i am sparticus: Words

Lock Me Away

Today, after much consideration I decided to go use some of my cinema vouchers to go see a film, and after a short debate I decided on seeing Ghost Ship. Don't make my mistake, it's rubbish, and it's a rip off of many many many other ghost films...
It has a little-girl-in-a-dress™ who appears when scary things happens and then disappears again
The various people involved start getting really agitated against each other
They get stranded with no way of escape
One of the crew decides that he's responsible for it all and goes insane.
Lots of blood everywhere
etc...
Anyway the film sucked, but the trailers before hand where absolutely amazing! And by amazing I mean they also ripped off lots of movies but with great amounts of special effects and stupid voice overs. In summary,
The Core
For some crazy and stupid reason involving a earthquake making super weapon, the earth's core has stopped rotating round. This means that huge electircal storms happen and blow up famous landmarks, and microwave radiation fries people to death. So obviously to save the world they have to find an eccentric genius who has built a tunneling device thingy and tunnel down to blow up a nuke to restart the core! Earth's only hope relies on them! If they don't suceed in blowing up the big nuke then the earth will be smashed to smithereens by an asteriod. I mean radiation. Whatever. Oh and the military people are being shady about it all as well.
Anyway, the novel twist is that it's not bruce willis saving the world. Excellent!
National Security
It's a movie about two law enforcement partners who hate each other! And are completely different!! And one's black and all extrovert while the others white and slightly fat!!! It's a completely new genre!!!!!!
Equilibrium
In the future emotion is outlawed! And the strictest anti-emotion enforcer of them all becomes enlightened to the truth and realises he has to fight the system in a series of matrix style fights. Trying to release people from their ignorance! But evil government agents are out to stop him! In stylish matrix poses! The interesting thing about this film is that in the entire trailer, loads of people pull loads of stylish kung-fu moves and wave fancy swords around and pull out nice guns, but no-one actually gets hurt. They just show off their weapons generally. Oh and you can tell the good guys in it because they wear bright colours. (y)
The Ring
Is possibly the most original of the lot, except it's a remake of another film. So it's not even slightly original.

Anyway that's a summary of the trailers I saw... and I'd just like to point out that all that information I just told you was gotten from the movie trailers. Makes you wishful for the days when trailers didn't tell you the entire movie plot, but instead made you want to find out what happened next. Oh well

BE GONE SATAN!

 this brown pau site is most interesting, so much so that I may start reading it more regularly. The guys managed to get blogging by sms working too, although he seems to have lots of extra random stuff enabled by his company.
 Anyway that's not the thing that grabbed my interest, because you see in this entry he writes about a certain Dr. Rebecca Brown who seems to be preaching a fairly scary demon obssessed theology, and links an article which looks into her background and reveals some not to postive things.
Anyway all because of this, he gets called a satanist!
 Why? well because at the start of one of Dr. Brown's books she says " SATAN DOES NOT WANT YOU TO READ THIS BOOK" so therefore anyone who says "don't read this book" is a satanist! Ah the logic of it all,
Anyway, Mr. Paulo replies with grace and love, and it doesn't disolve into a giant name calling match. Kudos to him.
 Anyway, I find it quite scary, that someone who professes to be a Christian and seems to act in a Christian manner gets accused of being a satanist merely because he looks into facts about a person and questions some of there theology. Hmmm where's the love?

Words? what are they good for?

I've just done excess amounts of fiddling with the internal workings of the site, hardly any of which are visible.
Makes me feel really proud ya know what I mean?
Saying that, a fantapulous feature will be coming out shortly, my tired brain and ability to code php permissing...
**update**
I've finished!! It works!! Now if you'd please click the word count below the entry...

