I’ve been up all night watching TV episodes on my computer. I’ve finally caught up on the vast majority of the shows I’ve had kicking about my ~/Videos for the last couple of months.

I watched the last few episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, Revelations, and Around The World In 80 Treasures. I also started watching season 2 of The 4400, which is pretty good so far. Apparently there should be a new season of Stargate starting in the next couple of weeks, so that’ll be good. I’ve got Family Guy and American Dad to help along the way though, so that’s good.

David came over to my house yesterday and we spent a while playing poker on the computer, and it was good fun. It’s not for real money so we’re not getting into huge debt or anything, but it’s still fun. We were possibly going to go somewhere if someone could be bothered, but Craig was at work until gone 9PM and JonP was very tired, so we didn’t go anywhere.

As the evening wore on we decided to go up to The Bold Forester and meet Craig there when he was finished at work. To our surprise Katie was there with that guy she hangs around with all the time. Katie is Craig’s female friend. I have no idea what’s going on between them, it seems kinda strange that she always hangs out with this other guy, Adam I think, but oh well.

Craig walked in and to my surprise actually sat with me and David instead of abandoning us for Katie. The thunderstorm really kicked up while we were inside and it was cool to see all the lightning and the torrential downpour which slowed into normal rain, before ending kind of abruptly.

David and I decided to go back to his house to play more poker, and Craig went back to his house to sleep. David and I must have played poker for about a zillion hours. We won a hell of a lot, we also lost a fair few hands… But now David seems to have the gist it’s much better.

When it reached about 6 in the morning we started talking about getting a McDonalds breakfast. A couple of hours passed because we wanted to be sure they would be open and we walked into town in the murk.

My breakfast was pretty nice, McSausage McAnd McEgg McMuffin with a McOrange McJuice. At least my orange juice didn’t smell a great deal like fairy liquid, unlike David’s coffee which was a definite offense to the nasal passage.

After McDonalds we kind of decided to work on a project that I first decided I wanted to make about 2 years ago or more. It consists of a wireless doorbell receiver and a computer microphone. Basically you remove the speaker from the doorbell receiver and hook it up to the microphone cable which goes into the computer. You have some software (yet to be written) which listens for input from the microphone, as it’s completely silent unless the doorbell is rung, and then display some kind of alert message.

With a few adjustments I guess you could easily take one of those baby-talking things and hook that up instead, then you can talk to people at the front door, or indeed take a message from someone visiting your house while you’re out, like an answering machine. I think it’s a worthy project, we just need to do a few more things, thanks to Leo for the help, and it should be done soon.

Oh yeah, also, my mum went out about 3 days ago, and she hasn’t come back yet, and I have no idea where she is and I haven’t spoken to her since she left or anything. It’s kind of weird. The oven doesn’t work properly and she didn’t go shopping before she left, so I’m living on junk food, which she’ll no doubt complain about when she returns.

My gallery software is coming along pretty nicely. I think the next major step is going to be database integration. I’ll probably give Class::DBI a look at mark‘s suggestion. Should make it pretty easy to allow a selection of database formats if I understand what it does correctly.

I played a bit of poker online with David last night, and it was good. Unfortunately he kept getting really good hands o_O I’m going to try to get a proper game arranged, even if it’s only a £1 buy-in. It makes a fun night. We could go over to Craig’s house, sit at the table, have pizza, coke, beer, and loads of stuff, and play poker. Someone gets to leave with a tiny bit more change than they came with, and everyone had fun. I miss playing poker.

David and I have been trying to get JonP or Craig to agree to go somewhere interesting for the last couple of days, but it seems that neither of them has a sense of adventure that reaches outside of Mansfield. 🙁 I’m sick of this silly place. England as well as Mansfield. Caliginous bloody place.

I’ve been working on my image gallery section of the site for the last couple of days. It should be pretty nice when it’s complete, but that’s going to be a while yet. It’s pretty complicated.

Once completed it should have commenting enabled for each image, some information about the image, a caption as set by me (as I take the time to go through them all), hopefully a semi-decent search capability based on image keywords. There will be two sizes of thumbnails, so you don’t have to view a tiny picture, or the full image to look through them properly, handy little “Previous” and “Next” links should also help with the browsing a lot 🙂

So yeah, I’ve been mostly writing code, and a little bit of hanging out with David and Craig, and even JonP for a few minutes. I also spent quite a while talking to Laura on Skype, which was mostly good.

I watched some of The MTV Movie Awards today, I’d already seen the Batman spoof introduction when it was on Channel 5 the other night, but I didn’t see who won any of the awards. I was pleased that John Heder won Best Breakthrough Male for Napoleon Dynamite, and I was also quite surprised to see him out-of-character.

Suddenly felt like answering them… So here they are.

1. What is your favorite action movie?

I don’t really have my favourites organised by genre I suppose… Maybe The Matrix.

