Blog - March 2005
11:59 - 31/03/2005 - Morals? -
I just watched a program on Channel 4 entitled 'You're Fayda' about, you guessed it the famous Harrod's Store owner, Mr Al Fayda. There was plenty of strong langauge and 'yobbish' behaviour (which I think was mostly acting, as I'm fairly sure I heard this 'yob' whispering in good french thanks alot to one of the attendants, and even if that's not so I'm fairly sure it was mostly sillyness) but it also had a 'rather' polical angle in parts. For one implying Princess Diana's death was no accident, as Fayda's son wasn't either. Which I personally think is very possible, but I don't like to indulge in conspiracy theories too much. I will say however the grief shown by Mr. Al Fayda was more human and real than anything I saw from the royal family.
The program got me thinking though, generally, about how much I hate this society's obession with celebrities, and how the royal family are considered celebrites (there's the link if you missed it). People seem to consider them as a different kind of people, a 'better people', now of course almost everyone you ask would deny this because that is silly, but I still think some believe it, even if they don't think that they do. This also gets me thinking about religion, which if you don't know me, I think is past it's time, or at least it should be! I don't believe any God, mainly because I find the idea of self-assuring delusions much more probable, even if en-mass, than an all powerful being, especially one that is all knowning, all power and all loving. Plus if there was an all powerful being why would he give a flying fuck about us? Well I could ramble on about this forever but I'm not going to, but in the next paragraph I am going to make a point of sorts.
Recently I decided that I think people just pick and choose as much of religion as they feel best with, sometimes it's absolute belief (aka blind faith), sometimes they believe just parts of a certain religion, and some just believe in a God but in no particular religion. Myself I just pick the morals, mainly from Christainity, and not much else, which I personally believe, as I would, is the most sensible approach. This raises a question though, If there is no God, and religions are more or less a work of fiction and should be done away with, where should our ethics, our rules of how we live our everyday lives come from? Because in this country the entire system of law is based on christain ethics, you need a set of rules from somewhere. So I think I am going to try to come up with a set of rules, a set of ethics, that is based purely on logic, and a few assumptions, for example, you'd (probably) want the system to be fair to all, and to give the best deal to everyone possible, but one that rewards hard work and punishes idleness [So democratic and Capitalistic in nature] and other than that just use simple physical reasoning. This, if I ever bother to do it, might take me a while, but we shall see...
14:14 - 28/03/2005 - Broken Computer and Broken Mouth -
My computer is broken, again. I'm fairly certain that World of Warcraft is the cause of the problem. Everything has always worked fine before that game, but not anymore. At the moment every single game I own is hard locking about 3 seconds after I enter it. I'm not sure I can be bothered to track down what's at fault and correct I think I might just format the whole thing and never touch WoW again, just hope it hasn't already perminantly damaged my Hard Drive like it did to the last one. For the holidays I think I'm going to leave the computer as it is, because then I can't play video games and I'll have to get some work done. I think I'm actually gonna take it apart so I have a desk to work on. That'll mean no more blog till I get back to Uni at least, not that there has been much recently anyway. If I do update it'll probably just be on Livejournal.
Another reason I'm not in the best of moods just at the moment is I have another mouth ulcer is on the side of my tongue, which is the most painful place to have them by far. So I can't actually talk at the moment. I haven't had so many recently which has been nice, and this one isn't too big so maybe it will heal up faster, but I should go see if the doctors in Newport will see me. Well I've had my week off, now I'm going to have to start actually doing some work, so first job is to clear my desk so I can work. This means taking this computer apart. Then I'll move on to cleaning this room up, because I find it a hell of a lot easier to do work in a tidy enviroment, don't know why, just one of those things I guess.
02:05 - 24/03/2005 - Back Home -
Well I'm back home, in fact I've been back home for over 5 days, because my sister was very nice and came and picked me up from london, with her friend Niki. Had quite an amusing time on the way home though I'll not go into details. I had to wait till sunday to get Wi-Fi set up, as I had to order some bits. I am now on my computer in my room, with two monitors, connected via Wi-Fi. Rar. It's pretty cool, except when the connection goes mental which it seems to do for no reason at all, and it's just a matter of waiting till it starts working again.
I took Laura to Birmingham Airport on tuesday and there was a funky offer on in the movie store there, so I bought 'Die Hard', 'Enemy of the State' and 'Resident Evil' I also recently aquired 'I, Robot' on DVD too.I have watched most of them twice already though, because I left all my Stargate DVDs in my room at uni. I'd decided that I was going to buy a squad or so of Space Marines and paint them up real nice, I may still do this, but I remember that I suck at painting so I may need buy a book telling me how to paint too! I already have some unpainted eldar figures, so mayb I should pain them up really good instead! With this considered I thought I might instead do some mapping for source to keep myself entertained, but mapping and me never seem to go together very well, or at least not for very long.
The reason I ain't blogged since monday is because World of Warcraft has suddenly taken over my life, again. It has been a fun little interlude, but I feel I'm going to have to cut down to a couple of hours a day max and go to bed quite a lot eariler than it's currently keeping me up as you can see. Fortunately I only have two exams straight after I get back, but I do have 3 exams another month on so it's best that I catch up with everything I've done this term and revise my first terms work. Anyway, my brain isn't functioning properly any more, so I'm going to bed now. Good night!
