Ain't nobody got time for that!

Here we go. I'm once again moaning about how I can never find time to do this but here we are.
I had a rubbish day at work today. In fact, it wasn't rubbish, it just proved to be one of those days that highlights my inadequacies. It's happened a few times in the new job and well when you swap out the environment and the people this stuff becomes apparent.

The big inadequacy is I'm not very good at talking to people.

That may seem a shock if you are one of the "elite" I guess that know me quite well, and find me to be a but of a loudmouth goofball.
I think the thing that I find the most annoying is that if you were to make the binary decision then you would label me introvert and that means that you are happy enough to just be quiet in the corner. It almost certainly is not the same for introverts but I like the social interaction - I believe we are hardwired to crave social contact. Perhaps habit can suppress this and to some extent it has in me - I find it very awkward sharing close quarters with other people like in the kitchen when making tea. I have lived on my own for so long now that while the idea of living with someone else (a lodger in the new place perhaps) sounds cool but I fear or rather expect that I would get annoyed at sharing the space with them.
I do want to be involved in the conversation, believe me. I've said this on the last two work outings, Christmas last year and Neil and Jim's leaving do, I feel the layout of the office and where I am in relation to others mean it's easy for me to remain quiet but please listen to my quips!
On the work outings, Lesley has said both times that she loves when "I come out of my shell" but that person that they see after a couple of brews is much closer to what I feel is the real me. Lesley's comments, bless her are probably said during her famed "blackouts", make me feel good. I, for the most part, quite like myself but it's an area of my life which I would love to improve.
I did a little digging round the Internet and there is a Shropshire Speakers event that happens once a month for those that want to improve public speaking. I'm not sure if it's what we're after or if it would be any help but might be worth a look?

I've also been toying with the idea of doing video diary things in lieu of the blog. I figure it may improve my speaking and who doesn't like a good monologue?

I was thinking of wearing a hat for the lolz...

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The posts that never were ( = Content!)

Along with digging through old posts, I found some old drafts that I started but never flourished, never matured into full-fledged posts. As mentioned in the previous post, I found it fascinating to read the kind of stuff I was writing a couple years back so I'm going to post them here for analysis. Some were particularly time specific, so don't make any sense here, although interesting my F1 post going on about Lewis Hamilton outshadowing Jenson and how now he will never get a chance to challenge for the world title, can't always be right :)

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The archives are interesting

That's true I think. For some reason I found myself looking at Google Analytics for this blog - it's always interesting to see how people stumble here and what they decide to look at. That being said I believe most people that go here are people I know in the real world, or fans of Bottom and drinking. Yes, that's right, one of my most popular posts is my Bottom Drinking Game - a game of drinking to the British TV Show Bottom (it is literally middle-aged Young Ones).
Anyways, I fell down the rabbit-hole revisiting some old posts which others had been checking out and it's made me want to blog again, so I shall try!

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Jonny plays Draw Something

Just in case you've been living under a rock these last couple of months, there's a cool mobile game called "Draw Something" which has come out and simply blown up.
A very simply asynchronous game which is perfect for the mobile platforms (Apple, Android) where you have to draw something (geddit?!) from a small list of words, submit the drawing and then have your mate try and guess it. Swap over and repeat. Lots of times.
So, I'm pretty addicted to this and with the latest update, it makes it easy to export your drawings. So that's what I've been doing and then sticking up on the tumblr I set up linked below.
The cool thing with tumblr is you can queue up posts so check back often - I currently have enough sketches to last up until Thursday!

Jonny plays Draw Something.

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JD's Footy Gambling Adventure

Some self promotion here so I'll make it quick. With the eve of this season's Premiership upon us I've decided it would be fun to have regular wagers on the weekend's matches with the fortunate side-effect of making a pretty penny. I present to you JD's Footy Gambling Adventure, a new blog I've set up where I will post my bets and then the awesome (or maybe disappointing) results. Head over there for more information. I could have made this adventure part of this blog but because it's such a bitesize idea I felt it best for it to be its own separate thing.
Here's hoping I pick well...

