a big guy in a big city

Posted by Bone at September 29th, 2005

So, this i officially the end of my summer holiday. I’m heading back to the good of University of Leicester today. It’s been pretty good on the whole, even though I wasn’t allthat busy. There’s certainly been a lot of drama, most of which stayed off this site to keep my thoughts out of the controversy (not that my self-imposed ban stopped me from telling people what I thought on Saturday night, trusty alcohol!).

Obviously there’ll be a change in the tone of the blog, and for better or for worse, there will probably be less pictures of tractors and deer, but you never know.

I’m going to bid you adieu (for a couple of days) with a few photos from my last night out with my friends, as you can tell, I picked the ones where I look camp as a log fire.

Posted by Bone at September 27th, 2005

Like most laptops mine suffers from the problem of overheating, leading to rather warm legs, and if ’scientists’ are to be believed, not that many swimmers in the basket, if you catch my mixed metaphor.

I scoured the net for laptop coolers, but found that the fans in the professionally built coolers weren’t in the right places so they wouldn’t be that effectively.

So what does the student with time on his hands do? Creates the cheapest/simplest/most ghetto thing that he possibly can.

Like all brilliant ideas it was ever so, ever so easy to do. I just got one of those big folders made of thick and tough cardboard, made some holes that matched up with the fans and errr, that was pretty much it.

Surprisingly it does have quite a significant effect, the motherboard temperature has dropped from a worrying 68 celsiuis average down to around 57 or so, not bad for 10 minutes work eh?

Pictures of this monstrosity:

I also made up a USB powered fan with a little cable jiggery-pokery but I felt that something of that level of engineering would be a waste, especially since the sides are open anyway, so the removal of air would be pretty un helpful anyway.

Posted by Bone at September 27th, 2005

Eat pizza. Just pizza. Lose weight. Genius.

Hacking Food: The All Pizza Diet

I’ve had a few thoughts on this kind of thing myself, I’m considering testing drinks that claim to reduce cholesterol, I just don’t believe it’s possible. And perhaps an all soup diet since I became obsessed with the stuff after finding out a can of Won Ton soup had just 104 calories in the whole thing.

Posted by Bone at September 27th, 2005

You wanna buy some clothes so awesome that emo kids will be crying in the street?
Then check out the good folks at FullBleed, it looks like some good stuff they’ve got there.

Why the random shop post? Why the devil not eh?

Posted by Bone at September 27th, 2005

So, my last day of dissertation research before I return to Leicester led me to Carlisle, the island of cars (not true). After a month away from the castle I returned to get some hardcore reading done.

And read I did, a whole diary, which was about 4 inches tall, and ever so ever so hard to read, it was like trying to read chinese if you couldn’t read chinese and had only ever been taught how to bake a cake.

It was tough.

But I didn’t start writing this to tell you that I’d been reading today. I sat at a very special table, it was from around the 13th century, so 800 years old or so, pretty special. But that wasn’t it either, it was part of the furniture from when Mary Queen of Scots was incarcerated at the castle in 1538 (or was it 86? or 36?) so she will have attended mass at that very table. Which I hope you will agree is pretty special.

Ok, Ok, I’ll be honest, that was a little bit boring, even for me. Tomorrow will have some pics of me in a controversial t-shirt (it has a bit of pink on it! eek!), unless I just can’t be confident enough to post myself looking like a drunk fool.

Posted by Bone at September 24th, 2005

For someone that goes to the cinema I certainly have been making a bit of a habit of it, having seen three movies this week.

This time me, Tiggy, Hodge, Greeno and Soph ventured out into Ambleside to watch Steve Carell’s “40 Year Old Virgin”. I thought it was very funny, well worth my £5 and discount popcorn (friends in high places).

V. Short review there since you don’t come here for movie reviews, and I don’t come here to write them. And I’m going out in about 10 mins and just thought I’d better write something quick.

Posted by Bone at September 23rd, 2005

My day has been so boring that I’m actually going to use a story that my Mum told me a couple of days ago.

