Friday 21 March 2008

Things I've noticed about this site.

  • The spellchecker does not understand the word 'blog'.
  • I don't know how to reply to comments. I am quite computer literate and this makes me believe it is not possible.
  • It sends me two emails for every one comment posted in reply to a blog.
  • It really wants me to have a blogroll. All I want is to call it 'friends blogs', but it doesn't like that name. It always wants to put new links under 'blogroll'.
  • The spellchecker does not understand the word 'blogroll'.
  • It hates macs. It wont allow them paragraphing privileges.
  • Apart from the problems above, I like it.

Thursday 20 March 2008

Things I've noticed about my blog.



  • Entries are longer than in most peoples, especially if I claim in the opening paragraph that it will be short.





  • Most entries are written between one and four o'clock in the morning.





  • I mix whatever I'm doing at the time of writing, with whatever I'm actually writing about.





  • I often write about whatever I'm going to say in my next video, making it pretty much pointless, unless you just want to be ahead of the game! I'm gonna try and change this one. The blog will officially include more unique material from now on.





  • It seems to be linked to youtube. Maybe because the other blogs I read are by youtube friends, more likely that youtube is basically 'blue skies central' on the internet and as such it has taken over my life. 





  • This entry in no way fits in with the others. It follows none of the above rules apart from the 1am - 4am writing.


Wednesday 19 March 2008

Youstage

So I already put something up tonight, but I've taken it down because it has a part two and I want them to be one after the other, and I feel like writing this.

I've not really written anything about the upstage competition since the opening rounds which we got through. Not because I didn't want to, it just happened to come during the period of over a month that I didn't write anything.

Well tonight Alex sent an e-mail saying he wouldn't be able to make it to the finals. He can't get out of work.

This has put me in a pretty bad mood. And by pretty bad I mean like, shit.

I'm not mad at him or anything, I might have been if he dropped out just because he decided to, which he was thinking about a while ago, but it's work, what can you do? Back when he was saying he was gonna drop out originally, and Smiv was too, I had almost decided that I would too. Then a Myles Dyer [epic] email turned them around and I've been pretty positive about it since. Well, until tonight.

I'm still gonna do it, but I'm not looking forward to it. It's not even that I don't get on with the other guys, I mean I get on with everyone, I'm too easy going for my own good. But that week was stressful beyond belief and Alex was the one who was there at the end of the day, just chilling with him after the craziness of the day kept me sane. If I think back to that week and take him out of it... I'm not even gonna do that, I can tell that's a mistake. But then esentially that's the same as looking forward to the finals. Shit.

It would be a whole lot better if it was just semi-finals and a final. that's two or three days. Add the quarters and it starts to sound like a week, and a week is sounding like a very long time right now.

A part of me just wants to say 'fuck it.' Go to the gathering instead. See all the guys again, meet Nic! I'm never gonna get to fucking meet Nic because of this! But I can't do that for a lot of reasons. Obviously I couldn't let the others down or the people who've watched, who are basically awesome. And let's be honest, it's three days work that, if we win, will buy me a video camera and that amazing mic I've been looking at.

But that's what it feels like right now: work. It didn't feel like that an hour ago.

You know what it's 3am, I'm going to bed before I make myself look like even more of a twat.  I bet I sound like Ash for fucks sake! (Apologies for the private joke.)

If anyone wants to do anything nice for me to make me feel better that would be great.
Especially if it's getting Alex time off work.

Monday 17 March 2008

103% complete.

Computers can be so stupid sometimes.

I won't tell you what it is that's completed and then some, because either you won't care or you'll be really annoyed, which is funny.

So this is a short message (I know I said that last time) to say that I've been sat here doing some boring, must be done tasks, which include a fair bit of waiting around for things to finish. Having gone through all my email, youtube, myspace, facebook... etc, I decided to come here and see if I couldn't learn a little more about this site. All I've really worked out so far is how to post blogs, which is about everything I want from the site in fairness, but I had a feeling there was a further 3% lurking somewhere.

While looking around I went onto the statistics page and one of the things it tells you is 'referrals'. For example, there is a link on my youtube channel, so it tells me how many people have clicked on that. Well one of the places people came from was Ben Loka's blog, which I didn't know existed. I looked and it was predictably interesting and full of wonderful Lokaness, so I immediately subscribed to it on this new blog centre thing that nerimon (I never know whether to call him Alex or nerimon, because people know who I mean by nerimon but Alex is... well it's his name!) introduced me to. I'll get back to that. Looking around Ben's page I saw where my link was, he has a lovely little list on the side entitled 'youtubian friends'. Breezing passed how happy this made me, it leads me (and I apologise for the time it took me to get here) to the point, which is that I stole it.

Maybe it's a common thing to do, I'm not sure, but I like it. So I have added my own lovely little list, which is on the right of this page, and is cunningly entitled 'Friends blogs'. It has links to all the blogs I read, it's a short but distinguished list at the moment but it's there if you're interested.

