Firefox 3 Surprise Feature

I just discovered something awesome in Firefox 3. I wanted to see how much somebody could find out about me if they Googled my email address (it only comes up with one page, but you could find out a lot from that page…), and I accidentally typed it into the URL bar instead of the search box (I do this a lot). Usually, if you type in something that isn’t a web address, Firefox will just automatically put you through to a Google search, which suits me fine (not sure if FF2 does this, or it’s new in FF3). But this time, it asked me if I wanted to log into gmail.com with the username jamhos! Okay, so I know Mozilla and Google are in cahoots, so this isn’t completely unexpected, but… Wow! Okay, yeah, I’m a nerd. Deal with it.

P.S. Don’t you love that feeling where everything in your life seems absolutely, wonderfully, deliciously perfect? It’s been a little rare for me recently, what with stuff going on, but I think I might just be back into the swing of it .

Gig Buddies

I sometimes wish I had more people that liked to go to the same gigs as me. I mean, Steve’s been great, submitting to many of my whims and coming along to concerts of bands that he’d never even heard of before I suggested seeing them. It’s something which I’m very thankful for, but it’d also be nice to have somebody who already loves the band as much as I, and who would have wanted to go anyway.

It’s kind of shame that I don’t still live in Victoria, or Nick isn’t in Sydney, as we tend to like a fair bit of the same stuff, and would surely have a ball going to gigs. But alas, this is not the case, so I will have to put that thought out of my mind. Still, there’s always the chance that one day I’ll meet somebody with a similar music taste. And that I like, of course. And we can all go to gigs together! Muahaha!!

Yeah. Sound cool? Hehe.

Dreams and Packages

I had the weirdest morning this morning. I woke up before my alarm, stressed that it was past my alarm, but then once I realised, went back to bed and kind of dozed off into that lovely kind of half-sleep. I think I was dreaming about a combination of my blog, Last.fm, gigs, and a couple of other things. I seem to recall Sufjan Stevens being a major discussion point, although he himself wasn’t in the dream. It kind of distracted me, though, so when the buzzer from downstairs went off, I didn’t even realise what it was, let alone get up to answer it. Errol did, though, and then came a-knocking at my door, saying that there was apparently a package waiting for me downstairs, and I had to go and collect it.

So I kind of stumbled into some proper clothing, and went downstairs to see what all the fuss was about. Ended up being my microSD card that I ordered a couple of days ago for my phone (it’s lucky I did, actually, considering my MP3 player is in for repairs). I’ve had quite a few things delivered, but only once before has the postie actually bothered to call up (in the case of my violin, and I wasn’t even home then). Usually they just put a note in the mailbox and I go and collect it from the post office.

Anyway, I’m not sure of the moral of this story. Maybe it doesn’t have one. Doesn’t need one? It was interesting all the same, especially my dream. Goes to show what I’ve been doing and thinking about lately though… Heh.

Yay, Life!

Isn’t it wonderful?

I find it fascinating.

I love thinking about it.

About everything, really.

But then, isn’t everything part of life?

Which makes the latter sentence redundant.

But I like it, so I will leave it there.

Also, I would feel bad backspacing it.

Okay, I will really stop blagging now.

And pressing return after every sentence.

Lots of love,

James.

(image courtesy ~nearly_dizzy)

French Police Switching To Ubuntu Linux

Apologies for the large volume of posts this evening (/morning), but I just read an article which excited me very much. Apparently the French police are progressively switching all their PCs to Ubuntu Linux over the next 5 or 6 years (all 70,000 of them!).

Sweet.

Sleeping Habits

As can probably be guessed by noting the time at which this is being posted, combined with the knowledge that I have work in the morning, my sleeping habits have been pretty bad recently. It’s weird, I used to stress about it a fair bit, lying in bed trying to get to sleep but not being able to get my mind to be silent for hours on end. But I’ve found a way to deal with it, and it’s quite effective. I just stay up until two or three in the morning, so that I’m tired enough to go straight to sleep as soon as I hit the mattress.

That may sound really bad, but it’s the best method I’ve tried so far, and it doesn’t particularly bother me much at all. It means that I don’t have to fight with myself to get to sleep, and I have an extra few hours to hang out, read a book, watch a movie, or something else semi-productive and enjoyable. And I seem to sleep sounder this way. It also helps when I have work in the morning, because it means my waking hours still stay pretty sane, and work seems to wake me up and have a more enjoyable day, rather than stumbling around half asleep.

