delusional

It's always worked for me too. When I was at school I used to get a hell of a lot of hassle from people, but by just walking away from things it never actually escalated to violence. Actually that's not quite true, I think I once got punched by some random drunk who was giving me abuse, but I turned around and walked away from that so it didn't escalate any further. Had I tried to "stand up for myself" I probably would have got the crap beaten out of me.

Neither of those are acceptable or even reasonable reactions. If everyone went around retaliating to things in either of the manners you've outlined society would very quickly crumble and fall to pieces - I don't know about you, but I certainly wouldn't want to live in a society where it was deemed acceptable for people to take the law into their own hands. Sure, the response from the authorities may sometimes be infuriatingly lacking in the eyes of the victims, but I think this is an annoyance we all have to live with whilst we still live in an inperfect world. I suppose it's a little different when we're talking about "playground politics", but mission_reefer_rider isn't exactly a kid anymore. I think 16 is more than old enough to start dealing with these things like an adult, which in my opinion means walking away from a fight where possible and minimising any violence wherever you can. The legal concept of 'reasonable force' is very applicable here.

It's already up on the shack! http://www.trials-shack.co.uk/trialmedia/TM1/TM1_full.zip

This is all pretty sound advice. A Ball Closure Ring (or BCR) is pretty much what I meant above, as you said, when you take the ball out they just slide on. You can probably pick up a really cheap one from a market stall somewhere for a couple of quid, you can always put it in your ears or something afterwards (assuming they're pierced that is). But don't put a cheap one in anything that isn't totally healed. You shouldn't have to worry about the size though, your piercer should measure you to work out what diameter you need for comfort. If they try and put anything other than a 1.6mm thick ring in though I would be pretty cautious of them. Actually I'd reccomend getting a lip piercing done with a bar first. I had my bottom lip done with a ring first and it was really awkward to heal, every time I ate I was knocking the ring and knocking off the scabbing around the piercing. Which meant it was uncomfortable and needed cleaning a lot more regularly than it might otherwise have done. If I was getting it done again I'd definitely go with a bar until it was healed. Does anyone ever try and do lip piercings with guns? That's awful! I know a lot of places use them for noses and upper ears (neither of which are a good idea) and I've heard of a few piercing tragus' with them, but I'd never heard of a lip piercing being done with a gun. What a horrible thought :o/

If you want to see what you look like with a lip piercing just get hold of a piercing ring and slide it over your lip. Much more realistic than any photoshop effort will be :)

No it doesn't... the extension is meaningless to file format. The only reason this can make any difference is because windows isn't smart enough to tell the difference between files based on anything beyond the extension. If you rename a .mp3 file to .wma it still won't work in something without the mp3 codecs! Isn't .acc the iTunes filetype? Actually now that I think about it that's .aac, .acc is some form of windows executable file format, which should certainly not be being used for music files. Are you sure it's not .aac?

I was going to get my cheeks pierced before, they're actually quite nice piercings on some people. Not sure they would have suited me though. But yeah, that's hardly a nasty picture... she's just put that thing through some normal piercings. Looks a bit odd, but not really sick in any way. I don't really understand play piercings though, sure getting a piercing done is an adrenaline rush and all, but it's really just a means to an end. Piercing yourself just for the fun of having the piercing done is a little wierd to me. Ah well, each to their own and all. I'm guessing none of you noticed that both those pictures carry BME copyright notices specifically forbidding duplication and republication?

This is the first time that they have done anal bum together and they hope you enjoy the songs. Intellectual humour? Are you sure about that? To be honest, although the London Underground song was quite clever I'm not that impressed with the other songs I'm listening to now. Just kinda purile and stupid really.

Bah, also all their 4meg lines require you to have a bulldog telephone line. May not be all that bad a deal if you're looking for a new telephone provider as well. The cheapest "always on" 4meg service from them is £30 a month for aDSL and Telephone line, which isn't that bad really. Bulldog used to be a pretty good company before they were taken over by C&W. From what I gather from my friends who worked for them the care they took of their employees went right down hill then as well :o/

That looks very nice... and I'll be moving back to St.Agnes at the end of the month :)

