i am sparticus: Words

Things That Should Come With Phones

You know what would be great? A button that when pressed would cut your phone off the phone network. Just think, you could use your phone to do all the things that you generally use your phone for, as a time keeping device, calendar, to do list, calculator, stop watch and countless other things, without getting any interruptions whatsoever! No more putting your phone on silent when in lectures or when doing a youth group and hoping that no-one rings you or texts you. I'd really love this feature, so all you phone manufacturers out there take note. I'm available for beta-ing any of your products, so drop a line to haveaphoneonthehouse@iamsparticus.co.uk. That'd be great.

Diego Garcia

According to the veritable fountain of knowledge that is my Dad with BBC News alerts the US Military Base in Diego Garcia (in the Indian Ocean) where forewarned about the the Tsunami by the Pacific Earthquake Watching Thingy the Americans have in place to protect Hawaii and the West coast of the US from this sort of thing in the Pacific. They didn't seem to tell anyone else though. Stayed tuned to Google for angry left wing websites complaining and angry right wing websites rebuking it all.
Or if you'd like to give some money to the disaster relief fund...

Top Five Top Fives Of 2005

Top Five Songs Released

• State Of The Union- David Ford
• Freddy Krueger ñ Reuben
• Mr. Brightside ñ The Killers
• Straight To Video ñ Easyworld
• All These Things I've Done ñ The Killers

Top Five Films

• Lost In Translation
• Dodgeball
• The Incredibles
• Shaun Of The Dead
• Dawn Of The Dead

Top Five Events

• My Brotherís wedding
• Soul In The City
• Simple Kid live
• Slovakia
• The Zoo

Top Five Blog Posts By Myself

• About my iBook
• About hair cuts
• When Assembling Bookcases
• The one in which seb makes a witty comment
• Arnold Schwaznager Meets the Imaginary Duck

Top five purchases

• My iBook & iPod
• Colchester Zoo tickets
• Assorted climbing gear (if weíre just picking one thing, then the shoes, definitely the shoes)
• Assorted CDs; Automatic For The People ñ R.E.M., Infinity Land, The Vertigo Of Bliss ñ Biffy Clyro, Kid A ñ Radiohead, Eye To Telescope ñ KT Tunstall, The Green Album - Weezer, The Lost Riots - Hope Of The States (Again, if picking one thing, The Vertigo of Bliss)
• My Digital Camera

Travelling Home Post Christmas

I like the railway. I really do. People often talk about how exciting it is to look down out of a plane and see the world as little dots and lines, but rarely does anyone talk about how exciting it is to see the world up close as big objects. I will though! Staring at dots isn't that fun! Seeing things close up at high speed is! I'm on the train right now and I just saw a fox! A FOX! You could try and see a fox from a plane, but even if you could, how would you make it out from the sheep around him? Or the person nearby? Or the countless other things that are to you, mr. plane flying person, dots?

So, it was with very little trepidation that I went to my grandma's local train station to get a train home. I'd rung up the national rail enquiries service earlier in the week and they'd informed me that I'd be able to get a train from the station direct to Reading, and then from Reading to Swansea. On arriving at the station I was informed by a guard that the national rail enquiries service doesn't take into account either bank holidays or rail maintenance. Apparently this happens quite often as the call centre is in India and people keep on forgetting to tell them about things like bank holidays, rail maintence time tables and office Christmas parties. Still, at least they're polite and can hold a decent conversation about Eastenders. Train Viewing Update COWS GRAZING IN THE FIELDS! A FARMER ON HIS TRACTOR! So I was left with two options. I could either take the rail replacement bus to the next station down the line, wait half an hour or so, get the train to reading and go from there or I could get a train to Birmingham and then go back down via Bristol. In case you're wondering how you decide these things, here's how I did it.
Me: Hey, of these two options which one will get me to Swansea the quickest?
Train Conductor: Well the Birmingham route is significantly faster, although you will arrive at New Street 5 minutes before the other train leaves, so of course if this train is late you'll miss it and that means a three hour wait. That and the fact that the line is notoriously problematic for delays and that in the time you've spent talking to me the train to Birmingham has left the station leaves you with only the bus option.
Me: Thanks.
Train Viewing Update FREE WI-FI OUTSIDE OF BATH! 25 SECONDS IN WHICH TO CHECK YOUR E-MAIL!! (you have none).

