Wednesday, September 29, 2004

I came across this map online this week and just had to share it. It's very good to see that my birth town in East Sussex made it onto a tube map at last. I wonder what a Leicester tube map would look like?

Posted by Antz at 11:47 PM | Permalink | | |

Sunday, September 26, 2004

Saturday saw the family event of the decade. My (only) brother was tying
the knot to his girlfriend and all the family were invited to Sussex to
celebrate the big day. To be honest this was pretty daunting as it is
the first time that David (and in some cases my gayness) was pushed upon
many of my aunts and uncles as well as some of my bro's friends.
Obviously as many of my relatives are pretty conservative I was worried
about their reaction to him, but as it turned out I had absolutely
nothing to be worried about.

The wedding was probably the first one where I've actually had an
emotional involvement with the happy couple. My brother and I aren't the
closest of people but seeing him get married was a very special moment
and for my mum was one of the best day's of her life. I'm sure photos of
us in our wedding outfit will appear around her house as soon as the
photographers have finished developing them.

As I mentioned already the wedding was the first time that David had the
opportunity to meet my not-so-near family. I'd had a word with mum
before the big day to see if I had to transform David into a friend
rather than a boyfriend but she told me that the family grapevine had
been in action and everyone knew about him and there was no need to hide
anything. I was pretty surprised by this as I have always been aware
that my parents didn't feel that my sexuality was in any way 'ideal'.

I don't know why I was worried as David got on with everyone like a
house on fire. He spent the whole reception chatting to both my
brother's friends and the family and it appears that nearly half of them
have been invited to come and stay for a weekend. Hopefully not all on
the same weekend mind you.

Posted by Antz at 7:01 PM | Permalink | | |

Friday, September 24, 2004

I've mentioned a few times on here that I love the new Minis and would love to get my hands on one, well, I've now actually ordered one of the beauties. I went into my local Mini dealer today to sign the papers and I should be taking delivery of a black Mini Cooper at the end of November.

I have to admit that I can't wait. I've never owned a new car before and since the death of 'Frog' about two years ago I've had to rely on David's Renault 5 (Maud) to get me to and from work.

Ordering the Mini was pretty daunting though. As someoe who has only ever bought pre-enjoyed cars before you just have to find the one you want and then hand over your hard earned cash but when it comes to the Mini there are just so many choices.

Even once you've decided on the model you want (I went for the Cooper) and the colour (Astro Black) there are still hundreds of options and assessories to choose from. With a bit of help from the Mini website and the salesperson at my local Mini dealership I finally made all my choices and now everything is going through and any time now my Mini will start to be built at the car plant in Oxford.

I've been told to expect its arrival on about the 23rd November. Can't wait.

Posted by Antz at 12:30 AM | Permalink | | |

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Now if you really know me you'll know that there are few things in this old planet of ours that really rub me up the wrong way. There is one exception however, Linda Barker.

In case you've been hiding under a stone for the last five years Linda Barker is one of the celebrity designers from the BBC TV makeover show 'Changing Rooms'. A woman who has single-handedly managed to force nearly every home in the UK to fill rooms with bad paint effects and piles of twigs.

For some reason I have a completely irrational dislike for the women. It might be her complete lack of design ability or her skill at disregarding what her victims (sorry, clients) ask for. She seems to believe that anything can be improved by either sticking bits of paper or twigs to it. She also is far too bubbly for her own good.

Anyway Curry's (who have been using her in there recent TV advertising) have seemingly given her the push and she has now been replaced by a young male Curry's shop assistant. Snip snip.

Posted by Antz at 11:14 PM | Permalink | | |

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

I'm not sure that it's possible but I'm getting more and more convinced that I'm gradually losing my creativity, which is pretty scary considering that I'm a design by both education and career. When I think back to my days as a child and while I was first setting out into the world of design I used to be so into the design ideas I had but these days I'm rarely happy with the work I create.

Maybe I'm just becoming jaded as I get older, or possibly that my expectations are just a lot higher than they were when I started out designing but I do find it very disturbing that I'm now rarely in love with the work I do.

I'm still very much in love with design and can still get very excited by the work of designers around me, however my own work failed to light that special fire inside me. It might be that a lot of my work these days is much less exciting than the CD covers and other projects I used to work on. Spending weeks working on a throwaway catalogue isn't by any stretch of the imagination exciting and, sadly, the very tight timescales involved mean that creative design takes second place to getting the job finished on time.

The same concerns about not being able to come up with truly great designs extend to the creation of AntzOnline. Looking round the net I forever see brilliant sites with great design ideas but when it comes to working on the new version 2.0 of the site I'm just left cold. I'm sure that when the new version hits the net people will love it, but I just wish I could say the same.

