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 1680×1050 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.

Ma First Daiye….

Hey, so here we are, long time no blog but it’s time to share again.
A lot has happened in the last few weeks, especially considering how little I’ve been blogging in these last couple of months so it’s a bit of a mystery what’s actually happening right now.
I’m sure I’ll be able to expand on the events of the past another time, but in a revision session, catch up type thing, it’s best just to spell out the simple facts so that you can pass the exam (There is no exam).  Basically, off the back of this JBC Course in Coventry I have managed to get a job hurray for me! Yeah, today was in fact my very first day, so it’s pretty scary to finally be part of the rat race proper.I am working for Prestwood Software based in the Stourbridge area, who offer financial planning software, and my job is to provide support for this software product to its users.  Also somewhere down the line, within a year or two, I will be able to move into the programming side of things, which is what I really want to be doing with myself so feeling pretty optimistic.

I have had my first day, indeed the first day of five week’s worth of training, to get me upto speed with the software product, how the company operates and more generally the, frankly scary, world of financial services.  Yep, I have my own desk and PC in the offices.  The PC itself is running Vista so that will be good to get some hands on experience with that.  My first day started off with a crash course in financial services, learning what endowments, annuities etc are.  I was asked a few times how I was getting on, what I actually wanted to say was what a mindfuck all this information is – I was feeling really stretched and my concentration levels seemed all over the place.
The main reason for that is probably the living arrangement I am currently engaged in, and other arrangements I am chasing. Simply put, Stourbridge is too far to commute from Wem so I set on sorting out my own place.  Unfortunately time spent chasing this other job in London (more on that later), I was only able to spend Tues to Fri of last week flat hunting.  That being said, I’ve done rather well I thought and with the help of my good friend Wilson [picture missing] I’ve decided to go for this house in Kidderminster.  Kidderminster being a short train ride from Stourbridge for those geographically-challenged people (like myself). I sent the application off for that on Sunday, and if all goes to plan I could be moving in this Saturday. I am very pumped about that, my very first place plus being in Kiddy I am quite close to Wilson so I won’t be in a new strange land completely on my own, which is a bonus.

Yeah, so currently I am shacked up in a B and B in Stourbridge. It’s not too great, put simply it’s a room with a bed(double) in, an ensuite bathroom and a TV, the TV being a big surprise.  The only proper benefit is the price, this place being cheap.  Money is getting very tight, and the whole application process and the required deposit all adds up to a small fortune.  Yeah, so slumming it a bit in this B and B till Saturday when it hopefully should get a load better.  I should be contacted on Thursday with regards to my application but hopefully it should be fine and I’ll be in my very own place before I know it.

Continuing my trend in offline blogging I will no doubt build up a backlog of blog posts while I seek to find ways to spend the time at the B and B, especially lacking the money to go out, have a pint or two, go watch a film etc… It’s ok, as you may have guessed by now, I’ve brought my laptop and my trusty external HDD to provide with TV based fun to keep me sane.
Here’s taking the first steps in becoming a working professional…

Week 1 (actually it’s week 3 now :S)

Very overdue but it seems any free time I’ve got so far has spent in front of the TV like a zombie, or down the pub with a pint, err… like a zombie.

I did try and write this at the end of week 1, and then again at the end of week 2, and now I’m here on the Monday of week 3 and still nothing, oh dear. I think it’s now best to make a number of small(er) entries rather than try and do a catchup of everything that’s happened so far.

So, here we are, might as well make this a kind of overviewy exercise. I’ve started on a course which should train me up with the powers of performing desktop and/or network support in a professional capacity. Along with the lecture and the study towards certification, there’s also the help with making my CV better and making a better interviewee of myself as well. That’s been one of my probs, so along with the skills, we should hopefully get there.

Along with the course, they’ve given me a place to live for the couple of weeks. I am currently living in Earlsdon Ave South, quite literally a stone’s throw away from where the Red Faction house was when I was back at Uni. Living with 5 others, and they’re a pretty good bunch and surprisingly of all different ages.