STETLER explained

This nickname was given to me one (probably) sunny day when I was about 16. My dear (strange) friend Dennis first called me it… not so sure where he got it from, most likely the dictionary, or book of weird un-heard of animals. He thought it meant sea cow! But as my dear (marine biology student) friend Alasdair pointed out, these weird creatures are actually called 'Stellar' manatees. So that's the story of my name… I kinda wish I hadn't told everyone now, coz I'm nothing like a sea cow REALLY! Except that I do like the sea, the beach, the waves and most of all the sun!
And as for my design work on posters all over Birmingham… well, I really don't know how THAT happened, I must have been bribed or something… oh but there's no money, hmmm…. John…?

Annoucement is really good ya?

This is a public service annoucement
Notice to all people, there are two people blogging on this website. Sorry for not making this especially clear.
Mwahaha

TITLE!

Heat waves in baltic places

Well we had a wonderful weekend… so good that we didn't even find the time to blog! Tee hee :D
Yes, so we saw Martin Grech-o on Saturday night… exactly 3 months since we saw him last! Haha - how weird! He was great, again! Put on an even more brilliant show this time with lots of unexpected bursts of mad-stoned-frustrated-rock-and-roll-musician-ness… Sparticus can explain in full detail, as he now owns part of the proof!
Oh, and John (Walley) now has a girlfriend… Celia! Congratulations both of you (from me anyway… I'll let Sparky give his own congrats, or insults?!)
Hey and (on a completely different note) can you believe, FREEEEZZZING, baltic Aberdeen had temperatures reaching 18 degrees C yesterday! Record for Scotland in January appartently! ITS SO NOT FAIR… that’s like a heat wave!

Archives!! WOOO!!

I've down two out of the four things below today, and am on my way to do a third. Helen's down this weekend so don't expect anything thrilling amazing, she'll probably use her evil mind powers to destroy all my intelligence.
If she does I apologise for posts about monkeys and stuff. This is what I would have written this weekend though
MARTIN GRECH WAS EXCELLENT.
Because we are going to see him tomorrow, and he will be excellent

Anyway, the real reason I'm posting is to say I've fixed the archives

something about keyboard shortcuts

Toodles people!
Tomorrow I see my darling little Helen! hooray!
Tomorrow I also promise to...

• fix the archives


• Attempt to setup the phlogging by bone prototype


• to pick up my most excellent photographs


• to have a shower

Top Five Things To Do To Adapt And Survive In Albert Square

• When you talk about your children (especially when being disparaging about them) do it when they are standing behind you. Then when you finish turn around and look at their expression of shock and see them run off. Then call out "insert name here, I didn't mean it". Yeah, of course you didn't
• When making annoucements that contain vital, and shocking information, always make them in the vic, on a friday night, late in the evening. This way you won't have to deal with the consequences of your annoucements till monday morning
• Talk about "fammileeee" a lot, like it's the most important thing in the world to you. Then when they are not around moan about them to your friends, saying how terrible they turned out and how insert name of older deceased relative would be terribly dissapointed with them
• When asked about your past make sure you only admit to having one (at most) living older relative. No-one in albert square ever has more than one older relative and if you do, you're clearly an invader and should be taken outside of the square and stoned to death.
• Have an affair, it'd look terribly out of place if you didn't

Heard it all before

for those of you still following my phone drama...
NONE OF MY SIM CARDS WORK!
But tomorrow it should all be fixed, and tomorrow I have the funniest (possibly) thing to write about ever.
Mooohheeehooooheeee!
I leave you with this story I was told by a very small child today
Small Kid: My hamster died!
Moi: awh really? I'm sorry to here that
Small Kid: Yeah
Moi: What was he called?
Small Kid: Hammy (okay so I can't remember his real name)
Moi: Oh, you going to get another one?
Small Kid: Maybe
pause
Small Kid: My hamster was stabbed in the gut with a knife.
Moi: Oh

LANDAN baby

Yay, I've just got back from the big smoke that is the amazing city of London!
I had a wicked time… Here are the highlights:
Thursday:
8.30am left Edinburgh by AIR! (Flew EasyJet, or maybe more appropriately named SleazyJet) I love flying soooo much. It gives me such a buzz!