2. What is the worst movie you’ve ever seen?

Maximum Overdrive, sorry Stephen King, stick to writing 🙂

3. Do you prefer comedy or drama?

Comedy, as everyone with sense does.

4. Recommend a good tear jerker:

Maximum Overdrive, it’s that bad 😉

5. What movie are you looking forward to seeing soon?

War Of The Worlds. I’ve been a fan of the Orson Wells radio broadcast for a few years now, and I love the Jeff Wayne musical version. I should probably read the book 🙂

The second set has an interesting little note afterwards that means that after this one I won’t be answering the second set.

“ON A SIDE NOTE: I understand that not everyone here is an American. The truth is, I just don’t care. Questions are always asked on The Friday Five that may or may not apply to you. If you don’t like the question, don’t answer it.”

Ok, fuck you then. The other one usually has better questions anyway. I mean seriously, look at this pathetic set:

1. Can you share a tale of a favorite summer cookout/get together?

Yes.

2. What is a favorite summer ritual of yours?

Going on holiday? Having a barbecue I guess.

3. After a long hot summer day, what is your favorite way to quench your thirst?

Drink something.

4. The 4th of July is coming up, what plans, if any, do you have?

I don’t know, I’ll probably treat is as a completely normal day, as for the vast majority of the world that’s all it is.

5. What are you looking forward to doing most before the summer ends?

Moving the hell out of England 🙂

Now I’ll never answer that Friday Five again, what a stupid thing to put on a note. It’s not like there’s any shortage of decent summer-related questions. It’s just pure lazy, inconsiderate stupidity.

I spoke to mark a little while ago regarding my time/date issue and he helped me a great deal of the way towards a solution.

Hopefully now things should be working spiffily. No more crapping around with half-assed fixes that only work for a few months.

You’ll see some comments around that seem kinda strange… They’re talking about underlying updates that I’ve made to the site, hopefully you shouldn’t see any differences at the moment.

I should be working on a few new things in the semi-near future, but things will retain the status quo.

£<> Still working?

My boxes finally arrived today! It took almost 8 weeks, but they made it! I’ve already changed into my shorts, worn my rice hat, worn the baseball batting gloves, looked through my DVDs, set the time and date on my camera, and started to recharge my batteries. Wahey!

I’m so glad I have all this stuff here at last.

So yeah, I’m off to sort through some of it and then go out somewhere before I have to go to the job centre.

Yesterday I started watching The 4400. It’s a good show, I can’t compare it to the X-Files like they do on the box, but it is worth checking out if you get the chance. I want to watch the rest of it, but I keep finding other things to do. Bothersome.

Today I went to get some new trainers with my mum and James. We were going just to get my shoes, we ended up buying 4 pairs of trainers, a T-shirt, and some trousers as well… I still only got the one pair of shoes though.

Once we finally got out of the designer outlet we went to Fisher Lane park to play some baseball and sit around in the sun. JonP was there so it was good fun.

So yeah… I don’t really have a great deal else to say. I suppose I’ll just go to bed, maybe continue reading Lord Of The Flies, since it’s been in progress for about 2 months now :\ I’ll probably just end up watching the season finale of Dr. Who though.

The whole “plan” of going to the cinema with Craig, Jo, and Laura went to the dogs. Craig called and cancelled, Jo didn’t send me a message when David sent her my number, and Laura didn’t seem too interested anyway. So I sat down on the sofa with the fan blowing nice cool air onto me for a while.

Stacey called asking for Craig’s number, she had two Craigs and didnt know which was which, I told her and she hung up. I sent her a message letting her know that he probably wouldn’t want to speak much because he would be with Kate. Stacey called back a couple of minutes later and said that he was with Kate and didn’t talk much. Then she stated that she was sitting around getting a sun tan because she was bored. Then it was decided that we should both go and see a movie to cure our boredom.

I met Stacey down at the bus station and we walked back up to the cinema. We got our tickets for Batman Begins and then some snacks, and sat down in our seats. We had quite a long time before the movie began so Stacey left the screen to go smoke. I sent some emssages to Craig and it turns out that he was just pulling up to the cinema with Kate to see Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Stacey came back from smoking and told me that she’d just seen them arrive, and then all the adverts and previews began. A million years later the movie started… I thought it was an excellent movie. A bit boring in the middle, as Stacey said, but definitely good anyway. They have to set the scene correctly, they wouldn’t want a trillion comic book nerds boycotting the film. I thought the psychotropic drug in weaponised form was particularly cool. Batman actually looked and sounded pretty fucking awesomely scary. The fire breathing horse was also very cool indeed.

I’m so glad there was no sign of Val Kilmer or George Clooney. It’s kind of a shame that there was not even a hint of Robin in there. It took me quite a long time to realise that the police officer would become Commissioner Gordon, but yeah, very cool.