There’s this guy called Dave from South Wales. His surname is actually Hughes which is again a surprise, but then again it’s a pretty common name in the land of Wales, so it’s time to get over that. He is 32 and has recently graduated from a Music Technology degree and is a bit of a classic rock/metal fan – in particular Guns ‘N’ Roses. Then there’s Aman, a recent graduate of a Computer Science degree and is 24. His twin brother has luckily got himself a job quite recently so Aman’s hoping to sort something out pretty sharpish. There’s Julian, 29, who currently works at Amazon in Milton Keynes as a problem solver. He’s originally from South Africa but is very cool, if a little hard to understand at times (I’m sorry). We then Peter, although that’s not the correct spelling – he is fact a Pole national and it’s spelt (and pronounced) a little differently, but that’s the English equivalent. And finally there’s Dal (full name Dalber – remember Dal and “beer” – easy!) who as Julian described him perfectly and concisely as a “party animal” – he is 25, also a computer science graduate, and is often out all night, or gaining points on his licence, usually not at the same time.

So that’s the guys, and it’s not that surprising that there are no girls living in the house, although there is a single girl in her course – Aeyeisha (sp) who seems nice enough, not really spoken to her much, and unsurprisingly, Dal has made it a bit of a mission to lay her – to his credit he did invite her back to the house late one night, not sure what came of that, she wasn’t in our house in the morning, and now Dal has moved out because of Asthma problems into her house, she better watch out lol.

It’s probs best to save anything else for another post, but it’s worth adding that some of the material in the course has been covered in my previous academic pursuits of computing, whether that be at A-level level (err..) or at degree level, so that’s a bonus, although I think the most useful stuff will be the practical stuff plus proprietary hardware/software like Cisco and Windows Server 2003 etc. Also it’s worth noting that a couple of the lecturers (Andy and Alex) are also party animals, pissheads at the least, and they are often out on the lash. I actually managed to make it out once so far with them, but that’s another post right there.

I will finish up by saying that I’ve signed up for random free photo hosting accounts (photobucket and flickr actually) and mean to get snapping with my mobile phone with pictures of the room, this Strongbow glass I managed to swipe (another post), random shots of Cov and if you’re lucky, me in my formal robes (read: shirt and tie).

Here’s spending another night decomposing in front of the TV.

I need a hero…

So, thanks to a recommendation by my good friend Adam, I recently started watching the show Heroes the other day, and Wow! what a great show, I have got immediately hooked and watched like 6 episodes in less than three days.  I cba to explain the story here, just check it out, but basically it involves a number of individuals, subtly connected,  who slowly discover they have superhuman powers and the show follows their tales.

Anyways, it got me thinking, not unlike a child, how great it would be to have a superpower, perhaps 3.  The characters that I’ve met so far in the show involve someone who can fly, someone who can alter space/time, someone with incredible regeneration, someone who can paint the future, a mind reader, and possibly the coolest one, like Rogue from X-Men, someone who can seemly borrow other people’s powers. Pretty sweet no?

 

So, let’s discuss which are the coolest powers from the list above? Lol.  But seriously, I think my faves are the altering of space/time and the mind reader.  The guy who can alter space/time is effectively a Japanese nerd, and thankfully his story so far has provided some light relief from the other stories. 

So yeah, the altering space/time is pretty cool. You could effectively do anything, a lot of the fun options have already been explored by the show including teleporting into the ladies’ room, and successfully cheating at gambling in casinos.

The mind reader one is also pretty darn cool.  I am also impressed with the show realising that it wouldn’t actually be an ability that you can just turn on and off as required, but you would hear people’s thoughts all the time.  I think first done in the original Star Trek series where Spock obviously had his mind-meld tricks, and I remember him saying how it takes years of training to be able to block out all the random thoughts of others.  Boy, wasn’t the original series of Star Trek quite cool, in a very low budget, Kirk-also-makes-out-with-a-hot-alien, The crew in red always die kind of way yeah!

The mind reading is particularly cool as the guy uses the ability to “win” any conversation he has, not to mention freak people out with facts about them that they have not openly spoke about.  He has also won back favour with his wife, with whom he is currently having troubles with in their marriage, by setting up the perfect date – everything she has thought would be good.  For selfish reasons, mind-reading would make dating a much more efficient process as once they start thinking, “screw this guy, he’s kinda lame”, you could then just move on, rather than wait for them to tell you so, a couple of dates later.  The power is actually not unlike the film “What Women Want” which although kinda being a bit of a chick flick, is quite a smart film, only for the cool mind-reading abilities.

