Friday, April 29, 2011

Photography and Archery...

...two hobbies that I haven't been able to do much of recently.
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I am about 7,000 words into a ~15,000 word dissertation for my degree, I am pretty much eating, sleeping and working on the damn thing. It's due in a week's time, and I'll have a few days breathing room before I have to revise for my four exams ...maybe I'll go take some photos then.
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These photos are from a day spent in a field last June. I took a few random photos of the abandoned industrial farm equipment and other surrounding objects, and a friend of mine took photos of me shooting:
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I started archery about 4 years ago as it was one of the only university societies that interested me at first. It was exciting and had a fairly challenging learning curve, not to mention that my dad had a very nice professional bow for me to use.
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I will upload some other photos in some future posts.

EDIT - In response to Xiism's comment :)
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Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Feeling anxious, insecure or hesitant?

Feeling insecure about an aspect of your life? Having trouble mustering up the courage to do something?
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Then let me tell you something.
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You are the successor of hundreds of generations of humans who have all managed to successfully survive and pass on their genes to you, meaning that survival of the fittest has resulted in your creation. You are the current generation of a line of humans who have out-lived millions of others.
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Out of approximately 40 million sperm, all of which have the possibility of creating unique individuals who aren't you, the sperm that became you was the fastest. You came first in a life or death race out of ~40,000,000 competitors. That deserves a pat on the back.
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Still feeling a bit down?
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You, yes you - reading this extremely insightful blog post, are the result of around 3.5 billion years of evolution. Species have come and gone, adapted and changed, but you are currently the epitome of evolutionary success. yahoo domains chicago lawyers law firm accident yahoo domains lemon personal injury attorney
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So in conclusion...

You are the result of thousands of your ancestors surviving and passing on their superior genes to you.
You are the result of the strongest and fastest sperm cell.
You are the result of ~3,500,000,000 years of evolution.

Now fucking act like it.
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Friday, April 22, 2011

The art of the man-cave...

Right, so we're moving into our new house in a few weeks and for the first time in a long while, I have the opportunity to customise a room dedicated to games, TV and drinking. I frequently have anywhere from 2-8 people round for epic sessions so I've been thinking about it and have a few ideas.

Cinema style sofas:

Construct a foot-high platform and put a sofa on top of it, throw another sofa in front of that and you get an awesome stacked pair of sofas with a decent amount of storage space underneath the rear sofa. Maximum view for maximum gaming and maximum comfort for maximum people... to the max.

7 foot projector screen:

Oh hell yeah. We've got hold of two ex-education HD projectors that work really well. They were probably stolen from a school or something, but that's not for me to worry about! Bolt a cabinet with a projector above the rear sofa, make a few adjustments, and voila:

Looks pretty epic, let's face it.

Include a mini-bar with fridge, a decent surround sound system and a media centre - and this might just end up being my favourite room of the house. Summer is BBQ season, so I'll be having a few of those, then retreating back to this room in the evening. Perfect for an immense gaming session and a chilled out film... or a chilled out gaming session and an immense film!

If you have any suggestions, let me know. We should be moving in at the start of June and if something like this goes ahead, I'll be documenting its creation.

Monday, April 18, 2011

A Culinary Masterpiece...

I've been working pretty hard on my major project for university recently and my blog has definitely been pushed to the sidelines.


Today I found God. I found God, and he was in the form of this mouth-moistening, penis-hardening, delicious invention. The father, the son, and the holy toast:



To make this sexy, seductive, gooey piece of Heaven, you need the following:


2 eggs, 2 slices of bread, a few slices of (or grated) cheese, some oil, a mug, a plate and, of course, a frying pan.

Start by pressing down on the bread with the upside-down mug to make some holes. Heat up a teaspoon of oil in the frying pan while you are doing this. Boil the kettle and wipe the mug clean for a nice cup of tea in the meantime.



Put the holy bread into the fires of Hell (the frying pan), and press it down so that when you crack the egg into it, the egg doesn't seep underneath. Crack the egg and gently drop it in the middle. You may want to pop the yolk to prevent the end product from being too messy - I didn't, because I like to live on the edge.



If you want to add seasoning, now's the time. I always add a bit of salt and black pepper to fried eggs. Do the same again for the second slice.


Put your cheese onto one of the slices and let it melt a little before you cover it up. Grated cheese makes the cheese a little more bubbly due to air pockets (a pro-tip from my buddy, James Allen). Go with whatever you prefer.


I broke the yolk on the second slice because two unbroken yolks in one sandwich is just plain crazy. Place the second slice on top and cook for another 2-3 minutes on a low heat.


