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A god awful mistake

Walking from coast to coast is something that I have been looking forward to for some time now. For years me and my friends have sat down the pub, slightly drunk, with the promises of “Yeah, yeah, definitely next year”. Next year comes and goes and the same promise is made again in the hopes that next year nothing will get in the way of our plans.

Well finally the year has arrived where the organisation has been put in place early, the time has been booked off work and nothing is set to get in our way. We are going. The trains tickets are bought and paid for, the campsites are booked, I’ve bought and read the guide book and now there is nothing else to do but get up on the day in question, stop talking about it and do it.

Cambridge Beer Festival from the air

One thing that has never had to be postponed, however, is the annual pilgrimage to Cambridge beer festival. Every year myself and a few others get up early to battle the public transport system of Great Britain so that we can arrive at opening time to get the most out of our initial outlay in transport fees. Every year we drink probably a little bit more than we should and then we get the last bus home, taking with us out souvenir pint glasses to add to the ever growing collection.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. Sitting in the pub the other day we were talking about the forthcoming walk, I was explaining where it was, how far, and from where to where, all the usual things that people ask. And then Darren say it. “So your not going to be around for Cambridge beer festival then?” As he says it the words hit me and I realised my terrible mistake. I was the one who was organising the trip so I proposed the dates and nobody objected so that’s what I went with. It’s too late to change it now, like I said the tickets are bought and the campsites are booked. There is nothing I can do about it now. I need to make better use of my calendar, scratch that, I need to start making use of my calendar.

Jonny, my walking partner in this expedition, was there at the time and he seemed to have a “oh well, that’s a bit of a shame” sort of attitude. I  really want to go though. I have’t missed it since I started going, so now there is going to be a hole in my glass collection. Not good. Anyone who was there when Darren revealed my error will know that it was more than a week ago. I am only writing this now because I have only just checked the dates on the beer festivals website, living in ignorant hope that the dates were later than usual. They are not.

To make things worse there are a number of smaller beer festivals in the area this in the next few weeks. All of them lie on the same weekends that I have tickets For the Camden Crawl and The Great Escape in Brighton. I had hoped to go to these instead. No such luck there either. I’m not really crying myself to sleep over this in the way that all of the above makes it sound. I’m just disappointed really. I’ll just have to accept that my pint glass collection won’t grow quite so much this year.

A step too far

(I apologise for the lack of pictures in this post. I’ll try and crowbar some in from Google later)

In a few weeks time I’m going to be going to Cumbria with my friend Jonny to attempt, and hopefully complete, the coast-to-coast walk as the guide book written by Alfred Wainwright set out. Anyone who has heard about the details of this walk will testify that it is not a stroll down a country lane on a bright Sunday afternoon. In light of this I thought it would be best if I were to get a bit of training in.

It started off earlier in the week when I thought to myself that a walk was probably a good idea. However every day the weather report looked ominous, and so every day I put it off ’til the next. Until on Monday I thought “stuff this! It’s going to rain every day until we go at this rate, I’ll just have to get a bit wet and in any case, a little water never hurt anyone”. So I set off.

It has been said by wiser men than me that if you are walking you should have a goal because walking without a goal is aimless and with no aims no success can be recognised, and, if you don’t succeed in what you are doing then what is the point in doing it? With this in mind and it recently being international record shop day I set my sights on David’s Record Shop in Letchworth town centre and at quarter to ten I set off.

I knew at the get-go that this was going to be a long one. For one thing looking at the map and realising I was going to have to as near as damn it cross an entire ordinance survey map AND get back again before it got dark. Another little thing that shouldn’t make any difference is that I don’t even live in the same county as Letchworth. This mental barrier seams to make a place feel so much further away than a place truly is, I mean Manchester and Lancaster truly are a great distance from one another and they are both in Lancashire.

