Crackin'

I spent this morning updating my CV in my underwear, and watching Gavin & Stacey...in my underwear. Now I've got to get ready to continue meeting people to say goodbye - something I'm extraordinarily bad at - as I'm supposed to be in Chelmsford in an hour to say cheerio to my friend Lois. The good news is that now I'm back on the car's insurance (somehow), I can drive there.

See kids? Things usually work themselves out in the end, if you give up hope of fixing a problem entirely and wait for someone else to propose a solution. There's a moral in there.

Upset With Car Insurance

Yesterday was both bad and good, for numerous reasons. I met up with - and bid farewell to - my friend Adam in Chelmsford, in a trip which would turn out to be my last opportunity to drive. That's because I was informed when I got home that the insurance company had called to say there had been an error with altering my Dad's policy, and that I hadn't really been insured to drive for the past week. I'm pretty upset at this, and I hate insurance companies right now after noone will allow me to drive for my last two weeks in the UK. Also I learned that it doesn't matter if you're over 21, there are still things you aren't allowed to do yet.

In more encouraging news, I'm in the last month of my picadé project, which was my attempt at documenting the year by taking one photo every single day. In less encouraging news, Andy Murray shot out of the semi-finals yesterday, and now Wimbledon is (nearly) finished and I have no car, the next two weeks are going to be looooooong.

A Mix of Topics

Well, playlist.com sucks, rendering my intricately-woven mixes 'unavailable' in my country. So I'm forced to switch to the infinitely more buggy mixtape.me for my series of tubes musiks needs.

In other news, we set the New Zealand blog up last night, which you can find at http://nzpostcard.blogspot.com/. For the time being, though, I'll be contributing posts to both this blog and the new one.

Updates Galore!

Here's a bunch of stuff that happened:

I went to visit Emily and saw Philadelphia, Allentown, and Boston; I went to an American senior ball; I left Canterbury forever; I left Twitter forever; I started to think about packing for New Zealand; I performed in a play at Artsfest; I graduated from university with a First; Michael Jackson died; I drove from Manchester to London in torrential rain; I made a driving music mixtape; Sandy and I beat 3 computers at Age of Empires on 'Hard'; I've been watching about 7 hours of tennis a day during Wimbledon; I've been saying 'sayonara' to friends before I flee the country; I recorded some songs, but not enough to make another CD; and I covered my bedroom walls with photos from the last 4 years.

For the full story, check out the picadé. (Useful, isn't it?)

To hear the songs I made click onto the last.fm profile I made for The Fundamental Floors. The reason for separating these from the Cute Kids project will become apparent when you hear the songs, owing to a difference in style. But at some point I'll probably succumb to merging the two.

One or two other points of housekeeping: first, here's the photo of me and the hockey team I promised to upload, in which you can try to find my face.

Secondly, Emily and I will be making a joint blog detailing our trip to NZ, so I'll shift over to that one in time. I'll post the address when we make the first entries, so expect hilarious anecdotes of our experiences, wonderous photos of the antipodean sights, and maybe even a video or two. Who knows?

Later days.

Cultural Difference

I like listening to Ladysmith Black Mambazo and singing along with words I make up. That's me letting my free spirit fly free.

Blogger > Twitter?

Not too much going on today. I went to my last seminar for one of my two courses this morning, and intended to get some grocery shopping done this afternoon, but got caught up intermittently playing the guitar and working on an essay some more. Currently I'm at the point where I've written about 200 words short of the word limit and have yet to say anything.

I never thought I'd say this, but I can't be bothered with Winamp anymore. I used to have it open constantly, not only because I like the library but because I used the global hotkeys possibly more than anything else ever. But recently I've been growing increasingly disenfranchised with the music on my computer as a whole: the result of losing 95% of it last summer and having to rebuild my collection from near-scratch, coupled with the weariness I feel when I think about how much effort I put into obsessive-compulsively entering the data into each individual mp3 file. Plus there was that time I came home drunk and listened to some songs - all of them are meticulously re-encoded at 128kbps to save disk space - and realised the quality is appaulingly bad. I should have just bought MORE space, like I've now done.

So recently I just loaded up my mp3 player with my favourite songs; the ones I would want to hear if they came up on shuffle. Screw 'having to' listen to each song on an album the exact same number of times like I used to, I'll just take the good ones thanks. So I've got that on me when I go anywhere, and increasingly frequently when I'm just sat around, I'll plug my speakers into it so I don't have to be my own DJ anymore. Also lately, I've been making use of online music sites: first playlist.com and now mixtape.me. I'll just chuck some songs I like but which I can't be bothered to download on there, and just let that play through when I'm on the internet. Finally, I've got a small number of albums in the .flac format, which I'll roll out from time to time with VLC, which is a nifty little program. At least not having Winamp open all the time means my computer goes faster.

The problem is that neither my mp3 player nor the websites submit scrobbles to last.fm (which I used to keep constantly updated), and while VLC does, pretty much the only things I listen to on that are old dub records I've got hold of in lossless quality. Oh well, I've been scrobbling for nearly two years; maybe it's time to gracefully call it quits.

When I Get To The Border

Last night I got halfway through Rushmore, and I fully intend to finish it sometime this evening, but I also have to prepare for a gig at Rutherford Bar tonight - which takes priority. I played there last week but that, coupled with the fact that I've been playing through complete songs more and more in my bedroom recently - means that the songs I have to play have become a bit stale for me. Time to whip out some fresh new material me reckons. By which I mean polish off some old material which I had never deemed performance-worthy up until this point.

I'm also currently engaged in the process of retrieving my lost Flickr password, so I can continue to update my pic-of-the-days for anyone who follows it (to wit: Emily, and any weird stalker guys who might be lurking). At present, having already sent an email to customer care explaining that I just want my password, I now have to respond to an email with the answer to a 'secret question' I don't recall ever previously providing the answer to. Then someone named Ratie at Yahoo is going to get back to me. Apparently the days of automated password retrieval are behind me, what with all those times I've had my identity stolen online, and all.

P.S. Yesterday I posed with the hockey team for this season's team photo, which I'll post when I get hold of a postable, computerized copy made out of 1s and 0s.

P.P.S. Check out my playlist (here), which I have as yet failed to include on this blog without it looking all cumbersome and rubs.