recepticle=Thursday, November 28, 2002
gah! and also barg!
i thought aol was fixed. well, it was. for a day. and then it started acting like the whore that it truly is. a crackwhore. in an alley. that died of a crack overdose. a month ago. and a pack of dogs ate most of her face. that's what aol is like.
a series of wildly unrelated content this evening; apparently, there is a new album out; marti pellow sings wet wet wet's greatest hits. um... what? he was in wet wet wet. so surely it should just be 'wet wet wet's greatest hits'? because it's very unlikely to be an album's-worth of re-recorded wet wet wet songs. the only thing i could possibly think of is that either a) it's a scam by the record company so they don't have to pay perfomance royalties to the other musicians in the band, or b) a marti pellow ego trip. either one is just as likely as the other. as i told my grandma earlier this week; marti pellow is high on the list of people who need to be shot come the musical revolution.
i was absolutely dying with laughter the other day, when yen told me that, as a young boy, he was under the impression that, since you get flavoured condoms, a girl's vagina was obviously equipped with a sense of taste. you see how our children could be utterly misinformed by the novelties we produce? on a rather more disturbing note, one of jon and yen's newer flatmates has an uncle who sells novelty condoms over the internet. one of the categories is 'cartoon condoms', which is a horrendous-looking collection of condoms not just printed, but actually shaped into the forms of popular cartoon characters. already it's gone past the 'unacceptable' marker, but there is one condom in the shape of maggie simpson. hello? sticking your penis in a baby? who that that was a good idea?
for anyone who's been to game phrenzy in the past couple of days... well, me and jon broke it. i broke the flash game, and i think jon broke the high scores table. but i haven't told him yet because he might cry. he does that a lot. we were watching 'home alone' and jon cried like a little girl when macauley culkin (sp?) realises that he's all lonely without his family at christmas.
sorry, that was a complete lie. but an entertaining lie.
but i shouldn't be blogging - i should be working. stop distracting me. get out of my house.
- posted by lawrie at 1:22 AM ~ comments
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
sorry, sorry...
i don't think there are many more ways i can say aol, suck my balls. i have said this many, mnay times, and in many many ways, but blame aol completely and entirely for the recent sporadic bloggage. i haven't been able to check my email most of the time, so if you emailed me and i didn't reply, then i apologize. i could see that i had email, but i couldn't actually get into it. also, i haven't been able to ftp anything up to any websites. which, being a web designer, is a bit of a pain in the ass, as you could well imagine.
but i complained loudly yesterday, and all of a sudden, a year-old problem with aol has magically resolved itself, and today i can read my email and my ftp works. [insert conspiracy theories here]. so, what did i upload? well, for a start, here's me at five years old giving a drum masterclass:
and a most recent addition is a copy of an email i received. maybe it's the lack of caffeine in my bloodstream, but i have no idea what to make of this guy. and i'm scared for his family. click here to read what either a very funny man or a complete fucking fruitcake emailed me today. he asked me to tell the world about what he's doing, so there you go brent. hope i did the jedi monks proud.
i have been rather slack in chasing up the other laurie malen, but this has been mainly due to email downtime, and i promise i'll get right on it, right now. stay tuned to this bat-channel. isn't that how it used to end?
- posted by lawrie at 2:13 PM ~ comments
Saturday, November 23, 2002
where have all the flowers gone?
i was wondering idly why i had so many comments in my last post, and then i realised it's because i haven't posted since wednesday, which is quite a long time rally. sorry. don't know quite how that happened. i suppose some of it may be due to me freaking out about the work i have to do for ocb; a lot of it may be due to my most recent quest.
actually, screw the word 'quest', i prefer the word odyssey. you've heard of dave gorman, right? well, for those have you that haven't (due to originating from foreign climes, or being completely ignorant), dave gorman is a writer/comedian who went around the world trying to find other dave gormans. fifty four other dave gormans, to be precise. so how does this relate to me in any way whatsoever? well, as i mentioned in my last post, there is a woman out there called laurie malen. and she's not me. obviously. the main novelty of this for me is that when my grandma had someone do one of those geneaology books for our family, it stated that there were only 147 registered malens in the entire world. so to find a woman with my name? excitement!