So I go to the bus and the bus driver tells me not to bother putting my bags in the below bus storage as it won't get too crowded. Ten minutes later and I'm rearranging bags to make room for someone else. The bus sets off full of unhappy squashed-up people. Half way through the journey part of the ceiling falls off.

Finally, I get to Swansea. Obviously all the buses are slacking off because it's a bank holiday, however it's the first Monday after Christmas so town's still full of people all of whom are carrying huge NEXT bags (which all contains clothes they'll never wear but, Hey! They were half price!! HALF PRICE!). I give up trying to find a bus going home that has any room on it and instead get a taxi. Within a minute the taxi driver has assumed I'm a football fan and is trying to find out my opinion of the Swans hopes this season. This needs to stop happening to me.

French Guessing Games

I was okay at French at school; I had an extra year to everyone else and so I got put into a higher set for GCSE's and coasted through with out too much work. Most of the time I couldn't be bothered to do the vocabulary learning though, and so instead I just made up feasible french sounding words. Many was the time the teacher told me off for taking English word and french-izing them, apparently the ability to say English things with a French accent won't get you by in France, or more importantly, get you an A in your exams. It goes both ways though, the best way of dealing with a French word that you don't know the meaning of is treat it like an English word you've never heard of before and guess at it from what it sounds like. Of course, the vast majority of the time this will fail miserably, but then occasionally it'll work out ok and you won't look like a fool and that, is something to treasure.

Anyway, I was sitting at my Grandma's house the other day playing games on my laptop while the rest of the family was doing the typical post-Christmas Walley family thing of reading the books they just got. My dad has this book on the history of France (get him) and obviously gets to a really amusing bit, because he chortles and stops reading. He lowers his book and says (and I apologise Dad for paraphrasing here) "Get this, Moliere wrote a musical called 'les malade imaginaire' and he..." "The imaginary duck?" interrupt I, confident of my French translation skills and ovewhelmed by the idea of a musical based on a duck that doesn't exist. To which he replies, "No, 'The Imaginary Illness' obviously, malade coming from the French word mal, meaning sick". Which just goes to show that trying to be clever by pretending that you know French doesn't work.

In case you're wondering, the punchline to the amusing anecdote about the French musical writer and the duck is that he died during the fourth performance of his new musical. Which is, if I don't say so myself, rasserener ironiquement (that is; to regain ones serendipity ironically).

Christmas Greetings

I can't see myself writing again before Christmas, so happy festive celebrations everyone! Actually, being that I'm a Christian, happy Christian festive celebrations! If you want to enjoy other religious occasions this Christmas time, you'll have to do it without my blessing. I'm sure you can cope with that though.

The Night Of The Living Not Dead

IMPORTANT NEWS! Tonight we went to Barons for Funked Up and it did not suck! I repeat: Did Not Suck. For those of you not acquainted with Swansea night life you should know this; apart from the occasional gig there is one decent club night. And by decent I mean that it's awful 97% of the time; that's 3% decent!
So we risked it and it paid off; we danced and moved and jived and did many other exciting synonyms for dancing.

I'd like to say that I was in no way involved in any suggestive dancing at any point, just the normal sort of dancing. I'm down with the idea that suggestive dancing is not really that helpful for the minds of everyone involved, but even if I was in favour of it, to dance suggestively would imply that I could dance to a reasonable level. I don't know what I would be suggesting if I tried to dance suggestively, but you can safely be assured that when they arrest me for it none of the witness statements will include the phrase 'mesmorizing' 'deeply hypnotic' or 'impossible to take my eyes off'. Unless of course it's followed by the phrase 'a bit like a car crash'.

