Sunday, January 30, 2005
Is this the start of an Apple backlash? Doubt it. David McCandleless has put together his personal take on the AppleStore; featuring loads of products us 'Children of Apple' could be persuaded to buy because of the little Apple logo. (Via PSFK)
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by Antz at 8:45 AM | Permalink |  | |
Saturday, January 29, 2005
Homophobic name calling isn't viewed in the same way by most people as most other abuse. Who in their right mind would use words like nigger, paki or spakker in their day-to-day lifes to refer to black, asian or disabled people? No one, that's who. However it still seems okay to use words like fag, homo, sh1tstabber and queer.
According to The Guardian a UK company has been fined because it did nothing to stop its staff and managers using gay taunts towards a queer member of staff. An industrial tribunal awarded £35,345 in compensation for constructive unfair dismissal, harassment and discrimination.
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by Antz at 8:17 PM | Permalink | | |
Thursday, January 27, 2005
In my world Apple are Gods. They have managed to produce throughout the last twenty years some of the bravest and most sexy computers known to man; and I'm proud to have G4s at work and home. I'm also proud to say that when David wanted an MP3 player we called upon the Gods and a white and pure iPod was bought before us (having paid a couple of hundred quid to Amazon). And it was good.
'Was' being the right word, for last week the iPod decided it didn't want to communicate with the mothership. No matter what I tried our little pod-like friend wouldn't show up in iTunes or on the desktop; i reset, i rebooted, nothing.
Of course things only go wrong moments after the warranty runs out and the iPod did just that. Just 54 weeks after I bought it can't be updated because it won't acknowledge the existence of my Mac and now we have the 'opportunity' to pay to have it repaired by Apple.
So how much will it cost? In total (including shipping) it's gonna cost a bargain price of £195 to sort out. It's going to be cheaper to get a new iPod on eBay than it is to get the original one repaired. Considering the premium we paid to enjoy an iPod you would expect the thing to last longer than 12 months. Or not.
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by Antz at 1:17 AM | Permalink | | |
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
One of my 'co-workers' has been ranting on about a cartoon called Salad Fingers for the last day or so, although she admits really freaked her out. Definitely worth checking out through - unless you scare easily.
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by Antz at 1:53 PM | Permalink | | |
Monday, January 24, 2005
I don't understand people sometimes. Today I walked through our general office at work only to find one of our temporary staff having a rant about immigrants and how they are basically swarming into the country and all getting new cars from the government and the best council
housing possible while 'native' residents are hard pushed to be able to afford bread and water.
Of course it was all a pile of b*llocks but I just couldn't believe that people actually believe all the rubbish that people like the BNP and the Conservatives have been pumping out for the last couple of years. Truly scary.
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by Antz at 4:33 PM | Permalink | | |
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Back in the days when I was a design student I used to carry round an ideas book. The whole thought behind it was that whenever I had a worthwhile creative thought I could scribble, draw or paste it into the book; ending up with this big book of brilliant creative thinking.
I read today that four artists, two in Belfast and two in Brooklyn, have been doing a project (called "Book") where they essentially share a book and take it is turns to create a two page piece of work. Each artist had five days to put together their creation before FedExing off to the next. During it's 36 week travels the book traveled over 60,000 miles.
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by Antz at 8:22 AM | Permalink | | |
Friday, January 21, 2005
There's been a lack of Blogger interaction this week because big and scary things are going on in my world; ones which my employment contract stops me blabbering about. Actually my contract allows me to tell you as long as you have no connection with the company I work for, but my server logs tell me that several of the people I share eight and a half hours a day with each day regularly check up on my daily ramblings you'll all have to wait. Oh the excitement of it all.
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by Antz at 7:33 PM | Permalink | | |
Monday, January 17, 2005
I'm always a sucker for a lovely boxfresh pair of Adidas Superstars and so this cool pair of black snakeskin are right up my street, and courtesy of a seller on eBay they were a bargain too.
