Time Out

We've got a mouse in the house at the moment.  I'm not a fan of mice (read here for more) in the house, in the wild they're absolutely fine, but not in the house.

Anyway, I was in the kitchen this evening, and it decided to pop its head out from under a kitchen cabinet and look at me.  This particularly annoys me, as I'm convinced that it knows innately that what it ought to do is keep out of sight, and only run around when no one else is in the room, but it refuses to even do this, and is obviously only showing itself to frustrate me.  So I jumped up and down, banged on the counter, shouted at it, and prodded a knife under the cabinet where it was lurking, to show that I really meant business.

However, I'd overlooked that recently we've been very firm in enforcing the "no shouting" rule with my son recently, and he came in the kitchen, and told me to go and sit on the stairs on time out.

And my wife backed him up.  Off to the staircase I went.

At least I got a couple of photos out of it :)

Time is running out to vote for me in the UK Blog Awards 2017, votes have to be in by the 19th of December if you haven't already, just head over to http://www.blogawardsuk.co.uk/ukba2017/entries/blog-thog and pop a vote in.  I'm shortlisted for 2 categories, Lifestyle and Digital & Technology, you can vote for both categories in one go from the link above, thanks!  Basically in each category the eight blogs with the most votes get through to the final shortlist so every vote really does count! Thank you again :)

Trying something new

Let's be honest, part of the reason for blogging is the audience. I started blogging because I wanted to essentially force myself to regularly write something, and I need an audience to keep me going.

And I wouldn't be surprised if, at least a portion of us bloggers, do dream about going viral and suddenly rolling around in advertising income and power.  And offers of free cruises in return for giving a review on our blog.

(For the sake of clarity - to any cruise lines reading - I will be happy to review your cruise ships on my blog in return for a cruise)

Anyway, one blog that I read - although not as often as I should - is the Hootsuite Social Blog.  Hootsuite, if you're not familiar, offer a service for social media folk to schedule tweets, manage social media searches, and lots of other stuff.  I've used Hootsuite for scheduling tweets for absolutely years, and it's a handy tool, mainly let down by my erratic tweet scheduling.

But on their blog they give great advice in the form of interesting blogs for anyone wanting to boost their social media presence.

One of their blogs which I recently read talked about lessons from 15 of their best performing tweets, which gives some examples of good tweets they've done.  And one of the key things is including photos in tweets, so that they stand out better in Twitter timelines.

So with the latest set of scheduled tweets I've included photos, and it'll be interesting to see how (if) it makes any difference to how much the tweets are noticed.

And of course, you need a good photo on any blog.

So here's one.

It's a pig with the ability to vibrate lurking within the pyramid of mystery. Let the memes begin.

Thanks for reading!

Don't forget the transatlantic debate on Saturday - US vs UK, which has the better political system?  Stay tuned!

I discovered a new career - Placenta Specialist!

Allow me to clarify that I am not, and do not intend to be, a Placenta Specialist.  I just saw it on a business card today and it surprised me.  As far as I was aware, the placenta was basically the thing that keeps the baby alive before it is born, and once it is born the placenta is basically not required any more, and is somehow disposed of - how, I don't really care.  I seem to remember that you can get useful cells out of it, so maybe that's a reason for a placenta specialist?!?

In other news, I realise that it is heading for the end of March, but did you know that March is Hexagonal Awareness Month? Yes, indeed, be aware of all of the hexagons in your life, and give thanks, for the hexagon is the most even six sided shape you can get.

If it's not already clear, I don't really have anything to blog about today. But I will have!  I'm writing scripts at the moment for filming that I am doing at the weekend!  So expect a new, epic (there's a hint) video next week!

Finally, if you're really bored, you can do a quiz now, about me!  I wouldn't recommend it except that they also allow you to make quizzes about yourself too.  Here's mine:  http://games.usvsth3m.com/how-well-do-you-know/mike-raven-574618673

Happy Chinese New Year!

Happy Chinese New Year of the Horse! I hope you're celebrating or making it in some way.

For the readers of my blog, I've done fortune cookie predictions for you! The top 8 countries that read my blog most - the USA, Germany, UK, China, Indonesia, Ukraine, France and Russia - have got fortune cookie predictions! We also feature the interdimensional return of the Pyramid of Mystery!

This is a Fortune telling drinking game for the video:

• Every time I say "So", take a swig of beer!
• Every time I say "Okay", take two swigs of beer!
• Every time I say "Hello", take a shot!
• Every time I say "Yeah", take a swig of beer and a shot!