D&AD (Designers & Art Directors) 'REWIND' exhibition (at V&A). SOOO cool and inspiring. Just full of ads and products (from Boots tights packaging, to iMacs!) that won 'D&AD' awards from the 60's to now. Some of the BEST stuff ever designed! And loads of award winning TV ads like Cadbury's mashed potato ('Smash' ? never knew it existed!), several hilarious car ads from like the 70s and lots of other favorites.

NBCA (National Business Calendar Awards)! YAY! (Main reason for going down to London as you may have guessed) Sally (other chick from my college who came down with me) received a Certificate of Merit for her origami based calendar, and I got the 'Highly Commended' award (with totally unexpected £100 cheque from wonderful sponsors Wynkyn De Worde Society!) for my magnetic calendar (which I explained previously). This is what they said about my calendar: "The Judges considered Magnetic Madness (my really bad last minute name for it) to be a well thought-through design, easily used in the home, and capable of effective reproduction. The fact that this was also a workable and instantly useable calendar was also noted." The ceremony was all formal with photos etc. and then we had wine and lovely sushi (my favourite) type nibbles while viewing all the calendars! Lots of fun!

Friday:
Mastering the Tube all by myself was fun! I love it! (strange girl!)

Tate Modern - a truly amazing experience (especially as its free!)! So much to look at that you're best going at the beginning of the day so you have enough energy! Anyway, Sal and I saw about 3/4 of it and then spend the same amount of time in the HUGE gallery shop! Never seen one so big! I bought this wicked Liechtenstein poster 'Whaam' (pop-art, comic-book style) which I will soon be proudly displaying on my wall!

Dinner at "TukTuk" Thai restaurant in West End with cousins Murray and Katie. It was so cheap but so yummy!

Saturday:
Proper Chai latte in bookshop coffee bar in Wimbledon. Muz and Katie introduced me to this new incredible drink which I'm gonna have to hunt down in Edinburgh! Actually the national 'tea' drink in Nepal is called 'cheeah' which is exactly the same - really sweet tea with lots of milk and some gingery, cinnamony spices. (but without the frothed milk) Yummmmm! You must all try it!

Flying again! This time leaving from Gatwick and its 200 or so gates! HA HA HA its such a joke!

So now its Sunday and I'm back home and not ready to start college again on Monday… grrr!

Danger! Danger! high Voltage!

This site is most excellent because you can use it to create signs, like this...

Bible Gateway.com

After spending a short while fiddling with internal mechanisms of this site (see the sms page, the links page and don't see the random php nonsense) I've realised that there aren't nearly enough links on this site.
go check out biblegateway.com then because it's very handy.

Sue this!

Remember those two crazy americans, the washington snipers? Ones a 17 year old who got declared an adult so they could execute him and then other looks vaguely foreign so probably works for al-qaeda.
Seriously no disrespect to the friends and families of the victims, what happened was terrible. I'm just trying to point out the stupidity in the america justice system

So anyway in response to this tragedy, guess what's happening?
reminder, this is america.

That's right! some of the victims families are suing the gun makers, and gun sellers even though the gun makers haven't broken american law (crazy american law, but still valid american law). The gun sellers may have, but still, what is it in america these days? It's like some automated reaction to sue the nearest person possible for any reason.
I'm going to stop now before I go off on a tangent rant about the 17 year old they are going to kill is still not an adult.
Oh well

Grounded For Life

I wasn't going to blog for the rest of this evening, honest. But I feel urged to after watching perhaps the worst sitcom I have seen outside of trouble for a long long time. The sitcom is called "grounded for life" and Fox (for that is who does it all in the states) describe it on their site as

It got no better.
It's not that the acting is bad, (it's actually better than most sitcoms) but the premise and the dialogue is rubbish. I mean seriously if you where 34 and married with kids would you still want to go out and get drunk and vomit all over the floor? So why do this couple? Ahh I don't know it's just worthless...

