Returning to hell… August 27, 2008
OK, hell is probably a little extreme, but still, school is horrible. About 99% of the people are super-snobby (private school sucks) and/or super rich. There’s only a small group of what I’d consider “decent” people. I hate the learning, I hate homework, I hate wasting my days in a classroom learning a subject I’ll never put to use (I’m looking at you maths & physics). Even the art is a chore, because “no inspiration” isn’t an excuse for lack of summer work, despite it being true (and I’ve been busy coding instead, which is far more important).
So, when the A-Levels are done, am I going to do something I enjoy at University, nope, off to do architechture which will be OK-ish, despite the fact I’ll never work as an architecht. Its the only design related course that’s at a “good” university, and I’m not allowed to go to the “worse” university. Still, gap year and life outside of work at university will be good.
What happened? August 26, 2008
Yea, the blog went down for a few days, then (much to my surprise) appeared back up. Why? Well, BlueHost (don’t ever know why I chose them) hosted this domain a long time ago, and this year, they basically forgot to warn me the domain was about to expire (oh, how useful).
Anyway, I logged in once I saw the site was down and discovered it had expired 3 days ago yet only just went down. I tried to renew, but they wanted a $80 fee on top of the $10 registration for “redemption”. So I contacted BlueHost’s sister company, FastDomain via livechat to work out what to do. They told me the domain was in auction. I asked where and they said they’d have their domain manager find out and email me. Surprisingly he did! He told me it wasn’t in auction, and it was going to be 90 days or the $80 fine. So I replied with an angry email about the lack of notification, as well as asking what the 90 days is actually for.
So I log on yesterday and the site is up! I go to my BlueHost account and, despite it being expired, I can renew for $10. Of course, not a chance of that, so I’ve moved pointlessramblings.com to namecheap now, whom are amazing.
Did the domain come back by error, by default or by kind act of BlueHost? Who knows…
Way too busy… August 19, 2008
Agh, blog neglection again, my time is completely consumed by my A-Level work and by more important things like web-projects. New WordPress themes, a new site, articles on another, content to another, updates to them all, argh! So much to do, so little time.
Next week is the return to my final year of College, I’m beginning to get seriously sick/bored of college because it’s boring, the subjects (with the exception of art) are mundane and it’s just not fun. Can’t wait to escape for a gap year followed by years of being a Uni student, it’s going to be awesome!
Google have ruined feedburner August 14, 2008
A once great service, I’ve been noticing recently many more errors from feedburner. I see sites with one day, 2000 subscribers, the next N/A (0) subscribers. Kerplunc’s sites subscriber counts are bouncing up and down every day, and sometimes vanish all together.
Get it sorted!
Results day August 14, 2008
It’s AS-Level results day today.
Why digg sucks August 12, 2008
I’ve tried numerous times now to get into the whole digg scene. I tried for interesting articles, for promotion, for something to do. However, each time I leave the site within just a few days, ever more determined never to return, but why?
Whenever I visit the site, I only seem to find three types of content on the front page: regurgitated news articles, ridiculous lists and the occasional funny image or video. Let me just run through and put to shame each one separately:
1. Regurgitated News: these I hate the most. News articles on digg. If I want to know about tech/web, I visit Tech Crunch or Mashable (more social stuff). If I want to know about the world I check BBC News, guardian.co.uk or Times Online. The one place I don’t go for news: digg.
2. Ridiculous lists: rarely useful and always well dugg are the lists. “Here’s 5000000000 links I put together but had nothing to do with now digg me and now them zomg wow!” is what I see. Of course, some of these link lists are useful, I particularly like the ones on Design Reviver. Others such as Specky Boy simply annoy me with the huge, and rather pointless, lists of sites to go to. This is what digg should be for, the individual sites, not links to links. If you want link lists, search up tags on del.icio.us (with the old, far better name).
3. Funny stuff: OK, funny stuff can be good, and it can lighten the mood on an otherwise crappy day, but on digg? No no. For funny stuff I go to sites such as I Can Has Cheezburger or College Humor and the like (although, I rarely do, since they’re full of rubbish). Nope, digg is not for this either.
So what exactly do I think digg should be used for? Well, it’s a system where people vote on websites, and what are people looking for? In reality, none of the above, because they already know of it all. We need links to simply awesome sites! New websites, new projects, new ideas, new games, new tools, new things to do on the web, things pushing boundaries, anything that isn’t another silly link list, funny video/image or a useless regurgitated news article.
For now, I remain glued to the excellent StumbleUpon, which, while it does annoyingly have some of the three pointless-waste-of-time-links, most of the content is excellent.
Our police need to get their priorities straight August 7, 2008
I was in London for two days last week, and I was shocked by what happened on one of our bus journeys:
Firstly, a whole team (not just one, about 5, plus a police officer and some bouncer guy) of, yes, ticket inspectors got on our bus. They discovered one man who hadn’t swiped his Oyster card, and the card was empty/faulty. He put up a tiny argument, refusing the 20 pound fine. This was fine, he wasn’t violent or anything like that, just angry.
Then it happened, after about 5 minutes of agruing, the bus was ordered by the ticket inspectors to stop. However, was the man made to get off? No. Was every single paying customer? Yes. What is wrong with the police? The priority is to the public, not the criminal! When he eventually gave in, they even allowed him to finish the journey.
This is what should have happened: he argues, police/ticket inspectors give up, smack him round the face with their batons, and drag him onto the street where they wait for more police to prosecute him. Meanwhile the paying customers get to our destination on time.
We need to be tougher on criminals in the UK, police need more power, more respect. Currently they seem to remain as the laughing stock of the country.
Well that was an exciting flight August 1, 2008
We came back from Belfast two days ago, and we nearly died.
About half way down the runway, our pilot slammed on the breaks and pulled out of takeoff, because apparently all the error lights came on (apparently it was too slow). So the send in the engineers, and their only advice: “use more power nextime”. So we lined up again, everyone was a little more than nervous really, since we had no idea what was wrong. The pilit definitely used more power, we were airbourne in about 3 seconds, and 100m of runway.
The flight was then fine until landing, when, about 100m above the ground, we had to speed up suddenly, because the plane wasn’t going to make it to the runway.
Turns out the engine was either a) full power or b) almost no power. That’s called fail. Still, it was exciting as well as shite-scary.
About
Hey! I'm Nick Barrett and this is Pointless Ramblings. I work as a freelance web design/developer, student and co-founder of Kerplunc. Read more »
Links
I no longer use del.icio.us, because it's unorganized. I use bookmarks, an app by me, for me! Of course, anyone can use it too though. It's unfinished, to work it you'll need a Kerplunc Account, register one here.
When I get around to making such a thing, latest links will magically reappear :)
Gaia Online
Have a guess at my password and hijack the admin capability of this blog: here :)