Snowball tastic

I'm pleased to annouce that the word -tastic, a word I spent much of my summer teaching to east europeans to improve their vocabulary, has gained popular acceptance with the masses. Bring on the invasion of the nonsensical suffixes!

Hello Moon!

Today Cafferine and I went to town and met up with the lovely Laura and her genius toddler daughter Ellie. Needless to say Ellie was the cutest toddler ever, and also the model of good behaviour, exhibiting a noticable lack of crying. In fact, the only time she seemed tempted to be unhappy was when first saw me and when she needed changing. And lets face it, if you've just met me for the first time you're going to be unhappy.
Even after that she still managed to learn my name first time around AND she correctly identified the moon, which if you think sounds easy just goes to show how little you know about small children. Children are taught that moon appears at night like the sun appears in the day; The sun appearing at night is not possible and therefore the moon appearing in the day is not possible. If you cannot accept that children are taught to think like this then how do you explain how I once managed to confuse an eight year old child by pointing out that actually the moon was visible in the day time and that was, infact, what the large circular object in the sky was.

Social Experiments For A World Gone Mad

Interesting story, a year ago or so I was speaking to someone I barely knew on MSN. Some how we got into a conversation that involved me betting I could find out where he lived before the end of the week. After an hour or so of pokey around the internet I traced his address. Now this was a guy whom I didn't know the name of to start with, so to do this seems like a pretty impressive feat, but in reality it was worringly easy. Anyway, the other day I managed to near enough repeat the feat, and again it was worringly easy. So I was thinking, how easy is it to track down people's address's over the internet?

So, as a grand social experiment I'm going to pick 5 people who are regular internet users and see how far I can track them down. Obviously I won't say who they are or give any details away about them, but I will reveal how far I could trace them down to. Points will be awarded for getting their full name, getting their live journal / website, getting a photo, getting their phone number and getting their address. The more I get, the more points.

You maybe thinking at this stage, 'this is all a bit twisted isn't it?'. I would like to stress I am only doing this as a social experiment, no details will be kept on my machine and as far as possible I will forget all about them.

Other than that, the rules are as follows: Half an hour max on each person, internet only; no using phones or anything else, no contact with the person, no using money, no doing anything illegal, no getting help. Each person chosen will be taken from a different popular website forum. The person picked from the forum will be a pre-determined number in the list of members as sorted by the amount of posts posted.

I'm starting tomorrow, so get your 'that's just wrong' rebuttals in now.

To Keep Myself Amused

Today I star in a Christmas Party Pantomime where I play a welsh shepherd and act really patronisingly towards all other characters (I am supposed to be patronising, it's not me having some arrogant belief in my own dramatic talent, though I do feel the emotion and pathos behind the 'been to see my father down the mine' line deserves some dramatic award). Tomorrow the various church Christmas celebrations happen, including the young church nativity play (tea towels! halos!) and the candle lit carol service (candles! carols!). Monday I head home to Swansea for Christmas.

So who knows when I'll next write again¹? WHO KNOWS!?!! With that in mind, let's review some old entries to keep you contented till I can think of something clever to say.
Sparticus predicts trackback spam two years before the fact! Spam on websites is dropping like the bomb (I'm so gangsta) and I saw it's potential first! Actually I saw it as a vague possibility and got pretty much everything wrong. Still, THE FUTURE HERE FIRST!
Sparticus talks about soon going to see the best gig of his life in the style of a teenage livejournal user! Note the fine writing style; the use of the word COZ, the spelling of the word writing (righting! HAHAHA!), the teenage angst underlying it all! Yes, this is the greatest parody of a teenager internet junkie ever made!
The entry in which Sparticus's parents meet Jaclyn's mum! Suprisingly enough, even if you know my parents and Jaclyn's mum this entry is still more pointless than a shark with a Rexel Matador 2 Stapler (for use with Rexel No.56 or No.16 staples only).

Happy run up to Christmas!

footnotes

1) Actually, I'll probably write again on Monday by the latest, seeing as I have internet access at home. There is no real mystery about it, I'm just trying to make it sound like there is.

