What time is it?

Adventure time, yo.

Oranges are not the only fruit

And nor, so it seems, is WinAmp the only reasonable music player on Windows anymore.

For a long time I have hated Windows Media Player for a number of reasons:

It has limited codec support
It is clunky and ugly
It has the kind of UI only cryptic crossword and Sudoku fans would find intuitive
It is slow
It doesn't play nicely with media devices
It is made by Microsoft (what?)

And yet and yet and yet... I started playing around with it this afternoon and I made a terrible discovery. In it's latest incarnation (11) it is pretty good. It is sleek. The new styling of it is very "prepare for Vista, bitches" which is no bad thing. Even if Windows is playing catch up to other OSes, making things look nicer is not inappropriate in my mind. The structure of the media libraries is well thought out. It handles album art with panache (although not well enough, quite frankly). It supports music stores (even eMusic, which was a nice surprise). Now that I converted my .oggs into mp3s, codec support is no longer an issue. And then there was the media player support. And this was the bit that hurt the most. It does it better than the Creative software I've been using that came with the Zen. How is that allowed? Granted it doesn't do podcasts (at least I don't think it does, I mean I've not really fiddled with that side of things yet), but the transferring/ syncing side of things is better thought out. And of course, this being a "media player" you can do your videos and pictures, too.

Oh well, maybe Vista won't be a complete cluster-fuck, eh?

Oh come on. Seriously.

MD-10 departs LAX with Northrop Grumman's Guardian anti-missile system - Engadget

ARE YOU AFRAID ENOUGH YET?

For fuck's sake, this isn't flight zero-nine-alpha over the DMZ, guys.

If music be the food of love

Try and find the album art for your life.

But seriously folks, since the advent of my Zen, I've started getting into listening to podcasts. I appreciate that I'm about 2 years behind the rest of the world on this one, but it's so good to have something that isn't music and is interesting to listen to when I'm mooching around Sainsbury in the evening, or walking back up the hill after lectures. I've got a list of... Many that I subscribe to (may I'll link them in my sidebar?) mostly ones related to site I visit on a regular basis, which gives a nice totality of experience, especially with places like Engadget, where there are so many updates to their RSS feed everyday that I have trouble keeping up. some of the others are just random finds from the ZENcast website, for instance I am now learning the secrets of a sixty second pedicure and why Britney's no. 1 fan site is closing. Important stuff.

On a music related note, I've noticed that in my room I'm more than happy to put everything (4000+ tracks) on random and just listen, shuffle and advance as and when I feel like it, but when I'm about town, I've got a select few albums that really hit the spot, at the moment it's the stuff I've got from eMusic or my many music blogs. There is also this which turned up in my feedreader today, which is very good indeed and although I don't have a car to drive down a long highway, I'm going to use to long Tube rides and a fie on anyone who suggests this isn't much the same thing.

As a nerd with essays to do I am, unsurprisingly, doing pretty much anything to avoid having to make a concerted start. So far today this has taken the form of finding new podcasts, upgrading the Zen's firmware and trying to find out how to transfer album art onto it. I mean, it's not even vaguely necessary and useful, but I'd like to. This has, I'm afraid to say, involved using Windows Media player. Which I'm not sure I'm doing right. It is not even vaguely intuitive in terms of its UI and I maybe using the wrong version. I don't know. All this just for some pictures I'll probably never look at, is it worth it?

So this is Wednesday and what have you done?

"I've had kisses that make Judas seem sincere"
~The Hold Steady

Not a grand deal, to be honest. But what I have done was to the soundtrack of "Boy and Girls in America" by The Hold Steady. It's easily the best album I downloaded during my emusic glut yesterday morning. The only reasonable way to describe it to you is by this metaphor:

You spend a night drinking with this guy you meet in a bar. Now he's dressed smart-shabby, open-necked shirt, nice suit and possibly a pair of cowboy boots, shaggy hair and a thousand-yard stare. Hes got a rosary chain around his wrist, but doesn't seem too hung up about it. He spends the night telling you about the things hes done and as the night progresses you realise that his look isn't one fashioned to be cool, it's just how he rolls. Some of the stories are balls to the wall, drink and drug fuelled white-knuckle rides, others are melancholy ballads to lost loves who took one to many or just fell by the wayside. He's got stories other people told him, but most of the time he's just telling how great his life has been. This is a man who drinks straight shots all night and tells you a story about how a couple met over oranges and cigarettes in a chillout tent. And makes it sound romantic.