Cut that bad boy into diagonal slices, because there is no other way to cut a sandwich. Enjoy with a nice cup of breakfast tea.


Beautiful.

It ends up being approximately 750 calories, with 55g of fat. Worth it though.
Food food food egg cheese bread breakfast

Thursday, April 07, 2011

Mistakes I see and hear every day...

...or have just noticed recently.

The English language is a tough one. It is a fusion of a few different languages; Latin, Greek, Norse and Norman-French to name a few. Britons should consider themselves lucky that they were raised learning English because it's one of the hardest languages in the world to learn. Despite the fact that it is 'our' language, I still notice mistakes every single day, some of which I've been guilty of too.

Bought/Brought
‘Bought’ relates to buying something. ‘Brought’ relates to bringing something. For example, "I bought a new donkey and brought it back to my farm." The easy way to remember which is which is that ‘bring’ and ‘brought’ both start with ‘br’. ‘Buy’ and ‘bought’ start with ‘b’ only. This is one of those awkward ones that a spellchecker won’t catch. - Also, I realised I don't actually own a farm, so does anyone want this donkey? I named him Dave.


Your/You're
This one grates on me like a chalkboard being scratched. I find it so simple, yet I see it on Facebook and MSN all the time! ‘Your’ - belonging to you. ‘You're’ - You are. "You're your father's son" or "You're going to annoy me if you can't get your ‘your’s and your ‘you're’s the correct way around."
The thing that makes me lose faith in the educational system is when I see kids typing ‘ur’ and ‘ure’ and still getting it wrong!

Affect/Effect
When people get grammar or words wrong, it has an effect on me. How does that effect affect you? Well, you end up reading this blog post for one. ‘Effect’ is almost always a noun, and it is the result of something. To ‘affect’ something is generally a verb. The effect is the change, and affecting something is the process of changing or influencing something.



Accept/Except
This is a minor one, but not many people realise that they're doing it. You may be thinking to yourself that you never get these two words mixed up, and you may be right. The reason that they're on my list is because of the way that a lot of people pronounce the word ‘acceptable’. I hear it pronounced ‘exceptable’ all the time, which is not a word. Try saying both versions out loud and determine if you're one of those people. Broken down, acceptable becomes ac-cep-ta-ble, and due to the ‘ac’ and ‘cep’, we get a false ‘X’ sound. It's the first ‘ac' sound that makes all the difference. - Pronouncing it as ‘exceptable’ is unACceptable!

Lose/Loose
An understandable one, this. In our language, a single ‘O’ makes an ‘oh’ sound, whereas a double ‘O’ is pronounced ‘ooo’. The way that ‘lose’ is spelled, implies that it should be pronounced ‘lohse’, and I think that's why many folks get it wrong. ‘Loose’ is an adjective, meaning the opposite of tight, take away one ‘o’ and you get ‘lose’. - The modelling agency told me to get lost because I needed to lose some weight. I returned in a month to prove my weight loss by showing them that my trousers were loose. They told me I was too ugly anyway. Their loss, losers.






Its/It's
Guilty. I make this mistake often, despite knowing the difference between them both. ‘It's’ means ‘it is’, while ‘its’ is a possessive pronoun. The reason that this sometimes catches me out is because usually when something belongs to a man, it's the man's possession (notice the apostrophe usage), but when something belongs to ‘it’, it's its. Oh well - if it wants its own section in my blog, it's going to get it.

Alot
...is not a word. - I still see it a lot though.

Literally
Right, this one is a bit different. It is used wrongly so often that we've forgotten its actual meaning. ‘Literally’ means "it really happened". So when you tell me that your dad literally exploded when he found out you were having sex, and that he literally flew out the door to go to your boyfriend's house, I find it hard to believe that he could fly, especially after having just exploded. What you mean to say, is figuratively. - Unless of course, he literally did explode for some reason and the explosion caused him to fly out of the door. Nope, probably not.

Desert/Dessert
I don't really blame people for getting this one wrong. Words like ‘desert’ have only one ‘s’ in them and it's normally pronounced like a ‘z’. So why then does ‘dessert’ have two of them and yet still they get pronounced like a ‘z’. Are we being purposely confused? Who thought that was a good idea?




Two/Too/To
Two turtles went to my house. Two toucans went to my house too. We should all know these by now? Surely? No? You're a lost cause.

Crotch/Crutch
This one annoys me. You walk around with the aid of crutches. You can kick a guy in the crotch, not in the crutch - unless he's been maimed, uses crutches and you want him to fall over, you evil person. The word ‘crotch’ gets confused with ‘crutch’ because crutches were fashioned from the crotch of a tree, which is where its limbs divide (the same goes for our bodies).
After searching for images relating to this confusion, I found out that there is such a thing as a crotch crutch:

Wow.

