Fascinating female Iraqi blogger: Baghdad Burning
archive for 2003
Just found all these site:
http://existencil.topcities.com – mostly grafitti/stencil stuff
http://edinburghst.blogspot.com – photography with a sprinkling of stencils
http://www.streetphoto.fsnet.co.uk – damn good b&w photography around Edinburgh, especially this one
entry from May 11, 2003:
> I seem to have reached a point where I really think I need a girlfriend, a real one.
girlfriend? check!
Banksie stuff- Lots of movie reviews (argh! lost! lost for ever!)
- More flashmobbing
…and something else
Our hosting company (I’m not bitter enough to mention their name) were doing an “upgrade” of the server admin software and everything went a bit mad. The HDD failed as they were doing the upgrade and so they had to restore from an earlier backup. This meant that all of my saved mail was deleted and the sites content is about a week old. I had loads of stuff saved in a folder in my IMAP box which is the most annoying thing EVAR. Registration numbers for software etc… grrrrrrrr
StickerNation is back up after a revamp and looking mighty fine.
Here they are:
- funny rants
- oliver jackson ollie edinburgh (slighty worrying)
- funny funny funny
- computer games don’t affect kids. if pacman affected us as kids (from the quotes file)
- i’m in love with my flatmate (don’t worry, its from the desktop grafitti post)
- junky movies list
Charlie Stross popped into work today to have a chat but mainly to sign some copies of his latest sci-fi work Singularity Sky.
Which reminds me of a conversation with one of the regular ‘crazies’ at work. She approaches the desk and everyone else scatters to the farthest recesses of the shop, leaving me to bear the brunt of whatever notion she has dreamt up today. It went something like this:
HER: “Can I ask you a book related question?”
ME: “No, sorry.”
HER: “Do you know anything about books?”
ME: “Nope, not a thing.”
HER: “Then why do you work here?”
ME: “I really don’t know…”
HER: “Do you know where I could ask then?”
ME: *thinks* “You could try the Balmoral hotel, just across the road.” *points*
HER: “Really? ok…” (random nonsense etc as she wanders off)
or was I too harsh? YOU decide…
These guys are just da bomb. Such good lyrics and beats, I must listen to Quality Control almost every day when I get in from work. Great pickmeup.
(If I could figure out how allmusic does its searches I would link more stuff up….)
I’ve just got through sorting my Kansas holiday snaps, here you go:
http://www.cyber-junky.co.uk/?page=gallery/index.php&mode=gallery&id=25
or if you really don’t fancy wading through 100+ snaps here is a condensed gallery with my favourites:
http://www.cyber-junky.co.uk/?page=gallery/index.php&mode=gallery&id=26
hey sportsfans,
I is back, back in the UK. Managed to sleep for 15 hours last night. Damn, I needed that. I didn’t manage to take any pictures of the kerazy hail, but found a pic on one of the local newspaper’s websites:
http://www.ljworld.com/section/bigger_photo/77798
booya
Random quick entry from a web phone thingy in heathrow. keyboard is ass
i.e. there is a Manhattan in Ottawa. A Reno county in Kansas. A California street in blah. I guess with such a big country you kinda run out of names for things and so end up repeating yourself and using 1st, 2nd, 3rd street etc.
Just spent the last three days on a road-trip through western Kansas, prime cowboy country. Spent a night in the infamous Dodge City, home of many a rootin-tootin mean gunslinger. Dodge managed to smell of processed cow the whole time, not a bad smell at first but it quickly becomes off-putting. Travelled along the Santa Fe trail, saw mock gunfights, went to a zoo, went to a Mall, ate food, then ate some more food.
Newest spotted lazy-American-invention: drive-through pay-phones.
Oh and new temperature high: 42°C (oh so hot). Also had a huge thunder storm with the biggest lightning I have ever seen. Damn impressive. Then while we were away there were hail-storms in Ottawa with golf ball sized hail. We came home to find trees shredded, almost every car pock-marked with craters and numerous windscreens smashed. We were glad we were out of town.