Anyway, I think you should buy this album, because it is bloody brilliant. Here endeth the sermon.

Wednesday is a hump day. I don't know who first told me that, maybe you did? But they were right. Wednesday has little to recommend it. I woke up late, the water had been turned off for boiler maintenance, so no shower. Too much time was spent staring at a computer screen, trying to make sense of an assignment I am yet to start and had rather hoped to be stuck into by now. But analysing papers seems just too much like hard work right now.

I guess the main reason for my apathy right now is that I think that maybe I'm not as okay as I thought I was. I thought I'd cleared up all the residual shit about Michelle, and you know what? I don't think I'm done with it yet. I mean, I am in the sense that I don't want her in my life, nor do I blame myself for our relationship going south - though you don't have to be a psycho-analyst to see something wasn't right. I just feel the hole in my life where she once resided. It is almost tangible. I'm being not all emo here, hell I don't want this shit right as I am busy. It can wait. But I don't think it will, which is a pain. I've got over all the stuff that reminds me of her, I don't feel anything towards her, not even hate. And this is where I should be I think.

*sigh*

Still, it's not like I'm stuck for things to do if I want to keep busy, right?

The Hold Steady - Stuck between stations (Live on "The Current")

Dear god yes

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Morrissey in talks for Eurovision

For the fucking win.

I can't think of better reason to watch the annual "music" event. Other than listening to dear old Tel getting drunk and slagging off the acts, that is.

In other news We are moved to tears by the size of the thing. And this maybe the best screenplay ever written.

Man, this mental health work-book is dull.

So indie it hurts

I like CDs. I like breaking finger-nails trying to defeat the impenetrable shrink-wrap around the case. I like reading liner notes, possibly even singing along whilst reading the lyrics. I don't apologise for it. I like lining up the writing on a CD so it is perfectly horizontal, I know, I know, OCD is so last year. I don't care. I love going into indie record stores and seeing a bunch of guys in corduroy jackets eyeing each other up, trying to decide who has heard of the most esoteric band. I love seeing girls at gigs, for bands that only come to the UK once a year, dressed up like a poor rip-off of Lisa Loeb and not caring. I've spent evenings just listening to WOXY. com, noting band names and trying to find their stuff on Amazon, it made me feel like I was 15 and listening to "The Evening Session" on Radio1. You know, before Jo Whiley became an obsequious sycophant to MoR artists. She's still hot though.

I'm not a neophile who will suggest that CDs have had their day and that we should all bow to the mighty iTunes music store. Mainly because my indie sensibilities are offended by DRM and the pretty awful range of artists in the store. But also because there is something nice about *having* a CD, case, liner notes et al. You don't understand? It's like the difference between your girlfriend telling you she loves you to your face and seeing her type it in MSN (or whatever the hell you kids use nowadays).

So what now, bitches? What comes next? Well, over christmas I treated myself to a Creative Zen Vision:M (which is an excessively long name. I mean, what's the deal guys? Is this some kind of e-peen thing?) to purge my bank account of all that silly money stuff and because 512 Megalbites of music is just not enough for a day around London. Also, I'm too lazy to hunt around for a new playlist everyday. Anyway, one of the things that came with it was a link to emusic. I've been getting these for years from WinAmp, every time I update it and every time I've thought "Ehhhh, no." It appears I have been making a repeated, odourous error of judgment. I think you can see where I'm going with this. I flipped a coin, signed up to emusic and downloaded a pretty eclectic mix with my free 25 tracks. The range of music on there is good, pretty indie (no U2 for you, over-priced iPod owner) and if anyone can point out to me how £15 for 90 tracks is an economically poor choice, I'd like to see the maths.