I left town by my usual path going though the moors. It was quite quiet for that time of day, usually I would have crossed paths with many a dog walker from the nearby villages but not today. Maybe it was the unusual quietness of that morning that bought out the mutjack that ran in front of my path, and then stood paralysed on the spot, watching me the entire time as I walked past from the relative safety of the dense tree line.

As I was making for a different target to my usual walk I decided to veer off  at an early point and had more as the crow flies. This was my first mistake of the day. I was still within a few miles of home and I found myself in a strange predicament in my head. I found myself, so close to home and yet not knowing which path to take. There was a part of me which instinctively went to turn around and reach for the map in my bag, but this was stopped very quickly by the part of me which said that I should know where I am going. It sat on my left shoulder like the personified cartoon devil in cartoons, it sat there mocking me, “WHAT! Don’t you know where you are? You idiot. All those times we’ve driven past here.  Didn’t you pay attention?” Logic stepped back in. “Lets be sensible about this, we don’t want to end up going down a dead end track now do we?”. As good was about to prevail over evil I walked around a corner and into the next village. There, waiting at the bus stop was an elderly lady at a bus stop, waiting for a bus (I assume she was waiting for a bus that is although quite what else you would wait for at a bus stop is beyond me). Then the devil did mock hard and in front of the old lady I decided to save face and made a snap decision, which promptly landed my walking down the side of a busy road with no path or grassy verges for safety. Perhaps my real first mistake was actually not consulting the map rather than choosing a path I did not know, either way it was a mistake, and a lesson to be learned. Always check your map when you are unsure kids!

Dodging the traffic I quickly made my way down the road to where I had planned to cross the road before I left home that morning. Taking the path on the left I then crossed a field, went down a lane,  detoured around a footpath that was overgrown and then crossed the A6. I could keep on describing briefly my route, however it is tedious for me to write and no doubt for you to read, nearly as tedious as the rain which set in soon after the A6, so I shall move on to Letchworth itself.

I looked at my phone as I approached Letchworth town centre. It was nearing three o’clock. A quick bit of maths told me that if I did not turn around very soon then I would not make it home before night fell. This is something, he thought of which I did not relish, so I picked up the pace. Fumbling with my phone in the rain, my touch screen went mad and  started typing words which seemed more like Basque than English. Sheltering under a nearby canopy and retyped in Google Maps asking for directions to David’s record shop. It took but a moment for it to return a map of Letchworth town centre with two dots on it. Two dots so close together it was hard to distinguish them as the separate entities that were myself and my destination. I turned around and there was David’s record shop. The voice inside started mocking again. I had no time to listen though. Time was pressing on and I needed to start making my way back. I moved without further thought into the shop and quickly had a browse round. A few things caught my eye but my thrifty nature whittled down my selection to two albums; one by Smoke fairies and the other by Laura Marling. I payed for the music and left.

I left the shop quickly and started making my way down the road which I had first mad my way into town. Then I saw it out of the corner of my eye: Subway! My stomach made an instant growl, a knee jerk reaction as if it too had seen the fast  food sandwich shop, sent here from the gods. I thought about if for about half a second and then made my way inside.

One “foot-long-chicken-pizziola-with-double-cheese-on-hearty-Italian” and about 15 minutes later, I finally actually set off back home, just as the rain started again. I take a slight detour that I hadn’t noticed on the way into town which saved me about a minute. And this was basically my thought process all the way back. Constantly looking at the map trying to find a shorter alternative to get me home that little bit quicker. I can already hear the lectures that I’m going to get from my parents and I know that no one wants that so I push on.

Around Hitchen I check the time on my phone. “3% battery life remaining. Please connect charger”. Great! I was in the middle of a field. Where was I going to get a charger from. Thank you very much android. I wouldn’t have been as annoyed it’s just I only took it off of the charger about ten minutes before I left, earlier that morning. I knew exactly what it was though. I was using a tracking app to see how far and how fast I was walking, seeing how close I was to being ready for the northern hills I was training for. The trouble is the damn GPS it uses devours the battery. Not much I can do. If I try to make a hone call that will surely kill the last of the battery before the call goes through, ditto texts. I thought the best I could do would be to leave it. At least it would tell me the time for a bit longer before it died completely. Final battery failure occurred at around half past four, many many miles still to cover.