Unlike however,

Fairly Oddparents which was hilarious and is on cbbc every wednesday at 4:00 I think. Now that's a good tv show!

Lawnnndoonnn

My dearest darling heleno is off in London this friday and the rest of weekend, so don't expect much bloggery from her, she'll be too busy doing all London things, like seeing the queen and noel gallagher and stuff. So we all know what that means! it means a whole weekend of just me blogging!

crumbs

The greatest image ever!

SomethingAwful.com

Hahahaha... they have an entire 5 pages of images like this! It made me laugh so much. Even so it's not nearly as good as this here website (also found via something awful) which allows you to make your own signs!!! wooohoo!!

No one has commented on this entry, you can change this.
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Me no likes dem uruk-hai

Hahaha well isn't the concept of having jar-jar binks in lord of the rings just the best thing ever!
Kudos to my dad for finding that out

apologise? us?

Guess what?? I got my phone sorted!! And I should be so grateful to O2 for putting up with me for so long. I mean I must have been ringing them for over 30 minutes! and they still deigned to talk to me! Now that's service! Not only that but when the first person just cut off in mid sentance, they let me call back, and gave me another person! who then told me that I needed to call another person! I'm glad they love me so much! they want me to speak to all their friends!! I spoke to 6 people tonight! Wow! I'm touched, I don't think I've ever spoken to 6 people before on the phone all about the same thing in such a short space of time! They each liked me so much they made me tell my phone story over and over again! Bless! And you know what? They said they could fix my phone, and the other person who has my numbers phones by Friday! and they even accepted my suggestion of the way to do it! I wonder what their way of doing it would have been, they never ever told me how they would do it if I hadn't suggested what I have suggested. I'm sure they would have come up with a better idea. And finally to top off all their greatness they wouldn't even apologise and told me that the likelyhood of me getting compensation was low.

...No, wait, there is no way of making that seem better than it is. They mess up my phone for 2 weeks (well it will be by the time they get through with transfering my old number over to my phone) put me through 6 operators, 2 of whom tell me I have the wrong number, one of which then issues me a number to call that doesn't exist, I also waste approximately 2 hours on calling them about it, the guy who has my/his number wastes about the same, and finally none of this is our fault. So you'd think they might apologise, or offer some sort of compensation? Apparently "O2 are sorry if this caused any problems". NO! BECAUSE REMOVING MY PHONE NUMBER, DISABLING MY PHONE, GIVING THE NUMBER TO SOMEONE ELSE, THEN LYING ABOUT WHAT'S WRONG WITH MY PHONE DID NOT CAUSE ANY PROBLEMS!
Oh and "We don't give compensation when people have to transfer their numbers over" EVEN IF IT'S ENTIRELY YOUR FAULT I HAVE TO TRANSFER MY NUMBER OVER?

But don't worry! It'll be all be fixed by Friday! from now till then I have no phone number, and then it'll be my old 077520***** one!! call my other one to speak to a very friendly person who is not me!
In the meantime, to amuse yourselves go look at my girlfriends much better post below.

Oh and guess what? If you search for complaints on the O2 website, it turns up no results.

German Beer

Ha ha ha!
I found pictures from the Design event I went to on Friday...
Check me out amidst a crowd of professional designers! (and notice comment below!!)
Tee hee *cheeky grin* :)

Messenger plus 2.0

Woohoo!! For all you people that use msn (That's like everyone then) Mess annouced that messenger plus version 2.0 has been released. You can read about all the details here but basically it adds all the things that msn should have that it doesn't. A quick list

• gets rid of add window


• extends default message length


• Allows custom colours


• Allows automatic archiving


• changing font style and colour mid message (both people need plus installed though


• Will allow msn to check your pop e-mail account (checks for new mail in accounts that aren't hotmail, my favourite so far)


• personalised away messages

O2 are a bunch of airheaded fools

Hey kids! here is why not to have a mobile phone on O2. This is an actual e-mail I sent them, for reasons found within this letter...