Catch the video now at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-xwUNA-jMM

Thanks to everyone that reads my blog - I'm a smidge off 30,000 hits which is quite outstanding (I know Blogger inflates the statistics a bit, but nevertheless it must be quite a lot!), do please feel free to comment and stuff :)

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

First off, I have to suggest that you check out the latest post on my mum's blog here.  She's written about my adventures with the Royal Mail, where one of my parcels was intercepted and sent to Belfast.  If I disappear suddenly, know that the security services have acted.

Secondly, if you're reading it right now (as in when I've just posted it), you have but a handful of minutes to get to http://www.twitch.tv/el_pinata and join in with the very funny and entertaining retro gaming "Garlic Bread Monday" live stream by Scott Tumilty.  Go now.

Still reading?

Okay then!

Inspiring is a word that I worry is used far too often.  And more often than not, in some sort of "fluffy" context.

"Oh my, isn't that sunrise inspiring!"
"Ooh! That mirror is so inspiring!"
"Man, that hot coffee kick is really inspiring!"

I am generally cynical when it comes to inspiration.  If you want to do something, do it.  Be aware that whatever it is - writing a book, getting your dream job, running a marathon, swimming the English Channel - is probably not going to be quite as wonderful as you imagine.  Writing a book is a long hard slog.  Your dream job might not work out to be as great as you think.  And the hours spent training for a marathon or swimming the channel aren't all going to be wonderfully joyous.

But that's not to say that you shouldn't try.  Do try, try with all your heart.  Because the one thing you otherwise get stuck with is regrets.

Anyhow, I have to say that The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is inspiring.  The Ben Stiller film is actually the second remake of the original 1939 story by James Thurber, and looks at an introvert forced to go outside of his comfort zone and travel the world in search of a photograph.  It is really very good (despite mixed reviews) and well worth watching.  Special mention has to go to Ben Stiller and his acting in the lead role - you would hardly credit that it is the same person playing the character from beginning to end, such is the change in his personality.  It's been out a little while now, so if you want to catch it in the cinemas, go soon.

Farewell my dear Nokia

It is with great sadness that I say farewell to my Nokia C2-01 today.  It's served me well for a good while (especially for a non-smartphone - I'm not going to insult it by calling it a "dumbphone") and I'm particularly going to miss being able to play Block'd, a great puzzle game by EA, but I've finally taken the step of getting a smartphone.  I've gone for the Samsung Galaxy S III, I know it's not the latest smartphone but I can't justify paying £35+ a month for a phone when I can get the S3 for £20 a month, along with all the minutes and text and Internet that I need.  I have wanted to be able to tweet and Facebook on the move, and currently the only way I can do this is generally by using my tablet (also a Samsung) but the problem with this is that the tablet is loaded up with videos for my son to watch, cartoons and educational things, so it generally stays at home, standing by for action.

So it's goodbye to the Nokia and hello to the Samsung - which I am loving quite a bit.  I do feel sad for Nokia, my first mobile was a Nokia 3210 - bought whilst at college, and I chose that phone because:

a) The battery life was longer than the others on offer, and;
b) The buttons were bigger, so they would be easier to press while drunk (as I say, I was still at college)

I remember the screen was monochrome, it was maybe three times as big and heavy as my current Nokia, and could hold ten text messages.  Ten.  I recall getting funny texts from friends, and having to delete them rather than keep them because I needed the space.

I did consider getting a Nokia this time - in particular I had my heart set on the Nokia Lumia 520 for about a day - but there just isn't enough apps on the Windows platform for my liking, I remember using my partners Kindle Fire when in London earlier in the year and being disgusted at the lack of apps on that piece of kit.  Only Android or iOS have enough apps right now, and I'm too much of a fiddler to be comfortable with the "black box" operation of an Apple device, even though it would get rid of all those times that an app crashes at the wrong moment, or the opportunity for me to accidentally kill my device by deleting the wrong file.  If Nokia would only have some handsets on Android as well, they might have a chance of recovering from their death spiral.

Same for Blackberry.

In other news - spambots are getting better!

I've recently adjusted my blog settings to make it easier to comment again - there's no word verification, because it does put people off, but on the flip side I do get spam.  Lunchtime on Sunday I got the comment below on one of my posts:

--------------

Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as though you relied 
on the video to make your point. You obviously know what youre 
talking about, why throw away your intelligence on 
just posting videos to your site when you could be giving us something informative to read?


Also visit my blog post: battlefield 4 beta 

---------------------

This one actually fooled me to begin with, I thought it was a real comment to begin with - I do post videos to my blog, after all.  However two things confirmed that it was spam:
1) Blogger automatically marked it as spam, and;
2) The post they had commented on didn't have a video on it!