13:30 - 14/03/2005 - Hypochondria -
I think I'm being a bit of a hypochondriac, which is unusual because I normal just go, "naa it's all fine, I'll be fine" even when I'm stuck in bed with fever or something. Now for those of you who don't know I get mouth ulcers extremely regularly, I tried to go see a doctor at university but they basically told me to sod off. Now yesterday Rachel said she'd read somewhere that it could be oral thrush (an overgrowth of a yeast germ, Candida, that lives in your mouth anyway but if you system is out of wack can overgrow...), which is yucky, except I did some reading around (as a hypochondriac would :P) and my ulcers don't really correspond to the symptoms I read about. It talks about white dots on the mouth and tongue, which can grow and join up to form plaques, now I don't have this, the ulcers I have almost always start with a cut and develop much more like canker sores, so much so I'm fairly certain that's what they are, but that doesn't explain why I get so many and I also do have a few small white dots under the skin of my lips occasionally, but they never grow in size. Well enough yuckyness, I'm just going to get an appointment with my doctor in Shropshire when I back for the holidays.
World of Warcraft really has become an addiction for me recently, fortunately I think it's starting to wear off, because now it takes longer and longer to level up, finish quests, increase tailoring/enchanting skills or whatever so I'm less motivated to stay online longer and 'just' get the next level or 'just' finish this quest because that will often take a few hours. Yesterday I managed to stop playing at 3pm (I know that sounds pathetic, I'm sorry) and get quite a few things done, including clearing and cleaning up amy room. It's now stupidly clean in here, which for some reason is making me want to work or at least get something more constructive than playing games done. It seems if I'm surrounded by mess I'm happy to sit in the middle of it and be a slob but if not I do work... interesting, going to try and keep my room tidy when I get home for this reason.
Website things, I've changed the menu slightly the 'More Blog...' link just goes to october for now but next month it will direct you to a new page where you can choose November or October and then next month ... you get the idea. This means that I'm not going to have to keep changing CSS file each time I update. I've also removed the IRC part and put Ely mIRC in misc. Simply because because of world of warcraft I'm hardly on #\-\az and it's probably going to die. Now that I've finally set up my Blueyonder e-mail again since the format I found I'd got an e-mail from Ian Macfarlane, the maintainer of the ZHLT 3 docs apprantely. Who pointed out that my HL resources page could do with some updating and very helpfully provided me with some links for the content I'd need, so I'm going to be doing that soon, thanks Ian :). Now more than likely in the coming weeks when I'm meant to be revising like hell, I'll take on some other project to distract me from it. I will be revising too, but I am almost certain I'll starting something else too. It could be a redesign of my website, I might finally start and finish an NS map or I might even paint some of my remaining Eldar figures, only time will tell.
16:53 - 10/03/2005 - Sleeping in. -
I thinking missing a 4 pm lecture because you overslept is pretty good! If you hadn't guessed that's what I've just done, so I'll be spending friday afternoon copying up today's lectures, but I'm quite glad really, because I have had very little sleep recently and I was getting close to resorting to caffine, and all of those who know me know I can't have caffine or my heart goes a bit physco and I'd rather not die from tiredness.
The reason I'm so tired is because I went to the KB Lan, very fun, I'll get onto that in a moment. I had decided, after a shitty week at uni with my computer having broken and needing a new hard drive (costing me £75) and having to complete an evil assessed problem sheet, that I'd stay in and have a quiet weekend so my dad didn't come to collect me. Then as Emma left for the weekend and I sat at dinner with strange (very nice, but strange) chineese people I decide I did want to go after all and my wonderful father came and collected me! We didn't get back till about 1am and then I had to get up at 6am to drive to Southport. As always happens when I get about 5 hours sleep I actually felt great, and the drive to Southport as great, almost no cars on the motorway, and I did the journey from Newport to Southport in 1 hour 40 minutes.
The LAN was great fun, highlights included me winning almost every UT2K4 deathmatch (I lost the one where I was trying to work out what was happening with Pizza's), £60 worth of pizza's on saturday, where the pepperoni pizza's seemed to have no toppings because they were underneath the cheese :/. Played lots of Joint Ops and Black Hawk Down, which I didn't really like only because I sucked at it. Although the Joint Ops Co-op was fun (cause you can just use a m4 and slaugher all the AI because there aren't 10 snipers ready to kill you as soon as you move out of a sidestreet...). We played a little bit of CSS and NS, but there were problems with about half the people's Steams not working in offline mode, so we couldn't play very much. Nix brought an amazing about of pirate games and porn, much appreciated by all, except possibly Ripsaw (he's 14) or at least not appreciated by his mum.
Then after driving back on Sunday, where I missed the same motor way turning 3 times and once missed the turning to go back for that turning, and it taking quite a bit longer because of traffic. I think we should reduce the population of all the worlds countries to a fifth of the current size so driving is nicer. Anyway, I went to see Rachel for a little while before we left and that was great because we were both in happy mood and just had a really nice time for 40 minutes or so. Then my wonderful wonderful sister took me back to london and we had a lot of fun just messing about on the drive, my sister is ace. Even more so because she didn't get home until about 3-4am.
I've not been able to get much sleep this week because I've been trying to level my World of Warcraft character to level 40 and buy a mount. Although as you get to higher levels the quests get more and more random and have to walk further and further from where you get them to actually do them, at least it seems that way, plus I've got about 8 elite quests piled up again, will try and form a good at the weekend and do those. Also last night NS v3, which is very good, distracted me for a couple of hours after I finished playing world of warcraft. Oh and I had to put someone on ignore in WoW for being a bit of stalking freak :/.
Well anyway I'm now going have breakfast (lol) and tidy up my room because it is in an appaling state, it really is. I'm just gonna have a quick bitch about the mouth ulcers on my cheek, *bitch* they hurt, fucking annoying *bitch*. Oh and install Microsoft Office &/or abode reader so I can look at my exam timetables.