I gots me a new shiny. A black 160GB iPod Classic. A student was selling it for 3/4 of the Apple.com price so even though my podlet is more or less working (requires a bash against the wall every now and then) I took the opportunity to snag this new shiny one. I’m so in love with the way you can scan through album covers that I’ve just spent 2 hours making sure all 4658 of my songs have album covers (technically 4657 since one is a .wav of Thom purring and can’t have a cover set). Tomorrow (or rather, later today, since it’s gone 4am already) I plan to sort out the misbehaving audiobooks that are masquerading as music albums. It even has a tunnel version of Breakout! I can’t quite come to terms with the idea of videos and movies yet – that’s a bit advanced for me.

Also on my new shinies list is a Alba TV/DVD combo – since moving into halls in November I have been using our spare TV and even though I have a powered booster antenna I could only get BBC 2 and Channel 4 – bad reception. Luckily I rarely want to watch ITV or Five, and parental units record BBC 1 progs for me. I bought this Alba TV for £35 from another student (end of year, they’re all emptying their rooms!) simply because I’m fed up of watching movies at lap height on my lappy. The weird thing is that despite the fact I have attached the Alba to the same booster aerial it now picks up BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV and Channel 4! Bonus! Plus, unlike the spare TV it has analogue connectors also (no scart, but the little red, yellow and white ones) which means it can communicate with my PS2.

All’s well with the world! Just have to wait for iPod to finish syncing then I can go to bed. And shortly afterwards get up again.

Darn DNS – dunno what that little DNS outage was due to. Got a very confusing email back from support where the English was sufficiently broken that it wasn`t clear whether they were advising me to take a certain action or that they`d taken said action. So I did nothing, and it started working again anyway.

Anyone else having their least fun pollen season ever? All the hayfever sufferers (and it is suffering, let me assure you) I`ve spoken to are, like me, drugged up to the eyeballs and still snuffling. Mother blames farming. “Crops” she says, specifically blaming rapeseed in particular. I feel this is somewhat unfounded, especially because as far as I know, the rape isn`t out yet, and due to the habit of Hertfordshire farmers rotating their crops, I`m worse this year surrounded by wheat\barley than I have in previous years surrounded by the ol` fields of yellow. You never know though, maybe she`s right (I have to say that bit – she`s my mum).

Firefox has this interesting and bizarre bug of occasionally having a spate of activating Find whenever I type an apostrophe or forward slash, hence the single quotations and backslashes present in this post. Apparently other people have this same problem, and those responsible for the silly browser can`t work out why it`s doing it. Arrow keys stop working for the duration also. Maybe it`s some kind of Grammar Nazi, designed to prevent contractions whilst also forcing us to accept what we have written and deny any kind of retrospective corrections.

Either way it’s driving me nuts IT’S GONE AWAY! Where did it go?! Why did it leave?! I’m goin’ apos’phe cr’zy! It’s m’d I’m tellin’ y’all! MWAHAHAHAHA!

Little circles.

I read Ben Elton’s Blind Faith over the last week – a generally acceptable tome, an image of the future with eerie references to Goog’ing people, Tub’ing their vids, daily blogs and Facespacing them. Nothing amazingly interesting but hey, it’s a book, and books in general are rarely bad. I wouldn’t buy it again, I might have library’d it. Acceptable though – and ironic (hence little circles) that I talk about a book that presents future life as the culmination of the current facebook/myspace/blog etc sharing trend on my blog…

I had a reason for posting this blog, for getting out of bed and turning on laptop and posting this blog and I can’t remember that reason. However whilst it loaded and whilst posting I have enjoyed listening to one of my favourite emotive numbers:

Juliet, *cue drum riff*
When we made love, you used to cry.
Said I love you like the stars above,
I love you ’til I die.
There’s a place for us.
You know the movie song.
When you gonna realise
It was just that the time was wrong.
Juliet…

