The wrst thing is, about leaving this blog for so long is the old “where to start” mentality. I’ve had so many good moments, shocking moments, and moments where I’ve made myself an absolute menace it’s untrue. 2011 has certainly been an interesting year.

there’s no other place to begin, and possibly finish this post too, the subject of streetlighting. Come on, I’ve been away for 90 days, if you expected anything different from this blog, you’ve obviously not been reading for 11 years. For the first time in 1995, Mercuryvapour Towers is once again lit by mercury vapour, and I’m not talking about one of my silly little “OMG! I can see one if I lean out of the bathroom window and twist my nick 180 degrees”. And I’m also not talking about plugging my AC Ford AC850 in and shining it up at the house. No, thanks to a fortunate turn of circumstances, my street once again has a mercury vapour light in it. It’s a historic moment for me. the last time mercury shone these streets, I was 15, and although it seems strange to say, back then, I hated mercury lights.

I’d grown up with them. Every street that wasn’t a main road was lit by them. Very few were lucky enough to have SOX, and that was what I wanted at the time. I’d draw pictures of mercury coulmns being smashed, and a new hockey stick column with a SOX lantern ready to replace it. Mercury was nothing to me. They were as common as dogshit. I never thought I’d see the day when mercury would be a rarity.

Times changed, and so did the lights. I remember, walking home from school and seeing the old GEC Z5590s nearby had been replaced with shiny new Beta 79s. I ran home, excited to see if Mercuryvapour Towers had received the same treatment. No! The replacements stopped half way up. Still, I knew that it would be the end very soon for mercury in this part of the world. I remember the next day, leaving for school. It was still dark, and the lantern was still on. I knew, as the car reversed out of the square, I would never get to see mercury in my street again. Part of me was happy It sort of felt nice to be “upgraded”. Sure enough, I returned home from school, and it was gone.

I can’t be certain of the exact date it happened, but I remember explaining to one of my friends in a text file (think: precursor to email… I’d type something rather like this, save it onto disk, he’d type something in reply, give me back the disk, etc.) how much I wasn’t going to miss MBF lighting, being surprised that I didn’t wake up with a suntan due to the ultraviolet they kick out… see, I was brainy back then… not! Some 17 years pass. We’re back in the present day. I could walk downstairs, look out of the window and see an image I last saw in my childhood… the registered address of mercuryvapour.co.uk bathed in mercury vapour light! Yes, I did see the first official switch-on. I was filming it too, but managed to miss it with the camera.

Right, that’ll do for the lights. Other things have been happening. It’ll be easier to refer to Twitter from now. on…

Pub quiz. Would have done well if it wasn’t for those pesky Brazil nuts! (4 Oct)
I now regularly attend a pub quiz at the Schooner, with various other people from work, whenever we’re free on a Tuesday. Get a three-course meal for less than a fiver, drink bottles of Carlsberg for £1 each, and do utterly bollocks at the pub quiz. This was our first week, and we finished last, all because Gary was adamant that the biggest producer of Brazil nuts beginning with B was Brazil. Wrong. It’s Bolivia.

I’m at The Paramount (Wetherspoon) (33-35 Oxford St., Portland St., Manchester) (5 Nov)
Jamie S wanted to buy some stuff from the official Man City store. He ended up with a car air freshener that didn’t actually smell of anything, and a tax disc holder. I ended up with a bag of CDs. One of the cases didn’t actually have a CD in. Also, a steak was eaten. Rab (who I’ve not mentioned on here before, but is an ex-work colleague (though the way things are going at the moment, EVERYONE will be an ex-work colleague shortly)), decided the smoking ban in pubs wasn’t for him…

We also attended the fireworks display at Stockton…

My photography sucks.

I’m at Westgarth Social Club for Siskiyou (99 Southfield Road, Woodlands Road, Middlesbrough) (11 Nov)

On the night of my previous posting, me, Jamie and Rab attended a gig in Middlesbrough. I’d not heard of the band before, but I did enjoy them, and now have both of their albums. The lead singer, from Canada, liked my description of The Sage as the Shiny Condom.

Eating something else other than fries (@ McDonald’s) (3 Dec)
Get this. for 31 years of my live, I’d never actually been to a McDonalds, and ordered anything other than “fries and a drink”. God’s honest. I was never introduced to them as a child. therefore I have never needed them, nor missed them. On my first full day of being 32 years of age, Me, Jamie S and Rab were in York. After standing up for the entire train journey (from Thornaby to York), we were hungry. Every place we tried was absolutely rammed. A mixture of abject disappointment and near starvation drove us to Maccy D’s. Knowing I wouldn’t survive on fries alone, I got Jamie S to point something out on the menu that wasn’t a burger or covered in sauce. I ended up with some chicken objects, fries and a drink. Getting there, slowly but surely.

Just received spam for a maccy d’s gift card. Think I’ll pass. (5 Dec)
After my above posting, you’d blame me? On my quest to try new stuff, this day was the first time I’d ever had Nandos. Won’t be the last, either.

JULY 2010

Mercuryvapour Towers was greeted by another new visitor, a rather frosty one at that. Our old chest freezer, which we’d had for roughly 20 years, was showing signs of giving up the ghost. It leaked terribly, and always had a coating of mould on it, thanks to the seals perishing, and the hinges snapping. They were held on by a small piece of trouser belt.