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by Antz at 11:14 PM | Permalink | | |
Sunday, January 16, 2005
The British Government has just unleashed its new Transport Direct website onto the net after four years of development. The idea is a bit like route finding services offered by Multimap, RAC etc but with one vital difference: public transport. Tell the site where you are and where you want to get and it'll tell you how to get from A to B using buses, trains, coaches and walking. Well that's the idea. The only trouble is that Transport Direct doesn't seem to know how to get from A to B directly at all.
I gave it a go and asked it how to get from my house (in Leicester) to my parents' home in the Sussex countryside; a journey of 160 miles by road. As a student I made this journey several times a year using public transport so thought I had a pretty good idea of how to do it quickly. It appears I was wrong. If I was going to do this i'd get a bus into town, walk to Leicester Station, get a high-speed train to London, get the tube to Waterloo, get a fast train to Tunbridge Wells station and then get a bus to the village my parents live in (or get a taxi - it's only 10 miles away). The total journey time is roughly four hours, less if you use a cab at the other end.
According to Transport Direct i've been totally misguided all these years. The journey should actually take over eight hours and involve nine different public transport services and several bits of walking. It doesn't even cope with getting to Leicester's station easily. Every 15 minutes a bus passes the end of my road on its way to the City Centre, from where it is a five minute walk to the station.
Not so in the world of Transport Direct: it suggests I use three different buses and a train to get there. At one point of its suggested journey (after the second bus trip) I am within four minutes walk of the station yet it insists I take a bus out of the city centre to a nearby town only to wait half an hour and get a local train service back to Leicester station.
Something tells me Transport Direct needs "A little work".
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by Antz at 9:54 AM | Permalink | | |
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
According to The Guardian Waterstones the Bookshop have sacked one of their employees for Gross Misconduct because he writes a personal blog and has mentioned them in it in a less than perfect light from time to time. It could set a precedent for other UK bloggers who mention their day to day work online, although as Waterstones' employee contracts doesn't mention anything about writing blogs it seems to me that they have been very heavy-handed.
Waterstones haven't said much about getting rid of Joe Gordon so there might be more to his dismissal than just what he said online but if not I he would have a pretty good case to seek unfair dismissal. You would, after all, expect for them to have given him verbal or written warnings before showing him the door if they didn't want him to write about his work online.
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by Antz at 7:54 AM | Permalink | | |
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Those gods at Apple have announced their new low-end Mac... the MiniMac. All the power of a mac in a 2 by 6 inch box... well, all the power of an iMac anyway; and for under £400. Obviously it's still more than a low end Dell but it looks like pretty good value to me... and we all said the Cube was small. Now where did I put my credit card?
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by Antz at 10:53 PM | Permalink | | |
Sunday, January 09, 2005
For the last year or so I've been a bit of a Do-It-Yourself Rut and haven't been able to force myself into any real home improvement action. The dining room has stood with half it's wallpaper striped off for months now and the last real decorating I actually got off my arse to do was when I sorted the new office out about a year ago.
Other than simply not being bothered one of the main reasons that I've not been doing much to tart up the house is because of our forthcoming plans to extend the house; which will, obviously, cause a few rooms to be trashed in the process. What's the point of decorating a room or re-flooring one if in six months all the hard work will have been wiped out when the builders come in and smash everything to pieces?
Today we've decided that realisiticly it's gonna take us until 2006 before we're ready to have any of our major building plans realised and so we've bitten the bullet and committed ourselves to doing some work in the living room. Having lived with the previous owner's choice of carpet for five years it's time to put something nicer on the floor, deal with the horrible fireplace and give the room a fresh coat of paint.
In the long term we're going to take out the whole fireplace and replaster the walls, but (and this is quite a big but) one of the two extension ideas we have will involve demo-ing half the living room and so there's no point spending big money on replastering walls that will have to be re-replastered.
