And I don’t mean making a blog entry while I’m at work, though that shouldn’t be ruled out - it’s my new blog at 3news.co.nz, so it’s literally a blog at work. It’s about… go have a read, and you’ll see. RSS/Atom feed also available.

I was planning my next entry to be all about a genius idea the local bus companies should implement immediately, that will vastly increase the number of users, but that will have to wait. ‘Cause I’m blogging at work…

Mirrored from Radio Over Moscow.

I think I got rid of that stupid snap.com window thing. Did I?

I watched R.E.M Live on the weekend, and after a rough start - largely down to Michael Stipe's dodgy, rough vocals - it was pretty cool, particularly from Electron Blue onwards. His voice came around on Everybody Hurts, and towards the end was this cool new song, I'm Gonna DJ, which apparently will be on their next album, which bodes well.

My latest entry for the CityBeat blog is on Scientology - it's even crazier than I remember.

Also, the alt.country music site I did for one of my papers, Alt.Country Calendar, is now online. Of course, it's a little out of date now, but it has interviews with Auckland's Bear Cat and Htown's R William Murphy, as well as reviews of Ryan Adams and The Clientele.

Word.

Question: do most of you read my blog in your friends pages, or come here specifically? I'm thinking of doing a re-design, but is it worth it?

So, five days into February, and I've got two backing tracks down... and I haven't even had a day off work yet :p Twelve to go. Then lyrics and melodies. And so on...

I reached target yesterday for the first time on a Saturday this year. It's been a busy week in the store this month so far, it's like everyone's thinking, 'It's February! I need some new music,' and buying it all from us. It's also International Buskers Descend On Auckland's CBD Week, which I assume the council thinks is a good thing for retailers, bringing people into the city and so on, and it seems to be working. But it's not. Whenever the buskers perform outside, the number of people coming in actually drops to virtually nothing. Grrr. So I get to hear people whooping and cheering, and not see.

I had so much I was gonna write about before I started this entry, now I'm rambling about meh. Argh, now I've got sandwich hiccups.

If anyone out there in LJ land has lots of money to spend, on me, buy me all this stuff. Speaking of LJ, I'm beginning to think I should've started using tags way back when. Does it make it that much easier to find entries about things?

I might blog again later, when I've got something to say. Or on Cold Ones Tuesday (Monday is a holiday, you see).

TOP FIVE ALBUMS OF THE FORTNIGHT

1. Maximo Park - A Certian Trigger
2. Cat Power - The Greatest
3. Gorillaz - Demon Days
4. Kaiser Chiefs - Employment
5. The Go! Team - Thunder Lightning Strike

TOP FIVE SONGS OF THE FORTNIGHT

1. Maximo Park - Graffiti
2. The Go! Team - Bottle Rocket
3. Maximo Park - Apply Some Pressure
4. Gorillaz - Fire Coming Out Of A Monkey's Head
5. The Strokes - Juicebox

...layout. That last one just wasn't quite doing it for me. Or the IE, Win95, 640x480 computers at work. Cause there's nothing else to do there on weekends at the moment, especially when you can't hear the music you're playing cause of the renovations upstairs, and the customers are barely able to stay more than two minutes.

I'm not gonna do the course. It's too short notice, and in four weeks no doubt I'll have something else to fetish over. It's the way it always has been and always will be. There's another intake in July, if I'm still keen by then. Somehow I feel being 26 and earning minimum wage will be all the motivation I need to sign up then, considering it's entirely feasible I could earn more per week on the student allowance and working part time, with a pot of gold at the end of the tunnel. Or rainbow. Or whatever it is I'm supposedly following.


No one should have to work in summer. It's too freakin' hot. Let everyone go on holiday, and if anyone wants to eat, they can make their own food, or find someone like the ant in that fable by Aesop, and bludge off him.

I went to a computer training tertiary education institute kind of place this morning, to see what they had to offer in the way of courses, cause as I would've written earlier, one of the things I wanna do in life is be a computer programmer (in addition to working in a library, owning a record store, being a journalist and owning a motorcycle). So the helpful lady decides she's going to get me to do a logic/aptitude test to see (a) if I have what it takes to get into IT, and (b) what kind of area my skills would best be suited to. She gives me the test, says it'll take about 15 minutes, and she'd leave me alone to complete it. I go through it, check all my answers, and call for her to come back in. She does, goes away to mark it, then returns to tell me not only did I complete the test in half the time available, but I also answered 28/28, a perfect score, so she couldn't tell me what area would suit my skills best, cause nothing stood out...

So that was interesting, I'm definitely more likely to go with them than I was beforehand, which is probably still unlikely anyway. Will have to see what happens...

Oh, and I changed my layout, you may've noticed. I was planning to just muck around with it and change a few things, but went a little ca-razy. And as Tariqa noted, yes, I did watch the entire original Star Wars trilogy, and yes, I did spend most of today watching Arrested Development. I want the second season now, damnit. And the third, if it ever does get completed...

I have no idea why Tara Reid is defiling our TV with her presence, but I'm determined to do something about it.