See You Cowboy
Local Time: 4:52pm
Well, we made it in one piece. I am currently sitting in the air-conditioned lovelyness of my Aunt’s basement in Ottawa, Kansas. No mid-air collisions or random mechanical failings. Total flying time of approximately 13 hours in three different planes means I was one tired bunny last night. Although bizzarely I woke up at 7am after going to bed after midnight. I’m thinking it might catch up with me soon.
So far we’ve eaten out twice and done some random shopping in Wallmart, and american is similar in some ways but then just bad-sh*t-kerazy insane in others.
Wallmart is a prime example, 5 litre buckets (literally) of ice cream, boxes of dozens of doughnuts. Plus the wallmart is about the size of two football pitches, sells everything under the sun and is open 24 hours a day
Oh and man, is it hot. You just just out of the air conditioned car and run to the air conditioned shop. It was pushing 35+ yesterday and it doesn’t really get any cooler at night. The heat is so bad, everything is made drive-through, so you don’t have to leave your car. Drive-through banks, post offices, movies. It’s mad.
I will report more soon.
Look right –>
I’m off to that small country called America a week tomorrow, visiting relatives in Kansas for the first time. The first time in Kansas mind, not the first time seeing the relatives. I’ve a feeling its going to be very strange, seeing them transplanted from surburban Harrogate-Yorkshire to Ottawa-Kansas, tornado alley. They have a storm cellar, I mean, yikes. So anyway, I get a train home on Thursday and I need to sort of some of that american money, and pack and buy shorts and suncream so I don’t burn like a muppet. All very boring things which you probably won’t care about in the slightest.
This will only be the second time in an aeroplane for me that I can remember (parents went to greece when i was ~1) so I’m looking forward to all the shenanigans, the waiting, the duty free, the waiting, the cancellation, etc.
I’ve no idea what to expect of Kansas though, everyone says its flat, and hot, and windy. I shall soon find out…
Fellow Edinburger and waterstones fave Charlie Stross finally gets married: Charlie’s Diary
So I did go out last night, contrary to the previous post. Good night aswell, ended up Opium. Which was cool as it was £1 a drink all night.
Saturday was a fun if extremely tiring day at work, we did nothing but watch the harry stocks and sell harry all day. Plus there was an absolute army of us, basically everyone was working. I started at 8am and it was pretty quiet until about 12 noon when the shiznit hit the fan. Five people at the front till and three at the back and we still had queues (and yes, we’re uber-fast). I’ll let alex provide the photos and details about the midnight opening shenningans (I’m not that kerazy). On saturday we sold out, more than a thousand in less than 24 hours, insane.
Yes, its the day after the summer soltice and hence my birthday (whoah, check out the bold). I must be some kinda hippy wild child, or maybe not. Anyhoo, it was another eventful day at work in the post-potter frenzy. Much comedy was had though with other colleagues who were all in kkkkerazy-giddy-kipper moods. After doing five days in a row my feet are killing, so much so that I actually soaked them in the bath tonight. I thought ‘soaking your feet’ was something old women did after going to the bingo or something, it was quite nice really. I really feel I should do something to celebrate tonight but I was at Kev’s fantastico cutty party last night so, hrm.
Colleague At Work : “What is you do at university again Olly?”
Me : “Computer Science *sigh* ”
Colleague : “Oh, hrm, I thought you did something more, erm, interesting…”
I think that was a compliment…
The extended exam celebrations have finally finished. With everyone finishing at different times we had multiple nights out as groups had their last exam. Last Friday has to be the Keraziest though, Kev invited me to the pub at about noon where we proceeded to drink the afternoon away in the sun. Then went back to Kev’s and drank more of his alcohol mountain and watched Challenge TV whilst drunk (highly amusing). We somehow went for lunch amongst all that which was comedy, what with kev almost dopping all his food and then forgetting we’d paid and then looking for our (non-existent) coats.