since she's an i.t. professional, it really wasn't too hard to find out via google that she is a member of something called the 'silicon alley breakfast club', and was last reported as being the vice president of business development at mediasites. so, in a very civilised manner, i set about emailing the people that organised the breakfast club, asking if i could perhaps be put in contact with the other laurie malen. here's how it went:
sibilance
as you may have noticed, my name is lawrie malen. i have a website, which is reasonably well-read, and so every so often i do vanity-searches on google. i came up with the brilliant idea of doing vanity searches based on mispellings of my name, because surely not everyone that mentions me can spell my name right, right?
one of the most common mispellings of lawrie is 'laurie', and thus the first search i did was for 'laurie malen', and low and behold, there's a whole other person called lau(w)rie malen, and she's a *woman*. so, i decided that i would follow it up and see if i could contact her, so that we may exchange polite emails and laugh uproarously about the wierd spellings of 'malen' that come through the letterbox every so often.
if you could pass on an email address or something of that kind, i would be most grateful.
lawrie
see? i'm a man on a mission, while trying not to be too scary at the same time. almost immediately, i get a reply from these people. i was so excited as i waited for the email to open! then i read this:
not sure what you'd like us to do. trace the other laurie?
...um, yeah. undeterred, i ploughed on with a clarification of my point:
apologies; i didn't really make that point too clear; i just read that laurie malen was a regular attendee of your breakfast club, and so i assumed that you would have a contact email of some sort. i know that she used to work at excite@home, and as far as i know,she is now vice president of business development with mediasite, who i've also contacted. i just thought that, since she was a regular at the breakfast club meetings, you might have an email.
thanks for your help
lawrie
again, almost immediately a reply came back. "woohoo!" thinks i, "jackpot this time! surely!". and lo, 'twas not jackpot in the slightest:
OK, so how did you find us and more to the point discover that she was friendly with us?
All too Hercules Poirot/Margaret Maples. Perhaps you want to put a little note of introduction together which we can forward to her.
Whew.
how did i find you? well, considering you publish the details of your 'breakfast club' on a website called ibreakfastclub.com, and on said page you give the names of hundreds of people who attend, including one laurie malen, it really wasn't all that hard. heard of google, you big dorks?
and so, very shortly i shall be putting together my little 'note of introduction', and i'll keep you posted. i don't think dave gorman ever had it this hard.
- posted by lawrie at 2:49 PM ~ comments
Wednesday, November 20, 2002
i am jack's broken vocal chords
i can't speak, due entirely to screaming, yelling and singing along at the top of my voice to every song the foo fighters played last night. i rocked. so, if my post today seems a little... meh, well that's because my brain didn't boot up this morning. plus, i already made this post, and accidentally lost it because in a fit of idiocy, i opened four hundred documents at the same time, and so spent five minutes with alt-f4 held down.
so, to touch briefly on the... stuff... that i have, um, did...?
make(brain)._go(NOW)
i bumped into rich yesterday. well, i say i bumped into him; i was idly meandering around town trying to find a way of killing time before i had to meet up with paul, and rich fell out of the sky and yelled "lawrie malen!" at me, and i jumped right out of my skin, and had to put it back on again.
i haven't been able to access my email for the past four days, because aol sucks balls. it doesn't matter too much, because no one sends me email anymore. apart from ralph dog, who i mentioned in my last post. ralph has this particular 'feature' on his website where he gets a girl naked, then covers her bits in ralph dog stickers, and then posts the pictures on his site. while he's waiting for the new 'girl of the month' section to be processed, he's asked me to put a selection of previously unseen photos of the first ever girl of the month. the problem is, i can't access my email where he's given me all the picture numbers, although this isn't too much of a tragedy; in my humble opinion, the first 'girl of the month' looks like a bulldog chewing a wasp that had it's face set on fire and then put out with a screwdriver. and then had clown make-up applied to it.
while i was doing a couple of vanity searches, i realised that a lot of people spell 'lawrie' with a 'u' insterad of a 'w', and what do i find? there's a woman out there with almost my name. this would be understandable if your name was jon winter, and you found out there was a woman called 'joan' winter, but 'malen' is a rare name that my family is ridiculously proud of. i'm going to email that lady and ask her what she thinks she's playing at.
also thanks a lot to annabel, aka mrs. phrenzy, for doing me and mumfy these rad bracelets:
so, yay.