Speaking of videos, I've finished my research for my fortune telling video I'm doing tomorrow, so look out for it on my YouTube channel.  As always I'd love some more subscribers both there and on my blog, so do feel free to do so!

Staircases are harder than imaginary lightsabers

So the other morning, I decided to cleanse the upstairs of monsters.  I never really decided what sort of monsters they were, they were possibly zombies, the main thing is that they weren't armed with any kind of ranged weaponry, and I don't think they had armour either.

Anyhow, the best kit to deal with imaginary monsters that I could think of was a twinned pair of two imaginary lightsabers.

I managed easily to take down half a dozen of the monsters and was pushing them back with ease, when I went to decapitate one that attempted to flank me.

And instead of eliminating an imaginary monster, I punched the underside of a staircase.

And managed to rip a chunk of skin off.

Ouch!  Next time I'll use a couple of bolt pistols, no need to swing my arms around quite so much.

I forgot on my last post to say that I've got a new video up on YouTube!  It's called Cash For Scratchcards, and you can watch it below or head to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uny-hDSpBuM

As always, if you'd like to see more of my stuff, head over to https://www.youtube.com/ravenswingthog and we can make that happen.

Amazingly, this blog is heading for 10000 views!  As I write this we've just blown through 9000 views, and are continuing to accelerate.  Thanks so much to everyone that reads this, and don't forget to comment on anything you want, the feedback is much appreciated (if you can get the website to let you comment that is!)

What should I write?

 I'm of two minds at the minute.

I do try to produce a blog post roughly once every other day, for two reasons - one, so that those people who read my blog get something new to read fairly regularly, but secondly so that I keep practising my writing, which is the main aim of me doing my blog in the first place.  I've neglected my writing for many years and my blog is the way that I keep my hand in.

But I am beginning to understand the importance of producing not just content, but quality content.  I don't want to just produce stuff for the sake of producing it, I want it to be interesting or funny or thought-provoking or just have some sort of value.

I also don't know whether I should spend more time consuming or producing (and I'm not talking about food for once!) - one school of thought is that while you're 'consuming', i.e. reading, watching, listening to stuff, you're not producing and I shouldn't be procrastinating in that manner.  On the other hand, logically the only way to produce material is to consume material so that the mind has stuff to work on - right?

But that might just be me trying to justify working my way through The Big Bang Theory - I've been watching a minimum of six episodes a night since last week, very much enjoying it :)

Anyway - apologies for the contemplative post.  Fingers crossed I'll have something new for Thursday!

Socks

I hate socks.

I mean, I like socks.  They keep your feet warm and when you drop your coffee on the floor you can use an old sock to dry it up.  But why do socks very very slightly differ from each other, just enough so that you can't make pairs?

My son is the worst for this.  I'm an old hand at the "well if the bit of sock above the ankle is black, it's all good" tactic, where the heels may be different colours but you can get away with it.

However, as an example, my son has about twelve socks which have blue, grey, and white stripes.  I like these socks because they fit him, they aren't too tight and they don't fall down when he runs around - which is particularly good because he'll take them off if they fall down.

So the blue etc stripy socks are good, you would think, except for the fact that the order of the stripes slightly differs from sock to sock.  So, unless you actually manage to have all twelve in front of you, you almost certainly can't actually make any pairs.

I would be tempted to pick two socks and hang the consequences, however now my son goes to nursery several days, a class run by the local council, and a class run by a local charity.  And particularly with nursery and the classes we try desperately to be the perfect parent, you know the one - the one whose child is all lovely, never muddy, washes up and can play the piano, and after class they're going to go and make biscuits out of freshly sourced organic flour and Peruvian honey.  In contrast, after the class me and the little one are probably going to get a bag of Quavers each, watch some Octonauts and if we really feel up to it, and I mean really feel up to it, we might have a bath.

After I found that link to the Octonauts website I spent about fifteen minutes rescuing sea creatures from an underwater storm.  My environmental side is showing :)

Thanks to my subscribers for subscribing to my blog, here's a (very bad) video I made for you!

You're welcome :)  If you're not a subscriber yet and you have some kind of RSS reader, this link should let you subscribe.  Otherwise right at the bottom of the page there should be a box that you can put your email address in, hit the button and you'll get email updates.

Or you could always subscribe for just 99p a month via the Kindle Store!

More exciting (to me) news about my blog - I passed 3000 views as of the 16th of January which is really nice.  Thanks for checking it out - basically I have a frustated writer within me (well I was hungry and he was asleep and I had a knife and ketchup) and my blog lets me do my creative thing and be happy.  It's all that trek towards self-actualisation, as Maslow probably didn't say.