Top Five Christmas Songs Ever

• Far Featuring Chino Moreno and Will Haven - Do They Know It's Christmas?
• Low - Just Like Christmas
• Six By Seven - I Believe In Father Christmas
• Belle and Sebastian - O Come O Come Emmanuel (One of the many sad things about John Peel's death is that they'll be no Belle and Sebastian Christmas special on Radio 1 like there has been previously, where Belle and Sebastian play lots of Carols and Christmas songs)
• The Pogues Featuring Kirsty MacColl - A Fairytale Of New York City

IBM and Lemsip

I was going to start this entry with an explanation of why exactly I was watching so much TV to write an entry based upon TV adverts I'd seen, but then I realised, 'Hey I'm a student. I don't need to explain my TV habits to anyone', and so that is how it came about that I was watching TV the other day. Normally I prefer watching the TV program to the adverts in the breaks, but the program was obviously quite rubbish, because I can't even remember what is was, but I can remember two of these adverts. The first is the IBM advert where two guys are speaking on the phone and the conversation is like:

'Dude I'm in Paris'
'Aren't you meant to be in Hong Kong? That's why I'm in Rome'
'No, because the big stacks of money we're making in Oslo is now happening in Toronto'
'Oh well that's fine because we have shiny computers in Tokyo'
'Good, then I'll see your greedy suit ass in LA?'
'I think you mean Stockholm'
'Word'

Then some woman's voice says 'Hey, if you think it's cool for a business to be full of change and you think that using the word dynamic in your publicity impresses your shareholders, then you want IBM. We're cool like that'.

The second ad is the Lemsip max strength ad. There are a whole series of these adverts but they all seem to go like this:

'Hi I'm an arrogant macho suit and I succumbed to some extreme flu because I work so hard and make so much cash. I was supposed to do some presentation for the company that would make them millions if done well but if done badly would have cost me my job to some arrogant macho suit. Fortunately I took lemsip max strength and so saved the company, beat up that arrogant macho suit and got a date with a hot secretary. If you take lemsip max strength, YOU CAN BE LIKE ME.'

I tell you this because of they both share a common problem. The problem with both these adverts is this; everyone in the adverts are jerks of the worst order, and not only that but you secretly fear that one day you'll turn into one of them. By using these products you bring yourself one step closer to being one of these people. I suppose this advert might work for the directors of companies who miss their youthful days of running around the world and sorting stuff out, but I'm guessing they don't want to remember themselves as being a jerk just as badly as we don't want to become one.

And with that, Trisha is on.

Tom McRae's Guitar

I got to play one of Tom McRae's old guitars the other day.

(This post needs no more text, for that should be enough to make you stop and think)

On Talking To Hairdressers

The problem I have with hairdressers is that I seem to have an odd misconception that I'm paying them to cut my hair. It turns out what you're actually paying for is someone who's willing to chat to you while giving you a free hair cut ¹. Looking at it from this perspective it's actually quite a good deal, except of course, if you don't want to have a chat. The best hairdressers seem to have the ability to gauge whether or not someone is wanting to talk, they ask a few questions and work out from the non-responsiveness of the person that they don't want to speak. It can be compared to the way someone works out if the body they've found on the floor is dead; poke it with a foot a few times and see if it moves. This science is beyond some hairdressers though and regardless of how non-responsive you act to their questions they still continue to ask them.

I had my haircut last Friday, and I got one of those last hairdressers. Actually he was more that one of those last hairdressers, he was the epitome of those last hairdressers. When hairdressers with an inability to release when not to speak get together to share stories and drink wine, this is the guy they tell stories about. About five minutes into my haircut I caved and I responsed to his questions with something more than a passive yes / no sound. He asked me about Ipswich Town Football Club and I mentioned that I thought we² might get promoted this season. Being interrogated over the positions that various Ipswich players play and whether this is the right place for them is not what I am paying for.