I’ve remembered! QI! Call me a cynic (I provide a comments feature for this very reason, please use it) but listening to the QI themetune (that I randomly have on my iPod just above “Private Investigations – Romeo and Juliet”, hence the distraction) gives me a warm, fuzzy and above all defensive feeling. As if being clever and being interested in things for the sheer value of being interested in them is frowned upon in today’s society. Being a smartarse (smAR-TARss) about something that doesn’t directly relate to celebrities or sport does to some extent make you a little bit just a teeny microscopically tiny bit Sad. Admitting to such interests makes me a little wary – and a little apologetic. As if to say “sorry I’m interested in the subject of random dog breeds and opted to bring it up today – I’ll go back to my cuppa now and be quiet”. I can’t help it – random fact of a nature that is no doubt invaluable to some but currently of limited value to me does compel me to learn it by rote, whereas not-so-random fact related to my profession does not interest me in the slightest. I suspect this is related to what is required of me, i.e. if someone should insist I learn the genetic variations of the cream gene in horses I shall no doubt spend the next few months learning the in depth pharmacokinetics of thiopentone. I am only interested in what I don’t have to know, and I choose to take that to previously unreached levels of obsessive-compulsivity. Oh yes, “compulsivity” is a word.

Hello everyone, I am Kai, and I am clever.

Sorry.

Beer cans. They are sensitive little fellows and will, if you do not take due care, erupt in a frenzy of froth and foam if you do not take proper precautions. Shaking them really isn’t advised. Dropping them is just foolhardy.

Obsession/occupation of the moment is Russell Brand. I read his Booky Wook over the last week (good, it was; on par with Marco Pierre White’s and better than Gordon Ramsay’s). Then to today I bought one of his DVDs, which also was good, though perhaps not as good as Eddie Izzard. See, despite inebriation and obsession my ability for comparative reasoning is not impaired. Though my spelling is, resulting in this post taking 47 minutes to write in total.

Although of course my personal history does not not relate to Russell Brand’s at all (never taken drugs despite friend’s doing so, from a nuclear family etc) I do find his book and his shows easy to relate to – the slightly chaotic “Everything’s fine but please remember that ‘balance’ is an intrinsically unstable condition in that a tiny move either way results in instability”. And also we share a First Joke. The Queen’s Legs joke, Google it. Bar the Knock Knock Doctor Who joke and Ding’s Green Car gag (a classic) the Queen’s Legs was my first remembered real joke.

I love that I see a tab and having forgotten why I opened it I glare at it and declare ” Tab! Why are you here?! You mean nothing to me! You appear under your own volition?! How is that sensible?!” The use of question marks with exclamation marks just next to them pleases me.

I’ve gesturing a lot which is usually a sign that I should not engage in online discussions; however, damnit I will!

I broke my plate this morning, and so far this evening I’ve stepped on it twice. This is perhaps an indication that I should remove it from my floor. Either that or I avoid ingestion of fair amounts of wine before stumbling around my room. And beer.

Oh, what a circular post.

Why does my apple tree (who’s called Annie, for those interested in the names of our trees. The other is called Clarabelle) put the effort into producing these tiny proto-apples, only to dump a fair number of them on the lawn in their pre-apple embryotic state? They’ve got little pips in and everything. It’s hardly an efficient use of energy. Admittedly dissecting one of these proto-apples (how else could I discover their pips?) did offer me some distraction whilst waiting for Facebook to upload a shed-load of photos from Easter Breakfast. I’m a little behind with my photoficationism. Easter 2008 is one of the best delays – the longest was the Interns and Residents’ meal from Christmas ’07.

So today in time-honoured time-waster fashion I’m sitting in the garden (literally sitting in the middle of the lawn, slowly getting a damp bum) surrounded by various animals. Charlie the rabbit (recovered from his flystrike problem) is having a good lunch of grass, Pumpkin the cat is a more reluctant companion, having been deposited out here by mother. Chill was around but has since gone off to sleep somewhere – having Pumpkin accidentally roll onto her put her off hanging around. Thom’s magically appeared in hedge also.