- posted by lawrie at 11:19 PM ~ comments
Monday, November 18, 2002
frustratingly inactive
you know who i had an interesting conversation with today? no one. because i can't get into any of my email, save for my work account, and even then i can only read, and not send. i was due to be doing a load of stuff for ralph dog, but i can't get into my account to see what he's asked me to do.
and, i've updated mechabreakout. massively. three new levels, two new power-ups, a couple of new types of brick, and a cheat... but i can't put the fucking thing online because one of jon's hostees is using about 250% of the available space. and i can't remotely host the game because the call it makes to the high scores table wouldn't be vaild. so bollocks.
- posted by lawrie at 4:27 PM ~ comments
Saturday, November 16, 2002
i had to live through it; now you have to read it
who wants to know the story of how i ended up blowing a phenomenal amount of chunks last night? all of you? right you are, then.
so, as you know, sleep was kind of lacking the night before, so i ended up crashing out about 9pm. emily wandered around in her little pixie way, simultaneously making a trifle and writing an essay on fourteenth and fifteenth century artists and their influence, while i was dead to the world, dribbling on the pillow. then, just as i knew i would, i woke up at about 1am and couldn't get back to sleep, so i pick up 'the kraken wakes' and started reading. an hour or so goes by, and i start to feel really really sick, but i get this brilliant idea that lying on my side will miraculously make me better; and it does. for about an hour. and then i woke up again feeling worse then before, certain that i was going to be ejecting the contents of my belly forthwith.
perhaps i should mention, at this juncture, what might have caused me to feel this way. well, emily and i invariably shop at tesco when i'm in essex, and yesterday was no exception. we bought loads of heavy stuff, emily's food for the week, and a couple of things i like that emily wouldn't touch with a nine-foot long shitty stick. this includes bread and butter pudding. so, last night i ate a burger, and half of this bread and butter pudding. and then, after waking up in the middle of the night i (stupidly) go downstairs and finish it off. yes, yes - i'm a big fat pig. and a stupid one. funnily enough, i started to feel sick just after my post-midnight snack.
so, after waking up for the second or third time, i climb out of bed and stumble into the tiny seperate toilet room, where i collapse on the carpet and begin to writhe and moan dramatically. after about half an hour, emily comes in to check on me, and i assure her that as soon as i've thrown up, i'll come back to bed; i really didn't want her to see me hugging the toilet bowl.
and at this point i will make another slight digression, and confess something; i hate throwing up. i know that mostly everyone hates throwing up, but i will go to extreme lengths to avoid it; one time, my entire family was struck down with a vomitous flu bug; it was inevitiable that i too would become ill, and so i starved myself for a day and a half. when i finally did get the bug, there was nothing for me to throw up, so i just rolled around in agony professing how much i wanted to die. but i never threw up. and that was the point.
so, even though emily and i have been seeing each other for almost three years, last night was the first time i was ever sick during our relationship. impressive, no? i knew that throwing up was going to be the only way i was going to feel better, and so i had to make myself sick. can you imagine what a tormenting decision that was? and by the time i actually worked up the bottle to stick my fingers down my throat, i was starting to feel better. but, it was the choice between throwing up and going to sleep, or feeling like shit and never getting to sleep.
stop here if you're squeamish. seriously.
so i jam my fingers down my throat; (gag!)... nothing. shit. i hadn't anticipated this. so i try again, trying to shove my own hand further down my throat than before; (gag! retch!)... nothing. what the fuck? so i try one more time, simultaneously trying to fit my entire fist down my throat and making myself heave at the same time. BINGO! and the floodgates opened. who knew that so much liquidized bread and butter pudding could fit into one little guy?
on that note, and for the sake of humanity, i'll stop here. sweet dreams.