Footnotes

1) When I first realised this misconception I assumed that I was actually paying for some to chat to me while giving me a free hair cut that is nothing like the one I asked for. I've come to realise that this isn't quite true, you just have to ask for your hair cut in an arcane language that no one is willing to supply translation lessons for. There's a gap in the market there. If someone wants to release 'So you want to speak hairdresser?' or 'a tourist's guide to hairdresser' you've got one buyer right here.

2) I generally object to people using 'we' to describe the team they support, especially when they only casually support the team because the grounds is a three minute walk from their house and can't name any of the players, but I'm feel I might have to overlook it this time.

On Seeing *nix as Cool

While learning how to use your Mac's unix shell program to install perl modules on the apache server so you can run Movable Type off your own machine may fill you with a deep and profound sense of geek cool, it's best not to share this with the rest of the world. They won't comprehend it and invariably won't see it as cool. Showing them the command line and pointing out the many lines of script that have executed won't help your case either. Did you learn nothing from the time you tried to impress your co-workers with the 300+ lines of script that you wrote in order to categorise your CDs?

When Assembling Bookcases

The reason you did not attempt to assemble the bookcase while feeling perfectly fine was because you lacked a screwdriver. It is important to remember that when recovering from the effects of a cold you still don't have a screwdriver, no matter what the drugs you have been taking might like you to think.

New Year Resolutions 2005

The problem with new year resolutions is that they aren't made with any fore-thought. Come new year's eve people inevitably think 'oh, this year I should really be doing something resolution like' or more precisely they think 'I drink too much / eat too much / smoke / Fancy that girl from admin, I should really do something about it. I know! I'll make a resolution, that way it'll seem like I'm doing something about it even though I'm not really.' This is inevitably followed by drinking too much at the office new years party, asking out girl from admin, being rejected and drowning sorrows in drink, food and cigarettes.

This could all be avoided though if people simply planned their resolutions before New Year's Eve. And so with this is in mind, here is my list of resolutions as they currently stand.

• Read the entry of the day on Wikipedia every day. Just think how good at pub quizes you'd get if you only remembered a tenth of what you read? Fantastic


• Add one page to Theopedia each week. I'm going to try to start with bible characters / famous theologians and maybe work my way up to proper theology at some point.

And that's my list so far. But feel free to suggest more. Or add your own. Reasonable entries will be accepted! To think, you could take part in the shaping of my 2005!

Does Anything Good Come Out Of Eu.com?

This site gets a lot of comment spam. Not that you'd know it, because spammers insist on spamming old entries which causes the blacklist program to kick into action and promptly block them all. But even so it's slightly frustrating to get thousands (alright, tens) of e-mails saying 'You have a new comment on a very old entry! B4RRY commented "we here sell V14gr4 cheap. In Russia, the Viagra buys you! (www.cheaptechnicallylegaldrugs.eu.com)" Is this spam?'. One of the things I've noticed is that every single site linked to in these comments is to a .eu.com site. Which brings me on to my question. Does anyone know of any sites that use the suffix .eu.com that are legitimate and worth using? Because unless someone can point out to me a website that is of any use that uses that cursed suffix, I'm banning them all.

Flickr Fun

I'm currently loving Flickr, especially now I've found some fancy iPhoto plugin that exports everything automatically. Expect sidebar redesignage to take place over the Christmas holidays to incoporate everything into a much sleeker thing.

GPRS Bacon Connectivity

I want everyone reading this to pause for a second and imagine that in front of them right now is not an entry that's going to talk about how geeky I am because I'm writing this via GPRS, no instead I want everyone to imagine that this is in fact the funniest thing you have read all year. Imagine it's a really amusing anecdote, possibly relating to my Portugese housemate and my attempt to determine whether she had any ketchup for my bacon sandwiches (That's right, I made bacon sandwiches without checking I had any ketchup first, I ADMIT I'M A MORON). Needless to the anecdote your imagining includes numerous cultural and linguistic slip ups and much needed hilarity.

Unfortunately though, I'm not posting anything that is remotely that funny, but hey, I am posting through GPRS.