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Gamechanger, part 1

Image by canonsnapper via Flickr

The blog has been quiet of late for a number of reasons. One of those reasons has been the summer (stretching onto Autumn, more about that later) of me learning to drive. I've alluded to it in various tweets and also my first (and currently only) iphone app review post where I looked at some apps to help with the theory test. Well I managed to pass the theory back in June, put in my practical test straight away and failed at my first attempt in August. Not to be beaten, I put in for it again and passed the second time round at the end of September, and there was much rejoicing.

This weekend I am heading back to Shropshire to take the final steps and secure my first car - a pretty cool red Fiesta (low mileage, good condition *thumbs up*) and the realisation that being able to drive really is a gamechanger.

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Blog Update Dec '08

It's been over a month since I last blogged so a quick update just in case the Internets think I'm dead.

There is only a finite time available every day, and while we're making do with the 7 day week (gave a thought to turning it into 6, could it be done!?) it means that something has to give, and the last month, it has been the blog.
Recently I've made a renewed effort to improve my attendance down at the gym, which I've had some degree of success. Add to that the fact that this last quarter has given us so many high quality games and even with the extra time devoted to this vice, there's still a fair number I need to try. Expect some Insert Coins about them all soon (probably in the next year :s) but I will add now that Left 4 Dead, a co-op first person shooter set in the wake of a zombie apocalypse is probably the greatest gaming experience this year, plus thanks to Gamestation's Christmas offers, I am soon picking up Fallout 3, so looking forward to that as well.

Also, I'm falling more and more behind with the podcast reviews as well, so will make a bigger effort to catch up. Plus (I may have used the word too many times!?) I'm thinking of setting up a new themed set of posts covering Film and TV, inspired a great deal by Billy of geekytalk.wordpress.com. Plus (the last time I promise...), I may finally get my very own Podcast/audioblog off the ground, and throw in some personal musings, rants, whatever I feel like etc

Hope to post soon, but if not, happy holidays! :D

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Just checking in...

My blogging has been put on hold as of late. I've been spending a bit of time with the new layout design and of course sorting out the logistics of getting a podcast working. What I will say is that I'm almost there. I've set myself a semi-target of getting the first episode out this weekend, so we'll see how that goes.

A lot of recent twitter tweets have involved progress on the blog and podcast, but there hasn't actually been a lot of change here. Checking out a few blogger hack sites earlier in the week and a very sensible recommendation is to set up a test blog to trial new features, layouts etc. So I have set up a beta blog as well it's not like there is any extra cost of having an extra blog.

I'm not going to link it here, as well it's quite messy. I rather annoyingly spent about 2 hours fixing the layout as IE is still a pain when handling CSS, it still has a different interpretation of paddings and margins arg. It looks fine in Firefox, and exactly how I expect it to but not in IE. Anyways, I got it to a point where it looks the same in both browsers, so I stopped for then.

I was planning on watching Clerks 2, my other lovefilm pick this week, but I completely crashed - one good thing is that I got a lot extra sleep so should be refreshed for the weekend.

IE is still a pain when handling CSS

Hopefully that means I might be able to make good on my promises of delivering the podcast + new layout this weekend, we'll see.

So basically, the blog will resume normal operation soon, I'll get one episode under my belt, move the changes over. One thing that has been set up here and not on the beta blog is the ratings widget which should be seen at the bottom of each post. Sometimes it takes too much effort to throw in a comment, saying how awesome the post was, but clicking on some stars should be something everyone can do.

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Add this to facebook <click here>