designamania

My turn to put some lovely links into our blog… as after all this is a 'weblog' site and it should have more links.
On Friday night I went to a BD4D(By Designers For Designers) design 'event' if you can call it that, organised by 'Long Lunch'
Hmm, I realise this probably isn't making ANY sense what so ever. Well it was an event where 3 designers came and talked about their work, basically! This VERY FIRST event was all on New Media (Flash stuff). It was so interesting!
The first guy, Qian Qian (a Chinese guy, newly graduated from Uni) had some really cool stuff to show. I love his work, its 'clean', eye catching and fun!
The second guy, Aaron Harper had some really good music but his new media work wasn't quite as amazing as the others.
Then the main speaker Mikey Stretton (Art Director of London based design company Randommedia) showed us some work he's done for various big companies (Play Station, MTV2, Adidas, 007, Habitat), and told us how he goes about designing sites, and what makes them attractive, fun but also practical.
I won't go into any more detail coz I could be here for hours and bore you all out of your minds, but I'll just let you go check out their sites and see what you think!

Festivaltasticness

NME Reports on lots of festival line up gubbins for this year. REM and Radiohead and Idlewild are all probably playing Glastonbury, man I so want to go to that, but as I'm poor looks like I'm going to have to start trying in to win tickets now. Reading's line up is all very rock and roll, but as per typical nme "we love craig nicholls and want to have his children" style, NME are saying the vines may headline the main stage. Over Metallica and System of a Down and the rest. Stupid NME.
So in conclusion, someone rich buy me a ticket to Glastonbury (actually buy me two). Rock on wooo

The sun has got his hat on, hip hip hip HOORAY!

Today I had so much to do that last night I had this horrible dream that everything went wrong and I didn't get my project finished on time, and I didn't get to buy something from H&M that I really need. Then to top it all off, the weather was of course absolutely TERRIBLE and dark and dreary!
My real day however was much, much better! I went to work on an early bus, and it was delayed because of road works but that was ok because I was early anyway. I actually managed to read something on the bus - 4 chapters of Matthew before I fell asleep… way too early! The weather was surprisingly mild and so I didn't even need to wear my woolly hat or mittens! It was busy at work (quite unusual for this time of year - everyone's skint after Christmas and probably still full of Christmas dinner!) so the time flew by really fast and my boss was in a good mood too which was a major bonus!! Talking of bonuses, he also put my wages up by 50p and hour! I'm well chuffed!
Anyway, then 2o'clock came and I left to go into town to do a spot of shopping for the posh thing I'm going to in London next week. (Oooh, excitingness!) Just as I left work though, I spied the bus I needed, merrily coming down the road right there, so I jumped on it right then! A few minutes later I was outside H&M - talk about a brilliant service! THANK YOU LOTHIAN TRANSPORT!! Then my day got more hectic as I spent 2 hrs shopping and ended up with a blister on the back of my foot - my trusty trainers finally died which was probably the only low part of my day! :( But I won't complain coz that would be way selfish of me.
So after all that I'm a pretty happy bunny really! Now I just need to get my head round doing some work again… oh yay! Bye-bye… projects due tomorrow calling!

Housework is the devils work

Right everyone knows the old expression "the devil makes work for idle hands", yes? Well whenever I'm not doing anything and I say "I'm not doing anything" people always go "oh well there is plenty of housework to do". Now you see, I pondered this for a while and thought "my hands are idle, and they offer me housework, surely they should offer me work poking burning people in hell with a trident instead?". Then it dawned on me, housework Must be the devils work, otherwise why would people try to get my idle hands to do it. Fortunately I find other things to occupy my hands with (like this website) and hence make good use of my idle hands and avoid the temptation of aiding the devil through housework.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go exorcise the washing machine

this is a an experiment and you are part of it

Is anyone looking forward to snow, or more snow depending on where you are in the country (or world for that matter)? I am! But this morning my hopes ALMOST came true when I looked out the window to see a beautiful white garden with sliding-footprints down the snow-covered path (my brother had already been let out!). Much to my dismay though, when I went to leave the house a little while later, the wonderful soft crisp snow was already turning to SLUSH!!! WHAT? And even worse, instead of the weatherman being nice and at least giving us a day of snow before it turned to slush, he had just given us slush straight out of the sky! Have you ever seen such a thing (actually yes, I think its official name is 'sleet'). But still most aggravating indeed!