This month, for some reason, saw me doing day shifts, meaning I actually got to see some daylight. Unfortunately, the daylight also brought with it stupidly heavy rain, with rain showers almost as heavy as the August 2003 deluge. I can’t remember the exact date, but it was a Tuesday, as Daddykins bought us both a Blossom Garden Special. I also had a loan of ATIF’s zoom lens for a few days. Shiny.

AUGUST 2010

A month of fun and frolics, and by that, I mean that the Tall Ships visited Hartlepool. It was a busy month for me when it comes to photos, with the tall ships, a night-time visit to Hart with ATIF, and the last ever performance of Accidents By Design, at the Seaton Carew Cricket Club.

We also deadified another mouse.

Not much else happened.

SEPTEMBER 2010

New stuff dominated September. And sunflowers. After finally giving up on my ancient phone, I went out and got myself a HTC Desire. It is still a shiny piece of kit. I also talked extensively about my purchases on Steam. It seems strange, but I started getting into gaming in a big way. Sucky weather and pure laziness meant that very little happened in this month. even the photo archive dried up after the well-documented sunflower walks.

Mercuryvapour Towers received a new heating system late-on in the month, and although we were without hot water for a day and a bit, it was a small price to pay for the warmth that we’d experience during the coming months…

OCTOBER 2010

Unfortunately, Employment Palace took quite a hold on me in this month, so I didn’t really accomplish anything. I missed a bus, that’s about it. There was the trip to Newcastle with ATIF, where I managed to take some 300 photos.

… not all of them great.

NOVEMBER 2010

Something happened in this month, which normally doesn’t happen. It snowed, and plenty of it too. In fact, it would appear that every photo I’ve taken since then has resulted in a “snow” tag being added to it. Some other stuff did happen, I started 15 days off work, interupted by a night with the people from work for a few hours of bowling… I won’t bother linking to an individual photo, instead the flickr set is, erm.. there.

DECEMBER 2010

I’m sat here, flipping my way wearily though a spindle of CDRs, for no reason other than I don’t know where to start with this particular month. It just passed me by. I had a lot of time off work, thanks to leftover holidays (and my first full day of sickness since 2008, bloody chest), but thanks to the snow which dominated the month, saw me hardly leaving the house. I’m too old to enjoy the snow now!

Though, saying that, I’m not tired of taking pictures of it – each time the sky clouded over, I was rushing around with the camera, taking as many shots as I could. One of them even ended up in the Dec 30th edition of the Hartlepool Mail. Cor, I quite clearly rule!

So, erm. That’s it, except for the bits I’ve missed out. 2010 in a nutshell.I can assure you it’s not really been as dull as I’ve made out on here…. actually, that’s a lie, it really, really has.

2011 hopefully will be different, I’m going to try and do stuff worth blogging about more often. which means I’ll be wasting more time sat in front of the PC, which, in itself is counter-productive to doing stuff worth blogging about… ah, it’s a vicious circle.

It seems absolutely no time at all since I was sat at my old white desk, typing my first post into blogger.com (before it got hammered by google), commenting on the annoying sound of fireworks going off around me. Yet, so much has changed.

I can’t even remember the URL for the first incarnation of this blog. It was using one of those free hosting sites, and not a very good one at that. Eventually, I settled down at mercuryvapour.co.uk , and have been using the same hosting company since then.

Not that the hosting actually matters, because, obviously the most important thing when it comes to talking about the blog, is the shit that spews through my fingers, into the black, plastic contraption in front of me, then through the magic of TCP/IP, apache, mySQL, and wordrpress, ends up on your monitor. I must admit, it’s been an interesting 10 years. I’ve mentioned many times that there’s stuff I will not blog about. For those who remember the early days of the blog, you’ll know what they were. I may have still been in that relationship. I may not have been. I’ll never know. I don’t care.

It’s hard for me to pinpoint a favourite post. I might as well write off the posts before Blogger implemented a comment system, or before I switched over to WordPress, because a lot of the time, it felt like I was talking to myself. OK, I know for the majority of time I DO talk to myself, but a little bit of feedback would have been nice.

I’ve just checked the archive, to find that the first comment was from c64glen, using his full name, on this post…

“New redesign”

That was 5 years ago, meaning I’ve only had 5 years to fully take on board your feedback. And by “take on board”, I mean ignore most of it. I have taken some of it on board, and my personal favourite has to be from Jonathan Sorrell, composer of the “You Bet” theme. It’s another post I’ve dragged out of the archives, and is available here. Check the comments.

On the other side of feedback, there’s been shit. Plenty of it. Mainly people who think that their opinion is more valid than anyone else’s on the internet. At the time of receiving such critiscism, I thought that the sea would rise and the sky go dark, and the sun would disappear, but the world just turns around the same, except that I’d been slightly less offended if it hadn’t happened.

My interests haven’t helped things. This is my blog. Should I be ashamed about street lighting and obscure TV themes? Of course not. If it wasn’t for a certain ‘deleted’ posting back in 2003, Andy The Iridium Fan would have no idea where I lived.

I’m going to bring this post to a close, as my mind’s wandering towards the shitty side of this blog….

