Wednesday, July 20, 2005

To be a really good blogger you have to be one of two things; either you have to be someone whose life is a rollercoaster from start to finish or you have to be so completely opinionated that you have an unsatisfiable desire to tell anyone who'll listen your thoughts on just about anything. Over the last year I've proved that I'm either of these things.

While I've managed to knock out nearly 200 posts in the last year I've often found it incredibly hard to find things to write about. Of top of that a lot of the stuff I've posted hasn't been exciting to say the least.

So I've decided it's time to reevaluate this blog and to take a step back from my daily postings for a while so that I can see where the world of blogging is taking me. You'll see less postings for the moment but hopefully everyhing will come back big and strong.

Posted by Antz at 9:12 PM | Permalink | | |

Thursday, July 14, 2005

A while back I was blogging about how an online community i belonged to, OutintheUK.com, was going to change its name to something far less appropriate; namely UpandDoing.com. In the end so many people complained about the name choice that the people behind it changed their mind at the last minute about the whole thing.

The name change was really just the tip of a very large iceberg of changes that the site had planned. Mid-May saw a complete redesign and a large increase in membership fees; it also saw a rapid decline in membership as the new look (known as NuOUT) was pretty much universally hated. Out's founders had come along, knocked down the slums and replaced them with lovely new towerblocks. The trouble is, history shows, people don't like towerblocks.

Out's radical redesign and 'ethnic cleansing' of its free users has cleared the way for a whole new breed of gay communities based of off the same ideal of a mainly-non-porn online world for homos. All of them are pretty new and also pretty small right now. The big decision is which one to go with.

I've signed up with two www.thingbox.com and www.outontheinternet.com so far and to be honest both communities are so small it's hard to get a feel for them. Thingbox certainly looks the part. OutontheInternet needs a bit more work.

Posted by Antz at 5:50 PM | Permalink | | |

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

I could be like some other bloggers and go on day after day going into tiny detail about my journey to work, what I had for lunch and so on but, let's face it, you really wouldn't be interested in it and so it somehow doesn't seem right trying to force it down your collective necks. That why (from time to time) there are gaps in the blog. This is one of those times.

Posted by Antz at 11:34 PM | Permalink | | |

Friday, July 08, 2005

From http://www.livejournal.com/users/pax_draconis/:

Old London, you must understand, is a cackling old whore. She is big, ugly and has blackened teeth and bad skin under the caked make-up; her warts are ill-hidden and her clothes not of the current mode. She is the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, throttling the life out of the Indies and the tea trade; she is Mother Gin, dashing her childrens' brains out against the steps in the rookeries of St. Giles. She is a villainess of the blackest stripe, of the old school. Mind your purse when you walk with her, because her fingers are nimble and her morals as open as her old sewers.

But she's built on the bones of Boudicca and the Gloriana herself; she's seen kings and queens and lords and she's seen a fair few of them lose their heads. She won't lose hers over such a little trifle as this. Jacobites and Chartists and Fenians and Roaring Boys and Nazis and the IRA have all boasted that they'll bring the old strumpet to her knees, and where are they now? They cast themselves against her and she wore them all down in the end.

This is the city of Hawksmoor and Wren; the city of the Ratcliffe Highway and the confessions of de Quincey, of Spring-heeled Jack and Francis Dashwood, of small quarrels in Deptford and great reckonings at Tyburn, of old Leather Apron and his red days of autumn. What do these poor fool people imagine they can teach old London of wickedness?

London's bones were old before the Romans came. Fire has scoured her flat; plague raddled her and still she reels out of the shadows, too much make up, stinking of cheap gin, skirts ridden up and though you know you shouldn't, still you can't resist her leering grin and promise of adventure in the dark.

History sits to one side plotting new abuses to heap upon her, this fallen woman of a royal line, and she endures defiant and unbowed, with a twisted grin and a dare. Don't worry about old London. She's seen off her share of black eyes in the past. Save your pity for those who have done it, for when London finds them she'll show none, like the cool and ruthless businesswoman that she is; no. In lieu of pity, she'll show them her own justice.

Posted by Antz at 1:35 PM | Permalink | | |

Thursday, July 07, 2005

You have no doubt heard about the terrorist bombing in Central London today. This is just to let you know that David, who is in Central London, is fine and was unaffected. Thank God.

Posted by Antz at 11:42 AM | Permalink | | |

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Life can be tough as a dedicated Mac user. It's true we have the best-looking PCs on the market and we have usability that any Windows user would sell his or her own grandmother for; but there are some times that are almost impossible to do on a Mac that anyone with a Windows-based PC can do within seconds. Last night I finally lost my battle to get a web-cam to work with any Mac MSN client out there.

It should be easy. Plug in a USB web-cam and open MSN Messenger; within seconds i could be chatting via video to my mates around the world (not that any of them live further afield than Wigan). Not so if you 'think differently'. For a start the range of Mac-compatible web-cams is tiny compared to Windows ones.

Secondly (you might be surprised to discover if you use the PC version) the Mac version of MSN Messenger doesn't actually support audio and video in any way shape or form; in fact there are loads of cool features us Mac-heads don't get to share in but don't get me started on that right now.

There are several Mac clients out there that let us Mac-users access the MSN Messenger network and give us access to loads of the features we miss out on by not being Windows users. Web-cam support, it turns out, ain't one of them. In fact the only one that makes an attempt at handling web-cams is an open-source one called Mercury.

