Category: The IT Crowd

xblogging

I’ve felt bloody terrible today, its been pretty stressful with uni and terrible housemates. Looks like my housemates who are sposed to sort out and pay the gas bill have not, and we may get our gas, and possibly electricity cut off.. fecking idiots, plus we’ll be charged over £330 for the privledge.

The worst thing is that it may affect MY credit rating! This got me pretty stressed, and the only response i have heard from the 2 who were sposed to paythe bill was… “We’ve already paid it”, now forgive me if i have missed something but i dont think British Gas would send out a letter saying we are being cut off if they had paid the bill!!!

Then i got an email saying that i have missed a number of labs and i have to go see my lecturer next week, or i may fail the lab coursework. Which just added to my stress!
So i’ve kind of loafed around and done nothing.

But i wasnt going to let the whole day go by without a blog, oh no.

Today both Darkplace and The IT Crowd DVDs were confirmed with release dates, and are availalbe for preorder on Amazon. Darkplace 7th July and The IT Crowd 9th October (very close to my birthday Hint! Hint!)

The Mirror for the IT Crowd episodes is having a bit of a bandwidth problem… They used up 1762GB of Bandwidth in the first 7 days!! So i thought i could get you guys to help him out by clicking a few of hits adverts or even giving him a small donation via paypal to help him keep the server up and the IT Crowd available to the whole world.
(Dont forget to disable Adblock!)

I’m going to be swanking it up in a hotel room like this in May for a wedding im going to with Lauren (all free of charge of course :P)

Check out this blog by Pedro Silva, he works for MSDN. It looks like they are developing something rather similar to “Visual Assembly” (my final year project, the website needs updating tho) as an add-on to Visual Studio 2005 called DSL Tools, (No not Damn Small Linux) its short for Domain-Specific Language Tools.

Its pretty cool that im actually doing something that microsoft considers a valid software concept, although im sure theirs will be much better than mine!


You might have noticed that i have a new link in my affiliates section: ThinkGeek, this is an awsome webshop, i would buy soo much from there if i lived in the US, namely Jolt Cola and the really cool mugs and t-shirts!

So if you feel like checking it out, i think i get 7% if you buy anything from them after clicking my link. Already made £3!
Check out this shot of my dinner yesterday:

A nice healthy 5 Bits of extra thick bacon all covered in melted cheese!

I recevied a little gift from Ergotron today as well, which will be getting a fullon review here tomorrow, heres a sneak peak picture, and the fancy camera i used to take some of the photos with:

I’ve also nearly finished Download Vista, and in Uni today downloaded a Ubuntu Live CD in 2 mins (40Mb Connection), so if i get board over the weekend then i might end up doing a bit of OS tinkering.

Oh and a reminder that there is now 2 weeks left in the Atariboy Logo competition, didnt want you to forget now :P
Keep you eyes open tomorrow for a possible Firefox 2 Alpha release as well ;)

And my technorati rank has gone up again: 7,273

eblogging

I’ve been coding all day, so im going to have a break and relax with my beloved blog, some bacon and a massive mug of tea.

My project is coming along nicely, i have finished off a lot of things that needed to be done and reduced my massive to-do list by quite a lot. If your particually interested you can read my project proposal here (PDF)
Quick Screen shot:

Seems that my earlier Speedblogging isnt a new thing, i dont have any links saved, but if you google it, a few pages come up, seems that its a blog without styling, just a large chunk of text and links to get the post out there as quickly as possible.

It was interesting, and i did it really fast, but afterwards i felt a bit like i had cheated, in the sense that it wasnt a very nice looking post, and not particually easy to read either. I doubt i will be doing it again for a while.

I’ve decided to compeletly stop the mega IM review, i dont have the time, or the inclination at the moment. Sorry guys.

Another thing i decided tonight is that at the start of april i will be dropping Windows XP, in favour of Win 2000 for gaming, Linux for general use and Vista for testing and coding. Prolly dual booting 2000 and linux on one drive and having vista on the other for when ever im feeling the need to tinker. No idea what distro i’ll use yet so any suggestions are welcome, keeping in mind that i much prefer UIs to Command Lines.

I’ve prefered Gnome to KDE the few times i’ve used them both, but im not too fussed as long as it works well and is easy to configure.

One other thing, can anyone confirm for me that the .net 2.0 framework is built into Vista? I’m pretty sure it is, but i cant find anything confirming it.

Keep those Atariboy logos coming too, there are some really good looking ones there, I have a definate fav at the moment, but there is still 2 weeks left, anything could happen!

Weblinks
Google have released a mobile verison of gmail, http://m.gmail.com its much more rapid than the normal verison, but it doesnt look anywhere near as nice.

There’s also a new verison of Windows Live search, although im not much a fan of microsofts previous search engines, i have to say this one is fast and responsive and give you good results too. [thanks rappy]
The Geeks of Hazzard – a very cool podcast/weblog, love the style sheet on their page too.