Native State was the agreed meeting point for the rest of the possee and we had lots of expensive drinks in there before moving on to Honeycomb. Which rocked, in fact for most of Saturday I still had the ringing in my ears from the massive drum’n’bass beats. Just remembered about Native State today and immediately checked my bank balance (ouch), bad places to buy rounds.
Started my full-time work shenanigans yesterday aswell and found that I’m working Wednesday-Sunday this week. Friday-Sunday being HARRY POTTER JUDGEMENT WEEKEND, that is going to be harsh. :/
Festival fever is also hotting up, with most of the programs being released this week. Should be a good summer 🙂
olly out.
Well, had my last 3rd year exam today, and it was the worst of the lot. Oh well. By my calculations I’m still above the 4th year threshold, which is nice. Went to the pub immediately and then bought cans and sat out in the sun, which was very pleasant. We’re in the process of going out again tonight, slowly.
Oh and on another note, our group for the System Design Project got 72% which was joint top in the year. Big up the Innovex krew!
Two to go, one this afternoon and one tomorrow morning. The end is in sight!
Three left, monday, tuesday and wednedsay morning. I can’t wait.
Just checking my referrer logs (all the sites that have linked to me) this morning and I see a link from the bbc’s scotblog page. It seems I was listed as a ‘tasty’ scottish blog. \o/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/webguide/scotblog/view.shtml?1054639675
Ben joins in the blogging shenanigans. It’s what all the cool kids are doing.
Well, it was bad, but not that bad. I am so tired now after getting up at 8am, it’s a shock to my system.
Warm, very warm. Too warm to sleep even. I’ve got a very nasty exam in about 9 hours that is going to be bad, very bad, my worst one infact. I just want to get it out of the way and not being able to sleep is not helping. gah
Nullsoft have developed a p2p app for small groups of people (10-50) that creates a network allowing file sharing, chat, searching etc. Seem quite cool stuff and its all ninja encrypted so no eavesdropping. Of course AOL/TimeWarner (their parent company) pulled the whole project two days after it went up. Can you guess why kids? Once something is on the net though its on the net:
Stuck…in…library….slowly…going….insane.
I can’t wait for exams to be over.
But, there is much comedy grafitti on the desks to keep me occupied. Here are some glorious examples of student humour:
“I eat Motherf*ckers for lunch”
and then underneath
“you are what you eat!”
and one from angst central:
“Help! I’m in love with my flatmate!”
this is what keeps me going…
In a move completely ripping off tef, I’ve gone through imdb’s top 100 movies list to see which I’ve seen. Exam procrastination ahoy!
read on…
A few of our buddies are involved in the BackNet project in Edinburgh. Their aim is to provide a community-run network, mainly utilising wireless technology. Adam has just drawn up a nice map of the current nodes and their coverage. Although it doesn’t look much this is quite an accomplishment, a few nodes are also coming online soon that will hopefully link up the nodes in my area (the bit at the centre left) and the cluster at the bottom.
Avoiding revision in the library and reading the uni computers services webpage I came across this in their upcoming projects section:
UN12 SMS Text Messaging Gateway
A project is proposed to implement a pilot centrally-managed gateway to a commercial SMS provider for the purpose of communicating with staff and students using SMS messaging. Services provided could include SMS paging service, email notification and University notices. The project would investigate cost recovery mechanisms and ongoing costs of the service. If approved, this project would be completed by May 2003.
UN13 WAP Interface for Mail
There are requests for additional interfaces to the University staff and student mail systems for mobile access. This project will investigate the suitability of a WAP interface for mail. If approved, this project would be completed by May 2003.
not bad I thought.
Windows XP has broken.
Again
Or it could be just that IBM drive…..
/me eyes HDD suspicously….
Saw the film last night, here is my opinion of it (spoilers)
read on…
Stumbled across homestarrunner.com last night, and managed to spend ages chuckling over Strongbad’s emails. Especially this one, the BURNINATOR strikes!!11.
Superb voice acting and nice animation along with ker-azy characters make for the funny.