Today I read a post on facebook from someone who, for reasons that completely escape me, wanted to hand over £23.50 of their own money to heckle a minor celebrity who has been accused of being a fake and a fraud. The person in question is currently unemployed.

The whole affair makes my mind boggle.

The same person will rant about how great magicians and illusionists are. People who get paid to trick, lie to and dupe people. However these ‘tricksters’ are allowed to do what they do and not tell anyone how they do it because they have a little club they can join and hide behind.

In my opinion it is sheer stupidity to waste money on a ticket and quite possibly be ejected from the venue just to shout insults and obscenities at someone.

Just so you know I live in Hull and I am about 2-3 miles form the server I tested on.

He also told me what he could remember about why we buy and wear them, he didn’t go into a great deal of detail but then he is only 5 and can get is facts a little muddled up at times.

It’s little things like this that make parenting worth while, worth all the sleepless nights, the tantrums and the arguments. They also let me know that despite anything  else that me and my wife are doing a pretty good job of bringing him and his little sister up.

In the zip file there are; 2 versions of explorer, a hard drive, a to do list app and a replacement for Nokia’s Ovi suite.

Download here

Despite the fact that I have only just started playing the European release of it, I have to say I am very impressed with what I have seen so far.

I am using an older machine it runs very well albeit with most of the graphical options set to low or off but this in no way detracts form the experience of playing, from the naming system ( you have to name your character in keeping with the lore and area that they come from), to the fact that you can buy your self a home, among other things.

The main fun for me comes form exploring the scenery and meeting new foes, I know this doesn’t sound like the greatest of reasons to play a game but after playing Guild Wars fro many years, it’s a nice change to wander round somewhere else and hitting other things in the head with an axe, sword whatever comes to hand.

I will be putting more posts on here about my travels, I might even name the places I have been to if I can remember what they are ( or how to spell them!) so stay tuned and read all about my adventures, victory’s and failures no matter how small or epic.

Please feel free to carry on reading if you want to, it is not going to make a lot of sense but you could read it all the same.

This is where I came across my first problem, after putting them all in one place so I could use relative links I put them in place on the first version of the site and on the home page everything looked great, “fantastic!” I thought. When I tried to write the blog page however, things didn’t go quite as well, the background image I wanted to use only worked for the top section of the page the rest of the page used the background colour I’d set in the CSS I had used to style everything.

So I have had to change the design of the site, I am no longer using an image as a background or as the mast head, in fact the only images in it at the minute are a few buttons used for navigation and a link. It also contains a hell of a lot of messy CSS boxes, (which I kind of understand), and some font and text styles (which I don’t).

The only way I can see this thing ever getting finished this side of Christmas is if I; A get some help or B do a lot of reading about HTML5 and CSS3. Either way I can see some very long nights ahead of me.

I find it hard to believe that it’s only now, with the rise in digital books and the portable readers so you can carry half a book shop around with you that some people are picking up books and reading more, what was wrong with picking up a book before, is it really that hard to do.

They are not books your reading, but well formatted Word documents. A book is a real thing it has a physical presence that a digital version cannot match. Pick up a new book and see how it feels, the weight, the smell the noise the spine makes when you first open it and the gentle whisper of the pages as you turn them. It is something unique something that you might have waited for, saved for and the anticipation you get when waiting to pay for it can be very intense. Buying a new book can be a very memorable, where did you buy The Deathly Hallows on the day of release? I was in Waterstones standing in a large queue trying not to hear what people were saying as they were talking about the book and I wanted to read it and not hear the story in little bits from the people who read it while waiting to pay.

Some people wont have that feeling now they’re answer will be merely “in my bedroom, living room, toilet etc.”  this is not how books where meant to be bought or worse downloaded illegally. Writers put a lot of time and effort into writing a book whether it’s a another book in a series or a new title entirely it should not be reduced to another file type on a computer somewhere. It should be picked up, held, enjoyed. Take pride in how far you have read in one sitting in how many pages are currently between you thumb and fingers of your left hand, this to me is what reading is all about, not having some device in my hands that I’ve had to pay far to much for to then have to pay for the book as well.

Minimalism has it’s place, it even has a place in my life and my home, but not in my library.

Really it all boils down to personal preference, I prefer the feel of a real book and when I’m reading one I don’t want to be interrupted by anything least of all by an alert for an email or tweet. I want to have to go and buy the book form a shop because it helps me decide if I really want the book in the first place the same is true about any form of media that I buy. However if you are comfortable with your device of choice then by all means use and enjoy the books you read just remember you can’t get a digital first edition and treasure it. 

The way people use their blogs is up to them. It should however be the readers decision to stay and read more not the writers.