Yearly Archives: 2010

A little bit of Rob Hubbard for you.

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I haven’t done a post about C64 music post in absolute ages. So when I learned that  handsome and multitalented Phil Strahl‘s podcast The Bleepcast has not one but two podcasts dedicated to the works of Rob Hubbard I thought it was time to share.

So if you like a bit of Hubbard check out the BleepCast – Level 6 and BleepCast – Level 7.

Also I’ve got a speical bonus for you. Did you know Rob Hubbard wrote the music for Jet Set Willy? No, well that’s because he only wrote the music for the rather terrible Atari version. Isn’t it weird the worst conversion of this classic gets the best music.

Here’s a Youtube video featuring the music from this rare classic

I’m really spoiling you as I’ve also got this excellent remix of this track by Serge P.

You can download this remix from here; Rob Hubbard – Jet Set Willy (Serge P. remix)

Managing Life

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So after my success in getting my weight down. I’ve been looking at my goals again lately.

The idea is to use Remember the Milk to manage my short term (life, website and work) tasks and 43things for my long term goals.

I’ve got a Remember the Milk  pro account and the android application installed on my HTC Desire. So all I need to do there is start using it full time to manage my goals.

I’ve been using 43things for quiet a while. Lately I’ve being trying to add the majority of my 40 things to do before I’m 40 to 43things as well as adding some new long terms goals that I need to focus on. Such as

I let you know how this all goes.

Good Omens for my Pride and Prejudice

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I recently gave up trying to read Pride and Prejudice, as I found completely uninteresting and rather hard to read. Sadly I’ll have to give a another attempt because it’s part of the BBC top 100 Reads, the reading of which I’ve set as one of my 40 things to do before I’m 40 goals. In it’s place I’ve chosen another BBC top 100 Read book, the infinitely more readable “Good Omens” By Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I’ve also recently read the following graphics novels “Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”  which is not the genius work certain Internet websites would have you believe and The Complete Maus which, if I was was a lazy tabloid journalist I would descirbe as the Schindler’s list of Graphics novels.

I would also give this post a horrible title like; Good Omens for my Pride and Prejudice.

Links for 15th Sept 2010

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Another mix bag of old and new links for you.

More coming links at the weekend, and we will have caught up by the then. Lots more blog posts coming this week too, so keep reading.

I’m not Dead.

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It’s a bad sign when I have blogged for a while, it usually means I’m full on procrastinating. However I have been up to a few things in last two months. I just haven’t been able to write about them. So here are some very brief highlights with pictures taking the place of interesting details.

First of all the way back in July there was the Middlesbrough Mela, which is always fun. You are always guaranteed a nice bit of food and live music.

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The wife and I usual take a couple of week leave at the beginning of August, partly to celebrate mine and Conor’s and Birthdays which are in the beginning of the month.

For his Birthday present Conor got some new games for his PS3 and some money which he spent on games for his PS3 (including Modern Warfare 2, so I don’t totally disapprove of how he spends his money) and I got a cheap second hand XBox360.

Rather than go on one big holiday abroad we had took a few mini-holidays, mainly because we skint at the moment. On of these trips was up to Hartlepool to see the Tall Ships.

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Jamie and Jim have already wrote good blog posts about the Tall Ships coming to Hartlepool. I’ll just mention the absolutely great selection of foods from all over the world, and the Bang Goes the Theory road show which Conor really enjoyed.

We also had a trip to Blackpool with my mate Dave and his family. Which Suzanne and I both came back from with a nice suntan, as we had some really great weather..

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Sadly the holiday had to end. Suzanne and I returned to work and Conor started his first week of secondary school. However my return to work saw a extremely rare to trip back to Lytham St Annes. So I took the opportunity to pop into Blackpool for a quiet night out

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but that’s another story…

Links for 28 August 2010

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Some of these are a bit old because I’ve been holding on to them for a while.

I’ve still got loads of these outstanding, so more soon….

Developing for Android

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AndroidI’ve been so impressed my new HTC Desire I thought I would have a try at developing an application for it. I’ve not programmed anything for ages, so I thought it would be fun to give it a try. (This is completely unlike when I said I would do this for in Morphun on my Sony Ericsson T310 in 2003, which never came to anything)

Turns out it’s a bit of a pain in the arse to set up. First of all I had to download the Android SDK, then download the SDK platform. The SDK platform matches the Android firmwear type (e.g. 1.6, 2.1 etc). So If you want to develop for different phones with firmwares I need to download each one. It also requires the Java Development Kit (JDK) so I had to download this from the Sun/Oracle website.

After downloading and setting up all of this you can start your programming. However you have to run everything via a command line interface, and didn’t fancy doing it that way so I installed the Eclipse IDE and the Android Development Tools (ADT) Plugin for Eclipse.

So after installing everything and setting it all up, I’ve managed to get everything to get an emulated Android phone to say “Hello World” and it feels great! Stay tuned to Project Android for further updates.

Server Move

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This blog has had the eRemoval men in. It has moved from a server in a building in Manchester to slightly fancier server in the same building. The new fancy server is a Linux server and has lots of fancy new features such as multiple MySQL databases and lots and lots of Subdomains.

It took quiet a while for it to be shifted and there was a few hiccups, but all is up and running now and so It’s now safe to leave new comments.

New posts coming soon…

40 Things – Five Years to Go

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Time is passing, it’s now less than five years until I will hit forty years old. So he’s an update on what progress I’ve made over the last year towards 40 things to do before I’m 40.

Updated 40 things

  • Have a piece of writing published - (10% Complete)
    I’m marking this one as 10% Complete, as I’ve had an article on Obsolete Gamer posted. I have plans to continue writing for Obsolete Gamer, and to start writing for some other websites too.
  • Learn to cook, properly. - (10% Complete)
    I’ve started to cook the majority of my own meals, but they are only simple meals. I beginning to wonder, how I should define being able to ‘cook, properly’ properly.
  • Sort out a proper diet, so I eat many different health foods - (100% Complete)
    After a bit of research I finally got a diet sorted a few months back. I’m now eating healthy and making sure I get all my required dietary supplements.
  • Have 15% or less body fat - (95% Complete)
    Not long ago I posted about my Body Fat being measured at 15.5% which make me just short of my goal of 15%. You might also remember I abandoned a goal of 10% body fat as I thought it was overly optimistic goal. I think when I hit this goal, I’ll replace it with the 10% goal again.
    Twenty books read now, and I can’t say I really fancy reading many of the ones left, but I’ll keep plodding on.
  • Join a Gym. - (100% Complete)
    I also posted recently about joining the gym, so this one is complete.

That’s it for now, hopefully I’ll get some more of this completed before this time next year. Keep an on posts using the 40 things tag for further progress,