- posted by lawrie at 7:18 PM ~ comments
Friday, November 15, 2002
crack! it really works!
i got less than five hours sleep last night, but i feel fit as a fiddle. wow, i think i'm the first person to use that phrase this century.
the main reason i got so little sleep are due entirely to mechabreakout at game phrenzy; last night i cleaned up the way the code works, added a new level (which is fucking badass), and a couple of new powerups, including a colour block nuke. oh, and i'm in the process of adding a cheat. muah ha haa.
and i'm now going to catch you all out by posting friday whyday... on a friday. bo selecta. at the moment i only have one why in my head, but it's a fairly large and mildly introspective one, mostly inspired by one of barry's recent posts.
why is it that anyone spending any amount of money in any kind of establishment turns the most normal, open-minded person into the most unbearable, abbrasive shit-eating cockmaster, comparable only to a handful of grainy sand poured right into your asshole? i haven't worked in any kind of real customer relations job for a while; obviously, getting jobs designing sites for people involves me in dealing with them, but it is a rare situation where, if they complain, i just start using words like 'proxy' and 'protocol' and any kind of three-letter acronym, and they fall silent. it usually ends with me advising people that you can solve most of a computer's problems by switching it on and off at the back about thirty times, then cackling wildly as i hear the explosion and the burning and the screaming.
i digress; people can turn into real dicks when commerce fails to meet up with their own perception of retail. a memorable instance of this was when i used to work in my stepdad's restaurant, a faux-italian joint called 'don's pizza & pasta' (actually, and this illustrates the point i'm making quite well; it used to be called 'don's pizza & pasta', but was then changed to 'don's diner' because people thought that we served only pizza and pasta. no drinks, no salad, no potato-based goods... just pizza and pasta. idiots.). i was very, very crap at this job. appalling, really.
so one day i'm serving a couple of girls, a blonde one and a brunette, who make a normal, regular order. i don't remember what the brunette had, but the blonde had a burger. i put the order through the till; some minutes later, the order comes down from the kitchen. i serve said order to table and walk away. then the blonde girl calls me over.
blonde girl: excuse me, can i have a plate for the salad bar?
me: uhm... the salad bar isn't free, i'm afraid. i can add it to your bill and bring a plate right over [i start to walk away to do this]
bg: actually, i think you'll find that it comes with the burger. [this is ultimate bitch tone; apply to her voice from this point on]
me: ...i'm sorry, but the salad bar isn't complimentary with a burger, it's...
bg: don't lie to me. it says it comes with salad on the menu.
me: i...
bg: get me a menu.
me: [i stare for a minute, then do as i'm told]
bg: see? do you see? right there [points at burger description]
1/4 beef burger : a quarter pound of prime beef burger, grilled and served in a sesame seed bun with relish, lettuce, tomato and cucumber.
me: [can't believe how fucking stupid this person is] um... actually, that just describes the contents of the burger. you see, there's lettuce and tomato and cucmber in your burger.
bg: [starts tearing burger apart] what? you mean this? just a mank piece of lettuce and one... two slices of cucumber? that's disgusting. you shouldn't be allowed to get away with this.
me: ...
bg: [continues to mutter about what a disgrace it is as i back away]
15 minutes pass without incident.
bg: [comes to the till, with timid and so far completely silent friend in tow]
me: that will be £7.90 altogether please.
bg: i hope you don't think i'm going to pay for that.
me: ... [looks at table, where there are two plates so shiny and white i suspect they were licked clean].
bg: ...because what you're trying to do is fraud.
me: ...
bg: [starts pulling out the cash, tutting and huffing. slams it down then storms out]
me: thankyou. [i turn around and immediately start doing an uncanny and hilarious impression of complete bitch to co-workers]
bg: [walked back in without me realising] i'd like to see the manager please.
me: oh. shit.
to the manager's credit, he completely diffused the blonde bitch and her crappy arguments, and even signed off with a salutory 'come again!', which had me on the floor dying with laughter. incredibly, the silent brunette friend lingered for a moment after the blonde bitch had stormed out and said in a little voice "thankyou, it was a lovely meal.", which had me cracking up even more.
and that's why i don't work as a waiter anymore.
