Blog? What Blog?
Well, just been scouting through my previous lists of entries to the blog (or possible entries, need to verify whether I actually posted them or not…) that I have on my laptop and realized that, well, I’ve not done an extremely good job of posting on this.
Now, it might help if I was online more often as then I could quite easily type something up and ‘whack it off’, so to speak, but then it might not.
Probably I just don’t make that good a blogger. Not the end of the world, blogging probably wasn’t going to go on my CV anyway…
But that asides, I also realized that I never really finished what I’d hoped to write about the New Year celebrations in a Deep South Egypt Stylee.
And I’m not going to now either. Here’s a quick summary:
I was stoned and drunk. I was ‘DJ’ of a fashion. I fell asleep on my digital camera, fucking the screen (technical definition). I had fun. The end. Good, huh?
Then over the last month I’ve been back to the UK, had an absolutely awesome time, and now I’m back out on the boat, where the guests due on have postponed until the end of the month, so now our first trip isn’t for, well, lets see, another 10 days. Got a workshop to conduct in a few days which should be fun, and gives me something other to do than playing /Battle of Wesnoth/ or /Pingus/ habitually.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading also though, its not all been playing games and doing bits of tidying up work wise. Oh yes. In fact, since I returned to Egypt I have completed no less than 4 books (/Shadow Divers/, /Omerta/, /Brief History of Time/, and /Dead Famous/). Not bad for a week.
I’ve just this morning started Tom Clancy’s /Rainbow Six/ which I’ve heard a lot about and from what I’ve seen of the start of it it looks like I’ll enjoy.
Also while I was home I read a classic, /The Godfather/ by Mario Puzo (also author of /Omerta/). I’m beginning to develop a weird addiction to Mafia-based stuff from reading Puzo’s work. /Godfather/ was fantastic, ddespite having seen the film already. /Omerta/ too was gripping and very clever, although not as good as /The Godfather/ or /The Last Don/, which I read last year.
Very good author though and I suggest you check out his catalogue, as I’ll be doing… 
/Shadow Divers/ I started reading shortly after I finished /The Godfather/ and is a book based on a true story of a couple of American divers who located and ultimately identified a previously unknown wreck of a German World War II U-Boat. I had some knowledge of the story already but the gaps this filled and the stories surrounding it were superb. Very well written and I think interesting and accessible to anyone, whether you’ve dived before or not.
/Brief History of Time/, for those sinners who haven’t heard of it before, is by Stephen Hawking, and for those of you who still don’t know, Google it (anyone unaware of Google should, probably, kill themselves, after they’ve questioned how they even got to this page). I have to be honest, I wanted to read this for a long time but still thought it was going to be too intellectual for me to understand but, bugger me with a pitchfork, it was explained in pretty common-sense terms (or as common sense as you can get in that area…) and overall made a lot of sense and was truly thought-provoking. Certainly made me think twice about whether science and religion are really at two extremes as I’d always suspected. An extremely gifted individual, I would again recommend as many people as possible to go out and get this book. You won’t regret it.
I’ll admit there were parts where I sort of sat there staring at the page unable to comprehend the fine details what was going on, but a quick skim back over what was covered allowed me the general jist. I think. I hope. I’ll definitely read it again in the fairly near future.
/Dead Famous/ is a book by Ben Elton who people seem to either love or hate. Personally I hadn’t rread any of his books since the end of 2003 when I read /High Society/ and another one I sadly forget the name of now but remember enjoying and thought they were fun for a light read. And this one is no different.
Now, given that I had nothing really to do, I was fairly hooked to this, and it is a good storyline (set in a reality TV show house where one of the housemates gets murdered and the ensuing investigation) with some lines that really made me laugh. In a lot of ways it is very analytical of ‘modern culture’ (or lack of it) so to speak and he does a pretty good job of it. He also does an excellent job of adding the main twist to the storyline at the end.
Like I said, people seem to love or hate Elton’s stuff, and personally I enjoy it. If you’re stuck for something to read on holiday or just sat around with not much to do, I’d recommend trying it out and seeing what you think.
But besides reading, most of which is old news, I’ve been rethinking and looking back over the [real:ppl] stuff I have lying around my hard drive and really reckon its too much potential and fun to just let it rot, so I’m trying, once more to rekindle things.
Don’t know how far I’ll get with it this time but as a stop measure I decided to bite the proverbial bullet and sign up for some free webspace to at least get the information out there whilst I try to work out how soon I can get the server functional and back online again. My guess is that it’ll take until the next time I’m back home to get that part sorted out, which is a complete bastard. My only hope or potential saving grace is that Rob somehow finds some spare time in his hectic schedule to be able to nip around and set it up. Have to see what he can do though. Probably if we can’t get the server up for a couple of months I might just buy some webspace and host things on there for a while. Doesn’t give me quite the freedom I or the rest of us had hoped and planned for, but if we have something up that can start to sustain itself and move itself along then thats a good thing. At least somewhere to successfully host the articles and get some thought going on. But then another part of me says it would be best to wait till we can launch a ‘full package’ at one time, save launching, taking downtime to move things to the new server and then relaunch.
But we’ll see what happens.
Those of you unfamiliar with any of the recently mentioned terms could do worse than to check out www.realppl.co.uk for more information, but basically, it’s a Project started by myself and some friends a few years ago with the intention of providing a free (in terms of beer and speech), centralized outlet for people, originally in just written format, but with the aim to spread to include as many media formats as our bandwidth will allow. The original launch of the site did allow us to get a good few members online, using the forums to discuss points raised in articles submitted (mainly from our age group and schools) and, I felt, gave us some decent discussions. I guess I’d kinda just like to get things back to that reasonable level again and get some decent conversations flowing. Keeps my mind ticking over!
Well, I must admit I’ve enjoyed blogging this pretty little ditty right now and I shall once more strive to keep my blogging more current as time goes by. The generator here is about to be put to sleep, and I fancy a couple of more tries at Pingus before I personally hit the sack, so farewell, sweet dreams, etc.