She went out to the cinema with some friends on Tuesday to see Pride & Prejudice at Ambleside’s premiere (and only) film venue, Zefferelli’s. They went to the in-house restaurant before the film, as they do a dinner and a movie deal. And guess who was there…

The woman up there ^^^, she’s Kate Ford and plays Tracy Barlow in popular British soap Coronation Street. She was there with someone that my Mum went to college with. No diva-ish attitude was noted. Oh, and apparently Pride & Prejudice is good.

But… how awesome was the season opener of Lost! OMGzzzzz, after having it pretty much on demand over summer I’m gonna die waiting for the next one.

How many celeb spots have I had on the blog since it started? If I ever have a competition that’ll be the question.

Posted by Bone at September 22nd, 2005

No, not another Amsterdam post, this time I’m actually talking about food. In particular the first time I ever tried to make sushi. A little story after the jump. *Check out the macro mode on the camera, awesome, yes?*

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Posted by Bone at September 21st, 2005

Been a while eh guys? I’d best just get stuck in with an all-around music/movie/life review.

Monday - Went to see Adam Sandler’s remake of Mean Machine, “The Longest Yard”, it was surprisingly good, and a departure from his regular own-brand of comedy, thought some of the principle elements remained. Guys getting hit/kicked in the crotch, that guy that always says “you can do it!”, you know what I’m talking about. Hilariously, Tigg asked for “2 pounds of salt.” Good times. Also, for dinner that night I had kangaroo , it was kinda disappointing, with a taste like braised beef and the texture of venison . Comically enough, the meat was rather springy (I can’t see this post being syndicated by slashfood, can you?).

Tuesday - Boring boring boring, until about 5 o’clock when I set off to Leeds (justifying the travel categorisation of this post) with Hodge to see the magnificent trio of Anberlin, The Early November, and The Starting Line at the aircraft hangar-esque Cockpit, description via Kenny Starting Line. Guess which is my favourite of the three…

They were all really good, although we missed a bit of Anberlin because our tight schedule got us there about 15mins after I intended. Mark your calenders friends, March 2006 TEN’s new triple CD album will be hitting stores. Although before that time I’ll surely be hitting the dancefloors in my new Early November t-shirt that I didn’t realise had pink on it, but I think I’m hairy enough for it to be obvious that the pink means nothing, nothing!

Today - Went down to Barrow to have my car serviced and M.O.T’d (what does MOT stand for anyway?), so to waste time me and Neil went bowling and watched Charlie & the Chocolate Factory in a totally dead cinema. I enjoyed the film, it just looks so awesome, hopefully it’ll see more film-makers cutting down on how much CGI they use. There was also a trailer for Tim Burton’s next(?) film, “The Corpse Bride” which stars pretty much the same cast as C&TCF that I’ve been looking forward too for a while.

My car was fine, except for something which sounds-life-threatening-but-isn’t called “shock absorber seepage” but that should be OK till the next check-up.

Posted by Richard at September 18th, 2005

Part of my excuse for not posting recently is that my computer became utterly riddled with spyware, and so had to be rebooted entirely, with all the driver downloading and frustration that this entails.

It got infected whilst I was doing some entirely legitimate surfing (looking up sites on the superb Icelandic band Sigur Ros), without having even downloaded anything: the computer started flashing up all sorts of warnings about spyware that were in fact just manifestations of the programme that had weasled its way onto my machine. The desktop background changed to a warning about spyware, and the task manager on my computer stopped working. There were less drastic solutions than re-booting the whole thing, but they seemed rather complicated, and my computer deserved a bit of a clear out anyway.

Still, I think that the people who write programmes like this deserve to be strung up by their testicles, and spat on, until they promise to devote their undoubtedly formidable programming skills to something a little more positive than forcing someone to waste about five hours mucking around with their computer, instead of doing something useful.

Rant over.

In other news, I met some nice Jehovah’s Witnesses the day before yesterday: they didn’t try and infect me with anything (apart from religion, rather halfheartedly), and they gave me a free book full of pseudo- science and quotation out of context. Lovely people though.

*Bone weighs in with his view, use Firefox or Opera for your web browsing, virus and spy check regularly (using more than one programme for each if you can be bothered)

Check outTop 10 reasons to switch to firefox from everyone’s favourite personal productivity blog, lifehacker

Also, there’s plenty of anti-spy/malware advice over at SpywareInfo

Bone, looking out for people, as ever.*