Are You Mike Raven?

I've just completed Are YOU Dave Gorman? a book, unsurprisingly by Dave Gorman & Danny Wallace.  In a nutshell, as a result of a drunken bet Dave Gorman travels around the world meeting other people with his name, in an effort to find and meet 54 of them, dragging his flatmate Danny along for the trip.  I love these types of books - Googlewhack and Round Ireland With a Fridge are two others that spring to mind - where an immense amount of effort is put into a bizarre task.  No, that's wrong - a quest.

There's something about a quest that appeals to me, going out and doing something.  And although I don't feel able to go and do something like this myself, I can live through their books a little.

I must go and watch Yes Man.

And I feel a session buying Kindle books coming on.

Putting reading aside, I've also made my first attempt at a YouTube video, this one is of me doing a brief review of Realm of the Mad God.  It's not very good, but I learnt a lot from making it.  I need to speak a little slower and clearer, and I need to have more of a script when I'm reviewing a game rather than recording a session playing the game, and then talking over it (which is essentially what I did).  It's important to create quality content, even if it takes longer to do.

If you still want to view the video, it's at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgzDWRtWRfY

Apart from that, it's been a quiet day - I'm currently not feeling too clever with a very sore throat so I'm going to go back to bed, where I've been most of the day! Night!

Why is a toothpick cool?

Coolness is a strange beast.

Someone with a toothpick hanging out the corner of their mouth has a certain "coolness" about them.  But surely this is a bad idea!  All you need is a shock or a coughing fit and you'd risk lacerating the inside of your mouth with a sharpened wooden miniature javelin?

And why a toothpick? Why not a spoon?  Or a pizza cutter?

From time to time I come across people who are naturally cool. Their hair falls into cascading waves, their smile turns their intended target to jelly and they inevitably work as a DJ or Motorbike Tester. Thinking about it, I’ve never met a Motorbike Tester – surely Motorbike companies must have them? They can’t just stick two wheels on a big engine, sell it to the first random person that walks past and look to see if it works?

Meh.

So, what's worth checking out today?  Well, there's rather a cool infographic (picture with information on it here - it shows how the Internet has changed over the last ten years.  I particularly like the picture of the old Yahoo! site - it reminds me of when I first used the Internet!

I'm getting very tempted to restart my World of Warcraft subscription but I'm just worried about the time it could eat up - for those who haven't played it, World of Warcraft is a very addictive game where you join a fantasy world, along with thousands of other gamers (altogether there is something like 12 million subscribers to the game) to complete quests, kill monsters, and pick up loot.  It is very good indeed and I've played it on and off these last five years.

Anyway, it's a bit of a short post tonight because I'm going to have a play at doing some computer games reviews to go on YouTube - all being well I'll post a link to some tomorrow!

Cheers, Thog

The Cat Is Alive!

My gran's cat is alive and well.

To clarify, my gran rang me yesterday morning very upset as the cat was acting extremely strangely and very unwell, with the likelihood being that it would have to be taken to the vet's and put to sleep.  Now the cat is not a young cat and hasn't been very well for a while, so we knew this day would come, but of course it's still extremely upsetting as it is the only pet my gran has now, and she has had pets pretty much all of her life so not having one would be difficult for her (she's now 81 and not up to having another pet after this one).

I was out all day yesterday (hey Alex, Mark, Phil and Dave if you're reading) so I couldn't take the cat, but I arranged to ring my gran back at lunchtime, and when I rang the cat was no better so things were not looking good.

So it was not in a terribly cheerful mood I arrived at my gran's this morning, prepared to extract the cat from wherever it was hiding (it is extremely nervous and hides when I'm around, probably because every time I go near it I take it to the vet).

However, the cat had completely recovered! Good news.

I should have known really.  We had the same situation about four months ago, when the cat was behaving very oddly again, and I went to collect the cat, to again take it to the vets.  The cat had hidden under a dresser in one corner of the room, so I pulled the dresser away from the wall, only for the cat to get around me and go behind the sofa.

I looked behind the sofa.

I saw a cat.

And a second one behind it.

Piecing information together we worked out that about four days beforehand a second cat had entered the house, and rather than leaving again which my gran had assumed it had taken up residence behind her sofa. So, when her cat was behaving oddly it was due to the intruder on its territory.  We extracted the rogue cat and sent it on its way.

So, all good news on the animal front.

I'm trying to decide whether to return to World of Warcraft - I still have a lot of friends on there (hey Guild Ravenswing!) and of course the Mists of Pandaria expansion is released on the 25th of September which a lot of people are very excited about - who doesn't want to be a very deadly, and cuddly, panda?