Sparticus' much belated year 2002 review

Welcome to the great Sparticus Review 2002! It was 12 months ago today that I predicted precisely what would happen this year here, here, here and here. All of them are wrong but make for reasonably good reading. Anyway instead of doing that (just yet) I thought I'd review this year...
Politically
George Bush continues to reign in tyranny, forcing everyone to bow down to his stupidity. Ariel Sharon continues to get away with the war crimes he started perpertrating 20 years ago and which still continue today. Tony Blair continues to act all smarmy. But at least he's not stupid or a genocidal maniac. Overall (n)
Musically
Coopers!! Easyworld! Kinesis!! Martin Grech!!!! READING!!! Most number of gigs been to in one year! Most number of free musical things gotten! Most number of albums bought!! Bring on more music!! Only bad thing is NME continually going down the plughole of self indulgence and idiotic appraisals of all bands with "the" in their name. Oh and Lamacq left us. Bad! Still on the whole(y)(y)
Personally
I'm working for a church, yay!! I passed my As-Levels!! I have a gorgeous girlfriend!!! Excellent!! (y)(y)(y)
Astrologically
As plebes left the aruroa of phetmen certain cross diagonal waves lengths failed to cause mass rainage of frogs. Aries in the 4th constant of yamaha meant that production was bound to fail, yet it didn't. Osama bin laden orbiting the third ring of nigete meant that world destruction would come in the 256th hour of the year. It didn't. (n)
Phonealogical
My phone sucks. booo

choo choo yet AGAIN!

Hey all, I'm back… or gone, or whatever depending on where you are!
I had a brilliant, excellent, fantabulous, exciting time in Darlington for two days, and then a week in (oh so NOT sunny) Swansea! It was great! But it all went way too fast as these things do and I'm in snowy old Scotland again already! Boooooooo :(
So anyway, I thought I'd just say how lovely it was meeting everyone in Swansea… even little tiny cute cousins! I hope I'll see you again soon, some time in the summer maybe, when the weather is a little less blaaaarggh!
Oh it was so funny today on one of the trains I got… it was York to Berwick and seemed to be a direct train from the announcements that were made. Anyway, I got on the train and as the doors losed and we pulled away from the station, this woman sterted yelling and almost crying! She had helped her disabled friend get her luggage onto the train and then didn't get off in time! OHHH NOOOO… but I (sinical person that I am) thought it was really quite hillarious! Especially as it was a direct train… and the next stop was 2hrs away. But this sad tale ends (kinda) happily when we stopped in Newcastle and I guess the woman must have got a train home.
Yay!

Marrrgghghhhaghahhh

Today, my O2 (scum scum scum scum scum) monthly contract phone stopped working. Apparently the SIM card spontaneously failed. Although it took me 50 minutes to actually find a human to speak to who could tell me this. Future advice for anyone who wants to call up O2 and complain...
Ignore any numbers given to you when you buy the phone These just cost you far too much and leave you on hold for hours
Call 192 and ask for the O2 head office number instead This is far quicker (only took me a minute to speak to a person) and makes a much nicer impression on them.
So they'll have to send me a brand new SIM card because my old ones so bust. Although to me this does sound like complete and utter lunacy seeing as my SIM card was working that morning, and my phone had been only off for 30 mins before I turned it on to find it bust.
Thus I conclude O2 are very very stupid.
Everyone go on Orange!!