Posted by Antz at 9:21 PM | Permalink | | |

Saturday, September 18, 2004

What is it with the weather this year? It's now September and it's
getting dark earlier and earlier; the central heating is on and the
thicker clothing is out of the wardrobe. The only problem is that we
don't appear to have had a summer yet. Where were all the long weeks of
hot sunny days? The last 12 weeks seem to have been punctuated by rain,
gales and more rain... hardly ideal summer weather... unless you're a
duck or something.

I know we've all been warned about the affects of global warming, but
surely there's no way that these effects could have f*cked up our
weather so quickly. Maybe this year the seasons have just got a bit
confused and everything will settle back to normality in time for
2005... or 2006.

Posted by Antz at 12:17 PM | Permalink | | |

Thursday, September 16, 2004

I spent a large part of my day today, working with a glamorous woman called Penny, beta testing a new tool to manage search engine advertising. Sounds boring in the extreme and indeed it was - although she did bring some fresh cream cakes to make the whole process much more enjoyable.

The tool we were going through has been created for her company by a team of Russian programmers and it seems that while the stuff they've put together is incredibly clever it's almost impossible to use.

We sat together for several hours trying to work out how the tool worked but had to keep reading their notes, phoning people at her office and generally going round in circles. By the time the cakes had been eaten we weren't any nearer managing to work out how to use everything and didn't manage to add a single advert.

This beta testing brings back horrible memories of some development work we recently had carried out at work to make it a lot easier for our customer service team to deal with reshipping items to customers. Well, it was meant to make it easier - in actual fact everyone who tried to use it got completely lost and several of the team were spotted almost in tears.

Posted by Antz at 8:31 PM | Permalink | | |

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

What is it with gay homopages? Why are nearly all of them so badly put together? Gay men are meant to be born with near perfect taste and style so why do 99% of queer sites look like they were thrown together by people to whom style was a four letter word?

I have to admit that I don't normally go out on the net to check out other homopages. Usually I check out a few sites and blogs I know and love and leave the rest well alone; however I've been actively following links around the gay internet in pursuit of good sites to add to the links page. The trouble is that there are just so few that I'd even consider linking to.

It seems that one of the biggest problems with most of the sites I've found is that they are full of tacky animated Gifs, are badly laid out with impossible to follow navigation and are so badly put together. Now I realise that most homepages aren't put together by designers but I don't can't see why straight homepages have developed so much during the last couple of years but gay ones haven't.

Creating a good, easy to use homepage (or any website for that matter) is about keeping it nice and simple, choosing and sticking to a colour scheme and creating a way of navigating around the site without the user getting lost all the time. It's not about seeing how many different flashing pride logos you can cram onto one page or how many nifty javascript effects you can run at one time.

Of course there are some great homopages out there. UK homopages such as IainGilfillan.net and NeilsObsessions.com are truly wonderful spaces that anyone would be proud to call their own. It's just a shame most of the others really let the side down.

Posted by Antz at 11:08 PM | Permalink | | |

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

The British government has postponed introduction of the Civil Partnership
Bill into the House of Commons for another three weeks. Ministers reassure
us that they're still fully committed to the Bill, but MPs from Northern
Ireland will be at peace talks on Thursday, the day pencilled in for the
first debate.

While David and I aren't sure whether or not we actually would want to
register our partnership through a Civil Partnership we certainly believe
that it was about time the UK finally sorted out proper recognition for
same-sex partnerships.

It is so stupid that a straight couple can meet and marry within a few weeks
and be united within the eyes of the law but a same-sex couple can live
together for five, ten or even twenty years and have no legal relationship.

Of course if certain political parties in the government hadn't hijacked the
Bill when it went to the House of Lords and added several inappropriate
amendments I'm sure the Bill would have been well on its way to becoming
law.

Posted by Antz at 9:45 PM | Permalink | | |

Sunday, September 12, 2004

I have to admit that once a month or so David sneaks off to play bingo at our local Mecca Bingo club at Freeman?s Park. He usually goes with a friend as I don't enjoy the experience as much as he does. Sadly, this weekend, he couldn't find anyone to go with him so I had to valiantly step in and go with him - yes I know I probably could have managed to persuade him not to bother going but I gave in too easily.

It's been a year since I last ventured into the hellhole that is a bingo club, and I'd totally forgotten about the unique breed of people that spend their evenings playing the games, sticking coins into the slot machines and downing pints of cheap lager.

Spread all over the whole bingoing arena were hundreds of middle-aged women decked in loads of light-weight Elizabeth Duke jewellery and seriously over-made-up sit with their husbands in their football shirts, beer-bellies and moustaches. Certainly a place that taste and fashion forgot.

I wouldn't have minded if the club was full of good-looking scallies in tracksuits and trainers to give me something interesting to look at but sadly it wasn't to be.