- posted by lawrie at 12:19 PM ~ comments
Wednesday, November 13, 2002
just a short one
i can smash cars up with a fucking hammer, man. that rocks.
right, it's listy time here on il n'ya pas d'infection ici, and thank the good lord satan, i've pretty much stopped getting search engine referrals for willies. mostly. i am, i discovered, number one for baked beans rhymes, number nine for poopants, number two for scary bridesmaids dresses, and (get this), the only match for community college morons.
for those of you who haven't been to pandacola.com, we have the gallery up, and panda cola has been 100% halal approved by a real-life muslim.
also, game phrenzy is up, with a slightly modofied version of mechabreakout, and a high scores table! (please note: at time of writing, game phrenzy is not actually up at all. give it a few hours.)
- posted by lawrie at 4:26 PM ~ comments
Tuesday, November 12, 2002
narcolepsy and the wonders of crack
i think i might have some form of narcolepsy; i woke up this morning [insert amusing blues riff here], turned over to grab my phone... then woke up an hour later with my arm outstretched, six inches short of my phone. so, i pull my arm in, waiting for the soreness to subside from having it in an extremely awkward position for an hour, and then... i wake up three quarters of an hour later. so here's my question to you wise internet folks; does crack help regulate your sleep? because we used to have melatonin, which was then reported as being biohazardous or something, and it would be safer trying to get to sleep on crack. is that true?
i've got a surprise for mumfy, and it's a brilliant one; i just hope i can get it done before the weekend. she's been worrying about her essays and things, but she worried last year, and completed the year with a 1:1, so perhaps worrying does for your brain power what crack does for your sleep? help me out here.
also, jon fixed the mailer script for gaijin design, so now i don't have to wait four years for website feedback to come through. *tips hat to jon*. he doesn't know it yet, but tonight we're going to be making a high scores table for mechabreakout, after i've made some slight code adjustments - it will be the first actual real game on game.phrenzy.org, and so you can all come along and compete against each other in a bid to win our affection.
oh fuck it - my brain hurts too much to write anymore; i need to be playing gta: vc right now.
- posted by lawrie at 3:07 PM ~ comments
Saturday, November 09, 2002
saturday twaturday
see? you can do it with any day of the week. apologies to those who have been missing friday whyday, since i never actually did one last week, and this week... well, things are going apeshit. in a really, really good way, but apeshit nonetheless; i figured out that i've got to come up with something like six and half thousand frames of flash animation, and i'm intending to get at least a thousand of those done by tomorrow night. meep.
but the problem is that i've set myself up rather badly now; you expect friday whyday, and the feeling to oblige is cramping the bitch inside me. but since i mentioned it, here's one that's bugged me for years: why do we have signs that say 'no dogs except guide dogs'? who the hell is that sign for? if you want to keep out people with dogs, you just put 'no dogs', surely? is a seeing-eye dog going to see that sign and say "it's cool, man - we can go into woolworths."?
and why do people in the 'higher social circles' do that air-kissing thing? when the hell did that become fashionable? "oh, muah, darling! i'm not going to touch your skin with my lips because you might have a communicable disease." and the person on the receiving end of that first air-kiss didn't get offended? you kiss someone, or you don't - stopping short is just a trick stolen from stage actresses and probably mimes.
and who the hell decided to make an 'art' out of painting yourself silver and standing still for hours at a time? i have walked through my local city centre on many, many saturday afternoons and seen crowds of people gathered around a man who is doing absolutely nothing, apart from being slightly shiny. staying still is just a question of endurance, and i could probably beat many people into the ground at that particular game; i used to be a life art model, and if you don't stay still for at least 45 minutes at a time, all the people drawing you start tutting and sighing heavily. every single time i heard it i wanted to shout at them "you fucking try it! standing here naked with a spear for a hour while a groupe of community college morons make totally inadequate sketches of your armpit hair! you just come up and have a go, bitchface!" but, obviously i didn't. i used to put packets of c4 into their car exhaust instead. tee hee.