It was around about the time of final battery failure that the weather turned again. I knew that from my outbound walk that this was about the most remote part of the walk (putting this into prospective this is the home counties, not far outer reaches of Scotland, so perhaps remote is the wrong word, but it’s the best I can up with, lets just say that its a few miles from anywhere significant). So with no technology, no company, no contact with the rest of the world and the rain starting again I again made a concerted effort to carry on, setting my sights on the county line. At least then I’d be in the right county. The border came and went. If it wasn’t marked on the map I wouldn’t have know I had crossed it. What was for me a significant mile stone in reaching the county I call home in the driving rain, was not even celebrated in a little “Welcome to Bedfordshire” sign. Not that I supposed that there would be on the these days well under used footpaths of anywhere that isn’t a national park.

Soon I had made it back to the part of the countryside that I often walked in, or at least, I could see it. I was on the top of a hill by a small industrial area looking down on a valley which I walked through often. This is a view I haven’t seen before. I see this valley often, but always from the other side. My target is obvious, a huge water tower on the top of the hill which always marks my way home. The rain had let off to a mild drizzle which I was grateful for. I wasn’t at all feeling cold, damp, wet, miserable. All those things you expect someone to talk about after a day of walking for mile after mile in the English countryside. My boots had kept my feet dry, my jumper had done the same for my top half and got only knows how but my jeans had seen me though the worst of it too! Until now.

I had looked at the map and elected a slightly different route back which I thought would save me some time. The skies still bright despite their clouds hiding all signs of blue I was beginning to think I could actually make it back before night fell. Walking through a small spinney, which plainly doesn’t see much in the way of people walking though I disturbed several spiders webs which attached themselves to be and I startled a couple of pigeons. Coming out the other side I expected to find a field with a gangway in the crops for me to pass though. What lie before me was a golden sea of oilseed rape, and through it, the tiniest rivern of unplaneted land which was barely wide enough for a mouse to pass. You couldn’t say that the path was not there, there was an instinctive line though which you could follow, but it was not wide enough for a person to pass. Not thinking much of it at the time I waded through. The problem is now not that it was raining. The problem was that it had raining. All of the plants were soaked themselves and after about thirty seconds of being in the field, so was I. My jeans soaked it all up like a sponge. What’s worse is that not only was it wet but it was cold and wet, and the wind was starting to pick up too. I wasted no time getting out of this field. The following field had a path around its edge, giving me some time to dry off, just a little. My legs warmed up the water that was in my jeans and things seemed a little better. That was until another field which was almost identical. I sighed, and now at a slightly low ebb, I went though, the field  quickly returning my legs the the cold that they were before. I was put in mind of some basic survival tips that I was told, about how even in the summer you should never jump in a river because of the extreme cold that they can be.

The last of the challenging parts of the walk over, I knew all of the paths from now on. I was well and truly back on familiar grounds, literally. Just one last obstacle to overcome. The cold. I had expected to warm up again like I did the first time, however the wind was that much stronger, my clothes were that much wetter, and I was that much more tired.  I just felt cold. I was concious that I was taking smaller strides than I was before and I knew that I was getting really tired. Not that ooo-I’m-a-bit-sleepy sort of tired, the proper I’ve-ran-out-of-energy sort of tired. Every step became harder to take, even though I was now on nice flat ground with and end goal in sight to lead my way home. I started playing a game of “How long will it take to find my body if I collapse here”, realising that the answer to that was too long and all things considered I wasn’t planning on an early death just yet, I shuffled my way up the last hill.