Accidentally
A lot of people write this as ‘accidently’, which is wrong. The way to remember the spelling of this word is thinking about the root word: ‘accidental’. The same goes for a few other, similar words. He said he did it accidentally. Incidentally and coincidentally his friend said he did it unintentionally too.

Receive, Relieve, Believe etc.
"I before E, except after C" seems like a good rule to live by, but then you grow up and realise that actually... your teachers set you up to fail in that regard. There are actually hundreds of words that this rule does not apply to; deity, foreign, science, height, beige, society, veil, weird, seismic, neighbour, seize, protein, either, forfeit, feisty are quite a few examples. This isn't counting the plurals of many words ending in ‘cy’, such as; frequencies, fallacies, vacancies and indecencies.
I still have to double check after I type a word like ‘receive’ or ‘believe’. I propose a new rule: "I before E, occasionally".

Irony
You all have Alanis Morissette to blame for this one. When something is ironic, it is unexpected. It's that simple. Alanis Morissette had no clue when she sang "it's a free ride when you've already paid" or "it's like rain on your wedding day". This is not irony - it is misfortune or coincidence. - A traffic jam when you're already late... to receive an award from the Municipal Planning Board for reducing the city's automobile congestion by 70 percent. Now that's irony.


This is but a select few that I can be bothered to write about today. There are a lot more though, feel free to let me know which ones you notice the most. Also, bonus points to anyone who finds errors in my post, it would be quite ...ironic.



Tuesday, April 05, 2011

You can chase a dream, but you'll need to run hard to catch it

We've all seen the pictures, posters or inspirational speeches; 'Change your life', 'Make your dreams a reality'. It's all very well reading these and embracing the next fantastic ten minutes feeling motivated and energised. Some of these pictures make me feel that I'm so awesome that I could walk up to a bear and punch it in the face.

After that though, it's not long before we slip back into the proverbial coma that is the norm. A good friend of mine once taught me to change my patterns often, because if you don't, every day becomes similar. If I follow a pattern day in and day out for a year or so my recollection of that year can become blurred instead of clear cut, separate memories.

Everyone has a dream or goal that they want to achieve, and I will say now that you aren't going to just stumble upon it - you need to create it for yourself. You are in charge of your life, as cheesy and forced as it sounds, you can mold it and shape it into what you want.


The problem I have with these inspirations is that they're so far from realistic, that they end up negating any long-term positive effect they might have had on the reader. You generally can't walk out the door and change your life, despite what they tell you. It doesn't happen like that, and reality will quite happily waltz in and slap you in the face before you get off your driveway. Most plans require time, effort and money.

It's pretty easy to want to change your life for the better, it's simple to know what you want to do or where you want to be. Getting there though, taking the first step - that is the part that a lot of people seem to find difficult. The best part is; once you have taken that first step, you're already on your way. Think about that for a second.

You get one life to live, figure out what the most important things are, figure out what experiences you want to have, figure out what you want to achieve... and think about how you're going to get there. Tell your friends and family, they will help you.

The first step is to have a plan. Make one, take that first step and you'll only be moving forward after that. "Do, or do not. There is no try."

Friday, April 01, 2011

A lie we have all told

"I have read and accept the terms and conditions"

No, you haven't. You haven't read clause 2.5c stating that you will donate your first born to Bill Gates if you don't want your PC to bluescreen. You haven't read clause 1.2.6 of Apple's T&C stating that if you purchase a Mac, you must worship Steve Jobs like he's an omnipotent bearded deity. I can imagine the Westboro Mactist Church holding picket signs telling PC users that they're going to hell.

Nobody except lawyers read these things, yet we accept the conditions that they offer because we want to access the damn product. It's similar to when we're installing a program and the 'Back' and 'Cancel' buttons feel rejected while the 'Next' button is getting physically abused by our cursor. We don't care about the finer details! We just want to access our freshly made Gmail or Ebay account, or play the new game that we've legally downloaded. I would definitely struggle to recall the exact number of terms and conditions that I have accepted this year. Anti-virus, online games, the census, forum accounts, random software downloads, and of course - my new blog. I probably can't remember half of the times because it seems to just blend in with the process.

The thing that amuses me when I do actually glance at the T&C is the language they use - it's total legal jargon. I love the way that they try to cover themselves for almost any eventuality. They are not at fault for anything and/or everything that someone, anyone or everyone may or may not have possibly caused. Wait... what? If you are unfamiliar with what I'm talking about - go and read one.

No... actually don't, just accept the conditions and move on with your life.