Unknown song

I really don’t know much about this song, though I did actually buy it, or at least the magazine it was given away on. It came part of a free tape on the front of a music magazine from around 1989, possibly 1990. I can tell you I bought it from King Oswy shops, the original tape was black, and came in a slipcase. It may have featured “Inner City Mama” by Nenah Cherry on the tape too.

Not that it helps much.

Unfortunately, the original tape came from a manufacturer who made tapes that didn’t agree with my tape deck, and it probably got chewed up and binned. I certainly don’t have it anymore.

With the borrowment of Andrew’s cassette deck, I’ve been able to source one of my old C90s which had a copy of this song on it. Unfortunately, it was copied in high-speed mode, meaning the above track sounds tinny as hell. Just for old times sake, I’d like to know who it is and who by. Don’t bother googling the “lyrics”. “Blip Blipiddy Blop Bleep” doesn’t bring up any usefull results.

Feel free to comment / email. If it sounds familar, that’s great, but unless you’ve got a *really* good idea of who it is, then don’t! Also ,comments about my questionable taste in music, then, you know that already.

2010-07-19 02:42:26: Just been freaked out by a light bulb and now can’t sleep.

a few mornings ago, I witnessed an odd phenomenon which I simply can’t explain, but it made me think something was wrong with the electrics… I’m sure you’re all aware of energy saving bulbs, and the fact they have electrodes at either end of the tube (and of course, the basics of how fluorescent tubes work). I was lying in bed, and I noticed a flash, then another one, rather like an ambulance going past with its lights blaring. This happened every few seconds. I looked up, and noticed it was the light bulb doing this, even though the light was completely off. I unscrewed the bulb, put it back in, and the flash never reoccured.

Ferr-eaky.

2010-07-20 19:19:37 Blossom Garden chow mein. Best food ever

This was altogether a fun and interesting day. Mainly because we were hit by another one of those freaky storms, similar to what happened in 2003, but not quite as severe. It was my first day of the second week of day shifts. The fun and interesting part came because everything broke at work. Twice. Unfortunately, my usual drinking establishment, which I’d planned to attend that evening, turned out to be flooded because of the severe storm, so Daddykins picked me up from work, made an excellent detour to the Blosson Garden takeaway. Regular viewes may know that this is my favourite takeaway in the entire world, and it didn’t disappoint. I also received a present from the postie…

Yes, it’s an Xbox 360 controller, but for Windows. I don’t think that there’s any difference between these and a wired Xbox 360 pad, except they come with a driver disk and a few windows logos splattered about the place. Still, I got it half price, so if I don’t use it much, I’m not going to be overly bothered. I found out that it makes “Flatout: ultimate carnage” playable. To an extent.

2010-07-23 19:09:49 Old tapes, beer, then indian. How can tonight get any better?

It simply couldn’t. I spent the whole night wallowing through as many tapes as I could lay my hands on… in fact, I started to write this post:-

For many years, Mercuryvapour Towers has been a place where things go to die. Music, records, computers, cassette tapes, and wasps, if my recent contributions on flickr are anything to go by. For several years, I’ve been able to make use of most of these things (barring the wasps), however, I’ve not been able to play cassette tapes. There are years worth of memories buried in these tightly wound reels of magnetised plastic, but seeing as I’ve had no way to access them, they’ve been kicking around in random boxes, gathering dust, losing their oxide, and sadly getting damaged.

Well, that day was today! I now have it sat next to me, and I’m playing some of those old forgotten memories. Currently, I’m listening to “Everything I Do” by Bryan Adams, as recorded off “Radio Cracker” – a temporary radio station set up in Hartlepool for the Xmas season of 1991. It was the first and only Hartlepool based radio station for 12 years, before “Pool FM” got their temporary broadcasting license.

I still have the tape recorder, and yes, I’m listening to a tape while I’m typing this. Right now. Currently playing is a “The Sound of Silcence” I must have recorded off the radio in something like 1995… Home taping is killing music? Remember that? If I didn’t have these badly recorded radio versions, I’d have forgotten about the songs I taped, then would have never bought them on CD. Tee hee! Anyway, that’s a rant for another day!

Through some stroke of odd luck, I managed to bag a 2PM – 2AM shift, meaning I would return home in good enough time to judge the weather, and whether it was worth taking the walk to a decent vantage point to catch the sunrise. After I got home, I was a little tired, and thought that the walk simply wouldn’t be worth it, so instead got the big Canon, and the tripod out, and began to take photos in the street. Admittedly, these weren’t up to much, and sadly, it turns out that my camera remote has bitten the dust, so I won’t show any on here.

Onme thing I did capture, however, is my own sign that the summer had started. If I’m awake, I watch it every year, yet this year was the first time I had actually photographed it.

Yes, it’s the instant that the streetlight outside of Mercuryvapour Towers extinguishes. I must have sat there, with my finger over the trigger button for about 10 minutes, waiting for the trademark clunk of the photocell’s relay clicking over, and the sudden lack of artificial light in the vacinity.

Shortly after, I decided that the cloud cover wasn’t bad enough to ruin a good photo oppportunity, donned the new pocket Canon, and headed off into the general direction of the fields. Well, I say fields, it’s been a housing estate for about 8 years, but there’s still a bit of undeveloped land which gives you a good view of any possible sunrise. I thought I was too late from the view of this photo…

I knew I only had a few minutes to make it to higher ground. I power-strutted like I’ve never strutted before, to the tune of “Don’t Go” by Yazoo. I am happy to report that I made it to higher ground before it was too late…

Admittedly, it’d have been better if those streetlights weren’t there.