Just a quick post mentioning something I should have done a long time ago and that is add some blog presence to my facebook profile.
It's quite funny that I added the BlogFriends application, a viral take on blog sharing, the premise being that other blog posts which I would be interested will be highlighted to me, prompting me to click, and vice versa with people potentially interested in my posts.
This works fine, and it showing a blog post made in the news feed is cool, I often check the facebook home page to check the news feed items of friends, whether that be status updates, new photo albums, one of the better things about facebook. Ok, so I must resist a rant about what is wrong with facebook and we all know what it is, and so do the 100+ invites I currently have - and that's probably too much of a clue. Anyways, no sooner had I added BlogFriends, that the developers go ahead and announce that they can no longer continue the project. Great, I think, is there an alternative facebook app out there. Now before I stumbled I checked out Widgetbox and there clever idea of taking a blog and making a widget out of it, which they cleverly called a blidget - pretty clever guys...
Whilst great in principle it seemed a bit clunky with the facebook integration, and at the end of the day it was nothing more than a list of post titles which can easily be pulled from the RSS feed and placed into a shiny box.
I had a look a few hours back, and a quick search later, and FlogBlog was offered to me. Yes, the dream of joining the Flogosphere and other bastardised terms await me.
It lists a number of recent blog posts on my profile which will click through to the blog thanks to a quick tinker with the settings. Not sure what will happen in response to a new post, if it adds a mention of this, along with title and linked up back to the blog itself then I will announce myself chuffed.
Yes, this has been a bit of a contrived post, a small milestone, this is post #50. Whilst that's great, it's not that many when considering the lifeline of the blog. I'm thinking of really getting the hammer down and working on developing a new positive habit, to go along with the others (more about that in a later post). Thinking a target of 10 posts a month should be achievable, that's approximately a post every 3 days. Like with new habits I've found it's all about little steps, so expect smaller bitesized posts to go along with the number of the themed posts which I have currently in the works.
Wow, that was actually much longer, enjoy and if you're coming from Facebook and have a blog of your own, then add the facebook app and I'll become an avid reader - I've been meaning to add some more links as I promised, so a set of links of blogs which I actually read on a regular basis would be a rather cool segment.
Take it easy.

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Oops I did it again!

Enough of the Britney reference, that girl is literally crazy. Anyways, just a quick post to say that I've been fiddling again, and I've introduced the other sidebar which I've been thinking of doing.
Not sure what's gonna go on there, it's basically a method of making the page look a little less daunting, i.e. not huge masses of scrolling, which was one of the motivations behind the post summaries and the "read more" links.
I've chucked up a few links for now, but will expand on that eventually. I'm thinking of sticking on a Digg widget of all the stories I've dugg, and I hope that a stumbleUpon widget is available now, rather than just the button through to my page, which is a bit crap.

Anyways, more of the themed posts are a-coming. The idea is that I develop the habit with older posts and then once I've found the groove I can keep them flying out. I've already started jotting some notes down during my lunch hour. In fact, Insert Coin #1 was written almost entirely at work. Can you feel the professionalism, mmm...

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New DLC announced!

S
o in a bid to get more content here rather than me adding more bells 'n' whistles to an already bloated bell and whistle page, I'm thinking about setting up regular weekly posts. For now, I'm thinking I should have a sports-oriented set of posts, obviously detailing the teams/sports I'm following and any rants or praise songs I may want to add there. Another obvious one would be to have a set about games, bit of a no-brainer. Another one could easily be a music type one, and I think that would do very nicely.
I'm thinking it might be quite pr0 to have these regular posts occuring on the same day each week, so we could have a gaming Monday. That would be quite smart, the name "gaming monday" however is not. So, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, I'll get to work on my own ideas, and then I will ignore any suggestions and stick with my ideas cos there are da best!
Also these special posts give me the opportunity to try out adding some images to the post titles (seriously I cannot stop tinkering!) so that might be something quite smart, we'll see how it goes. speaking of images, I do also want to throw in soe more pics to spruce the place whether that be ones taken with the phone (yikes!) or ones pinched from the Internet, and if that is the case I will quote my source like a responsible author.

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Added Flickr Slideshow!

H

ey, just a quick post to say that I've added the Slideshow page element so it will now cycle through a couple of pics from my Flickr page. I've just uploaded a couple of pics off my mobile phone, so whilst the pics look alright in the element, full page they look pretty cock so apologies.
When I get a bit of time I will do some more posts, I've quite recently been dropping into rant mode, so it's always good to share that with the internets...
Take it easy.

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New header image...

O
h my god! I've just spent a fair chunk of the morning, sorting out the header image on this lurvely blog, and man am I fed up with Internet Explorer. I was getting the image being rendered perfectly in Firefox but I was getting rather bizarre behaviour from IE7. Thankfully, with Microsoft copying Firefox, there are addons available in much the same vein as extensions in FF. So I went off and downloaded my first (and probably last) addon for IE7. That being a DOM inspector much like ones already available in FF.