I finally made it home about 10 minutes before it got dark. My parents had tried to ring me but with my battery dead they had got worried, especially as it was raining, so they had been out driving around looking for me. Now I feel bad. “You should have left a plan of where you were going”, they said, I know I should, now I feel really bad because they were driving all over the place, not knowing which direction to look. I explained the situation with my battery. “You could have called on a payphone”. I didn’t even think of that. Payphones to me are an obscurity of a previous generation, something I hadn’t even considered, despite walking past several of them. “Oh, and your dinner’s getting cold”. Great, and they had made dinner as well. And just to top it off when I took my boots off there was a nice big blister on the side of each heal.

OK, positives. What I am going to take from this is first of all that just because it is not the lake district or the highlands of Scotland, it doesn’t mean I can go out for a walk as long as that with just a map and a bottle of water. All that they said when training for D of E wasn’t just for insurance purposes and the over used “what if ” situation that ignorant youth assumes will never arrive. As a subsection to this thought there is a reason why they said to not to where jeans, “because you will get soaking wet and its not nice” they will say. The youthful I-can-do-anything-me teenager is then only reminded of when he stood in a puddle in the town centre, where there are many buildings to block the wind, and plenty of phone signal to call for help if required. No, from now on I shall make sure I have gaiters on for anything that isn’t bone dry weather, and as soon as I can afford it, some trousers that are going to repel water at least marginly better than sponge.

Secondly. My phone is getting an upgrade. I have already ordered a replacement battery with nearly three times the amp/hours. This should see me through a single day, no matter how far I go. Also it means that I will have my current battery as an emergency spare which I can take as an.. er.. an emergency spare. It’s worth pointing out that I am also looking into some solar panel chargers for the coast-to-coast walk. On these long treks there may not be a plug at the end of the night. Indeed I know this will be true on several nights and with the phone taking GPS readings all the time I don’t want to have to use the emergency battery if I can help it.

Thirdly, it may sound obvious and you will have been told this by every responsible adult from as long as you have been old enough to go out by yourself. Leave a route plan of at least your rough heading. I realised in the final few hours of my walk that I was genuinely out of energy and if it was much colder things could have gotten serious. As an aside to this when planning your route that you will tell to someone else, make sure you see how long it is. Make sure that the route is do-able in the time you have and is within your capabilities. My route stretched me slightly too far and it was touch and go as to whether I’d make it before the dark fell and I’d have to concede defeat and call a taxi, now there is something I really don’t want to have to do, for my prides sake. I don’t like the little voice inside that mocks me. I need to make sure I beat it every time.

I’m not sure exactly how far the walk took me. I know it was 21 miles when the phone died, along with its tracking app, looking at the map I would say it was at least another 10 miles back home. That is a long way but the Cumbrian hills are a lot steeper and it’s not much more than some of the longest legs on out walk is going to be anyway. I need to get back out there and train a bit more yet. Just as soon as the blisters have gone down a bit, that is!

EDIT: and another thing, always have 40p for a phone box!

 

Reading 2012 and what the world makes of it

Reading 2012 and what the world makes of it

This isn’t a rant to say how dare someone not agree with me because I like the Reading line up and they don’t. Of course you have the right to not like the Cure (god only knows why though because they ROCK!) and you can say that there is nothing else you want to go to. My question is has this  person even looked? Have they ventured beyond what they already know and and thought perhaps I might see what’s on at Hop Farm this year? It seems to me that if all they want to know about now is the next Glastonbury then probably not, and I think that’s quite sad.

