A long night ahead…

I’m going to be up until about 3am. You see, I have a near-3000 word piece due for a gaming magazine by tomorrow morning. A piece I have not yet begun, complete with pictures (which I don’t own the copyright for) and quotes (from experts I haven’t yet contacted).

In short, I’m at the wrong end of a journalist deadline. Writing for a magazine is a lot like writing an essay, once you get the hang of it. The only difference is you can’t plagiarise whatever obscure books and websites say. Ah, and instead of getting marked for your work, you get feedback from commissioning editors. Common feedback includes “rewrite, 4th & 6th paragraphs by 2pm – need higher res pictures too”.

Finally, instead of a 48 hour extension and using any excuse under the sun to have a deadline extended, you will instead be dabbling with lawsuits and the possibly of never receiving a paid commission again.

Still, at least I’m being paid a comical amount of money.

Never use clichés.

The end.

We’re back

Sorry we haven’t been posting recently. I’ve been busy working for The Man, Tim’s been busy with a bad case of “man flu”, Sugarush has just been busy with men period.

Back to regular updates on Team189 from today.

In the meantime, I leave you with one of the funniest sentences i’ve ever read – as quoted in the Guardian newspaper:

“The government insists it is making headway in the fight against corruption. New figures claim 67,505 officials have been punished in less than four years. This includes Qiu Xiaohua, the head of China’s national statistics bureau.”

Sugarush and Tim on a mission.

On Sunday afternoon popular team 189 member, Sugarush was contacted by a certain assistant manager of a highly respected restaurant/bar chain. During this call he commissioned the Rushin with an important task. This task was to be a Mystery customer, evaluating food, bar and staff during the following day.  She thought long about the request and decided to accept. (actually she said yes straight away because it meant free food and drink). Tim was also granted a guest visa and accompanied her on this venture, recording it carefully on his new phone!

Monday arrived and rushing and manager secretly met to study the criteria they would be looking for and grading that day. Yes we have hangovers….

 With a quick conversation, manager x left for the gym while Tim and rushin began the mission. A few cocktails and main courses later…..

Next began the huge wait for one of the waiters to come to clear the table and ask us about dessert. No one came so we had to find something to do….

Looking out the window Tim couldn’t understand why there was only half a bus waiting outside…

 Tim finds some excitment in eating a large spoon of sour cream that is left over on his plate.

Next there was some confusion about which dessert the 2 mystery customers would be sharing.

                                  

The pair opted for the Chocolate and orange ice-cream sundae, only to find it actually had real orange in it which they hated because they didn’t read the menu properly.

THE MISSION WAS COMPLETE.

We reunited with a now more awake manager and celebrated at the study with further food and beverages…. WHAT A DAY!

How you can get Lost series 3 now

Several people have been asking me how you can download Lost series 3 now.

Well, you can’t, not the whole series yet anyway. What you can download are any of the new TV series being shown in the new TV season out in the States. Here’s how you do it:

Step 1: Download a piece of software called “Bitcomet” by clicking here.

Step 2: Install this software onto your hard drive.

Step 3: Go to websites like mininova.org, Torrent Reactor, torrentspy.com. (There are many more, just search for torrents in Google and you should find some nice websites).

Step 4: Assuming you’re so lazy you simply clicked on the first option mininova, search for “Lost” (or anything your after) in the search box.

Step 5: Find the result with the most seeds/leeches (indicated on the right) and download that torrent onto your desktop.

Step 6: Double click on that file and it should begin downloading the torrent into c:/program files/bitcomet/downloads (or something like that.  It could take anything around 1 hour to 1 day to download, it depends on how many people are ’sharing’ the file. You can also download films, music and anything else you find this way. Happy stealing!

If you wonder what things like Lost s03.e01 stands for it’s (Lost SEason 3, episode 1).

I wont spoil it here, but the first episode of the new series of Lost was fantastic. New One Tree Hill series is mediocre. IF you’re looking for something really good, download a TV series called “Studio 60″, the writing of it is fantastic, and it has Matthew Perry from Friends in.

If you have any problems downloading any of this stuff, leave a comment below and i’ll answer it asap.

SPACE man

Anyone that picks up a copy of this week’s SPACE newspaper will find my article on social networking in it.

I’m great.

However, rather than subject you lot to reading through the rest of the crap in the student newspaper, you can simply download the article by click here.

Don’t say I never gave you anything.

We’re on the bus

Team 189 have some big news.