Apart from that, I wanted to flag up a set of websites that always entertain me, the Not Always group, namely:

• notalwaysright.com
• notalwaysworking.com
• notalwaysrelated.com
• notalwaysromantic.com

These sites get real funny stories submitted for your reading pleasure.  The first one, notalwaysright.com was the first site and covers all those customer service stories of people trying to deal with difficult customers.  For anyone who has worked on the customer service side you'll relate to some of the stories!  One of the top stories is Lost In Translation - a story which makes me glad I can't speak a second language!  Over time I've pretty much read every story on there.

And if you have a minute spare, why not watch a video of a man gobbling at turkeys too!

One last thing, I've been enjoying the Jeff Lewis 5 Minute Comedy Hour on YouTube - I mentioned it the other day but it's worth repeating as it really is funny.  Jeff Lewis, who plays Vork in The Guild (again, go and watch it, very very funny indeed) delivers some excellent comedy in 5 minute chunks.

I'm pretty tired tonight so going to leave the blog there - oh, I did have a slight panic earlier, when I noticed my website address is http://thoggy.blogspot.co.uk/ - the other day I ordered a load of cheap promotional materials (postcards, business cards and labels) with thoggy.blogspot.com on them.  I've just checked and they both end up in the same place, relief is mine!

What's in a name - and a few websites to entertain you

I got a letter from Stephen Fry!

I sent him a fan letter a few weeks back and got a response, thanking me for my letter and with a bit of text.  It was nice to get (and a nice change from bills), it was unfortunate that he had my first name as Mark instead of Mike but it's something I've got used to!

It's surprising (to me anyway, but to be fair I already know my own name) how often I get Mark instead of Mike.  Sometimes I consider resorting to Michael but it always seems a little formal to me and best suited for when I'm being told off about something.

Anyway, I'm going to mention a few websites for you to check out:

http://www.oneplusyou.com/bb/ has quite a few cool tests that you can try out to pass the time.  One of these is "How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take In A Fight" - I took the test and I can take on fifteen five year olds.  If you don't mind though, I think I'd rather not anyway!  And according to "Would You Make A Good Human Shield?" my result is...

56%

Created by OnePlusYou - Free Dating Site

So in the case of war you've got a 56% chance that I won't dive out of the way of the machine gun fire and that the bullets will be stopped by my body.  Hope that comforts people.

Another one is Drinkify.  Drinkify asks you what you're listening to, and then recommends a drink to listen to it with, as well as in many cases playing the music.  It doesn't seem to accept anything but it does accept a hell of a lot of different things - I put in "Felicia Day", who although has sung a few songs (very well) is primarily known as a writer, actress, and producer and it still came up with a suggested drink, albeit missing music.

The last site I'm going to mention is Whatdoestheinternetthink - on this site you type in something and it tells you what the internet thinks of it.  I just typed in cheese, and apparently the internet is very positive about cheese.  For the MLIA folk (another excellent website by the way) Harry Potter is 72.9% positive and 74.2% negative about Twilight - an outstanding win for the wizard over the vampires, I think!

And for completeness, the internet is positive about Felicia Day too.  I feel another letter coming on, hopefully this time if I get a reply it'll be to the right name!

I should point out that a couple of the sites I've mentioned today I became aware of thanks to the Vsauce channel on YouTube, which also gives some fascinating scientific facts (like what would happen if the entire population of Earth jumped at the same time) by a guy called Michael who I presume also got fed up of being called Mark.

Thog

PS Probably no blog tomorrow as I'm out for the day, fingers crossed back on Sunday!

Fish...

Image Copyright Brian Robert Marshall. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic Licence. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Now I'm not an expert on fish.  I pride myself on knowing something about a lot of things, but not a lot about a lot of things.

And fish are something that I know little about.

I know that they breathe in water, and swim, and eat fish food (and probably something else in the wild).  I know that it's a myth that goldfish only have a memory of three seconds.

But apart from that, I don't really know a lot.

Anyhow, we were very generously given a fishtank at the weekend.  My son loves looking at fish, so it's a cool pet for him, plus they're pretty low maintenance - no walks, no throwing sticks, no combing their hair.  I've always quite fancied a fish.

So, we headed down to the pet shop to buy some fish.

Whoa! You can't just, like, go and buy some fish!  You get questioned as to the size of your tank, how long the water has been in there, if fish are already in the tank etc etc.