I feel that this is probably quite a usual response from Mr. Joe Public to not even realise the existence of the smaller festivals because their line up was not announced on Radio 1. Perhaps we should lobby the radio stations to announce ALL festival line ups throughout the country. In fact YES, the more I think about that the more it makes sense. If the radio had a responsibility to announce the acts playing at all of the UK festivals then the smaller festivals would be heard, the name would be out there and people could make a decision on what festivals to go to actually knowing what festivals are there to go to. Now you might say that the charm of the smaller festival is that no one knows about them and that they are best left under the radar where only these that go looking will find them, leaving audiences that appreciate the music and provide the right atmosphere and yes I get that. However people won’t go to a festival because it’s name has been read out on the radio. I once sent a message into the radio which got read out on air, no one wanted to talk to me afterwards! But seriously people will know that a band that they like are playing and THAT is what will attract them. Generally most festivals will have a sort of musical vein which they travel down, collecting different artists from the same genre (I doubt Lady Ga Ga will ever be playing at Bloodstock). This means that the smaller festivals which can only afford one semi-well-known headline act will attract the attention of those interested people and they in turn will discover similar unknown artists, helping to improve the music industry as a whole by giving more exposure to the underground and unknown but within the genres of the festivals.

I think that this is a great idea and I hope it makes sense, in short ALL festival line ups should be announced on the BBC so that people have the chance to decide from the full list of festivals where they want to go. This will in turn help those starting out by showing casing more unknown artists to a wider audience that will attend the smaller festivals as a result. Or is this wasting too much of Fearne Cotton’s valuable time when she could be telling us all about her terrible shopping ordeal?

What I got for Christmas…

What I got for Christmas…

This is my first ever post from my new favourite toy, my new phone. Anyone who knows me at all will know that I really like my gadgets and6 “boys toys”, they’ll also probably note that I’m a tight git who saves his money for the important things, like beer and cider. So it was quite a shock to my friends when I turned up at the pub brandishing a new phone. “Must have been a Christmas present” they all responded. How well they all know me.

The purpose of this post is to see how easy it is to actually use, that’s why I’m writing a lot and saying very little, I’m trying to see how easy it is to type with. On that front I have to admit, it’s bloody excellent, the keyboard is very small and at first I had my reservations, but after a little getting used to I think it’s not such a bad little system; after all, I’ve written all this!

Some of the other things I got included sweets and chocolate (see below for a photo upload test) as well as q fruit press, as soon as I can find a good supply of apples then you watch the cider flow!

Happy Christmas and a happy new year to you all, I hope you had a good holiday and I’ll see you all soon.

 

T’ra

It’s been a while

It has been a long time since I last made a post. Since I last wrote about my ineptitude in the world of flash games and general lack of touch with the Zeitgeist in the world of computing and web design, I have become more and more involved with work, and not the job I first hoped for in life. I have now become a fitter of changing room furniture. This basicly means I screw lockers together in changing rooms for health clubs, spas, golf clubs, gyms and anywhere else that needs changing facilities.

I went to university with the hope that I would become more employable in the world of the internet, hoping to get a job in web development. After leaving university I applied for a few jobs, but it became apparent that I wasn’t going to get anywhere, and besides I was starting to become a bit disillusioned with the idea, I mean if I wasn’t able to motivate myself to work on my own projects at home then how in the world would I motivate myself to work on the more tedious problems that the boss would surely be giving me. This is my excuse as to why I haven’t been writing much here. Nothing relevant to the subject of the blog. This was supposed to be web design and development, but looking back on things and the way my life has gone I really should have looked for something different to do and kept the internet as a bit of a hobby. Something fun. Something I would want to do. I can say with some confidence that making websites has become just that again, and with that I have a renewed wish to get on with all those little projects that I had the idea but never got round to developing. I recently thought to myself that I was spending too much of my life not doing what I wanted to do, being too dependent on hoping that my friends would want to do something so I could tag along. No more. I am going to go to the concerts I want to see, write what I want to write, read what I want to read and go where I want to go.

Of course, I’m not stupid,  I’m not going to roam the streets forever more because it sounds like a better idea that work, I’ll need the money to do all the things in life that I want to experience. And in any case, in my line of work that in itself can be an experience worth having. Visiting Taymouth castle and the jobs in far off counties spring to mind immediately, as well as the thoughts for a soon approaching trip to Hamburg, Germany.

