Hi there. You may have noticed a quick overhaul. I was getting tired of the old look and decided to ‘upgrade’ the wordpress theme I was using when I was upgrading wordpress itself. Hopefully, this one ain’t too annoying.

Not too much from me, I’m afraid. I’ve just completed semester 1 of my Masters of International Studies, and that has drained most of my energy. Pretty soon I’ll be back, shrieking like a tomcat in heat and generally moaning about every little facet of my fairly flaccid life. Hopefully, I’ll get to write here a bit more often. In the mean time I’m writing on my ‘music’ blog over here.

Hi all.

I’ve haven’t updated here in a while, mostly because I haven’t really got anything that interesting of a general nature to talk about.

I just wanted to mention that I’ll be taking a break from Facebook for a while – I’ve deactivated my account temporarily. This is because my masters course is kicking my arse with essay writing.

You may email me through the usual means (assuming you know it!). If you don’t, well, you’ll just have to wait until I jump back on the ol’ facebook bandwagon.

You can get to me through the following ways as well

I will be still be writing in my music blog, http://parallel-lines-slow-decline.blogspot.com/
I’m also on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dazmurray

Otherwise, have a nice few weeks. After semester finishes, I want to overhaul this thing a bit as well.

Ok, I recently bought a MacBook Pro, despite the words of Charlton Brooker. My first Mac. My faithful Dell was showing the signs of old age and had to be put into semi-retirement. I’ve had the Mac about three weeks now, and these are my first impressions.

To be completely honest, I’m not enamored to the Mac as many others seem to be. Some of my Mac loving friends are sure to think that I’m inherently biased against Macs, and that maybe a fair call, but I’m attempting to be as objective as possible.

While I’m slowly getting used to it, there are a few annoyances with it, mostly directed at OSX. Now people will surely say ‘oh you just need this app, and that app, and this app and blah blah blah’. Good interface design should be native to the system. Its like buying a door for a house that comes without a handle (I know that many doors come without handles, so bad analogy perhaps).

The things I like include:
* Scrivener – The application that finally convinced me to try my hand at Apple. It is brilliant. Its a project management tool for writing.
* Expose
* Spaces
* It has a tonne of power (2.66GHZ, 4GB Ram)
* OSX is fast.
* The trackpad is cool and fairly intuitive
* iCal is a nifty little program. I can also synch it with google calendar, which is handy.
* The full backlit keyboard is great
* Inbuilt mic and camera is extremely awesome for Skype.
* Quicksilver – I love being able to set my own keyboard shortcuts.

Things I don’t like
* Bad support for keyboard shortcuts (luckily Quicksilver gets me around this).
* I’m installing applications all over the place and there is little clue as to where they are actually located. I like the idea that I can know where everything is installed so I can reduce file clutter. Finder is pretty terrible – its no Windows Explorer. I once accidentally installed an application to the trash folder! Surely, OSX should be smart enough to realise that people shouldn’t be doing this!
* Lack of Chrome support. That ain’t really Apple’s problem, but I miss Chrome all the same. Firefox just ain’t the same. Hurry up Google.
* Getting to the desktop. I like being able to easily get to the desktop (ok, yeah so I know now that you can go Fn-F11 to do so, but I changed it via Quicksilver to Apple-D, which is more like the Windows desktop shortcut)
* Lack of a maximise button. I don’t buy this Apple philosophy of ‘maximising the screen environment’. Why does Apple have to make such arbitrary decisions on what the user wants to do? Let the user decide what they want to do by giving them them the option.
* Apple-tabbing to a running program sometimes does nothing – this seems to happen if I’ve minimised a program to the dock, moved to another program, then apple-tab back to the previous one. I’ve selected it, but nothing seems to appear on the screen (oh, its because you have to maximise it from the dock again….isn’t that a little counter-intuitive?)
* I like having a delete AND backspace key. I like being able to forward delete!

Ok, Ok, I am slowly getting used to the interface. Jumping back on to my old Dell the other night and I had suddenley realised how useful the Mac trackpad interface is compared to the trackpad+buttons interface that my old laptop uses. It is very very handy!