Sadly (but fairly inevitably) we didn't win a penny, despite coming close a number of times. I would say 'better luck next time' but hopefully I won't have to go back.

Posted by Antz at 12:26 AM | Permalink | | |

Friday, September 10, 2004

Now I have to admit that from time to time I enjoy nothing more than settling down and watching some Living TV classics such as Extreme Makeovers. There is something pretty cool about the magical transformations of people who feel that nature has given them less than pleasant features? a rather hooked nose, hair loss etc all magically transformed into beautiful people.

But tonight David and I came across Five?s Cosmetic Surgery Live which was dedicated to sexual cosmetic surgery. For nearly a whole hour we were shown the art of creating designer vaginas, luxury labias and God knows what else. The one question that stayed in my mind was WHY?

Why would women want to have random bits cut off of some of their most private bits? Or for that reason have collagen pumped into their G-spot? It just seems weird to me.

Posted by Antz at 11:31 PM | Permalink | | |

Thursday, September 09, 2004

It must be great being a cat. Abercrombie and Fitch (who entered our lives last May courtesy of Chris and Rob) must be two of the luckiest felines alive. They get the best places to sit, get to lay around all day enjoying the summer sun, get all the food they could want and generally boss David and me around until they get their own way.

Posted by Antz at 9:52 PM | Permalink | | |

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

Life is so much harder with the pressure of having to create a blog posting every couple of days. There is always a little annoying voice at the back of your head saying "write your blog, write your blog".

The trouble is that while i'm still finding my blogging feet I haven't really decided what form my blog will take. Do i just ramble on about everything that goes on in my life, or do i cherry-pick interesting topics that pop up from time to time.

I suppose, to a degree, it depends how much of my life I want to reveal to anyone who comes across the blog. Do I want people to know about the rollercoaster ride of adventure that is my day to day life?

Posted by Antz at 11:45 AM | Permalink | | |

Monday, September 06, 2004

The news today has been full of Scotland's plan to follow Ireland's lead and announce a complete ban on smoking in public places - which means a complete ban of smoking in bars and restaurants, as well as (strangely) company cars and lorries. Obviously if Scotland does go ahead with this plan it won't be that long before England seriously considers a similar ban.

Being one of the English minority that smokes you'd be slightly surprised to discover that I'm not totally against the idea of a public ban - for a start it would stop idiots having a fag on the dance floor in clubs and randomly burning anyone within a metre radius. The number of times I've returned from a night clubbing with burn marks on either me or my clothes. Bastards.

But it seems to me that a ban on smoking in public places is completely missing the point, as is the annual money-maker that is the tax increases on cigarettes and tobacco. The reason that me and tens of thousands of other smokers continue to smoke is because we're addicted to it. And it is incredible tricky to break that habit.

The government needs to spend more time and effort finding a successful and relatively easy way for smokers to kick the habit without undergoing a couple of weeks of hell. If I knew that there was a way to give up the dreaded weed without falling out with everyone I spend any time with as a result I'd jump at it. Maybe they?ll see sense and at least stop charging VAT on nicotine replacement treatments.

Posted by Antz at 11:09 PM | Permalink | | |

Friday, September 03, 2004

It's official I love Minis (or rather BMW Minis, as one of my team at work insists they must be called). I went on my very own version of a mini adventure today and got to test drive the sex-on-wheels that is a Mini Cooper. I've been lusting after one of these fine examples of British (ahem) engineering for ages and finally got round to organising a test drive with Julia from Leicester's Mini dealers, Sytner Leicester.

Had the pleasure of spending an hour flying around Leicester seeing what a Mini is like to drive... and it's totally fab. I so want one. All I need to do now is to sort out the financial side and then hopefully we can have a lovely black Cooper on the drive.

Posted by Antz at 10:28 PM | Permalink | | |

Thursday, September 02, 2004

Tomorrow I'm off to get my hair cut, or restyled or whatever and so I've been trying to find some idea about what I want to have done. Until last year i had my hair cropped and so since growing it back I've had the opportunity to play around a bit with it... the trouble is that it seems almost impossible to find a website dedicated to having men's hairstyle galleries.

How hard would it be? I've come across hundreds of similar sites for women's hairstyles but only a handful seems to acknowledge that the not so fair sex have heads of hair too. The few sites that do have galleries of men hair ideas generally seem to include about ten photos of 'do's' created sometime back when the world was black and white and men had three choices - cropped, mullet or side parting.

That said, however, having done my searching i feel save in the knowledge that when i need either a wig or hair replacement therapy the internet will serve me well as I found sites that deal with both in abundance.

Posted by Antz at 9:41 AM | Permalink | | |

Previous Posts