Sometimes when you have livejournal/blog like this, you kinda want to say so much, but realise it's far too much to fit in one post; mainly cause you've just spent an hour writing an email about the same crap and don't want to have to type it all out again.

Sometimes, cause someone's already said it all before, much more eloquently (wow, that sentence is the definition of irony).

But for those who are following this micro-drama, today I hung out with a guy, Martin, who claims to be the 'registered' tenant; ie, the guy whose name it is on the forms. He did appear to be aware of what kind of person dead guy was, but seemed casually relaxed and together for a guy who legally should probably be in a lot of trouble. Kosh, AKA Mr Meowgi, even turned up for a pat-fest.

So blah... Randoms won't know what the hell I'm on about, and I'll just direct myself to the particular email if I want the whole story in the future :)

Tariqa should be home any second now with an awesome new haircut... done by student hairdressers. Cause we're that poor. So poor I biked all the way to Greenlane to deliver the angry letter to the property managers this morning... and almost got run over and beaten up doing it.

Some guy in a nice car kept creeping over towards where I was on my bike, on K Rd, and seemed indifferent to my presence... I lightly rapped his closed window with my knuckles to let him know I was there, and shouted in futile frustration, 'fucking watch out!'. He got the message, and stopped closing in, I biked to the front of the queue at the lights, two cars ahead of where he was. Green, I went, the cars came too, eventually he got in front of me and pulled over to cut me off, winding his window down. A brief conversation ensued, basically consisting of, from my end, 'you almost fucking ran me over!?' and from his end, 'i'm gonna fuck you up,' and exaggerations about his precious automobile. When he got out of his car, I thought, well, uh-oh... and began biking away. He moved as if to chase, then jumped back into his car and started it up quickly. I managed to sneak around the bend on K Rd and down Heather's side street before his (obviously piece of shit) car got going, and managed to hide in a car park for a minute or so before my heartbeat settled... and I set off again, on my epic journey into Greenlane, and past the boarding school I once almost enrolled in (Dilworth).

I was going to make a massive post about this.. but tea is on, and minimal and cheap as it may be, it smells nice. I want to eat it.

We sold a copy of Rosita Vai's album today. Wow. A whole copy. The lady purchasing it said she was doing so, 'to give the young lady's career a boost.' I commented, 'I think she's already had a pretty big boost,' in reference to the obvious, and she replied, 'has she?'

Err...?

Almost managed to sell another copy of the Arcade Fire album this afternoon, as I often do. I've sold a copy three times out of the last six times I've played it at 5.10pm on a Saturday. Not bad for an imported indie record, considering I've only managed to sell one copy of the new Robbie Williams album the same way...

There was something else I was going to blog about, but I forgot. Ah well. Spaceghost will be on soon.

I should update my 1990s blog at some point shouldn't I? I'm nine years and two months behind the present...

I was feeling left out! Everyone else is doing it (again), so why shouldn't I? I'm talking about blogging, of course. I used to have one back in 2003/4, ended it just over a year ago... when I got the girl. Of course... it's when all awesome stories should end. In fact, it's how ALL stories should end, awesome or not, but never did for yours truly, till then.

So yeah, got the girl, ended the book. Blog. Even if it was basically a 'warts and all' diary in content and effect. I went back to writing in a diary, as I had done happily for seven and a half years prior to then. But now, I've realised I do really crave the near-instant gratification you get from seeing people respond to your daily musings and doings. You just don't get that with a diary; until you're dead. And er, that's just not so instant in the gratification stakes. I did have this other blog for a while, into which I spewed forth bile about my old job. Well, not the job per se, but the customers mostly. Demons, some of them were. You can see it here...

Ignore the last couple of entries, scroll down for the good stuff.

Blah, I'm just copying my girlfriend in starting a blog in addition to a paper and pencil diary. And this entry REALLY is just so I can see what colours everything is popping up in. But I might as well use it to say something important... like, um, about, um, Star Wars or something. Oooh. Got it. Tariqa was saying the other day that to some people, our relationship must've seemed like something out of a Mills & Boon (hey, I wouldn't know, I've never read one, I'm all man, *grunt*). Cause like, we met years ago, then almost had something but didn't, then didn't speak for ages, then started hanging out again, then decided to give in to the powerful, er, powers of the force and shack up, then leave town, and live happily ever after, as far as people in our old town, Hamilton, could tell. I was like, 'hmmm, I suppose...' She then said we're now living in the time after the book has finished, or at best, an epilogue. I didn't like the sound of this... so proposed instead we are merely in the lull between episodes, and the events of this seemingly smooth period in time will be recounted in the blue-worded blurb that flies across space at the beginning of the next book/movie worthy epoch in our lives...

She said I shouldn't try and relate EVERYTHING to Star Wars. I think my mum said the same thing to me when I was nine, but about the Commodore 64. But hey, I suppose I shouldn't mind being compared favourably with a Mills & Boon hero. Those guys on the covers always have awesome abs. You can tell, cause they've always got their shirts unbuttoned for some reason. Perhaps because they have awesome abs?

Well, I'm done for now. Ooh ooh, listen to my songs. Or die.