On the way home, I did manage to photograph one thing which has been in existence for the majority of my childhood, but is soon to disappear behind a wall of ivy, are the old cricket stumps I used as a child. You’ll have to forgive me if I get a little reminiscent here, but I know one rather quiet troll reader who will no doubt get a shiver down his spine by viewing these…

Here’s a closer shot after some of the ivy had been removed….

Finally, here’s s shot if you were stood in the ‘crease’.

A place I wouldn’t see very often, as I was shit at cricket, and used to receive unfair bowls from Chad, such as “grass cutters”. Chad, you will note that many of the features we used to use have been removed. It’s no longer possible to lose a ball in “Carl’s bush”, and that the impossibly rare 100 runs for hitting Ringwood’s garage can no longer be achieved. A 6 or 4 can still be earned by hitting it up his driveway, though he’s not lived there for many years since Mrs Ringwood died. I can no longer hit a ball into Kevin’s pond (Kevin, you may remember had more than a passing resemblance for Ex-Tottenham footballer Vinny Samways) thanks to a growth of elderberry to the left of where I stood, and the fact that the pond disappeared years ago. The pile of rubbish is pretty much where we bowled from – the house is currently empty and undergoing renovation, hence the rubbish.

And on that note, I’m off to bed. Morning!

Anyway, I have been, and still am, incredibly busy with stuff, which is one of the reasons I’ve not been updating this, plus I’ve had writers block up to the eyeballs. My “drafts” folder is, as usual, full of little snippets of posts I started, then never finished.

Music is one of the things which has been seriously influencing the past couple of months, especially an 8-second clip of a Kraftwerk song.

I was at work about six months ago. Ian, who sits behind me, had a bit of a “Kraftwek” night, and was playing some of their tunes. An 8 second piece of music got stuck in my head. It had been used as a sample in another song, and could I hell remember which song it was. I later found that the song he was playing was “The Robots”, but even after an extensive interwebs search, I couldn’t find out where else I’d heard it. I knew it was in a song from the 1990s.

Off to #speccy, nope, nobody had heard it there, not even Marko who is normally good at this type of stuff. I uploaded it to my phone, and played it to everyone I knew, in the vain hope that it would jog the memory. I even set it as my ringtone, thinking that if someone rang me, and I heard it out of the blue, I’d pick up on it straight away.

Sadly not. I joked to Chris (who also didn’t know it) about me hearing it when I least expect it, totally out of the blue.

That was months ago, fast forward to yesterday. After looking for a few things, I happened to spy my old video recorder in a box. It hadn’t been used for about 6 years, not since my TV card died. I hooked it up to the telly downstairs, and played some old tapes with the intention of transferring them to DVD. There was one particular tape I was after saving. A non-descript looking tape, with a ripped label. Amongst hours of me playing in the garden as a kid, with our old black and white camera, was the very last edition of “Northern Life”. Halfway through, they had an “outtake reel”, with music dubbed over it.

The track was a song I liked, instantly recognisable to me anyway. All of a sudden, 32 seconds into it, there it was. THAT BLOODY KRAFTWERK SAMPLE! I was delighted. And unsurprised that my prediction was right.

The Kraftwerk tune was “The Robots, and the sing I remembered was “I Can’t Stand It by Twenty 4 Seven. Chris shuld be bitterly disappointed that he didn’t get it, but then he doesn’t read here anymore!

Speaking of which, it was Wayne’s 30th the other day. I sent him an email, but it looks as if he’s gone AWOL again.

JULY 2009

I’ll try to keep this short, and I’ll probably fail miserably. Following on from my earlier sunburn issues, I thought I’d make the situaltion worse by going back out in the sun and attending the Hartlepool dockfest, in order to get some photos. The photos were successfully obtained, but after waiting in a queue for at least an hour for what I thought was goingto be an action packed opening ceremony, it turned out to be the worst thing I’ve waited for in the whole history of anything ever. Infortunately, the damage was done, and I spent the rest of the two days walking around like an embarrased lobster. the fact I was wearing a bright white t-shirt never really helped matters.

Mid July was next, and I happened to be pointing the camera out of the window, to record the black clouds on the horizon, as shown in this photo, the first time it’s been shown.

OK, technically, those clouds aren’t on the horizon, neither were the clouds directly above my head. I was personally depressed about the fact that I hadn’t gone abroad this year. There were a few reasons behind this that couldn’t be changed, but I still felt that it was something to do with me, and spent a good few days moping about it. Obviously this was infinitely insignificant compred to what was about to happen.

Maybe there is such a thing such as fate? The day that we were “due” to go away (as in, the day that we’d gone away on the previous two years, and originally planned to this year), my dad suffered a heart attack. At this point, I went into “offline mode”, meaning that the rest of July was totally written off.

The Google car did visit Hartlepool too.

AUGUST 2009

Computer problems dominated August, with Beastbits constantly switching off. I thought I’d found the cause of the problem after inspecting the video card in Beastbits, and its broken fan. In this never-before-seen photo, you can see that the lead on the graphics card had became disconnected.