- posted by lawrie at 9:00 PM ~ comments
Thursday, November 07, 2002
panda cola ho ho ho
it's up! the completely unofficial panda cola website is up! galleries of our panda cola craziness coming soon. meta google-robot = i am panda cola king. muah ha haaa.
- posted by lawrie at 6:53 PM ~ comments
Tuesday, November 05, 2002
thanks a lot
i've just almost-finished a website for a band, and killing time until i take a trip down the road to see yen and jon (click 'em on the right - you know who they are). i decided to see what the register had to offer in the way of top-tech geek news. as i was typing in the domain name, i obviously made some kind of typo (as i so very often do), and i got this happy crappy; oh yes, thankyou for pointing out that i might be dyslexic, instead of suggesting that i might have just made a small typo. you fucking bastard. it's one of those opportunist web addresses that take advantage of the fact that you might have typed in 'geocites' instead of geocities, or 'microsoftfuckingsucks.com'. fortunately, my good friend google pre-empted this, and they own gogle.com, which handily redirects you to your intended destination.
interestingly, microsoftfuckingsucks.com was bought by 2600 (hacking-type fellows), and they simply redirected it to the microsoft site. that didn't stop microsoft from strong-arming the domain from them; in most cases, they probably would have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for the fact that bill gates owns america. or something.
we're off to see fight club tonight, but my mom has never heard of the film, so i told her we were going to a fight club, where a bunch of us meet in an abandoned warehouse and beat each other to a pulp in an attempt to subvert consumerism and the capitalist dictatorship. ho ho.
- posted by lawrie at 6:59 PM ~ comments
Monday, November 04, 2002
i'm ascared
there are big bangs going on outside and i'm frightened. i'm also starting to get slightly pissed off with my current host; all of my webspace was down for two hours this morning. in standard eastern time, it was down between approximately 3.40am and 5.40am, but in good old british time, that's between 8.30 and 10.30 in the morning. this is not a good time to have my work site down. i am pissed. also, it seems to take about a day for emails to reach me. i want to live in japan; apparently with a standard japanese adsl home package, you can download at about twelve meg per second. probably because they all download hentai porn of schoolgirls being raped by giant robot squid monsters with eyes on their willies.
notice i used the word 'willies'. this is to avoid the never-ending number of hits i receive regarding male equipment. i've complained about this before, and i won't bore you again, but it appears to be clearing up now; i'm finally starting to turn up in search results for things like gta 3 cheats and download foo fighters mp3s. actually, that last one was a total lie, but give it a couple of days, and they'll start pouring in. i'm such a google whore.
and i think you should all go and visit this icelandic girl who linked to me because, bless her little cotton socks, she's only had 126 hits. and the last time i looked (about five hours ago) she only had 125 hits. and also yen, barry, and my lovely girlfriend mumfy.
on saturday we went shopping and bought some andrex, and inside was a free puppy. unfortunately it wasn't real, and i almost complained. but then i got to name it red robot. and i was happy. and i seem to be talking in fragments. quite a lot. first, three words. then two. one.
- posted by lawrie at 9:35 PM ~ comments
Sunday, November 03, 2002
sorry, sorry
friday whyday didn't even happen on saturday this week, but mostly because i haven't been paying enough attention; last time, a whole bunch of questions suddenly popped into my head and i needed to blog it down. i suppose that's what it's like if you're a writer but you have writer's block, and so you sell your immortal soul to satan in exchange for a couple of good story ideas, and then *pop*; you get a story idea about a writer who sells his soul to satan. and then you'd be all like "oh satan, you scamming fuck!" and satan would be like "ha ha, you're stupid.".
so anyway, no amazing pops (apart from panda pops, that is) just yet, and i think i'm a wee bit too tired to go for a full-on whyday right now; perhaps tomorrow, for tomorrow is a different day. not like today, which is the same. not the same as tomorrow, though.
fuck, i'm tired.
- posted by lawrie at 10:30 PM ~ comments
Friday, November 01, 2002
but first...
you have absolutely got be kidding with this shit.
- posted by lawrie at 1:27 PM ~ comments