From an information perspective - after looking at your site I don't have that much idea of the kinds of things you do. Some overview of the general types of site and technologies you can work with would be a good idea. For instance, you've said you're a programmer yet not actually mentioned one programming language that you know. I'm guessing some form of programming was involved in your course, but very few people are going to know what that includes. So, for instance, people will probably want to know if you can do php/asp/perl etc, or if you know how to work with any databases and what platforms you can write for. I'd be inclined to make less of the fact that you're proficient in Dreamweaver - at the best that's just telling people what you use to write HTML (kind of like me saying I'm proficient in Bluefish) and at the worst it insinuates you don't know how to code HTML properly. Assuming you do, you'd be better bigging up your HTML knowledge and if you have to list Dreamweaver listing it a little less prominently. Assuming some exist it would be advantagous to show some previous work, even if it's just a list of names of companies you've worked for/with. Obviously this is a totally different kettle of fish, but if you look at the site for the company I currently work for you're instantly impressed by the list of names down the right hand side, even if most of them don't actually tell you anything about what we did for those companies. So, even just a list of company names under "previous customers" would be good. In terms of web-design there are a couple of minor things I'd change on the site. Firstly your <title> tags should contain your company name at all times. So "About me" should probably be "About us | MD Computer Solutions". Not only does that just look a little more professional but title tags are often used as the title for your page when indexed in a search engine. I have to agree with tart on the menu size. You should probably use a slightly larger and perhaps a bold font - at the moment it doesn't really look like a menu, more than a list of links. You probably want to differentiate your internal navigation from any 'normal' links. I'd be inclined to move the menu divider bar a little closer to the menu text - what with the the small text and large space your menu looks a little lost over there! You might want to think about including a "home" menu item as well, at the moment there doesn't appear to be any way back there. I know most of the designers I work with would have a fit at your use of centred text - it might look a little neater with left aligned text instead. God, I've gone on a bit there. I hope some of that's useful to you! I always forget how much I've actually picked up about web design in the last few years. Crazyness.

I haven't been to any gigs in years, but I've got several lined so far for this year. The Mars Volta 16th March, Brixton Academy. and Nine Inch Nails 5th July, Brixton Academy. Although I've got the tickets I'm not 100% sure I'll be going to see NIN, it's a little far in the future to plan. But considering how quickly they were selling out it would have been foolish not to get the tickets :) edit Totally forgot, I went to see Siobhan Fahey (ex Banarama and Shakespeares Sister) on Thursday night at Electrogogo in Soho. Even met her afterwards (apparantly I wandered up and introduced my friend to her, despite having never met her before). Although I remember very little of that gig... I was more drunk than I've been in a very, very long time.

Ha! That's what my doctor told me. It's a complete mong diagnosis. RSI describes the symptoms, not the problem. Within the umbrella of RSI there could actually be a whole host of completely different things wrong from Carpal Tunnel to a slight sprain. It's like a doctor diagnosing you with having a a sore leg or something equally useless. Basically, that's not a diagnosis, it's just telling you what you already knew was wrong. I pushed my doctor to get me a referral to a physiotherapist when I was "diagnosed" with that, although the useless woman reffered me to an occupational therapist, which wasn't much help really :o/

This is true, however digital set top boxes are so cheap these days it's hardly worth worrying about. Sure, it's nice to get a TV with a digital tuner onboard, but I think it should be a minor point comparative to the things that you can't easily upgrade with extras (picture, sound and inputs probably being the most important). This is true, however I don't think it's as much of a problem as people like to make it. Screen burn is caused by displaying a single static image on a screen for prolonged periods, which is most often seen when playing computer games (e.g. with the health meter in a FPS or something). However, as long as you're not the kind of person who plays one game, solidly for months on end - or as long as you're careful about varying what you display on your screen and not leaving it on when you're not using it I don't think it'll be a problem. Screen burn can be an issue with CRTs as well, they're just a little more resilient to it. In the end I decided that the benefits of the quality and size of screen I could get for my money (which, incidentally was nowhere near the retail price mentioned in those articles) when buying a rear-projection were worth the slightly increased risk of screen burn - especially as I use my T.V. far more for movies and shows than I do for gaming.

Home Cinema Choice is pretty good for TV reviews, as are the fairly well known A.V. Forums. I bought my tv after reading that review on Home Cinema Choice, and I couldn't be more pleased with it.

