the Cliff Richard on his blog. Good of him to mention it, also good of him to point out that sound levels are a bit screwy. I’ve been having this problem quite a bit. In line with my open source addiction, I’m using Audacity. This is a very neat audio recorder along the lines of the proprietary SoundForge. You would hope that by webcast5 I would have sorted this out. Still I’ll plug away. The main problem I’ve been having with it is amplifying the talking parts without it clipping. I’ve tried using the compressor, the clip remover, the peak smoother and every other plugin with ‘er’ on the end. Finally I resorted to going through each bit with the pencil tool and shifting each little wave manually. That wasn’t fun, there must be another way. I’ll play with it some more and hopefully figure it out.
Me and Jim had lots of fun doing the last one and we’re already talking about the next. Jim want to interview Duncan, our local celebrity trumpeter (who is mentioned on the cast). My main aim is just to play and talk about local bands. A nice dream for the future is to do videos of the bands live and to host them.
I hear a god awfull noise. I ignore it, it should go away. It doesn’t. I’m roused so I lean over and click it, that’ll make it go away. It works for what seems like a couple of seconds (9mins). Repeat process until suitably late for any appointments.
I just found a rather useful site with a directory of all the pubs and bars in Thanet, put together by the Thanet Camra Association. I’ll see you all on the streets for lager-vomit spotting.
As a nice treat this evening I picked up a worm for my computer. I was on a public wireless network, but only visiting safe sites; bbc, blogger etc. Bit of a shame really as it meant I had to do the decent thing and disconnect from the network and scan my computer to remove all traces. Internet security is a tough one, even if your a security obsesive like me. Still, I find these things quick and remove them quick. I picked up a common piece of malware the other day called ‘winfixer’. I’m sure many of you have experienced this one. A quick search around the security zines and I found a tool called VundoFix to remove it. But for the general user, you should really only need two key pieces of software to keep you safe.
Firstly, anti-virus. I will not at any point ever recommend Norton. It’s crap. Not only is it not very effective, but as the most common piece of ‘protection’ it’s normally the first that virus writers try to circumvent. Personally, I use AVG free edition, which did a great job for me tonight, as it has in the past. Though it’s not 100% (what is?), it is very effective with all but the most obscure virus, trojan or worm. Another good free one is Avast home edition. I used to use this, but changed for no real reason other than AVG gives me more info. I like to know what my computer programs are up to. Paying for one should get you a better product, but I’m not recommending anything here as the two previously mentioned are effective enough for home users. I might mention though that McAfee once struck a deal with an adware company to let their software through for a certain fee.
Secondly, anti-spyware/adware. I’m happy with my ad-aware SE personal by Lavasoft. Another free one, but does have some payable upgrades. I have tried others, for example, InfoWare’s SpyRemover, but most of them have a habit of telling you that you have malware, but ask you to pay for removal. Ad-aware is a tried and tested classic who, like AVG and Avast, have large business divisions which subsidise free home use and ensure an up to date database.
Many people would recommend getting an additional software firewall. I won’t. Use the windows firewall and if you have anything like a router, use the hardware firewall. Software firewalls have raised all sorts of furore in security circles. They give a false impression of control by giving the user a allow/dis-allow pop-up every time they go to use a program that uses the internet. Also, because firewalls are deeply embeded into the system themselves they are good targets for an attacker, as the worm ‘witty’ showed.
All in all, so long as you get your windows update every month, keep your anti-virus and adware up to date and run regular scans, think about what websites your using, you should be able to stop your computer from getting a nasty cold.
Well, I’ve been using the google calendar and I now have a visual representation of how bloody busy my life is. I think I have a gap in there somewhere and within moments it gets filled. I think it was just nicer being busy and not noticing. I’m still not figured out quite how to let others view it without puting it on my own webspace or the other user being a google account holder. Sure I’ll get that soon enough though.
I’m off to go work the door for a tonights football at the student club. Thank God I don’t have to watch it!
I can see the ripples of each post sending waves across the internet. The last post gets el’oonagi listed on Thanet Life (though in the blog section, guess it does look more like a blog these days) and a post or so before looks like it’s going to get us a free BBQ from Eastcliff Richard. So long as he doesn’t assume another name and declare himself winner of his own competition!
Anyhows, for any of you ale drinkers out there, there is a great one down the Churchills at the moment called ‘Waggledance’. It has settled nicely and I highly recommend it.
Well, here I am at work. It’s a hard life. Though I’m not sure what I’ll do when the laptops battery runs out as I’m just sitting in the corridor and there are no power points.
I’ve updated the sidebar bit of this blog, seeing as I’m getting a bit more attention than I expected. Additions include: Thanet Life, our alternative newspaper; Living Room Sessions, a slowly updated blog by some friends of mine who do radio shows at their uni of Roehampton; Big News Margate, Margate info with attitude; Nethercourt Notes, a man who spends alot of time on the Ramsgate westcliff, presumably because it’s the furthest away he can get from Richard while staying in Ramsgate.
I’ve also included a link to my googlepages. This is free webspace that google is giving away. The space doesn’t allow you to use ftp at the moment, so it’s a bit crap if you want to use it to host your own website, especially as you have to use the monkey-proof layout editor. But it is useful for storing files to externally link to as they give you 100mb space. They also have some neat widgets if your prepared to take the risk and use the ‘experimental features’ in the settings. The widget you’ll find on my one? None other than pacman. So if your really bored, you can go play that.
Cripes, I make one post yesterday on the anonymity of Eastcliff Richard and all of a sudden I’m splashed across not just his blog, but I’m listed on the Thanet Life blog too! What happened??? Not even oonagi is listed there.
So last night I recorded a new webcast for oonagi. This time it’s a duo with me and little jim. Mainly talk with one track from Candy Sniper. It was good fun to do one bouncing off someone else so I think I’ll do more like that. After that we headed down to Deviate goth club at Rainy’s, Ramsgate. A neat idea for a late night metal get together on a Tuesday. Shame it was a bit dead, and those that were there were a bit miserable. I cheered some guys up by teaching them to make little paper cranes (spurred on by a conversation about my new band ‘1000 Cranes’), but all in all everyone was a bit long faced. Funny, goth kids are normally upbeat, bizarre as that may sound.