I think what I’m trying to say in this post is that life hasn’t gone the way that I originally hoped that it would, they have turned out better, even when I was resisting the change in my life and I tried to take a path which I now feel I’d be bored with. This website, as an advertisement for me as a web designer, really is defunct, I’m not a web designer, not professionally at least, it’s just a hobby (albeit a hobby that I now have a serious debt to pay off for).

I’m going to keep this website going as an overflow for multiple other websites which I am going to start up. There were many designs which I worked on at university which I am going to try to put online in the near future, many of these will have blog features that I will use as appropriate. Likelymoose will become my ‘any other business’ blog, for things which do not quite fit in my other creations, which will be slow in coming because its just a hobby.

Am I behind the times?

I was just having a quick stumble through the internet today when I came across an entire genre of flash games which I have never heard of before. I am talking about the amazing genre of web-cam flash games. All of the games require the user to enable their web-cam to do different things, turning you’re browser into a cheap version of the eye-toy, the
X-box Kinect or Playstation Move.

One game which I had fun playing for nearly two minutes before I got bored was called ‘Night of the Ninja’ in which the screen shows your web-cam and you have to bat away small cartoon ninjas which run onto the screen trying to sleigh you with swords.

Good idea, but it doesn’t really work because the mechanism is based on movement which means the slightest jolt of something you didn’t mean to move will cause you to kill more than you intended to. I think the easiest way to win is just to film a rave or a windmill, can’t go wrong.

My ponderings about CDs

Are CDs on their way out completely now? I wonder about this more and more now, the questions of; will I be able to continue to buy an album from a new artist any more? and if I do will they release a deluxe version of the album in six moths time which repeats the first album but with a few extra tracks, one of which you really wished was on the first version of the album that was purchased in the first place? (I’m looking at you Ellie Goulding!). I think this is just a marketing ploy which the record labels are now resorting to either; make you buy an album twice so that you have all of music you want (note: the very best song which sells best in the singles chart will be an extra in the second album), or the other musing I had was that the record labels are trying to move towards a download only system where they have no production costs of any tangible product which I know many people want almost as much as they want the music in the first place.

I think this will be more and more likely to be the case in an age where we become more and more dependant on computers for our day to day life. The young will be bought up to accept that loosing all of their information when the computer breaks, along with all of their music on iTunes will be a part of life that they should learn to accept. This is something that I will not condone and will out of principle not download any music any more. I have come to this conclusion while listening to an album which I have had in my list of CDs to buy for over three years now: Amylie – JUSQU’AUX OREILLES. A cracking album which I suggest that everyone listen to, you can sample the tracks off of the album at http://amylie.com/musique. Anyway while listening to the CD which I got for Christmas (thanks Mum!) I realised just how difficult it is to buy this CD. It has been on my list for over three years and in all that time I could not track down a copy and Mum, who bought me the copy I now have as a Christmas present, could only find one supplier who only had one copy. Such a limited run of CDs, for such a brilliant artist, such a waste. This is the quandary though, I could have gone straight into iTunes and downloaded the album three years ago but since then I would have lost the album twice over in complete and catastrophic hard drive failures. I know what anyone with any technical mind is going to say and it is going to involve either complex back-up systems, hard drives, jukeboxes, CD-Rs or all of the above. To which I say “Why should I have to?” The record companies are supposed to produce just that: a record. Not a file available for download but a tangible object which can be played with a cover and artwork and something to read, even if it is just the credits fr who was involved in the production.

Amylie CD

(Oh lord) Please don’t let me be misunderstood, I am not saying that we should all go with out downloads, renounce iTunes and all go back to vinyl, although that would be no bad thing. I myself have an iPod, which I use regularly, I am not ranting about digital compression and the quality of the sound being lost. What I am saying is that anyone who releases a CD should consider that not everyone is the same as them and just because they like their song that they should listen to it in the same way. Artists of the world give us back our CD option!

