Phil Long's blog – Teletranone

Another weekend has come to an end – capped by a pleasing result for Liverpool against Chelsea this afternoon.

Friday night I went to the Elephant and Castle with Paul, James, Chris and Nathan; though due to poor planning I had already eaten, so didn’t get to indulge in an Elephant burger. Saturday, well, plans fell apart to go to Manchester so instead I had people round and we ordered Chinese. Before that the day was spent chilling, progressing the wine to stage three of course, and recovering from Friday (which I did surprisingly well). I finally got round to plugging my rear speakers in to my amplifier. I’ve been here more than six months and figured it was about time to get it sorted.

I fought between two titles for this post. On Friday in the Elephant I heard a song which I’ve also heard before on a TV advert; possibly for Prison Break, but I’m really not sure. I wanted to get it, but didn’t know who it was and unfortunately (in this specific circumstance only) the music was quiet enough that people talking prevented Shazam on the iPhone working out what it was. So, on Saturday night, I did my best to perform my own rendition to friends in the hope they’d recognise what it was. You’d be surprised how many songs have ‘Wo oh ohh oh oh ohh oh oh oh oh ohh’ in them. Needless to say, watching music channels led to almost every song being suggested as the one I was looking for.

As the night went on I managed to get closer and closer to remembering something a bit more unique about the song, until finally Knowlesy recognised it as by Elbow from the album Seldom Seen Kid. The song in question was ‘Grounds for Divorce’. iTunes impulse buy naturally followed (the song, not the album – I suppose I should listen incase I like anything else by Elbow). I really do like the song – fantastic atmosphere too it – especially when the main ‘hook’ kicks in. I was just grinning like an idiot when I downloaded it and played it for everybody. I’m not convinced they shared my enthusiasm.

I went to bed after copious amounts of alcohol at 3 am (or 2 am if you account for the clocks going back today).

Today, a late waking, bacon butties, then lazing around watching the football, Scrubs and Stargate Atlantis. I also took my day seven shot of my tea this evening (titled ‘Serving Salmon’). I tried some other shots of me in the dark conservatory with Tufty’s pirate cowboy hat – but decided they weren’t so great. There is a day six on Flickr but it’s just me, drunk; so not especially exciting (it was last minute).

Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV started following me on Twitter (for those not familiar with Twitter, that basically means you get updates – it isn’t some weird stalking thing;) ) last night and the e-mail prompted me to go to Twitter in the first time in ages. I spotted she had posted about possibly trying a funky AppleTV ‘hack’ called Boxee – which basically plays any media from shared drives as well as content from some providers for our American cousins (it’d be nice if there was a UK version which worked with iPlayer); which would be handy. So, full of enthusiasm, I headed over to the Boxee website in hopes of downloading it and giving it a go.

Alas, it’s currently in Alpha and you have to register – and registration is a manual process with quite a delay. So, that’s done, but I couldn’t give it a try immediately (which I suppose ultimately isn’t all bad, as I can’t seem to find my USB gig stick). Essentially, the hack works by installing a menu option during the AppleTV’s boot process. Once done, you select the menu item to download the full version of Boxee. The beauty is it adds it as a menu option, leaving the normal features of the AppleTV intact. As is pretty much par-for-the-course these days for any new software, it has an element of social networking built in, so you can share information on what you’ve been watching with it. It’ll be interesting to see how that works.

Tomorrow I take what can loosely be described as my ‘car’ in for its MOT at good ol’ EK Motors. Hopefully there’s nothing wrong with it – but given it cost £640 and has done 124,000 miles I’m not being too optimistic. Other than that I’ve got nothing exciting happening this week. Maybe swimming on Tuesday, maybe play football on Thursday now my toe is healed, but that’s about it. Excitement City, Arizona, it is not. Oooh! But I have taken the chicken out of the freezer to make Buritos tomorrow.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Related posts:

Wired

Top sites for beginners in photography

Barron Falls – Australia