And if you pass the test, you can have one or two fish.

Then, a week or so later, you can have a few more.

The reason is that the filter sponge in the tank has bacteria in it, that eat the fish waste.  And the bacteria have to scale up to the increase in waste caused by more fish.

This does make sense.  But the amount of hoops you have to jump through to own a couple of the things is incredible.  I don't know how they survive in the wild, with no filters, or tropical fish food (our pellet fish food will "do for now" but next time we need to get the right stuff).

The other thing is the "size of the tank" issue.  Obviously, you need a tank big enough for the fish to swim around in and do their stuff. That's cool.  But have you seen the fish in the tanks at the pet shop?  There is way more fish in one of those tanks than would be recommended if I owned the tank.  Apparently it's okay because "they aren't in the tank very long because people buy them", but I can't say that I fell for that excuse.  Surely some of the fish get wise to the little net coming in and nabbing their mates, and head for the ground when the pet shop guy turns up, so they never get picked, and as a result suffer fish depression due to small tankiness.

Nevertheless, we've got some fish.  They are quite cool, swimming around in what must be a giant ocean of a tank compared to the one in the pet shop, but they are quite good at hiding - as soon as I released them into the tank, promptly one of them vanished, making me check the plastic bag in case it had somehow stuck in the bag and was undergoing asphyxiation.  But sure enough it showed up after a while, happily swimming around.

I was giving this tale to my parents today (Khat and Ravanna of Guild Ravenswing) and was quizzed "Are they tropical fish? What type of fish are they?".  Apparently as they're tropical fish, they need a heater in the tank, which doubles as the light.  I had been turning the light off on a night so it didn't scare the fish but it's needed to keep them warm! Sorry fish, I promise to look after you better in future.  I was also asked what type of breeders they are - not a clue.  I'll go back to the shop and ask!

Not about SEO. Seriously, do not read this post if you are interested in SEO. In fact, don't read this post because it will make your life worse.

I would guess that there is a lot of interest in SEO.  Even on my tiny blog, I have had new Twitter followers and viewers, quite possibly because I mentioned SEO in my post on Sunday.  if you are one of these people and you've stuck around for this article, thank you and welcome.  If you don't know what SEO is, go read my post.

So, what shall I blog about today?  I've been feeling very creative and geeky lately, possibly because I've finished watching The Guild which is a fantastic web show.  Go see it if you haven't.

I'm toying with the idea of doing some kind of PC game review show on YouTube, I think that it'd be quite fun to do (and cheap as well), one problem is that I am a committed mumbler.  My voice is quite dull and I very easily slip into a mumble to make things worse.  Will have to work on that first.

Okay, what I'm going to blog about today is going to make your life worse if you read it.  This is your warning.  Before you read any more, go change to a different website.  Shut your PC down.  Do not read the rest of this post!

I warned you.

I thought about this when I was a kid, and it has blighted me on and off ever since.  And it will do the same to you.

Last chance - go to YouTube and check out Geek and Sundry, it's really cool! Or the Jeff Lewis 5 minute Comedy Hour, I'm really enjoying that as well.

...

Okay then.

Have you ever thought about breathing?  About how your body automatically breathes?  It just does it, you don't need to think about it or anything, isn't it great?

From http://www.radpod.org/2007/02/02/double-aortic-arch-type-2-subtype-3/

Now try to think about something else.

Go on, clear your head.

Except you can't, can you?  You're thinking about breathing.  And you start to wonder, what if it isn't automatic?  What if you have to tell yourself to breathe, or your lungs will fill with carbon dioxide and you'll die.

Time for another breath.  Are you going to consciously work your lungs?  Take a breath in?  You are, aren't you.

Next breath - this one, to prove to yourself that it's an involuntary reflex, wait for your body to breathe, don't tell it to.

But it's not, is it?  You can feel your lungs wanting to exhale, but nothing's happening.

You'll have to breathe again! Consciously! Voluntarily!

How long will this last?  Five minutes?  All day? THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?!?

...

...

Told you not to read this post :)

Is this one funny?  Can't decide if it's funny or creepy. Tomorrow's will be cool, it's going to be about fish!

Until then,

Thog

I Hate Nappies

I hate nappies.

On Monday, my other half went out for a couple of hours around dinner time, so I was looking after our 2 year old.  He's ace.

I was washing up in the kitchen and he came, took me into the living room and sat me down so he could snuggle up with me for a bit, which is cool.

Then I noticed that his nappy was bulging - time for a change, I thought. Not a problem.