Actually, you can’t. That’s a really shit photo.

I didn’t do much in August. I was still off work for the first few weeks. I had only been back at work a few days, when we all learned about the sudden death of Stu, the security guard, of a heart attack. After what had happened in the weeks previous to that, it hit home. Hard.

On a lighter note, I met up with Chad the prolific troller who haunts this site with witty anecdotes (sarcasm), and long forgotten, often embarrasing memories of our childhood. Saying that, it was nice to see him after all of these years.

SEPTEMBER 2009

Quite literally, nothing happened in September. There were a few site issues, and a day trip to York. That really is it. There’s nothing in either the blog archive or my flickr account to show that anything happened at all.

OCTOBER

The occasional site problems continued into October, though the whole month appeared to be dominated by a hunk of metal and magnets. Yes, that was the month where that bloody Samsung hard drive arrived, and spent a good few days trying to get it working.

Photograph-wise, it was even more barren than September, with a mere 91 photos being uploaded to flickr, though one of these was part of my “bargain of the century”…

I went to a radio rally with Daddykins, and met one of my Flickr contacts, which was nice. I also got “knocked back” at Asda, and no matter how cheap their buns were, the humiliation meant I never returned there for over two months.

NOVEMBER

The flickr meet I attended at the Historic Quay was the highlight of the month, even though there were only a few photos that were actually any good. It was good to get the camera out for the first time since September and actually get some shots took. My computer problems officially ended when I gave Beastbits the right royal kicking it deserved, and it is now an ex-machine – its parts used to update and repair the scribcam.co.uk server.

The old video card from the server was a bit broken…

… well, it was after I’d finished with it. The new machine gave me my first glimpses of Windows 7, and… well, it’s not Vista, so that’s a plus point, I suppose.

DECEMBER

December has seen something we don’t usually se a lot of this time of year – snow. It also became the month where it occured to me, that I am officially old.

You are officially old, the second you look out of the window, see snow, and instead of jumping up and down like a kid, you slowly turn away from the window and think “If I go out in that, I’m going to break something”. Instead, I stayed in the confines of Mercuryvapour Towers, and took plenty of photos of it.

It takes a lot to get something hanging from a wheely bin to look insanely festive, but I think this manages it quite nicely…

Although at the time of typing, it’s actually Xmas Eve (thanks to the wonderment of scheduled posts, you’ll be seeing this a couple of days later), I doubt anything else is going to happen within that time, so this leaves me to wish both of my readers a very happy 2010, and I hope that it’s a much better year than what 2009 was.

The sooner 2009 ends, the sooner I can get on with life, and start afresh…

JANUARY 2009

The first proper post saw me killing off the video blogs. They were unpopular and embarrassing. I took the first of a handful of walks throughout the year, and documented it with photos. Work continued to get me down, for reasons I can’t think of, and I survived the great Google outage. The first death of 2009 came in the form of my 4Gb memory stick, which succombed to a shorted out USB port…

FEBRUARY 2009

It snowed a little, more than once. JT moved onto the other rotation, and I started blethering on about creating backups using Clonezilla. Unfortunately, this was not going to be the last long-winded post about my computer experimentations. In fact, this seemed to be the whole theme of the year. Work started on building houses on the vacant land on Warren Road, despite it being heavily landscaped only a few years before, no doubt at great cost to the Hartlepudlian taxpayer.

Dick Brown, webmaster of www.dick-brown.com (the w’s stand for wankstain) received an insanely full bottle of orange squash.

MARCH 2009

An entirely forgettable month, if I’m honest. I worked overtime for only the second time in my life, and I went to Durham with Chris at some point, to give my camera its first test. I ended up misjudging a step and twatting my knee off the floor. The cooler on the sarnie machine also malfunctioned, casuing it to display “HEALTH CONTROL” on its VFD display.

APRIL 2009

April 1st consisted of vast amounts of kitchen cleaning. April 4th consisted of my Grand National faux pas, and mercuryvapour.co.uk once again moved servers.

A bird took residence in Mercuryvapour Towers, and it became apparent that nobody reads this blog anymore.

MAY 2009

Unperturbed about the bad news regarding the blog “statistics”, I still continued to write. On May 7th, Andy The Iridium Fan donated the second mercury lantern into my streetlighting collection, in the form of an unused Revo Prefect.

The biggest overhaul came towards the end of this particular month wne I took delivery of a new dartboard.

A lot of spare time was taken with this particular hobby from this moment on.

Dick Brown received some money from MS, on May 13th. I have no idea what for, but I was on-hand with cameraphone, to record the historic event…

JUNE 2009

So, everyone will be asking, where were you when he died? Yes, surely, the biggest, most famously untimely death of 2009, according to the mercuryvapour.co.uk super-statistic website generator, is…

Yes, sod Michael Jackson. This was the most untimely death for me anyway

Apart from death, June consisted of record breaking sunburn, after climbing Christchurch, and spending about an hour up there.

It really was crustier than it looked.

Unfortunately, it turned out that a sunburned scalp was to be the least of my worries, as July rearerd its ugly head… stay tuned for Part 2

For the past two nights, there has been one of these little shits in the office. I happened to be the first one to spot it the other night, as it happened to land on my “umbilical cord” (the wire from my headset leading to my phone). I froze, slowly backing up, unplugging my headset, and then legging it. As I reversed it headed towards me. I think everyone thought I was mad.