We've ordered the flooring today and David got the tools out and attacked the horrible fireplace hearth which has been hidden under a pile of white pebbles since day one. David loves demoing stuff... it must be in his genes. The flooring will be here in a couple of weeks and it'll give us an incentive to get new skirting boards fitted and the walls painted before it arrives at the end of the month.
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by Antz at 8:13 PM | Permalink | | |
Like most British gay men I have a real soft spot for Victoria Wood, who is without doubt a goddess of British Comedy. On the Guardian's site today they've published an extensive interview with her, no doubt to tie in with the launch of her Acorn Antiques: The Musical in the West End at the end of the month.
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by Antz at 4:15 PM | Permalink | | |
Thursday, January 06, 2005
It seems like only a day since the end of the Big Brother 'Panto' but tonight the third series of Celebrity Big Brother crawled its way onto our screens. Time to brace yourself for 18 days of Big Brother style TV featuring what can only vaguely be called celebrities. Expect to find out too much about the likes of John McCrirck from Channel Four Racing, Bez from the Happy Mondays and failed Radio One DJ Lisa I'Anson. Of course the one bonus was getting to see a quick appearance from the ever-sexy Will Mellor, who sadly isn't in the house.
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by Antz at 11:14 PM | Permalink | | |
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Looking for a unique t-shirt design that reflects the kind of email spam you get? If so Spamshirt.com has just the tees you're looking for. All you have to do is pick your colour and your very favourite spam subject line and they'll make your shirt for you for just £22. Bargain.
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by Antz at 10:53 PM | Permalink | | |
Monday, January 03, 2005
"After 30, you can survive with just six friends of the right calibre and temperament. You need one to lead and one to follow, so that you don't have to make all the mistakes first but can also be a trendsetter for at least one of the lower echelons. You need one to support you unreservedly and one to criticise you with equal enthusiasm. This leaves you free to make your own choices but also gives you someone to blame when things go wrong. You need one who's always in - so that you have someone to ring in the evenings - and one who's always out, so that you always have someone to meet in town. Otherwise you'll be the one who's always in and having to talk to people who only ring you when they've got nothing better to do.
"Fun additions to the circle can be a) an utter slag who is as free with tales of his or her sexual misadventures as they are with their favours and can be guaranteed to enliven any gathering with a splendidly uninhibited demonstration of either talent, or b) a friend with whom you enjoy a certain frisson of Unresolved Sexual Tension. Do not let this become the year in which you resolve it. Yearning is a lost art and it behoves us all to nurture it in the few pockets of modern society where it still manages to cling on to life. Plus, the value of having someone around whom you know you could shag if you but lowered your eyelashes/pants in their direction is of incalculable benefit to the post-breakup spirit and should not be thrown lightly aside."
The whole of the article, by Lucy Mangan and published in The Guardian, can be found here.
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by Antz at 11:05 AM | Permalink | | |
Sunday, January 02, 2005
For the last few years David and I have decided to throw a dinner party for new year, rather than going out to some bar or club and celebrating with hundreds of people we don't know. We both have suffered with a string of disappointing new year celebrations and so decided that it would be much more fun being with a group of our close friends to see the year end.
This year we had five house-guests for the weekend and 11 people at the house to enjoy a three-course meal (lovingly prepared by David), a nearly never-ending supply of champagne, and general fun and games leading up to the arrival of 2005. It was obvious by the complete state the house was in when I woke up in the morning that everyone had a great time; though few of us can remember any of the finer points (and 'Pub Rules' (What happens in the pub stays in the pub) prevent me from telling you what I do remember). I can see several trips to the recycling centre in the next few days.
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by Antz at 10:57 PM | Permalink | | |
Saturday, January 01, 2005
The New Year is now upon us and while most of us are nursing a sore head here are some shots of the countdown to the new year here in the UK and over in Times Square to keep you going until my first real post of 2005. I hope you and your loved ones have a very happy new year.
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by Antz at 1:00 PM | Permalink | | |
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