The question was 'Why don't they legalise Canabis' Well the young man who said this hasn't done his homework as its already technicaly legal, Decriminalised to be exact, so the police will turn a blind eye as long as you arn't smoking it in public or causeing trouble due to it. There is a big difference between de-criminalisation and legalisation. It's far, far from being technically the same thing. Although it still hasn't actually been decriminalised in this country, it's been downgraded to a class C drug (it was previously class B), which means posession is no longer likely to be an arrestable offence. Although you could still technically go down for 2 years for possesion and 14 for dealing - how much you have to be carrying on you to be arrested for dealing is very open ended. Although it's still a silly question, as we've been slowly going down the road to legalisation for years. You can't expect these sort of things to happen overnight. The arguement about handing out aid to economincally poorer countries is an interesting one. It's unquestionable that the contemporary solution of just throwing cash at these problems and expecting it to all get better is flawed to say the least, however turning oneself inwards and leaving "them" to sort it out for themselves is just not applicable in the modern world. We live in a highly interconnected global society now, and seperatist concepts like that don't really belong in this time period. I think perhaps what is needed more is a change of attitude from this "us and them" thing that perpetuates peoples consciousness still - we can't hope to share wealth (in both the economic and knowledge sense) on a global level while we still view ourselves as saviours for handing over a little spare change to struggling nations...

If it's been going on a while I reccomend going to see you doctor about it, if you ride and use a computer a lot and it's something more than just a bruise/strain you want to get it checked out so you're not just continually making it worse. Other than that, think about picking up a wrist support and look at the ergonomics of your computer and bike (and anything else that could cause your wrist problems). Really though, if it's an ongoing problem go and see the doctor. At the least they can give you some solid advice or pass you on to someone who really knows what they're talking about.

What OS are you running on the desktop machine? If it's XP then you can use remote desktop, which is actually very good. Only use VNC if you absolutely have to, it's as slow as hell - even over a 100meg LAN.

There's no snow here, it's really nice weather (at least it looks it through my bedroom window). Unfortunately I'm not riding because I've got to go into the office in a few minutes (and only got back from work at 00.30 last night). Looking forward to the end of my job now so I'll be able to go riding again, haven't found the time for a proper ride since before Christmas!

Heh :) While I was only semi-serious with that comment, I am naturally suspicious of any company that collects more user data than is strictly necessary, and Google are one of the primary offendors of this (at least among legitimate companies). From what I understand of it Google have explicitly stated that they will never delete any email that passes through their servers and have a reputation for never deleting *any* information at all. While they were only a search engine this was a little disconcerting (pretty much every search you have ever done still stored somewhere on their servers?) but the inefficiency of tracking data to users made it a much lesser problem. Now with their extensions into email and tentative moves to desktop searching they have access to an unprecedented quantity of information - the sort of thing many big advertising companies would give both their legs for. It may well be that Google have no intention of using any of this data in an unethical manner, but I'm personally not comfortable with the idea of any company (no matter how benevolent) storing that much personal information on me. As for admins going through thousands of emails, you have to remember that we're talking about a company that are one of the best in the world at making sense of the mess of data on the internet. If anyone can get some meaningful data from a few million emails it's probably them. In general I'm not really opposed to Google, and I'm certainly very impressed with some of the software they produce (I was going to quote GmailFS here as a really f**king cool little toy, unfortunately though it seems it's not actually written by google). I think I just spend too much time reading El' Reg :)

It's another google tool for collecting as much user information as possible.

Not as scary as 192.com. They're one of our clients at work, so we had free access to all the data they have stored - if you type someones name into 192.com it'll give you a list of all the addresses they've been registered to live at; make pretty accurate estimates as to who they were living with at the time; list their neighbours; a full range of contact details for them and in 90% of cases show you a highly detailed ariel photo of each of their listed addresses. Of course one click will show you all the same information for all their listed housemates and neighbours. Which is all very useful if, for instance, you want to find out where the object of your stalking devotions lives and at the same time spot the location of a convenient bush to hide behind that'll command a nice view of their front door! Even scarier was the previous levels of security on the servers holding all this information...

Oh, thanks, I didn't know about these... I might well be at that Brixton gig as well then :) edit CONFIRMED. Just ordered my ticket for the 16th.

Wait for a week for TS to come back up?

Heh, that sounds like my idea of a good time! I can be very analytical of films, as well as pretty much every other type of media. I seem to spend a lot of time drawing parallels between different narratives and pondering the social significance of plot elements. I'm a lot worse with books, continually looking at the development of ideas and little inflections of language. I guess I'll always just be an English student at heart really :)