Mercury is turns out is one of the most clunky hard to use programs out there; not helped by the fact that its ability to handle web-cams is about as good as my ability to carry boiling hot soup in my bare hands, it fails to work with pretty about any Mac-compatible USB web-cams. It's shitty forums and support section don't help much either.

So it looks like if I wanna use my web-cam online I'm gonna have to persuade my mates to move over to Yahoo Messenger. Despite MSN being unable to make video work through their network it seems that the people at Yahoo can. Shame none of my mates use it.

Posted by Antz at 1:12 PM | Permalink | | |

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

You gotta love people. For the last couple of years there seems to have been a never-ending flow of hard-up students and attention-seekers who've been selling their forehead to the highest bidder on eBay or though one of a few sites that have appeared to make a buck or two out of this very niche market. In exchange for a couple of hundred dollars the forehead's owner gets to sport the highest bidder's logo for a month or so. Online gambling seems to lead the rankings when it comes to signing up 'mobile billboards' in this odd-ball craze.

Then, of course, someone has to go that little bit too far; someone decides to make the advert permanently. Kari Smith from Utah in the US has auctioned the right for a company to have their logo permanently tattooed across her forehead. In exchange Goldenpalace.com have handed her the princely sum of $10,000 (which works out at about 34p a day if she lives til she's the ripe old age of 70).

Something tells me she might not be the smartest cookie in the box: To everyone else, it seems like a stupid thing to do. To me, $10,000 is like $1 million."

By the sound of it she may have a empty space up for rent inside her head as well as outside.

Posted by Antz at 1:28 PM | Permalink | | |

Monday, July 04, 2005

Well i've been going on about the Cropped or Not poll for the last month and so it is only fair that you should get to see to see the outcome. Out of the few hundred of you that took the time to vote one way or another 59% voted for the hair to go and so it has.

I've certainly got a few mates who'll be very pleased to see the hair back to a respectable length. Only trouble is I only bought a new pot of hair wax at the weekend; not a great deal of use for it now.

Posted by Antz at 10:40 PM | Permalink | | |

A month ago (to the very day) I launched the 'Cropped or Not' poll; which, as you'll all remember as you hang on my every word, was your chance to vote in the most exciting poll of the internet's population since, well, ever. It was your chance to say whether or not I should crop my hair like it was back in the good old days.

The votes have been literally trickling in and so far 59% of you want it cropped and, unsurprisingly 41% want it not. The poll will be closing at 8pm tonight so this is your very last chance to make a difference.

Unless the 'non' camp has a serious surge of support over the next few hours I can feel an imminent attack of the clippers. You can take the poll here [link now removed - poll finished].

Posted by Antz at 2:22 PM | Permalink | | |

Sunday, July 03, 2005

It's always really cool to get to make new friends; people you can have a laugh with. Over the last few months David and I have been chatting to a lad called Stu on the OutEverywhere site we're both members off. We've met up for drinks a couple of times and last night he and his shiny new boyfriend George came round to the house for a bit of a BBQ.

I say 'bit' but as David is the male equvilent of Nigella Lawson we actually had what could be described as an outside banquet; prawns, tuna steaks, homemade burgers... the list goes on. It certainly wasn't a case of whacking two quid's worth of econo-burgers on the flames and seeing what happens.

It's great when you can spend an evening with a couple of people and spend some much time time laughing that your head starts to ache and you start to wonder whether you'll ever manage to stop. Simply four people with nothing to prove getting on really well and

Posted by Antz at 9:01 PM | Permalink | | |

Friday, July 01, 2005

You might have noticed that the blog design has been tweaked a bit. It looks similar to the old version except that it doesn't use [totally evil] frames to hold the whole thing together and it now expands to fit the height of your screen. It also means that the old 'feature' of links opening inside the central blog frame has now has been banished to history.

There are still a few 'features' that I need to sort out with the site's menu that is getting a bit confused between the framed and non-framed parts of the site but hopefully I'll have fitted that before any of you notice.

UPDATE: I've sorted out the menus now so that everything doesn't open in separate pages and stuff. Hopefully everything should be back to normal now.

Posted by Antz at 5:39 PM | Permalink | | |

If you'd been keeping a regular eye on the blog over the last few months you'll know that a while back I walked away from my job; leaving three year's worth of work buillding a business from nothing to a turnover of nearly £1m behind.

This weekend will see the soft-launch of the brand new store I've been working on since I quit to see if it stands up to having people use it. The new store, called Loudclothing.com, sells rock t-shirts, music tees and other band merchandise and in time will feature a lot more as well. We're starting off doing what we know best and self-funding ourselves rather than relying on financial backers to put some cash in and then take most of it back out when we need it most.

The Loudclothing.com site still needs some work (and a lot of products to be added) before we launch properly but hopefully it'll cope with everything our customers can throw at it.

Posted by Antz at 3:40 PM | Permalink | | |

Anyone would think that tomorrow's Live 8 concerts are somehow going to cause the second coming of Christ to occur and an end to all desease, poverty and hate in the world by the amount of free promotion it's getting on the TV and radio. At the end of the day it's a free music festival featuring a bunch of WASPs who are probably doing it because it's the only chance they'll ever get to play to over five billion people in one go.

Getting people to sit and either watch the TV for the day or stand in one of several parks around the world listening to a free concert isn't going to make any government change its mind about helping third world countries deal with the issue of poverty.

You could add your name to the Live 8 list to show your support for the cancelling of third world debt though.

Posted by Antz at 2:20 PM | Permalink | | |

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