So maybe buying music online has a place in my life, especially if it means I don't have to pay over the odds or wait weeks for that American import-only album.

Check your head

Today's topic: Mental health.

At least that was the topic of my lectures. I didn't think I would be that interested in mental health issues, but I was. I've always been a bit suspicious of psycho-babble and penis being an explanation of everything wrong with people. In the UK at the moment, approximately 1 million teenagers suffer from anxiety or depression. That's the kind of figure I am suspicious of, as I remember being a teen and I'm pretty sure that anxious or depressed is the resting state for a teenager. I have a theory about why kids nowadays are more vulnerable than in the past, but I'll get to that in a bit. It was a gentle easing back into the regimen of lectures and learning et al, the lecturer was using her "soothing voice" technique on us, something I only picked up on about half-way through the lecture. It wasn't monotonous nor soporiphic, rather it was relaxing. Made me think of "Dune". But anyway. More interesting was that 15-year-olds that smoke Cannabis are four times more likely to develop depression. Not overly surprising, I must say, but interesting to see it confirmed empirically. Pretty much everyone was wearing grey, which at first I thought was more than a co-incidence, showing our mindset. But then a course-mate informed me that grey is the new black - whatever that means. But she did suggest eloping, so I can't really get that annoyed with her.

So down to my theory. Feel free to disagree with me on this one, as almost sure you will:

Are we as a species in danger of becoming overloaded with information? Some kind of critical mass of consciousness? Are my generation are perhaps the best able to deal with this? We grew up at the beginning of global communication happening on an everyday level. We saw the birth of the Internet, surely the most important catalyst in this global mindset. We have had the chance to acclimatise to it's growth in popularity and the opportunities it offers, evolving with it. Younger generations haven't had that option. For them it has always been; MSN-bullying, MySpace paedos and sex from every outlet. They don't have the point of reference that we do, no chance to switch off. Kids today have their mobile 'phones with them at all times. The idea of not being on the grid is alien to them. So the stresses and strains of this accumulates in a way that might have been familiar to the 80's Wall St. executive, but surely aren't appropriate for people who aren't even sure what they want out of life.

Discuss.

[Tortoise edit] Looks like being mentally is pretty much a crime nowadays :\

Reasons to be happy

A little something I was fiddling with before bed tonight was gaim and a work around for the ports blocked by the fascist Halls' firewall.

And I won.

:D

I've got my jabber account and my AIM account working fine. Hooray!

Next up, installing the gaim-e plugin working and going all PGP on my messages. I really do not understand the resistance people have to a little encryption. Still, I am something of a zealot in this regard and will do my utmost to jolly people along.

[ninja edit] Or not, seeing as how a) I can't open an ftp port (grrrrrrr) and b) It only supports AIM, Yahoo and MSN. Bloody hell, these things are sent to challenge us, I guess.

I am my own fantasy

So I've just watched "Hogfather" and it was good. For a Terry Pratchett adaption, it was superb given that so much of what makes Pratchett fun to read is the narrative, something you can't really do with a TV show. It worked and was both touching, funny and a little unnerving in parts, so all good, really.

And it got me thinking about the central theme, which is the notion of fantasy and how it gets us through the day:

Death: Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
Susan: With Tooth Faeries, Hogfathers?
Death: Yes. As practice you have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
Susan: So we can believe the big ones?
Death: Yes. Justice, mercy, duty, that sort of thing.

And given that I am prone to think about the nature of existence in the shower, in lieu of any greater mental challenge whilst washing, I wondered if this was a pretty good point. For the past couple of years I have entertained the fantasy of growing up - The pretty wife, the house, the car, the mediocre middle-class friends - which suddenly struck me as a) One of the reasons my last relationship crumbled without me realising it and b) As a total waste of my fantasy.