(Did anyone not use Maslow's triangle whenever possible in assignments?  It was the easiest psychology theory to find and use whenever one was needed, regardless of whether it is right or not)

subscribers and dan abnett

Wow! I didn't realise I had subscribers!

I think Feedburner is being a little optimistic

If you're viewing this blog because you're one of my subscribers, thank you (a thank you video is planned).

If you're not a subscriber and you have some subscription software, please feel free to consider doing so!  Head over here to sort it out.

Why don't they make sausages with four flat sides rather than tubes? It'd make them a lot easier to cook..

Sorry, I'm not very focused today!

I've been trying out a rather interesting game called FTL: Faster Than Light.  I bought it on Steam for £6.99 because I like space stuff and I like strategy games, it had quite an interesting spin which makes it more of an adventure.  You basically have a ship to race across the galaxy, attempting to escape the rebel fleet following you.  On the way you encounter ships to blow up, merchants to trade with, alien races to meet, deserted space stations, all kinds of weird and wonderful things can be found.  It has a good combat system which is complex enough to be interesting but not too complicated, and a bit of system management (but again not too complex).

In case it isn't clear - I just pounced on a rebel transport and they smacked me good.

It's all good.

Until the below happens...

Game Over. This happens more often than you'd like.

I still need to get the hang of the game, I tend to push all of my money (scrap in FTL) into ship upgrades but whether I should be doing that or saving up for something like a teleporter or maybe a cloak I'm not sure.  The game is a lot of fun though, and the key thing is that you never know what you're going to warp jump into - every system is random so it could be a planet doing some scientific research, or a seriously tooled up alien cruiser that isn't actually looking for you, but if you don't play your cards right will happily dismantle your ship while the captain uses your bones as toothpicks.  All the time a rebel fleet is busy chasing you so you constantly being pushed to drive forward, to reach the final rebel flagship.

One of the best things, strangely, is that it's short enough.  As an example, I love Birth of the Federation. I love Space Empires 3.  I loved the original X-Com: Enemy Unknown.

But the problem with all these games is that (unless you're extremely bad at them) they last a long time.

You can spend days, if not weeks, conquering a galaxy and achieving ultimate victory.  Which can be fun, or can get boring - when you're twelve days into a game and you're again tweaking the exact outputs desired from Gamma Hydra III, a small planet in the middle of nowhere that to be frank will never have any impact on your overall empire, you can think to yourself "I'm supposed to be enjoying this.  I'll go watch the Big Bang Theory instead.".  Whilst in FTL, you're going to be dead in less than an hour.  I'm sorry - the game will be over in less than an hour.  There's about a 98% chance that it will end with your ship being in pieces scattered across the cosmos, but you never know, you might just get lucky and win.  And even if you don't win, you'll have enjoyed the ride.  It reminds me of "choose your adventure" books you used to be able to get, the most popular ones written by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, founders of the Fighting Fantasy series, you almost always died when playing them but it was fun trying.

Anyway - check it out.  It's cheap and won all kinds of various gaming awards.  It's definitely better than a lot of "commercial" games.

Totally changing the subject...

Anyone who is a fan of Warhammer 40K fiction will be aware of Dan Abnett.  Whilst not saying that there are several very good Warhammer 40K authors (Graham McNeil, Aaron Dembski-Bowden and Sandy Mitchell immediately spring to mind, with honourable mentions given to Gav Thorpe and James Swallow) Dan is certainly one of the best (if not the best) author writing for Black Library.  I do recommend for anyone who reads any of Dan Abnett's work to check out a group of videos of him here, very very interesting.

Best of all I managed to pick up two of Dan's books from Oxfam today at lunch, so I've got a bit more time enjoying his works before I have to return to rereading "Know No Fear"

I was so wrong - and thank you!

Firstly, as of today my blog passed the 1000 views mark. Thank you to everyone who's viewed my blog, especially those who have visited it and came back for more!

Now, I was so wrong when I said I wasn't excited about Pandaria.  I actually started playing it last night, and it is so much fun!  I've only really just got into it, but I've hanging out in Honeydew Village, and I am seriously loving the pet battles! Win!

A week or so back I decided to get a new, proper broadband cable to replace the thin, almost invisible telephone extension that we connect our router to upstairs.

I ran a speed test of the old cable (at www.speedtest.net), and found that I got download speed of 5.7 Mbps per second.  Not bad.

Then, I disconnected the old cable, plugged in the newer, better, and shorter (length is important when it comes to cabling, and the shorter the better) RJ11 high speed broadband cable, and tested again.