Some things in this world strike me as… odd

I was just sitting here, on my laptop, stumbling away a Sunday afternoon in November, when all of a sudden I heard coming through the crack in my window the jingly tones of an ice-cream truck. Surely at this time of year even the children of this fine town would shy away from the frozen treat. According to the weather channel, which I just checked, there are severe storms on their way, the met office have already issued weather warnings for gales, it is currently only 3°C and looking out of the window confirms that, yup!, it’s pitch black out there. My question to the world to try and explain for me, or indeed to the driver of said ice cream van, is how on earth can the running of an ice cream van be justified in these conditions?!?!? As a business proposition surely that is financial suicide, you would be better off not wasting the diesel and saving the money, especially at the cost of fuel these days!

A cartoon ice cream van

BSc (Hons.)

Today was (apparently) one of the biggest days of my life, the day in which al of my hard work and effort over the past 16 years of education come to a pinnacle and the establishment recognise my achievements by bestowing upon me the title of Bachelor of Science. Now as a graduate I can go into the world and correctly, although somewhat pretentiously, put letters after my name. Great.

I don’t know if it is just a male thing, or perhaps it is the company I keep but I found today that none of the people at the ceremony who I talked to at length were that interested in the day and I have to be honest, neither was I. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I went, I can tick it off in my life box saying “Yes, I did it, I went to university and I did the whole thing properly”, but I just knew what was coming up, even though I had only read the agenda quickly. Several hours of people talking about how great the university is and how “It’s not the end of learning”, etc. etc. all the clichés about education that everyone has heard since they started their first school.

I have to give it to the organisers though, the whole thing was bloody well planned out. The logistics of making sure that every single person was in a snaking queue by the time they were seated for the beginning of the ceremony must be an unenviable task. Also I realise that everyone wants their 10 seconds of fame, and with a fair few hundred to get through it’s going to take a long time, so I thank the organisers also for not making the rest of the ceremony go on for too long, I can’t abide long and drawn out waffling about how good things are, you feel like standing up and shouting “We know, we did it!” (MR. Croft).

In fact out of the whole experience their are only a few things which I would say could be improved, first of which can only be:

  1. APPLAUDING. There were, I guess, about 400 people all having an award presented during the session which I attended. Each one of them individually went up on stage and each one received their own applause. By the end of the event my hands were in a terrible shape.
  2. THE COST. In total it was a quid short of a ton for tickets for my family to watch and the robes for me to wear. And on top of that there are the professional photographs to be bought and the DVD of the ceremony and aaaaaall the other pens, and key-rings and other knick-knacks with the university logo on them, which some people, HAVE to get. I bet a fortune was made today.
  3. ERRR… really there is no three. I actually quite enjoyed the day, it was no where near as long and dragged out as I was anticipating. It was well organised and one of the honorary doctorate speeches was even mildly amusing!

Point three really does some it all up and I have nothing further to say, however I feel that there should always be at least two lines under a list just to make the article look right. Well done to everyone who graduated and to Liz, who made the speech on behalf of the students graduating.

Two suns of Tatooine

Have you ever heard of Jeremy Messersmith? Neither had I ’til today. One of my golden nugget finds on SU was this little gem from Jeremy, its a song which has a tenuous connection to Star Wars in the lyrics, and has an amazing video depicting the first trilogy of films made entirely out of paper, see…

I really like this song. There are a few more which are on youtube which I’m going to have a look at, possibly his website as well if I like what I hear, you never know there might be an album!

Addendum: No, he doesn’t have an album, he has three! They are all available for download from http://jeremymessersmith.bandcamp.com, further you can get three of them on CD as well as “The Reluctant Graveyard”, the most recent album, on vinyl and cassette as well on his website – http://www.jeremymessersmith.com.