Studying, how not to.

I was once approached with the question "Stuart, how do I waste as much time as possible, and not actually end up getting anything done"(Well, that was me, but I always seem to give myself good answers, so it was a sound plan).

So I got to thinking, how does one, with a pretty hefty amount of time, determination, motivation and free government money which you have to pay back, manage to squander all of the above? While the obvious answer is of course overseas pyramid schemes, (which could be seen as a grown-up's version of funding a child, just with less heartwarming photos (maybe)), the simple answer is anything. But a special type of anything, let me go on. (Not that you have a choice).

As was proven in 1939 by Hitler, that the best way to invite Europe to a picnic was to help them all join the great country of Germany. But that's beside the Pola-, point.

As was more relevantly proven by Stalin, keep your focus on whatever you're not focused on. How did he display this? Well obviously by finding means of distracting himself from the monotonous task of assisting then-Facist Italy and Germany in the little known conflict (as the name infers) World War II.

So how did he do this? Well, when Germany decided that they wanted a winter getaway, Russia decided that they were going to put their dinner dates with the Axis forces on hold indefinitely. (with good reason). They were still civil enough to go ahead with their swinging plans.

So, following this, we can construct an easy guide for how to not achieve anything beyond a few deaths.

STEP ONE: Decide what you are going to do, (this can be anything). Make sure you take steps towards going ahead with this plan.

STEP TWO: Right as the implementation comes to fruition, look around you, is there internet nearby? (Catch 'n' tag). If not, find a fly or interesting spot on the wall/person/WMD.

STEP THREE: Decide that you are going to do this distracting event, move to STEP TWO.

STEP FOUR: If you got here, you were cheating, or are a general failure at failing to be a success.

So in conclusion, doing nothing is easy, some of the best pasttimes for such an event are writing blogs, and staring aimlessly at your inbox, alone, *Sits playing harmonica*.

Unrelated, but my email addy is in my profile.
Over and out.

The early bird got the worm, and another spontanious blog post, and a list!

Well it is currently 8:42 and I've achieved the achievement of waking up at a half reasonable time on a Sunday, which if you know me, is a considerable feat for myself.

Which in a way brings me to my latest topic for rambling, a surprise if you will as I only have just sat down with a tea and a bowl of my favorite artery-clogging cereal, which is not cigarette puffs (Though there could be a market for that kinda thing).

SO the video game industry gimmick of the 21st century seems to be achievements, and the absolutely useless points that are implemented so players can engage in the inevitable "Mine is bigger" competitions, as usually partaken in by sufferers of large tumors. The video game platforms Steam, Xbox-Live, PS3 and the bastard step child called Games For Windows, who aside from its initial implementation of stealing Halo 2 from the hungry masses only to cater to the rich and not necessarily famous lead to its unimpressive performance of being sent to the corner and only being called over to the adults table for verbal abuse, that and huge run on sentences.

But ignoring my run on sentences, achievements are here, in some cases they are implemented well, (Portal for example, and the later Team Fortress 2 packs) and in some case they are not; real life . Achievements add a whole heap of replayability to the latest titles, with Team Fortress 2 managing more achievements you can shake a sanvich at. These little nuggets of tacked-on gameplay help us feed our craving for gratification from the little screen we stare out for hours on end, or, in the case of the MMORPG, days on end.

While I've been singing the praise of TF2, it also understandably susceptible to one of the main pitfalls of achievements, the "Do this obscure thing 20 times which will never actually happen in normal gameplay but might if you keep playing for hours and hours." This was an understandable problem with their system as the whole concept was relatively new at the time, and have shown they realised their cock-up with their latest releases being relatively cock-free which is good for all those feminist lobbyists and better for the gamers. The more unrealistic of the achievements were a major factor in the release of the fan-made achievement servers, where people could congregate and help each other and reach their common achievement (haw haw). These servers appealed to the lazy who were seeking access to the new weapons, the dedicated who were seeking to gain an edge and the downright twats who also spend their spare time ripping the wings off flies and killing anybody actually doing what they were meant to.

At the end of the day, if blogger were to implement achievements for doing 10 posts a day, I would most definitely be tempted to attempt this easy target. But I've always been known to spend hours and hours on something with no real return apart from being quite fun and a money sink.

Stuart out, I've got achievements to get!

New Logo!

Well, as you can see I've know used all my cunning and might to make the sexy 692x150 image you can see above. There will be a tutorial within the coming days on how I created it, so hopefully that will keep you entertained, or at least not foaming at the mouth. But as for now, I am melting in part to the local climate of this area, where my hyperbole thermometer is exploding from the excessive heat.

More posts will come in a few days, but feel free to ask me anything photoshop/coding/anything related via comments.

A teaser of what is to come in the following days:

• Tutorial on creating the header above.
• Tutorial on creating a 'special' certificate for your loved and not so loved ones.
• A random rambling on another staple office item.
• And the odd mention of the word "sex" to increase my content range.

The death of email clients. Aka: The extremely verbose history of internet, with the odd reference to emails.

Back in the day's before high speed ADSL, fibreoptics and other broadband methods the internet mainly consisted of users making telephone calls and screeching strange pitches to the receiver on the over end. Of course, many people did not like these calls and thereby refused to use the telephone while the internet call was taking place. As a result of this, internet browsing sessions were either routed through a secondary phone line, or just used for insanely short amounts of time.

The great race of the extremely-late-hominids decided they liked the idea of communicating with each other and thus the email was born, a simple pile of text which was sent screaming towards the great ISP repositories of mail. Every now and again, little Jimmy would use his Outlook Express email client to check whether Susie had received and responded to his proposal of marriage, complete with a little image of a ring comprised of ascii characters. Then, once assured that there were no email for him, he would sadly close Outlook and his internet page featuring naughty images of women.

As we suddenly entered the 21st century, where the world suddenly realised that they could do something with their excess pile of D-Link modems and thus constant access to the internet took hold. From any household the leaky-tubes were moments away, little Jimmy's photo collection soon grew to hold the great number of videos he had also found. He had created an online email account and was able to attain near-instant notifications of restraining orders sent to him via email. His free ISP email address laying dormant, aside from the odd avalanche of Viagra, singles sites and the odd inquisitive email regarding the size of his 'business'.

Jimmy eventually saved up his pocket money and bought a laptop, for seven-odd shillings he had access to his Microsoft XP and other questionable material on the go, a triumph for modern technology. But the freedom was restrained by the lack of internet unless tethered to a modem. So Outlook was used once again, queuing up his unsent email, and syncing with his online email service when he finally reached the mystical box of connections and other exciting goings-on.

Sometime later, within a few years, man made another huge leap in technology. They had finally finished constructing the "D.I.Y Home wireless router out of a potato, a multitude of LED's of the blinking variety, a fresh haddock and Tom Hanks." Laptops were then rapidly adapted to use this technology, which in its early years could only provide interweb in a small area. But in more recent years, the areas of Wifi coverage grew with unstoppable force, the immovable object sadly being absent from reality.

So as we rapidly approach the stage of technological evolution which worldwide wireless access is an achieved goal, the question is will there be a place for the old offline send/receive email clients? With such stable access to the internet, and a greater array of user-friendly online applications such as GMail, will programs such as Outlook, Thunderbird, Evolution, and the large amount of other applications tasked with mail sychronisation fade into obscurity, with odd ramblings mentioning the "Good 'ol days," "Fiddy Six K?" and "Reboot plz".