Our bottle of house bubbles has run out so we need to refill it with something bubbly. What shall we use? Washing up liquid? WRONG! I spend a long night testing every detergent-containing product in the house. Read on for the exciting results… Read more »
My final (planned) festival of the summer was the Moor Music Festival which was held on Ilkley Moor last weekend. It was really very, very good! The bands and DJs were mostly local and yet the quality of the music was extremely high - some of the best acts I’ve seen all year. It was also smallest festival I’ve been to (1500 capacity but I don’t think it was sold out) and I can now safely say: “The less the merrier”. There’s a much more intimate feel to small festivals. You feel you’re just among a big group of friends and and over the course of the weekend you invariably meet the same people again and again which is really nice. As it happened I actually was among a big group of friends as this festival was also our yearly Perry Court get-together and that was really nice too. Now I’ve got a week to get my act together before I jet off to Corsica.
Life is hard.
I only have one pair of shoes. This means I wear them for everything from weddings to trekkings, the Alps to Egypt. I’ve had the same pair for over three years now and recently commented on how impressed I was that after so much wear, tear and severe mistreatment they were still presentable enough to be worn to a job interview. But then something amazing happened: I took them to Glastonbury.
It rained a stupid amount on the first night which made the rest of the weekend a mudfest - as usual. My shoes got so utterly caked in mud that sometimes my foot was literally too heavy to lift and I had to try and scrape some of the mud off in order to continue walking! Well, it gives me great pleasure to announce that after a considerable amount of washing and scrubbing, they are now back to their original and entirely presentable state of suede black leatherness which, in my eyes at least, makes them The Best Shoes in the World Ever.
Go ecco! More tales from the fields…
If you don’t know what it is then you clearly don’t live in the UK.
I suspect these adverts are actually created by some form of computer virus that has taken over the TV stations. It started late night on The Hits but quickly spread to MTV and the other music channels. The speed of the infection slowed for a while until it began to infiltrate other cable and satellite channels and even the internet. Now it’s victory is almost complete as it has made it’s way onto prime time terrestrial and it’s on twice every ad break now on E4!
Further evidence that it is a virus comes from the fact that it morphs slightly every few days (or at least the first few seconds of it do - I’ve never seen more than that). And if we imagine, for a second, that real people are paying to have this shown on TV then where are they getting the money from? Have you ever heard anyone using this ring tone? I certainly haven’t. And wouldn’t the TV companies immediately banish it from their stations in the knowledge that they are losing huge amounts of advertising revenue due to the fact the everyone changes the channel as soon as that fucking thing comes on?
On the one hand it’s the most irritating thing I’ve ever seen or heard. On the other hand one cannot help but be in awe at experiencing something beautiful: the birth of AI - even if it is a malicious little cunt.
I got a bit of a shock yesterday when I said goodbye to Lydia and realised that the next time I see her in a few weeks I will no longer be a student! And before that time I have to learn, revise and be examined on four modules worth of academic junk.
To follow up from my previous post I can tell you what’s even more ridiculous: you can get a new mobile phone on a contract with 100 minutes a month which for the first year, after cashback, costs you… minus 18 pounds sterling! That’s right, you actually make money by ‘buying’ their phone. Sheer craziness.
Anyway this is just to say that I’m still alive and well. I’ve got a few photos up in the new photos section including a selection of Egypt pics. And while on the subject of phones and pictures I’ve created a ‘compact’ version of the photo site. If you have a WAP 2.0 compatible phone please try it out and let me know if it works: wap.clump.co.uk
My venerable and well serving Nokia 8310 is becoming a little senile these days and doesn’t like receiving calls. I’ve had it for over two and a half years so I decided it was time to change up a gear and get myself a spangly new phone. After a few hours of searching I happened across this paradox:
e2save.com have this deal where you get a new SonyEricsson S700i and a 12 month supply of 200 cross-network anytime minutes + 100 texts for just under ?200 (after cashback). At the same time that phone is selling for ?200-?250 on eBay. That means that if you’re willing to put up with an older phone you can get all your calls and texts free for a year and make up to ?50 in the process!
Combine that with easy mobile number portability and it’s a wonder anyone stays with the same network for longer than a year.
I’m sure you’ve all heard horror stories about eBay and how they’ve done this to someone and they’ve done that to someone else. We’ll I’ve had only good experiences until today…
Today: eBay burned my soup.
I had made a big pot of vegetable-drawer-soup (which turned out to be potato, carrot & parsnip) and thought “well it needs another 10 minutes or so. I’ll just go and check if I’m still the winning bidder”. Some time and many clicks later my nose alerted me to the disaster.
Of course I ate it anyway because I’m poor. I suppose I can probably blame eBay for that too…
I had an exam yesterday afternoon at 2pm. It’s the first year they run the course so we didn’t have any past exam papers to look at. However the lecturer gave us an old masters exam which he said was pretty much the same content. I looked at that and saw that I could do pretty much all of it straight off. So I spent the day before the exam not doing very much. I planned to get up early and do a bit more revision before the exam so I set my alarm for 11am.
When the alarm rang I must have just switched it off because the next time I woke up it was 1.45pm.
Read more »
A formula has been developed to determine the worst day of the year, reports the BBC, and that day is tomorrow.
From a brief inspection of the formula it is clear that it omits two very important terms. These are AE and AS representing the anticipation of the end of exams and going skiing, respectively. Once these are factored in, Monday 24th January doesn’t look so bad…
I recently had several important realisations:
We talked about it and decided Sam and Jimmy should come with me but I never fully expected it to happen (especially as the urge to go skiing was provoked by an advert on TV for soup - advertising works in strange ways). However, now that my account is considerably lighter than it was an hour ago, I can confirm that it definitely is going to happen.
We’re flying at 7am on 29th Jan. Exams finish on the 28th. It’s gonna be messy.