 

Here’s looking for a local toxic dump from which to gain superpowers. Wish me luck!

What the Frak?! You motherfrakker!!…

Hey all, Quite recently I’ve been exploring my interest in sci-fi and decided that I would check out the series Battlestar Galactica.  For those not in the know the show is a remake of the original series made back in the 70s – it is first billed as a remake, but is more of an evolution of the story set about 40 years after the war with the Cylons.  I won’t go into any particular plotlines cos frankly that will take too long and I really cba, but I will say that the premise of the show is that after this ceasefire between mankind and cylon (according to them, the plural of cylon is indeed cylon), the cylons begin an onslaught on the human race, trying to wipe them out. The aging ship, the Galactica is the only ship to avoid the attack, and after meeting up with a civilian convoy formed by the new President  – who used to be Secretary of Education (a schoolteacher as they often joke), jump off to some far away part of the Universe away from the Cylons.  This would be ok if the Cylons themselves weren’t bent on chasing them down and killing them all for good, and to make matters worse, Cylons can now look like ordinary people, which as even the creators admit, makes special effects a damn side easier, and they are agents within the fleet.  But there is hope, some scripture has already described their journey to a new home which just turns out to be Earth, horray!

 

Ok, hopefully that has wept your appetite, perhaps not, but it shows a lot of promise, but after watching the first two seasons I have my reservations about continuing to watch it.  For a show that boasts it is a sci-fi show, there isn’t a terrible amount of sci-fi actually in the show.  The fleet being out in space is a big help, but it could so easily be set on the ocean and they’re still encountering the same problems – food, fuel, permanent settlement etc, cylons/pirates chasing them.

Delving a little deeper than the general themes of the show mentioned just, a lot of the plot of the show seems to concern the conflict between the remaining military and a new fledging government.  Also one reservation is the reliance the show puts on Gyuss Baltar, the leading scientist in the fleet, who since falling in love with a Cylon agent back on Caprica(or whatever planet he was on), now sees visions of her talking to him, advising him on what would be best for the Cylons etc.  It was quite smart at first, but having him appear to talk to noone in particular, and them sometimes have his hallucination knock him about a bit, it has got tired. 

Although not a crucial flaw but something that doesn’t make complete sense. Not to go into too much detail for those who’ve not seen the show, but as I said before Cylon agents that are indistinguishable from humans now exist.  Now these agents are notoriously hard to detect, as the show will no doubt explain, even their synthetic blood is identical to human blood.  If these agents have technically the same physiology as their human counterpoints, then the question arises, where do they get this superhuman strength from?  They’re exactly the same as the human they replace except they have the ability to pick someone up by their neck and chuck them about a room… yeah right *rolls eyes*.   One particular cylon agent is of this middle aged, and kinda fat guy, and yet he also possesses this incredible strength and speed, but how? I mean, c’mon it can’t be something in their muscles or blood or whatever cos it’s the say as humans, and you don’t see them throwing people about all the time do you?

Another thing which really annoys me, and this is a more general point, but it is now particularily bad on Battlestar Galactica, and that is shows that are obviously censored to not include swearing, but feel that some cursing is crucial to the script, and thus create their own swearwords to avoid censorship – Battlestar is one such show.  The word that they use in Battlestar is Frak, as an obvious alternative to Fuck (sorry kids :s).  The use of the word wasn’t immediate in the series, but during the first season, it entered the vocabulary somewhere halfway through and has steadily got worse.  Most uses are along the lines of “What the frak is he/she doing?!” etc, but there have been the odd “For frak’s sake!” and possibly the most criminal “Motherfrakker!” *sigh*. It just sounds really lame and quite embarassing for me to be watching it, I hold my head in shame on behalf of the writers…

 

Now, I am not objecting to swearing, nor am in the party that states that there never can be too much swearing, but I like characters to be depicted realistically, and well we all swear, so writers should be given the option/ability to write it in without fear of censorship.  Especially when a show’s plots are so character-driven, which is actually one of Galactica’s strengths, it just feels really fake, and you suddenly are no longer totally immersed in the story and become very aware that you are watching a TV show – or at least that’s me :D

 

Here’s leading the charge for free swearing, so come on you bitches and join the cause…