After Mikes IT crowd Remix, a contest has shown up and its got mike working on a much better verison with our resident mixmaster comaboy, i’ll keep you posted, but the guitar bits i can hear through the walls sound really good. [thanks crazy]

And i’ll finish with a plug for the IT Crowd group on flickr, which is great :P and a couple pics of the beautiful Lauren

Monday Night Blog

I’ve been really busy this weekend, so not much time to blog unfortunatly.

I’m designing a website at the moment using XHTML/CSS for Comaboy’s birthday, It will be here at Comaboy.com, I also might be designing a site for an Art Dealer as well, although its not confirmed. I’ve been using this site as a great resource for css.

I also found this clever site StrangeBanana, it creates a random CSS style every time you load it, some of them look pretty sweet.
Wordpress went down again this morning, and i couldnt read any posts on any wordpress.com blogs, a little worrying, hopefully we will have some news or and update post from the developers soon explaining whats going on. My guess is that there are some new impressive features coming ;)

Heres a great article about how marketing folk should approach bloggers if they want them to promote their product.

The Best IT crowd mirror i have found so far, although it looks like its home hosted or similar, so be kind with it.

Theres been a bit of interest in Logo Competition, i know of at least 4 people that a designing one, i can’t wait to see what they have planned, thanks to Niceguy for spreading the word here too.

Heres a few blogs i’ve been watching recently: Neurotic Kiss, Tales from the Dust, Helpdesk Knowledgebase and I’m a Nerd, i’ve also added a few more blogs to my blogroll, check them out –>

I’ve fell in love with this case/mini pc, its basically an embedded linux webserver. The case only costs £20 and the PC board itself is another £80, but i dont really think i know enough about linux to make a good use of it.
More details here, and buy it here.

IT Crowd Withdrawls

Seems like quite a few people are suffering from the lack of any more episodes of the IT crowd.

Thats right, the series is over but will be returning later this year hopefully. But what can we fill the void with? Not normal TV thats to be sure!!

Fear not tho, I have a show that will save you, at least for a few days…

Darkplace!

This is my favourite show of all time, the premise is that it was made in the 80’s but much too scary to be shown, until now.

Its done to look so incredibly dodgy and badly filmed that it comes off very funny, Richard Ayoade (Moss from the IT Crowd) stars as Thornton Reed.

You can watch the full first episode here

More details on SaveDarkplace and on Garth Marenghi’s Myspace page, the is also a DVD coming very soon.

That should tide you over for a little while.

Linky

What ever this Origami thing is here is a video from microsoft about it which they prolly dont want you seeing yet. (Looks pretty crappy to me!)

I also noticed the scrob hardly ever comments anyone but himself: His cocomment posts

All the IT Crowd episodes can be found mirrored here too, although you will have to strip the DRM yourself or get them via torrents if you dont have windows media player.

I’m also still looking for a linux blogger to help out with my upcoming battle of the IMs, preferrably with good english skills too!

I made a little chicklet for my site too, feel free to splash it about!

The IT Crowd Episode 5

Episode 5 is now online and avaiable for download here from the Channel 4 website.

It looks like channel 4 has listened to its viewers, and removed the DRM from this episode, although you need to be in the UK to download it from their website.

For Anyone outside the UK you can download Episode 5 from Atariboy.co.uk

IT Crowd Homepage – Digg – Downloads – Screencaps

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Catch Up

I’m spending the day at home today, my cold has got worse, i feel like crap and have too much work to do as well. Our shower has broken again as well, its just not a good week.

Lauren has been with me all week as well which has been wonderful, but it also means that i dont sit infront of my pc all day long, i havent really seen digg or any of my usual blog reads, so i’m a little behind, i’ve also got a couple private beta invites for things as well, but just haven’t had the time to investigate.

Atariboy.co.uk is kind of online… there is an index and a contact page, again i haven’t really had the time to sort it out. I have uploaded episode 1 and 3 in widescreen .avi form, as well as an .mp3 of the intro music, episode 4 should be on there in widescreen .avi in a few days and tomorrow episode 5 in DRMfree .wmv

BlogMad!

I’ve signed up to BlogMad.net, which when released will help increase the traffic to your blog by the same amount that you view other blogs, i.e the more blogs you view, the more will view yours. Sign up here


XPize is a little download which updates all the icons, pics and wizards that microsoft couldnt be bothered to update for Windows XP, if you like your XP looking nice then this will suit you perfectly.

Have you ever wanted some of those little badges that you see all over the place, but can never find the one you want?
On this site you’ll find about 4000 of them!

And lastly Zooomr, a cheap copy of flickr that adds a couple of things that the average person would never use, this is not what web2.0 needs, this is not what the interweb needs full stop, people should be putting time into creating something new and useful that doesnt already exist, and if you are going to do it, at least make it better than flickr!! Zooomr fails to get close to flickr from the outset.