It turned out that 4 of the 5 people who were in the office with me also severely disliked the little stripy buggers. The only person to not admit to disliking them was Dick Brown, webmaster of short-lived shitfest

By the title of the posting, you’ll probably be thinking that I’ve just bought a new sofa, or something. No, for you see, I have for the first time in 8 years connected my zip drive up to my computer. It’s wonderfully obsolete.

The story began in approximately 1999. I can’t remember the exact date, or even the exact year, but the data on the disk that I found would suggest either late 1998, or early 1999.

I remember Daddykins had gone to Currys on the marina to have a look at something. Possibly a new TV, or video. I would have been on the dole at this point.

My computer setup was using a 10Gb drive, which would often become full. With the only external storage available at the time being the humble floppy disk, I would find myself just deleting stuff because I needed the space. Whilst in Currys, I spied the zip drive, which would allow me to move a whole 10% of my drive onto removable media in one go. Considering I was a child of the Job Centre, the investment was immense. £100, plus a bit more. It definitely broke three figures anyway.

I had first became acquainted with Zip drives in 1998, when I was doing skivvy IT work at the accountants on Victoria road, and had used zip drives to move old data from an old Win 3.1 machine to a Win95 machine. I accomplished this using DOS. God, those were the days.

Anyway, I purchased it (or rather, Daddykins purchased it for me, and I would pay him the money back over a period of time. this was often the arrangement for hardware I purchased befire I got a proper job.

After the initial setup, and ripping off the paper mache moulded sides that the drive was held into, I connected it, and installed it as you’d expect. It’s a parallel port device, so it needed drivers. I believe these were included on a floppy disk. I definitely know you could create a “guest” disk, allowing the drive to be recognised on any machine temporarily.

I absolutely adored it. I only had one 100Mb disk for it at the time, but still, the 10% free disk space was an absolute dream. I didn’t have a full connection to the internet at that point, so 10% of hard drive space would take a while to fill. This means that if I needed a new disk, I could plan for it well in advance. This I did. I probably used Scan to buy them, at what would now be an extortionate price.

Disaster was about to strike, and ironically, thanks to the data on the disk (which I’ll come to in a minute, or an hour the way I’m typing). It was March 1999. I had ordered a few things for my machine, such as a new CDROM drive, and amongst this, was an extra 100Mb disk. For some reason, I’d set my computer up downstairs. I presume it was so I could easily work on the machine when the new parts came, without having to fit everything on what would have been a very untidy desk.

And, this is the disaster. Within minutes of inserting that new ZIP disk, I stood up to do something. My foot trailed along the zip drive’s power lead, and “Bang Crash, RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”… The drive had fallen to the floor, and the “RAAA” was coming from the fact that the impact had ripped the disk surface while it was spinning, and the drive heads were now completely out of alignment. I was the owner of one completely fucked zip drive, only a few months old.

It was one of those moments that just made me want to cry.

Daddykins suggested taking it back to Currys, and suggesting that it was faulty. Luckily, I’d read something about a “click of death”, where the heads in the zip drive would click twice, and not mount the disk. This was exactly what mine had been doing.

Off we went to Currys, my hands clammy, clasping the casualty. I went up to the desk, mumbled something like “Oh, it’s got the click of death”. The guy looked at me slightly strangely, but without further hesitation, nipped into the back office, and came out with a nice, shiny new boxed drive. I was beyond happy.

I vowed to never make that mistake again, and make sure that its footing is secure, and that I don’t have wires trailing all over the shop. The zip drive still had regular usage, and even received a mention on 8th February 2001. This was technically the day that my beloved zip drive moved into the realms of obseletion, as Daddykins had purchased a CDRW drive to go into his computer. We didn’t have a network at this point, so the 5 zip disks I had accumulated were put to use simply transferring the data between the two machines, so I was able to write whatever I wanted to CD, and it would be accessible on any computer I had, either then, or in the future. No need to lug about huge drives, and even less need to install drivers.

Shortly after finding out just how convenient the whole CD writing thing was, I went out and bought my very own CD drive, possibly from Scan again. It was at this point, that the Zip drive was disconnected for the final time, and its path into obseletion had been completed. The data that was on the disks at the time is probably still on them, but unfortunately at the time of typing this, I can only find one disk, and it would just happen to be the most important one of the lot. It was my old website backup disk!

Amongst the several folders on the disk is a little zip file, entitled “WebsiteNOV200.zip”. What’s even better, is that the files included, are actually from December 1999. It includes the very first incarnation of the blog. Back then, I’d called it a diary. I had to type it out in plain HTML, as blogging hadn’t been invented, certainly not in the automated sense anyway.

EDIT: 100Mb of a 10gig drive isn’t 10%, it’s 1%… this will be why NASA turned down my job application. Maybe.

JANUARY

January started with a bit of a worrisome note. I thought I’d lost touch with Coatesy, after I sent him a Happy New Year text which never got delivered. I spent the new few weeks wondering what had happened to him. Turns out I’d sent the text to his old number, and on 25th January, I went round to his flat, and beat him at Track and Field

The 1st day of the year also saw the first photos uploaded to Andrew Dorrian’s Photo Gallery.