This saturday, to commemorate absolutely nothing whatsoever, we’re going on the bus. Going where? Well that’s a damn good question, we’re most likely heading to Gloucester, but we’re not too sure to be honest. At around 3.30pm we will be getting on the bus (god bless student freebies) and getting off at every stop on the way for a pint at the nearest pub. It’s kind of like the Team 189 version of a pub crawl, only without all those fiddly walking bits. Instead we get on the bus in Cheltenham and get off at every bus stop for a pint. Then we get back on the next bus. We’re not too sure this idea is going to work. Sugarush, whose annoying enough when she’s sober, gets crazy on alcohol and travel sick on vehicles.

…so it should be interesting.

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. We’ve been terribly busy. I’ve been busy with my work (still waiting for the company to go bankrupt), Tim’s been busy with his guy, and Sugarush has been busy telling me not to write anything bad about her (so haven’t been able to write much i’m afraid Sugarush-fans).

We did go to a house party last night, which wasn’t particuarly eventful. About 40 – 50 people squeezed into a very small house. It did have it’s highlights mind, for example my attempt to strike up a conversation with a random stranger:

Me – “So how do you know everybody here?”

Random stranger – “It’s my party, I live here.”

Until next time. 

How Rich became an Irish Traveller

It has to be said, i’m really not clued up enough on Irish Travellers, especially considering I now am one.

So, like many of you have I imagine, I was filling out the University registration forms when it asked me to update my personal details. These details included current address, contact information and, most importantly, ethnicity. Does the University expect us to change our ethnicity on a yearly basis? Could I suddenly goes from White – British to Black Bangladeshi?

Out of a healthy curiousity, I decided to see what options were available, most of them were fairly standard. “White – British”, “White – Scottish”, “White – Irish” (gotta seperate these people out you see), then I came across one which seemed far more interesting, “Irish Traveller”. What is an Irish Traveller? Does anyone know? Are these Snatch style gypsies living in Caravans around the campus somewhere? I certainly haven’t seen many. Are these a lot of gypsies does anyone know? Or did the University simply add that ethnicity in on the off-chance that an “Irish Traveller” would be registering for a course one day and sue the uni for discriminating against his Irish Traveller heritage?

It soon occured to me, this might be my only opportunity to ever become an Irish Traveller. So I selected Irish Traveller as my ethnicity.

Do ya like dags ?

Here are some facts about my new heritage from Wikipedia:

“Irish Travellers are a nomadic or itinerant people of Irish origin living in Ireland, Great Britain and the United States. They refer to themselves as The Pavee. An estimated 23,000 Travellers live in Ireland, 15,000 in Great Britain and 7,000 in the United States.”

“Some of the marriage customs, at least in the Southern Travellers (Memphis and “Georgies”), allow for 11 year old girls to be engaged to be married to 20+ year old men. Weddings occur as young as 16, often to a first or second cousin. Because in Traveller culture men are the ones who provide for the wife and family, a girl’s main goal is to marry. The bride’s parents pay the groom’s parents a dowry, which in some cases can be quite substantial”

“The Traveller lifestyle often produces friction in the community, especially in urban areas. Labels such as gypsy and pikey are common in Great Britain. Gypsy is more properly applied to the Roma people but is offensive to both groups. The derogatory terms gyppo and gypolata, derived from gypsy, are also heard in Great Britain.”

If i’m honest, I only selected Irish Traveller so I could get a screenshot of proof, then change it back. However, there isn’t actually any option to change it back. So until I find out otherwise, I am officially the only Irish Traveller university student in the UK.

The 24 Drinking Game

Important stuff.

24: Drink When…

• Someone annoying is kidnapped.
• A terrorist informs another terrorist that “Everything is proceeding as planned.”
• Jack dies
• Jack is resuscitated
• The person in charge of CTU makes a bad call.
• Jack goes rogue.
• Jack is fired.
• Jack is arrested.
• Jack breaks out of CTU.
• Jack is reinstated to CTU.
• “Protocol.”
• Someone gives a hopelessly vague order (”Take precautions.” “Make something happen.”)
• Someone gives a redundant order (”Proceed as planned.” “Execute the next stage.”)
• The president screws up a common phrase (”Keep me closely posted.” “We’ll cross that bridge when the situation presents itself.”)
• Someone at CTU has to go behind their boss’s back to help Jack.
• Jack says “I don’t have time to explain”
• Someone requests satellite co-ordinates
• Agents manning the perimeter are redeployed
• There is a change of who’s in charge of CTU (2 shots)
• Everytime Jack has somehow managed to change his clothes
• Everytime Jack or the president cuts a deal with someone in custody
• Whenever CTU is infiltrated/attacked

That will do for now.