Now, I knew that we were running low on nappies.

There wasn't any in the changing box.

Hmm.

Or upstairs in his bedroom.

Not even under his bed.

Okay, I thought, we can use one from out of his going out backpack, and I'll ask my other half to fetch some on her way in.

The going out backpack was empty as well.

Right, I decided, action needs to be taken.  He's going to need changing soon.

So, I decided that we would pop out and get some.  We headed down to Lidl on Cottingham Road - before anyone gets up in my grill about going to Lidl, they're very good value and their nappies have won some awards and personally I've found them to be better than Pampers and Huggies ones.

Parked up.

Got my son out of the car.

Got my son into a trolley.

Went to Lidl.

Realised that Monday was a bank holiday and that Lidl had shut early.

Returned the trolley and put my son  back in the car.

We then went to Tesco on Newland Avenue.  Went in there, but they had nappies sizes 2, 3 and 5, and we've been getting my son  size 6, so no luck there.

I got us back in the car and drove further down Newland Ave to the Sainsburys.  Unfortunately a ne'er-do-well was lurking around the entrance, and being a tough burly lad I decided to drive on.

We made it to Sainsburys on Princes Avenue.  As it is a bank holiday, people had been drinking all day, there was shouting going on, broken glass on the ground - not overly pleasant, but by this time I just wanted to get some nappies no matter what and this time I took the bull by the horns and left the safety of the car.

Went into Sainsburys - sizes 2, 3, and 5. No 6.

I decided to take a risk and buy a pack of size 5 nappies and hope that they would do for the time being.  Bundled my son back into the car, and headed for home.

Got home at last - this took me about three quarters of an hour, while I was supposed to be tidying the kitchen and generally sorting things out.

Opened the door.

On the table in the hallway was an unused nappy.

Ah well.

When my other half got in later, I told her the story.

She pointed out the new set of plastic drawers where unused nappies are now kept.

She also brought me a cookie.

I hate nappies.

But I like cookies.

Diablo 3 - by a noob. And shaving - by a noob.

Hmm - I think I've got a spot on my chin.

The reason that I'm not sure is that I have a fairly decent beard growing.  I try to keep it under control whilst at work, but I haven't been at work for 5 days now and it's sprouting quite well.  And I think somewhere underneath it all there's a spot.

Might have to shave an exploratory gap to check.

Anyway - off topic.  I've just completed Diablo III on Normal difficulty.

Diablo III, for the people that don't know what it is, is a very good game.  You essentially play through an adventure game, killing monsters, picking up loot, typically being accompanied by one or more helpers as you explore the lands, ultimately heading towards taking care of a rather nasty chap called Diablo.  Apparently he's the root of all evil or the centre of evil or some such gubbins - I've heard that not only does he not pay his television license, but he even helps himself to a grape in the supermarket without paying for it (that annoys me no end)

So, I created a mage called Raistlin - whilst many people know me as my WoW hunter Thog, Raistlin goes back a lot further, to when I was a kid and read a book called Dragons of Autumn Twilight.  I got this book in with a game for the ZX Spectrum - the game itself wasn't memorable, but the book was.  Raistlin was basically this mage, who starts off neutral but over time turns to evil.  If you want to know his story, read the Dragonlance books - they're good. (And to any readers of the Dragonlance books - I know I massively oversimplified Raistlin's backstory here)

So, Raistlin was a cool character and so I used his name in various old RPG games, notably Dungeons of the Necromancers Domain and Mordor.  But when I played WoW, I couldn't get Raistlin as a name, so he fell into longterm memory for recovery at a future date.

And then Diablo 3 came out.

So, Raistlin is back and has just kicked Diablo's ass on Normal difficulty.  I won't go through the details in case you haven't played the game yet (I do recommend it), but I would say that the way the game is set up is directly against how I play.

If I play a game, I usually play it on the lowest difficulty setting, so that I feel like less of a noob, and once I've completed it, that's it.  Don't play it again.

But the idea of Diablo 3 is that you play it on Normal, then on Nightmare, then on Hell, and finally on Inferno.  Now my understanding is that I'm essentially going to play the same game (albeit harder and with better loot) four times, and to me it just seems like a grind.

I like seeing new content, that's cool.  And new loot is always nice.  Perhaps I need to party more?  I'm a bit of a solitary player (mainly so that I don't look bad in front of other players) and I've done very little partying.

I guess I'll leave it a little then give it a try on Nightmare mode - my fiancee has played through the difficulties and loves the game, so there must be something to it.  Any comments folks?