Anyways, firing that up and returning to this blog page I started to diagnose the problem. Strangely enough it was flagging that there were margin and border properites being applied although I knew from staring at the CSS in another tab that those attributes had long been commented out. Seems IE7 does some weird caching of CSS stuff. Anyways, I went back in, explicitly told IE7 not to stick any margins, borders etc in places and voila! both browsers render it pretty much the same.
Man, it's like having to guide a child round the shops. "No! We must go down this aisle dammnit!"

Time to recover from IE-induced stress *sigh*
Take it easy

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Gym me up Scotty!

Yes another blog from work, just keeping it brief, heralding the imminent return of the Gym Impressions posts which had a short-lived history last year. Obviously, since moving I have not been able to keep up my regular attendance at Wem's excuse for a gym, but rejoice! I have joined my local JJB fitness club and pretty swish is it too.

Obviously the amount of people is a lot higher, i.e. more than 1 but with that there are more machines and apparatus for me to look very cool struggling away, sweating like a bastard, I belive is the term...
I am of course taking my mini mp3 player along with me, as I am not partial to the dance rave-a-thon themed music they have booming out. So this would mean a chance to stick on some choons and jog the night away. Speaking of which, Reuben's "We're all going home in an ambulance" is an absolute must for upping the pace. It starts playing and I reach for the speed up button = winnar! Other possible gym reviews coming up would be Motion City Soundtrack's latest venture "Even if it kills me", (mmm, no emo vibe going on there, lol) and Tellison's "Contact! Contact!" which have been recommended to me by Adam, has a lot of promise.

In other news, the look of the blog needs a bit of work, I changed the header image as I was annoyed that the image wasn't stretching at higher resolutions, and even post-change it's actually no better. Do not view this at 1680x1050 like I did with my shiny new monitor, it's scary! So I will put aside a bit of time to sort that.
I also want to spruce up the site with a few more pics. Blogger have produced a Flickr slideshow widget so I need to populate my Flickr account, and get that happening. Unfortunately, as I discovered just before I went to the NFL london game last year, my digital camera has stopped working, so I was left to cope with my mobile phone camera, which is frankly a bit rubbish. Anyways, I have some pics on there, some fun, some a little random from my travels on the train.

A lot of my stuff has been broken, or in need of replacing when it came to the move, and I'm slowly working through all my material goods. The first thing that needed replacing was the weak 14" TV - I now have a lurvely 37" HD TV monster! (again pics have been promised for some time...). I have just replaced my 15" monitor which my Mother broke but refuses to admit to it. So the next thing I need to replace is the digital Camera, and I'm also hell bent on finally getting myself an iPod classic, it will happen, maybe after next payday.

That's enough of my lunch hour spent blogging, time to go eat. So yeah, look forward to Gym Impressions blogs coming soon, and I also want to have a positive rant about the xbox 360's latest dashboard update so check that out.
Take it easy.

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An Apple a day keeps Microsoft away...

Hey hey hey! Just doing a mini-post from work, a habit which I could possibly develop if workload is low, but anyways, here was me saying I would blog more, and oh crap! we're already a month down of 2008. My friend Adam has decided to go on a solo
holiday to Amsterdam, and he's documenting his travel adventures here, so go check that out, it's got lots of lovely pictures (which can be enlargened oh yes!) and it's well written, but I've got a slight bias there.

Anyways, Adam was going through selling a lot of his stuff, and naturally being one of his good friends, I got first dibs on some of the stuff. I got a few games, Halo 3 legendary edition (yes, the one with the helmet! :D) and the ultimate amongst the list is the Mac Mini. Slightly embarassingly I have not properly set it up, but what began with mere curiousity to the Apple approach, is slowing becoming fanboy status of the sliding scale. I'm not there yet, but I would only keep Windows for games and really the only games I stick on my PC have been WoW and the football manager series, and it is possible to get Mac versions for those, and if that's not enough, thanks to the Macs being Intel-based, it's much much easier to get Windows apps or indeed Windows to run natively without any hacky emulators and the like.