I mean, if you fantasise about some responsible, upright future, what the hell are you doing? I should be fantasising about more... Fantastical things. Not some fucking idealised tedium that I may well slip into without really doing anything to cause it to happen. It seemed so dull. I'll use my conscious, important time for that. Hell, I'm entering a career where there will a surfeit of reality, of the real nasty side of existence. I shouldn't spend the time in my head dreaming about becoming a lassez-faire suburbanite, should I? Did it really give me any pleasure? Given that so much of my future was based on dreams, should I be so entirely surprised that my ex left me? Not because I was constantly off in some fantasy land, but rather that I was planning a future, one that left nothing to the imagination. Thats not the way a relationship should be based and it's not what my "me" time should be used for.

Is it?

As a foot-note, I've noticed that my mother bought me a pair of boxer-shorts (surely the best underwear in the world?) that have "Think of England" on the bottom of one leg. Is she trying to suggest to me an alternative lifestyle choice? D:

I have done... Questionable things

But also great things!

Well, potentially great. Well, okay, if you're going to be a fucking pedant about it, I've done some good things and some bad things. But that's not important right now.


What is important, at least to me, is that I've decided to make a new blog after the demise of ironictoaster, because I need an outlet for my creative side. And goodness knows my course doesn't give me that oppotunity. So down to business...

I've done somethings today in preparation for my course starting anew on Monday. This is a course that seems to be more and more like some kind of beaureaucratic rite of passage; if you can handle the outrageously poor planning, the lack of logical timetabling and the herculian task of finding out where I'm meant to be on a daily basis, then, then you will be sufficiently hardened, nay forged in the fires of poor management, that the NHS will have little to intimidate you.

Things I have done today to prepare for the next semester:

1. Bought a decent sized, non-fun, calendar for noting important dates (courses, placements, exams, coursework due dates, gigs, rectal exams etc etc)
2. Bought a pad of post-it notes so I don't have to keep on using the back of envelopes for taking notes at my desk and then using bodily exudates to adhere them to surfaces.
3. Bought a diary. Mobile calendar. I think the logic behind this is self-explanatory.
4. Done a crap load of washing. I had officially run out of socks this morning and that is not a situation I ever want to face again.
5. Decided to write an email to the IT department at uni. Seriously, I can understand them blocking the BitTorrent ports of the halls' network (what percentage of all 'net traffic is BT now?) but blocking ports used for IM clients, FTP, hell even NTP services! It's just too retarded for words and thus something must be said. It wouldn't be quite so bad, but this is only the case in halls - Not a problem on campus >.<
6. Watched the first half of "Hogfather". It really is rather good. Which is nice. There are few authors I think should be kept in book form and Terry Pratchett was one of them. But now, I may have to rethink this.
7. Started an audio-diary (note I did not say blog) of my time learning to be a nurse, 'cause I need an outlet of all the shit I see on the wards and I don't want to make my friends start hating me because I all I talk about is my course. And I'm too lazy to write it down.
   

Which brings us nicely to my questionable things. Or rather, thing.

I was torn between two games before Christmas. I thought "New computer, why not buy a new game?" Y'know, something to test out the new components (lol dual core) and entertain me when I'm trying desperately to not think about course-work (1500 words of the role of the nurse in a multi-professional health care team? How does this improve my nursing? Srsly.) I was torn between Neverwinter Nights 2 and Dawn of war. Both had reasons to be bought, however I went with NWN2 because I knew the territory and enjoyed the first one so much. However, after downloading the demo for DoW, I can see that I chose, poorly. I've never been a fan of RTSs but this is like nothing I've ever played before, it's pretty, it doesn't involve all that "you require more Vespene gas" stuff. You capture points on a map, build tanks and kill the other guy. The graphics may not be mind-blowing, but it really is a fantastic game and compared to the horrible, horrible UI in NWN2 (it's like they saw what was good in Bioware's design and just chucked it away) it's more... Fun.

So I think we've learnt something from this experience. Namely that I am a retard when it comes to purchasing computer games and I should really leave it to the experts. I should stick to nursing.