Right - I'm going to try to find a spot!

(Fifteen minutes pass)

No spot.

Damn that hurt.

I (stupidly I know) dry shave.  I generally use an electric razor to get the thick of the beard, but then I always need to use a Mach 3 or a Fusion Power Stealth Ninja Deathblade to remove the last few rogue hairs (and even then it's amazing how often I look in the mirror and a single inch long hair has sprouted overnight) and when it's been a while since I last shaved the dry shave stings a bit.  I constantly get told to wet shave, the trouble I find is if I wet shave the razor gets gummed up with bits of cut beard almost instantly, so you have no option but to buy a new blade (and I like to make the blade last as long as possible - which also unfortunately increases the pain), so instead I dry shave.

Ultimately, the problem with razors is that we don't really know anything about them. The only way we can measure the quality of a razor is by the number of blades it has. So manufacturers are having to outdo each other on the blade front, and it is only a matter of time until we are all using a razor that is also used in Chinese takeaways to produce shredded crispy duck.

To go further, there are manual razors (that don’t need electricity) and electric razors. Electric ones usually don’t give as close a shave, but last ages and don’t peel your face off. But now you can get manual razors that need a battery. I await the day when I own an electric razor that doesn’t need electric, and instead you rub it on your calf for five minutes to generate enough static electricity so that all your hairs on your body stand on end and you get to pluck them off one at a time with a pair of tweezers.

Battery powered tweezers, of course.

SEO and doing it

I've been reading about SEO today.

SEO, for those not in the know, is Search Engine Optimisation.  According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization) it's "the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural," or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic"), search results."

Basically, when you Google something, you generally look on the first page for what you want, and the further away your result is from the first page, the less likely someone is going to click on it.  When was the last time you went beyond page ten of a Google search, despite it possibly finding millions of results for you?

So it makes sense that you want your page to appear as near to the front as possible, to increase the amount of visitors to your site.

Following the Wikipedia article, there are several ways to do SEO. One is getting indexed - to be found the search engines must visit your site.  Well, I've visited a few of the leading search engines and submitted my site for review, so box ticked for that one. Boom!

Secondly, preventing crawling.  The search engines employ programs called "spiders" to visit sites, and gather key information, and you can tell spiders not to index a certain page if it isn't relevant. (for example the secured payroll website of a company probably doesn't need to show up on Google) Not really a problem for me, I'm happy with everyone seeing any of the pages of my blog.

Five minutes and I've already done two points of SEO. Man, this is easy.

Third - Increasing Prominence. This sounds good. I like to increase my prominence whenever I can.

Writing key words in my documents that people search for will increase the likelihood of being found.

But! These spiders are sneaky, they're like jumpy spiders or something.  If you just post a stream of text like "Cheese nachos yoghurt tablet happy brie" they'll know that you're mean and they won't link you or track you or do whatever it is they do, wrap you in a web and eat you for dinner.

Hmm - I don't want to be eaten for dinner by a digital spider.

Never mind.  Apparently I need to be a white hat, instead of a black hat - tricky, I only have a black hat.

Or a santa hat.

So, the idea struck me, what if I make a story out of the key words for the moment?  That way, it'll look legit, right?

So what are the key words I should use?  I had a little look at a few leading websites to see "what people are searching for right now"

And here's the story.

---------

Kate Nash sat in Tampa, eating a Mars Curiosity from her Clutch Bag whilst perusing an advert for used cars on her Tablet PC, but she couldn't focus on the offers.  Her thoughts flitted between healthy eating, beerfear, and the Paralympics.
 "If only Victoria Wood was here," she thought aloud, glancing over at the HD television which was showing Celeb Big Brother.  She flicked the channel over to X Factor, and went back to her Tablet PC.

A thought struck her. She shouted for her butler, and within but a moment or two, he arrived.
 "Jeeves! I want to ask you, how big is the moon?" she asked.  Perplexed, he paused, before answering "The diameter of the moon is only 3,474 km across. Madam, may I suggest that you review the progress of the Arenanet Technicians Fixing your Server?"

She fixed him with a steely glare. "Thank you Jeeves, that will be all. Oh Jeeves," she called, as he wheeled around to face the door, "do be a good man and feed Lycos, won't you?"
 "Yes, milady." Jeeves answered, jumping out of the window shouting "Yahoo!" as he fell.
 "Silly man." she said, pressing the lift controls, making them go Bing.

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To the entire world who are now on my blog after I've deployed SEO - welcome to my blog.