I am slowly going to make the transistion. Although not really an Apple product as such, but around the same time, I've been checking out some podcasts. It kinda started out with ExtraLife Radio (please check out this guy he is super talented, so much so a part of me resents him) and having that play whilst I've been working through the tiresome later stages of the career in Forza 2. Oh yes, please check out the rest of the site, the web comic he makes is absolutely pr0, I stumbled on it thanks to the heavy WoW content much earlier on, but basically it's a geeky comic, so win!
This led me to check out iTunes, again with the Mac influence (I've tried it before and found it rather clunky compared to Winamp). Anyways, I will eventually get an iPod classic (I know, too many Apple products), so it's good for me to get familiar, make sure all my music is added etc. Anyways, I have to say that using the iTunes store to find podcasts is awesome, so I've added all my old subscriptions and a couple new ones, like the Jonathan Ross one which I still need to check out.

I also took this opportunity to check out the diggnation podcast which is really really good. I've got the HD one so I can enjoy it in all it's lovelyness through the 360. Anyways, it's basically two guys (which actually work for digg I later discovered) that have a chat on a couch over some popualr digg stories drinking beer. It doesn't sound much as a concept, but it's pretty godamn entertaining, and the two boucne off each other really well. It's so good in fact, I've downloaded some of the back catalogue as I really don't mind the chat about old stories such as the Halo 3 4 player online coop announcement etc etc. Yeah so check it out, I did it and think it's awesome.

All this podcasting stuff got me thinking that maybe I could knock one together, just have it be a light-hearted topical chat/rant show. From my limited past experience it is best to have 2 contributors, just 1 and it's just a monologue, not that great, any more, and there's just words everywhere. So, I'm appealing to the intermawebs to see if someone would like to be a co-presenter of some kind. Scott Johnson of Extralife seems to simply record his skype conversations, so it wouldn't be too hard to get up and running, and plus it would mean that I would be posting to here more often, so it's all good. Comment me up and that would be cool.

Anyways, posting in my lunch hour when I really should be lunching.
Take it easy

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Happy new blog spot 2008!

Yes, it's been a long time coming, but here's a fresh new post on me blog! Crowds rejoice!
It is a little bizarre that the gap has been such a huge 'un as it's not like there hasn't been things to post about.
Probably the biggest change, which I alluded to in some posts ago was the fact that I have a job! horray! I've finally gone and joined the rat race, and have been slowing waking up to the realisation that I should no longer see myself as a student anymore.
Obviously this is more of a "hey Internets! I'm not dead yet!" type message (of course, I hear you all cry), so content is actually a bit on the sparse side. I'm not sure if I can be bothered to catch up on some of the major events of the last 3 months or so, that's not to say there haven't been that many.
Along with the jobness, I've managed to get my own place and all the fun that has been getting that all sorted, and settling in. Also of course, there have been some pretty huge releases which I have purchased in the fields of music and games, possibly the most immediately significant of those being the latest Coheed album and Halo 3, but more of those later.

...And to wrap up the post, it might be worth jotting down some new year blogging resolutions which I will attempt to keep. I think the first one would be of course to blog more, and leading on from that, I've never been much of an online blogger, I usually have to force myself to blog and then upload it later which usually leads to mammoth posts which trail on for too long, kinda like how this one is turning out. So yeah, more online blogging, prefer the better, short but sweet, a quick judgement on some news article I've read, we'll see how it goes...

Till then, take it easy and watch this space, there is a lot more to come...

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Smooth with a capital Smoo...

Two posts in one day, I truly am on a roll. Again, I have been on a search to spruce up my blog. I found this little method to largen and indent the first letter here. It's a shame that you have to physically force the style settings. Perhaps with a bit more research, I could get a little script to do the hard work for me when I hit "submit" in Windows Live Writer or an alternative offline blog writing tool thingy.

I'm also looking into lobbing on a chat widget into the already crowded sidebar, which makes me think it may be time to adopt the 3-column layout hack - again there
's no simple high level way to do that, you have to physically go in and play about with the CSS styles, and in my experience it gets a little awkward getting a layout that renders well in all (majority of) browsers. I would just develop in wonderful Firefox but the n00bs that buy their computers from PC World enforce Internet Explorer development on us and that's always fun, although not seen how vers 7 renders - if you ask me it is so much closer to FF now, I'm of the opinion that as FF is open source, the lazy Microsoft boys went in and reverse engineered 7 from it, mmm...

Here's wasting time looking for Blogger hacks...