I’m sure in a few months, many of these issues I’ve had initially had will be ironed out over the coming months. I’ll probably look back and say ‘oh, whoever wrote this is an IDIOT’ and then think ‘oh, its me, I better just re-edit what I wrote and make it sound like I’m less of an idiot.’

Yep, some guy in Sweden who won the Nobel prize said the internet might have stop Hitler.

I don’t see the internet stopping genocides in Darfur and other forms of persecution across the globe. Its not a panacea.

Furthermore, saying that the internet *may* have stopped Hitler is also like saying that antibiotics might have stopped the black death.

Pfft. Ridiculous statement.

A hilarious, as usual, Charlie Brooker story on the Guardian website about visits to not so great theme parks made me recall a trip of my own to the sadly now defunct Nostalgia Town, many moons ago.

It would seem that history will not look with kindness upon Nostalgia Town, which was conveniently positioned on the main road between Caloundra and Noosa, at the fountainhead of David Low Way. It was a tiny theme park known primarily for its ghoul themed 18 hole mini-golf course, Graveyard Putt, but also incorporated “fun” events like remote controlled boats, a miniture rail way that encircled the mini-golf area, and horrible, ugly, automatons created to explain the concept of ‘nostalgia’, so I’m led to believe. From memory, I believe one such explained how cane farming was undertaken in ‘the good ol days’. Fascinating stuff!

Anyhow, one day a few of my friends and I decided to go to Nostalgia Town for a round of mini-golf. It was pissing rain and the place was deserted. The owners expressed disbelief that we had bothered to drive four hours from Ballina in New South Wales in the pouring rain for a round of mini-golf (Actually, we came from two hours away in Brisbane, but the owners were not to know). We claimed to be siblings who had got annual leave from the management of the Ballina caravan park and decided to spend that day at Nostalgia Town, after ‘being enchanted by the almost mythical allure of nostalgia town, woven into our minds by a tapestry of tales by the travelers that to and from our humble caravan park’. The owners were quite impressed, surprised that Nostalgia Town had such a glorious reputation south of the border. (edit: I’m reminded by a friend that we said that Conor was actually the mayor of Ballina, presumably taking some time out from his mayoral duties).

Anyhow, we played a round of eighteen holes, wistfully walked amongst the ‘nostalgic scenes’ that inhabited the main building, and yelp with glee as we battled for control of the murky green pond with our rusty remote controlled boats. Oh, this was truly a great day.

To add to the amusement, we stopped at a local Kentucky Fried Chicken for a feed, where Conor ate several meals of chicken in a chicken-related food challenge, only to stumble out of the store, towards the bushes surrounding the drive-in menu ordering station. You should have seen the horror on the faces of the drive-through patrons as Conor violently retched up half digested chicken while they waited for their own chicken related meal; it was truly a horrific, and yet quite amusing, sight.

We had bid farewell to our gracious hosts, and with a somewhat air of inevitability turned our backs on Nostalgia Town. A year later I rang to enquire as to the health this iconic Sunshine coast amusement venue only to found out it had ceased operation. Tears rained down upon my cheeks as hard and with as much violence as the raindrops that had soaked us on our glorious day at the venue a year prior; my office shirt drenched with salty tears as the former owner related the passing of the theme park. Woe was I.

You see, some bastards built a massive freeway bypassing the place, and consequently Nostalgia Town had run out of business.

Speaking of the aforementioned Brooker article, there was this golden comment regarding ‘crap’ theme parks placed on the blog that I had to share

“I took my lad to a Halloween theme park called Spooky World the other year. It was a farm.

At least half the kids and several of the adults instantly started howling inconsolably and a thin layer of piss and shit lapped at our feet.
Brilliant, it was.”

This is primarily for me mum, cos she don’t do no face-cool action.

Recent photos.

London – Autumn

Mike’s Leaving Shindig

Shunt, London Random, Angs Party

London – End of Summer

Weekend in Birmingham