#236 a norwich blog

There is a saying that everyone has a book in them, I wish I knew what mine was so I could start writing it. As much as I want to combine the best-sellivity of Harry Potter with the bloodlettery of American Psycho, it doesn’t feel like it’s going to turn into a good read.

If you know the answer to what my book is, please tell me. Or maybe you know what yours is?

Update 16/04/08: I’ve binned the sociable plugin, so most of this post is irrelevant.

You may notice the presence of two new icons under each post that look something like this:

If you know what these are, click them. Do it! Otherwise, keep reading for your web2.0 / social media lesson for the day.

First icon: vote for the post on Digg.

Digg is a news site where articles are submitted and voted for by the public. The more votes an article gets, the higher up the listings it goes. The truth: as an end user Digg is crap, I’m just hoping to fluke some search engine rankings off this.

Second icon: bookmark the article in your del.icio.us account.

Del.icio.us is a great social bookmarking site, very useful even without the social aspect. Unlike Digg, I recommend using it. In short in allows you to bookmark websites and organise them by tags, groups etc. The best thing is being able to access bookmarks from anywhere, not just the browser you saved them in.

Also, any shared bookmarks can be viewed and searched by anyone. If you’re looking for something specific then searching del.icio.us can be more effective than Google, despite the flawed nature of tags.

On the social media subject, I take back everything bad I’ve said about Facebook. It’s actually quite impressive, just initially confusing. Myspace is still shit.

Any questions?

While there are other places on the internet you could read about films, they’re all wrong unless they agree with me. Today I shall be assassinating 28 Weeks Later, I’d say the following contains spoilers but that suggests it has anything worth spoiling.

Off we go. The story is weaker than Simon Quinlank’s lemon drink – frying pan, fire, repeat. It might have worked if it wasn’t the same frying pan every time, but evolving the plot would have been a great backup plan.

People in the film have absolutely no common sense. To my reckoning the virus outbreak, and therefore most of the film, could have been avoided at least four times:

1. They let the boy into their safe house when they know the infected are outside. It’s one of him, several of you, he has to die for the greater good.
2. The girl unblocks the safe house window-slats to look outside, giving away their presence nicely.
3. Annoying kids sneak out of the safe area of the city and find their infected Mother.
4. Despite having seen first hand what “the rage” does, Robert Carlisle’s character kisses the obviously infected wife.

I spent the whole film hoping that the main characters would be mutilated by zombies because it’s all they deserved for being so stupid. It ruins the drama when “will they live” becomes “I don’t care if they live“.

Finally, Bob Carlisle’s zombie vanishing tricks and firebomb immunity were ridiculous. One and a half films have shown “the rage” to turn people into mindless killing machines, then inexplicably it turns one man into a zombie Solid Snake.

In defense of 28 Weeks Later, nearly all modern horror films are rubbish. What do you think, was 28 Weeks Later crap, is the horror genre more stale than old bread, or has The Departed spoiled me so much that I can’t enjoy any lesser film? Answers in the comments.

I was always under the impression that PC World were a nightmare for returns. This is possibly based on something I heard from a friend of a friend a very long time ago, but people always remember bad experiences even when they were those of others.

Anyway, I bought a new router from them because my current one has become sentient and decides that I don’t always need wireless. I wouldn’t usually use PC World but they have the good-on-paper D-Link DSL-924 at a competitive price.

Medium-length story short, the new router’s admin software did not like Mac browsers. Back to the store, “this won’t work with my Mac”, refunded. I expected that to be much more difficult.

Voila, a positive customer service experience. Well done PC World, even though your TV adverts do suck.

For the first time in seven months of living in Norwich’s supposed red-light district, I was asked if I was “looking for business“. There was even the offer of something cheap as she only needed to earn twenty pounds. I didn’t ask.

Still, she opened with “hi” and a smile, which is more than I’ve ever had from a Lidl employee. I doubt she had any soup to sell though.

Excuse the Magic: The Gathering references, it’s my slight excitement about Future Sight spilling onto the blog.

In order to keep up with the Joneses 2.0, I’ve sorted out a del.icio.us account. For the uninitiated, it’s like favourites but stored on the internet for all to witness, like digital laundry.

If the prospect of rooting through my bookmarks excites you then I suggest you click right here. Perhaps you would just like to know what else has been tagged with “Norwich blog“. You could use this kind of knowledge to spark fascinating conversations at cocktail parties.

According to Google webmaster tools, unfunked.org was last crawled on December 25th 2006. As well as this, unfunked.org appears to have no backlinks. Both these things suggest that this blog shouldn’t be indexed, yet individual blog posts are making the listings.

It’s all very mysterious, like the girl that Peter Andre warbled about.

“She had legs up to her neck”

Saturday saw me gracing Norwich Waterfront* for Meltdown. It was suitably the same as always, personal musical highlights being:

• Bodyrox – Yeah Yeah
• Bloc Party – Helicopter
• Klaxons – Golden Skans

Apparently Klaxons are playing UEA and have sold out, no doubt bought up by students with little better to do than know about gigs. I have Deftones tickets though, didn’t beat me to them ones you workshy slackpants.

* I assume that the Waterfront website only appeals to the “people” who use MySpace. The Klaxons site however is special, like how websites were when we all used Netscape 3.

Over a grand of technology went into drawing this Viva Piñata animal. Worth every penny for the pirate hat alone.