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New blog stuff

Hey ho! Here I am putting off doing some work so I thought I'd waste time by playing about with the ol' blog.
Couple of changes, some more noticable than others. First one should be pretty obvious if you were to scroll down, and that's the inclusion of two tag clouds. It's probably the only thing lacking from Blogger when compared to Wordpress is a native tag cloud implementation (oh, and trackable statistics, but that's really for us admin folks). Of course there are a couple of scripts out there that can parse the standard "labels" list; I probably could have knocked up something myself, but why reinvent the wheel??

Yeah, so I found two scripts out there that can do the job, and not wanting to commit to one just yet, I've thrown them both into the sidebar to see what they look like. Also, I'm trying out the (semi-)new blogger widget, the poll widget! Yeah, so it would be great if you could place your vote and after a bit of time I'll commit to a cloud and remove the rather lame looking current list.

Another change is the inclusion of the twitter badge. I've been aware of the micro-blogging tool but had been hesitant to adopt it. Saying that, I was over on Major Nelson's site(Xbox live updates + other news) and noticed he had the twitter badge up and running and thought it actually looked quite neat. It's very much like the "status" feature on facebook, and I usually try and have a bit of fun with that, so thought I'd chuck it on the blog as well - in a small effort to try and get me back into the blogging routine. I have a few more interesting pics taken on my phone which I may well share, but the quality's not great; especially with my shaky arm LOL.

Another small change, hardly noticable, is my swapping of my Last.fm profile. I've been slowly adopting "Jimiminar" for every online handle/identity out there and well my last.fm profile was lagging behind. Cue a shiny new profile and I've just swapped over the quilts/recent tracks but it should be business as usual...

Here's trying to find something else to put off work...

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What is your love message?...

Hey, I saw this in my blogger dashboard, and thought it deserved a post.

I checked out the blog itself and read this moving story of this guy George and his love Gina and I got a little annoyed that I can never match the words he used. It got me thinking that I should contribute to the project - not so much as to change people's (or a certain person's) impressions of me, but that the main reason I blog is from the theraputic release from venting my anger/frustration or celebrating something I have found to be very ace, or jotting down a few life events cos noone has bothered to ask in a few days.

Here's starting on my love message...

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The State of Blogs to come...

Hey all, again I have neglected this blog over the last few weeks despite a couple of noteworthy events happening etc. Anyways, I plan to hit the heavy stuff a little later in the evening, but first some lighter stuff.

First things first, I've made a few small cosmetic changes to the look of the blog. Probs the most noticable is the header image I've added to the, believe it or not, header.  Yeah, no particular reason for the water, I was just looking through this archive of random wallpapers I downloaded a while back, looking for something I could take a slither off to turn into some cool artsy background. Well I went for this ocean scene with dolphins jumping. I almost cropped a dolphin into the header image but thought that would be a little lame, so just kept to the waves.  The colour of the sea being pretty close to the standard background I had before has meant that I have kept the header text white.  I've also changed the blog title and added a subtitle, subtly withdrawing one of the many names under which I go.  Wow, who thought you could talk at length about some small changes to a blog header lol.

There is one small problem with the new header image, in the fact that it has a fixed size. I spent some time trying to find a solution to the problem as if the blog is viewed in resolutions of 800x600 or dare I say it, lower then the header image overhangs the header and doesn't look very pretty indeed. Also due to the limitations of my available monitors, I have not seen it above 1024x768 and I don't want to think about it - I was suprised it was not more of a common problem, but I gave it a good search but gave up after a few hours. My advice, only view this site in 1024x768 resolution, kthx :D

 

Other changes are to do with the Last.fm quilts sitting in the sidebar.  Thanks to the efforts of the last.fm development team, they've now developed multiple sizes for the quilts, so I've opted for the smaller ones. It's ok folks, the pictures swap round so you can still watch in awe and see/read the artists/albums I hold dear.

Also new in this post is my use of Windows Live Writer in composing this blog entry.  I read that version 2 had entered beta phase on the blogger main page, so I'd thought I'd give it a go, hopefully it won't fuck it up completely.  It has been found to work ok with Blogger so I don't foresee any problems, so if it works out I will use it more in the future, and possibly make more exciting blog entries, with pictures and definite links, rather than me kinda rambling about something I read/watched but may in fact of dreamt up, mmm.

 

Take it easy...

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