In Early January, the Shakespeare Pub, formerly the Catcote, was demolished to make way for a parade of shops, which are nearing completion.

Overall, I uploaded ony 16 photos to flickr, making it a very dull month photo-wise.

FEBRUARY

In contrast to the dullness of January, this month seemed to have everything, and that includes taking over 900 photos. For most of the month, however, I was the most depressed I’ve ever been over a stupid row about a packet of crumpets, and my even stupider anger. I’m quite sure the person involved will never truly forgive or forget it… I’m damn sure I’ll never forgive myself, or forget it.

Every cloud has a silver lining, and after being unable to sleep because of this incident, I got up before the cold winter sunrise, and walked to the headland to take some photos. Can you tell that I was crying when I took this picture? No? Good.

That was the incident which summed up the month for me. It wasn’t good, and it was all because of me.

Gary Smith left Employment Palace for pastures new.

It was certainly the month for unbelievable sunsets.

The streetlights on Easington Road FINALLY got replaced, after approximately a year of the new posts standing idle.

A little later on in the month, I went to Newcastle with Chris. Many photos were taken, including an almost exact copy of a image I’d seen on flickr many times…

Unfortunately, the longest Febrary for four years didn’t end with such an inspiring image. I had planned to take a catalogue of pictures, as it’s only something that happens every 4 years. Clearly this photo shoot never happened.

And I didn’t blog much. I did, however, blog about the earthquake which happened on February 27th. That was a very odd night.

MARCH

March’s blogs appear oddly to explain things that happened in February. Thanks to the afore mentioned crumpet incident. This included the trip to Newcastle in two mega blog posts, and also further detail about the earthquake.

A big brown envelope plopped on my doormat at some point in this month, I’d been summonsed for jury dury the following month. Balls. I took a bus ride to Middlesbrough to see how long it would take. Some shite photos were taken.

I also did a mega-tidy, which means that my carpet was seen for the first time in several years. It soon disappeared again. 317 photos were uploaded, none of them look particularly fascinating.

I also bought my first 500Gb hard drive.

APRIL

Early highlights of the month include the purchase of a 250Gb external hard drive, and my winning of several pounds on the Grand National.

The first major incident to occur was the major fire at the Bonne Bouche factory. Those were my photos, but you can never have enough photos of a major fire, so here is some that Andrew D took. He was lucky enough to have some of these printed in the paper.

Very little else happened which didn’t involve jury duty, hence very little blogging or photographs. However, during the weekend between my two weeks, I went to Durham with Chris. More photos were taken.

It was at this point (or around this point) that I started the record database, something whcih I’ve been building ever since.

Of course, there was the bus crash which demolished the brick bus shelter on Easington Road. Turns out April was quite a month for local stuff I could photograph. Humphrey Lyttleton also died, which was something I was truly gutted about.

MAY

This appears to be a month completely written off. Nothing happened apparently. I was sick of work as usual, and made my feelings felt in the only way I know how – blog about it. It was also the month of my mamoth walk around the town. I got plenty of photos, including some of my favourites of the year. Remember the new 500Gb HDD I’d purchased? Well, it began to die. Ironically, I mentioned that the power supply might have been at fault. I didn’t have that thought for another 5 months….

This is part 1… Part 2 to follow, hopefully this year.

Of course, the question is, would I be enough of a tight bastard to spend the asking price of 45p? Well, considering I actually have a photograph of them, in front of my monitor, I think you can safely assume that I did indeed buy them.

The bags are obviously bigger than they are now, and the packet has “Bigger Like They Used to be!*”… the asterisk points to some small text stating “as in 1977″. This clearly shows they’re not trying to corner the kids’ market with these, instead they’re going for the adult market, who grew up with them as kids, and were dismayed to find that Walkers completely destroyed their branding.

Now, I like to think I had a little part to play, after my rant on one of the UK newsgroups about the state of British crisps, and in particular Monster munch…

Someone in uk.culture.nostalgia.1980s asked “What do you miss from the 80′s that you wish were still with us?” My reply is the long-winded one below…

>>Cheese and Onion Monster Munch.

Quite honestly, in the last 12 hours, I’ve pouched at least 6 bags of these particular crisps. I love them so much.

Is it pure coincidence that I wrote that on August 3rd, and here I am, a month and a half later, chowing down on original sized Monster Munch?

On the subject of music, I actually bought a copy of an obscure record I’ve been looking for since I was about 13. It’s the Loading Bay Records version of Ankie Bagger’s “Where Were You Last Night”, a song I know nobody on this entire planet will know. (but I’m sure it’ll start picking up search results in the near future).

I first heard this song some time in about 1993. Daddykins was in the washhouse experimenting with packet radio. I was in the front room listening to a temporary radio station somewhere in Middlesbrough, when they began to play “Rofo’s Theme”, a song I will always remember from childhood holidays at the world famous Sandy Bay. I slapped in a cheap cassette tape in order to record this excellent tune. At the end, they mixed it with this song, which was unknown to me at the time. Luckily, the DJ did indeed announce both tracks’ names and artists.