I mentioned before a 'blog centre' Alex (I went with Alex this time, that's odd) introduced me to, and I think that's what's made me more interested in blogs over the last few days. I've always been annoyed and even put off of blog sites because there are too many of them and I never know when people have new entries. Well problem solved, thanks google. If you go to www.google.com/reader you can subscribe to people who are on loads of different sites. So if you, like me, love the idea of reading blogs but can't keep up, then I suggest you give that a go. Also if you have igoogle as your homepage you can add a google reader section on there. Right I think that's more than enough free advertising for google. Looking back, I especially like the part where I said, "if you, like me, love..." how pulled straight off a low budget, daytime tv advertisement script is that?!

Oh and for fans of irony, Alex's blog was the only one I couldn't get to work on google reader.

So that's been my experience of getting more into blogging, which, it seems, has even resulted in a second post this week! I've even just though of another one I want to write, this is getting ridiculous!

Oh, on a totally unrelated matter, if you saw my latest video, I mentioned that the previous one, a cover of Reptilia by The Strokes, had a lot of views (compared to my other videos) and I didn't know why. Well, I figured it out. Go to youtube and search 'the strokes'. Ah, what's that, top of the list? HA!

Though it has brought an increase in the number of negative comments with it, I'm pretty good at ignoring those, but I do wish I'd spent more time on it now! I recorded it when I was well on my way to being very ill. The vocals aren't great, as I've been told many times by people who think that would be, what, helpful? Still those comments come with the territory. I'm glad it's getting the views. I looked at one of those 'honours' lists that they do. I saw it sat there with charlieissocoollike, fiveawesomeguys, and BenLoka's videos, I was even on there twice because of Alex's latest video! (Alex 2 - 1 nerimon. That's got to be an injury time winner!) I know it's silly to care about honours and views and such, but it is quite an important part of my plan; becoming 'big' on youtube because I use it for the social aspect, which the stats aren't important for, but also as a promotional tool for the music, and the fact that I'm doing well with the numbers makes it all worth while in an objective, emotionless sense. Subjectively it's all obviously worth it simply because of the amazing people I'm meeting.

And I started by saying this would be a short message! You should be so lucky.

Wednesday 12 March 2008

Oh dear, I have neglected you!

It has been brought to my attention that I neglect my various internet pages.  I think I've been better with youtube lately but yeah... no blog posts in February. Ah.

Well, for some reason as Dom sings the Spice Girls to me over Stickam, the old blog just came to mind!  I am pretty tired so this will probably quite short. I'm at that point where you don't know whether you're more hungry or tired, and you need to follow one of those instincts soon. I think I'm gonna go with sleep and leave food for the morning. Dom is now on to Take That if you're interested. It's good. 

Ok so blogging... how does it go again? Oh what's going on with me, yes that's it! Well I'll start with today I suppose, not that I did anything particularly interesting. Well this blog isn't about how interesting my life is, is it?!  The only incredibly interesting thing that happened, unless you count me unsuccessfully attempting to write a song for MuggleSam, is a friend of mine finished his EP!

Ok it would be better news for my blog readers if it was my EP, but live with it. I don't think I've mentioned him before so here is your formal introduction; This friend is also known as Jay. I'll give you a link to his youtube channel at the bottom, it would be a substantial missed opportunity for you not to go there and subscribe to his videos.  So he has been working on an EP, if you don't know that's basically half an album, and it's what I'm working on too (though mine is unfortunately rather static at the moment on account of my lack of a good microphone.) I have been talking to Jay about it for a long time and was more excited than it would be realistic to expect! But I wasn't disappointed. I actually felt proud of him, which is fairly ridiculous as I have had nothing to do with his musical education at all. I suppose you can be proud of friends... Or I'm just weird. Well at any rate, it's piano based, alternative, low fi, full of awesome and free. I'll link that too, you can decide for yourself. I told him I was jealous because I wish I'd been recording when I was his age (15... I think) and that's very true. I'm constantly devastated by the fact I was too damn shy to go with this music thing until I was, what, 21? I'd love to hear the songs I had inside me as a teenager. Oh well, at least I'm doing it now.


Right this is quite long now isn't it? I haven't really talked about my life at all! Well I'll be going back to do the upstaged final in a couple of weeks, I'm sure you'll hear about that soon enough. It's just in my head because we had a little meeting about it tonight.

There you go, that last paragraph is enough to cover my life, its 3:33 now, which although I like as a time, is quite late. So I'll be ending this blog, which basically turned into an advert for Jay's EP. Oh well, it deserves a blog! I said I'd do a video for him actually; I'll do that in the next couple of days.

So there you go then; a blog! I'll try to make the next one less than a month away.



 Jay's channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/ofarevolution441

And a free download of his EP:  http://verythree.blogspot.com 

p.s. Mine will not be free. Just feel you should all know that!

p.p.s. It's now gone 4am and that means it's far too late for proofreading or spellchecking. I’m sure you'll get over that!