So I grabbed a new theme for my blog. I think it’s pretty nice! I’ve modified it a bit from the stock theme to add times to the post dates, but that’s more or less the extent of my meddling.

For people commenting, it supports something called a Gravatar, or globally recognised avatar. If you sign up at that site you can upload a picture of yourself or anything you like, and it’ll show up next to your comment as long as you use the same email address for both the comment and Gravatar.

I’m hoping at some point to make my own theme from scratch, or nearly from scratch, but I have a great deal of learning to do before that happens. Also I happen to be truly awful at graphic design, so I’d be most grateful to anyone out there with mad art skillz.

Erm, at some point I’ll write an entry about coming back home and what I’ve been upto, and read what Lucy and Cassie wrote in their last few blog entries, but for some reason I haven’t gotten around to all that stuff yet.

Away!

The anti iPhone from TMobile

BREAKING ATMO - Gotta Have Records Of Everything 

Pictures of the Serenity and Firefly DVDs in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station. This is so many kinds of awesome.

So I’m trying to install Ubuntu, because heck, it’s time I tried it. So I head to the Ubuntu site, read some fairly encouraging spiel about how Ubuntu is easy to install, will be full of fun & joy, be packed full of helpful apps to get me going, and all will be well and good when I’m dancing in hippie-land with all those people who have thrown off the shackles of the evil empire.

One download and burn to CD later and I pop the thing in my CD drive, restart my computer, and boot from the CD. I go to the installation option, it starts to load and… bang, it drops to a text shell and starts spewing errors.

Fantastic. Tells me that I can type “help” to look at the availiable commands. Apart from the ones named the same as DOS commands I have no idea what they do. Am I being required to prove my worth before I am allowed to install the damn thing? No, it’s just shit. Either that or my computer’s hardware is somehow completely buggered in some way that only affects free software.

To cut a long story short, Ubuntu blows chunks. At least Windows fucking well installs. At this point I’m fairly happy to have paid a premium for a product that ACTUALLY DOES SOMETHING.

Fuck. This. Shit.

The other day I was told that events a while ago were not really how I had perceived them at the time. The details are inconsequential - it was a long time ago. It did make me think, however. I might just be a bit na

I’m at a party at Josh’s and he asked why I haven’t written anything since my post about the ball, and that was on Sunday, I think. So I’m sitting at his laptop typing this out whilst watching South Park.

I’ve pretty much been busy is my excuse. Had a couple of friends down and that kept me kinda busy; well, a friend and an acquaintance, at any rate. Tom and Meg, as it happened. Although Tom had to disappear back to Lancaster because he had an exam in the middle of his visit so me and Meg watched a stupid amount of Buffy, Spaced, and Shaun of the Dead.

Anyways, that’s why I haven’t been writing all of the much. But right now I’m at Josh’s, which is (sorta…) near Spalding. Much as I can tell it’s a good 50 minutes by car from Peterborough, which is about 50 minutes by train from King’s Cross, so it’s a bit of a way away. There was a BBQ, and we went to the pub where we were accosted by a kinda drunk woman (or at least it seemed) called Donna, who challenged us to a game of pool and then kinda failed miserably at playing it. Anyways, back at Josh’s there was a fairly abortive attempt to play Drink Monopoly instead of Ring of Fire, I still can’t quite fathom why.

Anyways, it’s a party at which there’s exclusively guys, so going to sleep is a hazardous experience. Once guy already has permanent marker on his face, nearly got his eyebrow shaved off, and got shocked in the face with a joke electric pen. I was actually feeling kinda sleepy, and Nightmare on Elm Street was on; the parallels were kinda frightening.

In other news, I hope to actually be interesting again in a week or so, when I have time to read newspapers and philosophy and novels and stuff like that.

Oh, I was reading Scoble the other day and he was rating social networking services and amongst other things wondering why Facebook was so popular, almost like he thought Facebook had appeared overnight and become insanely popular because of some feature it had. Social networking sites are useful because they have all your friends on them. Facebook is big because everyone at your university has it. All your friends from back home have it. It’s an exponential phenomenon! MySpace isn’t big because it’s good. Anyone with half a brain can tell that.

Ah well. Time to post this now and do something else!

P.S. Most people agree that Sally Sparrow is hawt.

The Imperial College Centenary Ball. Wow, that was an event and a half. First there was the dinner, then the fun fair, dodgems, drinking at the union, wandering about wondering why nobody was playing good music, eventually ended up in the marquee where Alex Zane was, at last, playing something halfway decent, got some dancing in, then rolled up for the Survivors photo at 4 am. Then we hung around at the union for a few more hours.

It’s 8:20 am and I just got back into halls. I’m completely knackered.