I don’t know whether it’s caused by my bad sleeping habits from the past, my inability to control the random (but fun) tangents my brain goes on, or some sort of mild insomnia, but whatever it is… I guess I don’t mind! I’m still getting reasonable sleeping hours, provided I don’t work full-time. My brain still has it’s random tangents, too, it’s just that I’m choosing to be awake having them, instead of trying to get to sleep and fighting them.

Maybe this blag didn’t have much of a point, but I figured that considering I’m staying up not sleeping, I might as well write about staying up not sleeping.

P.S. The music is always better at night.

Warships and Happiness

The photo above (badly) demonstrates one of the reasons I love Australia so much. Sorry it’s such a bad photo (I was late for work at the time), but what I was trying to capture was the fact that there was a warship (three, actually) docked in Cockle Bay, gangways down, with not so much as a guard in sight, let alone one with a gun.Admittedly they didn’t seem very large, important, destructive warships – probably just patrol boats or something – but I still think it’s wonderful that we live in a country in which there is so little risk of somebody doing something stupid that the Navy doesn’t find it necessary to place even one armed guard on three warships.

It was my inspiration today.

xkcd on the US Election

Even though I haven’t got into it too much, I feel, as with many others, that the upcoming US federal election will mean massive changes not only in the US itself, but throughout the world. It has a similar feel to Gordon Brown taking over from Tony Blair in the UK, and Kevin07 beating John Howard here in Australia. That is, if the right candidate wins.

I probably won’t talk about it much more, at least until the candidates have been selected, and then the election itself has been completed, but I read this really interesting blog by Randall Munroe of xkcd. He blatantly supports Barack Obama, but for very good reasons, and I don’t blame him.

Check it out, he makes some excellent points, and even some witty remarks!

nickjamvendetta

You probably noticed when I linked to it in an earlier blog, but I’ll say it properly here. Nick recently launched a music-related blog, and invited me to contribute. In the past week, we’ve put together 12 posts, all of which I reckon have been pretty interesting. It includes gig reviews, album reviews, random music-related things, and Nick even just did a review of Die Hard 4.0, so there could be quite a bit of variation in content type!

So far I’ve been posting all my gig reviews both here and there, but that might change eventually, so that they’re only there. See what happens, though. It might not take off yet! But yeah, it’s pretty exciting, and thus far has been rather more successful than greplifeblog, my collaborative blog with Steve (not that that hasn’t been fun).

So, check it out – nickjamvendetta!

LCD Soundsystem @ Enmore Theatre, 26-01-08

I was feeling pretty lazy going to this gig, so in the end I was glad I was seated, even though dancing to LCD Soundsystem would’ve been pretty rad. Surprisingly enough, Dappled Cities (Fly), the support act, was rather different to what I expected, and I ended up enjoying their stuff tremendously. I even went so far as to search for their album today in JB Hi-Fi, however I was to be disappointed. I’ve been disappointed in JB a lot recently… They don’t have Dappled Cities, Tigermilk, and a few other albums that I’ve wanted. But that’s another story.

Dappled Cities were both energetic and fun, and great to rock out to, but also easy and pleasant to listen to, which is no mean feat in my books. The lead singer (or one of them) was having a lot of fun, and his energy definitely got me in a good mood for what was to come.

Although LCD Soundsystem are meant to be dance artists, whenever I listened to the Sound of Silver, I never felt a terribly great urge to get up and shake my booty (not that that’s a very pleasant thought anyway…), as much as I enjoyed listening to it. But live, it’s a totally different story, and it’s hard not to get up and have some fun. Which is something a great deal of people did, even upstairs.

It seems to be a recurring theme recently that the songs I like best from the album(s) are not the ones I like best at the live shows. Such was the case here, with All My Friends. There was nothing wrong with it, it just wasn’t the best track to hear live. I was also a bit disappointed when they first started to play North American Scum, as it was noticeably quicker than the album version, but once I accepted the fact, it was admittedly a lot better to groove to, and ended up being thoroughly enjoyable, and ended up being the highlight of the night.

Oh, and the lights were totally awesome. DISCO BALL FTW!!