Packet radio is a method of transmitting computer data via radio, and was (occasionally still is) used by ham radio enthusiasts to transmit text through the airwaves at a moderately acceptable baud rate. Unfortunately, Daddykins transmitting these data packets affected my recording, and every 30 seconds or so, there is a loud squeal, totally wiping out both songs for a second or so.

Sadly, the tape has long gone. At some point in the last few years, I recalled this song, and after weeks of searching, tracked down an awful copy of it. Unfortunately, this copy was taken from the 7″ version of the song, and was scratched up in places. Oh well.

Every so often, I went onto ebay, looking for it, and I kept getting sick of seeing “0 items found for
ankie bagger”. There were CD versions appearing occasionally, going for extortionate amounts, and none of those were the Loading Bay version. I was on ebay the other day, and just did a search for a bit of fun… the result?

“Ankie Bagger Where Were You Last Night Loading Bay Rec”… oh my.

Again, it was a few quid more than I’d normally pay for vinyl, but I couldn’t really give up this opportunity. As shown in the picture, I bid for, and bought this vinyl delight… yay, go me. So, I’ve been belting that down my ears ever since. Wahey!

On the subject of music, the Middlesbrough “Music Live” thing is on again, which I attended back in 2004. If it was anything like last time, it’s definitely worth going. I know a load of people from work are going, so I think it’s going to be a good day, as long as the weather holds up. If the weather the last few days is anything to go by, that’ll be a no. We’ll see.

Right, let’s move onto the normal comments on here…

Chad: Good move on not buying the “rubbers,” I doubt you’d have ever used them, ever[1].

Have a nice weekend[5].

1. Regarding the rubbers, you know, you’re actually right. I’m strange in the fact that I insist in writing with a pen as opposed to a pencil. I could have a drawer full of pencils, but I would still dig through it all the way to the bottom to see if there’s a pen in there. I think it went back to my old school days, and the fact we were forced to used pencils, yet the bigger kids were allowed to use biros, etc. That was when the decision was made that the 4th year and the 3rd year were merged into two clas… waaait! Rubbers! I get it now! You meant condoms! Hahaha! That’s so funny! No, truly, my sides are creasing here… bwahaha. God, it’ll take me years to recover from that hilarious use of Americo-English.

5. Thanks. I’ll try my best. The Saturday is a write-off, though.

Wow, I didn’t plan to go off on that rant when I started on the comments section, and I don’t think I’ve ever gave any background information into who “Chad” is. He grew up on the last house in our street, and he is wholly responsible for some of the best, and the worst, moments in my childhood. I am genuinely delighted, despite his comments and my ramblings that he still remembers, and even dreams about the past years. About 9 or 10 (correction: 7) years ago, he moved to Japan to become an English Teacher, and we lost touch. During the early years of my blog, when I had an external forum, he posted some stuff on there which I seem to remember taking offense to, at the time.

Since then, he has never gone away.

I just hope and pray that one day we will meet up again, face-to-face, to discuss everything that has happened in our lives.

Right, after that marathon, onto the Outtake vlog… this one’s a bit of a mess… this one’s supposed to be the one everyone hated. It sort of backfired on me.

Noscere: What? your supposed to keep the out takes?… Bugger

Well, I did, and this was the result! when I record a vlog, I do it in one go. It saves fucking about each time I get something wrong, I don’t stop the recording in between, as that just complicates things. Instead, I just edit the crap bits out with Movie Maker, which doesn’t actually affect the original file. This means I end up with the final version, but still have the original source video. Sometimes I do delete them after I upload them… the “washhouse” master is long gone – there were plenty of outtakes in that, it was about 15 minutes overall.

Unfortunately, this was the most popular one I’ve ever done…

Daniel H: Fucking love this.
Aidey: That was fab! More please
c64glen: This is my favorite one so far!
Owen: (3 comments)
I think you should do a Numa Numa video.
These should also never have been cut !!! they are great!!!
Hahaha SHUT UP SQUEEKY CHAIR !! That’s so my new message tone…

The whole reason I posted this blog in the first place was to get negative comments from it, to see whether it was worth filming any more. Not one negative comment. Everyone loved to see me making a prick of myself… how does that work?? Either way: Owen, I’m not making a Numa Numa video. ever. Thanks for emailing those modules, these will be featured in some way in the next vlog, though I’m not sure if they’re suitable as a permanent new theme tune… of course, the question is, has the recent feedback made me rethink the whole vlog business? the answer: of course it fucking hasn’t…

Oh, nad just an explanation on one of the outtakes…

big bad mick: im curious to see what outtakes didnt make the outtake real…

This is where the confusion lies… YOU (the comment poster) aren’t “big bad mick”. Which is why that was an outtake, I got you mixed up with “bigbadmick”, who was the webmaster of Curried Books – a now defunct (as far as I know) blog. It was just the ultimate in brainfarts where I got you two mixed up. I laughed at the time, and my “fuck” reaction. Uh, I hope I’ve explained that well enough. I probably haven’t.

As for your question, there’s lots of material that didn’t make it, mainly due to the fact I didn’t sift through it. I’ve recorded quite a few vlogs which I wasn’t happy with, or had technical issues such as bad sound. I did one on the light of Liverpool’s defeat in the Uefa cup final. I really wasn’t happy with it. Despite the outtakes, I do have some quality control.

Roght, that’s it for now. Consider me wound down. I shall attempt to post at some point tomorrow.