8.2 Mbps!

Yes, that's right.  A whole 2.3 Mbps faster.  Something like a 44% speed increase.

Anyhow, I was happy.  But, I would have to take up laminate flooring, and glue the new cable carefully along sides of bannisters and the like, so I decided to plug the old cable back in for the time being.

I got 8.2 Mbps again.

So, we're sticking with the old cable.  If anyone would like a 10m RJ11 high speed broadband cable for going from your microfilter to your router, do drop me a line and I'll get it out to you.  Obviously some love for the blog in return would be cool!

If you really want to know, here's the stats in full:

	15m basic cable, 060912 @ 0753	10m RJ11 high speed broadband cable, 060912 @ 0757	15m basic cable, 060912 @ 0801
DOWNSTREAM
DATA RATE (KBPS)	5717	8191	8191
NOISE MARGIN	15	7	7
OUTPUT POWER (dBm)	123	122	123
ATTENUATION (Db)	45	45	45
UPSTREAM
DATA RATE (KBPS)	1021	1021	1021
NOISE MARGIN	11	11	10
OUTPUT POWER (dBm)	189	168	167
ATTENUATION (Db)	23	23	23
Speed test from www.speedtest.net
ping	22ms	26ms	23ms
Download speed	5.06Mbps	7.22Mbps	7.12Mbps
Upload speed	0.84 Mbps	0.82 Mbps	0.83 Mbps

I'm nearly ready!

For anyone that runs their own website, today I found a really cool tool for you.  Nibbler carries out an automated free test of your site, and tells you basically how good it is - it covers technical specs, if the website has been tweeted about, and basically gives you some guide as to what you should work on to make your site better.

If you want to see the report for my blog it's here.  One of the cool things about the checker is that it gives you "badges", like achievements in games, good and bad ones.  They even run competitions sometimes to get bizarre badges.

Which is why I'm about to say "Ni! This is a dead parrot! Brian!"

And deoxyribonucleic acid.

(I'm really pleased I wrote that right - my dad used to be an industrial chemist and I wouldn't want to have misspelt a chemical!)

Read their blog too, it's really cool. Almost as good as mine! :)

Anyway, so far I've got a score of 5.3 out of 10 for my blog, 885 points, and 12 badges, including W3C Rebel (basically my blog is so bad at complying with web code it's James Dean) and Ink Waster (I'm missing a print style sheet apparently - so don't print my blog or bad things will apparently happen).  It promises to be very addictive as I try to fiddle with stuff to increase my score.

So apart from that, I've nearly got my stuff together to do my Guild synopsis video on Saturday.  No details yet though, you'll have to wait until you see the video.

One thing though I'd really appreciate - when I do post the video, I'll tell you where it is and all that.  It'd be a big help to me if you just watched the video, and maybe Liked it if you've got a YouTube account (or a Google account, they're the same thing), I'd really appreciate it.

Bye for now!

Warning: Blogging Is Seriously Addictive

I am so addicted to blogging.

I love being creative and being able to get stuff out there, it's so cool.  But it's difficult to try to impose quality standards on yourself to make sure that what you put out is half decent.

I've had this blog going for just over a month now and I wanted to thank you all for reading it.  Over the time I've had something like 110 unique visitors to my blog and somewhere between 700 and 800 pageviews.  Not exactly a massive amount but from nothing just a month ago I'm very happy.  Something like 25% of visits are for more than a minute too so not everyone is just coming on, going "oh my god" and leaving.

Just 65% of them :)

Interestingly after the UK the most popular countries visiting my blog are France and Canada, so if you're from France or Canada - thanks! Bonjour!

My dad is going to be producing a guest blog in the not too far distant future so stay tuned for that.

But it's weird how much effort I put in to getting the blog promoted.  I've signed up to numerous blog directories, I've got a t-shirt with my blog address on it, a load of blog business cards and a handful of blog postcards (all very cheap - thanks Vistaprint!)

We're having a bit of a clear out at the moment prior to the launch of Mists of Pandaria next week, so I'm tempted to do a bit of a giveaway to people willing to promote my blog for me.  I'll have a look round and see if I've got anything anyone would want.

Apart from blogging I'm getting stuff together for making my The Guild Synopsis video on Saturday.  For those that missed my last post, The Guild Season 6 premieres on October the 2nd, and they're asking for the community to do video synopsis of seasons 1 to 5.  I've got a draft script but I just need to make my props.  As mentioned in the last post, if you'd like to help do let me know.

Anyway - got to go and play some WoW!