I’m the Euphoric frickin’ Llama.

I’m no expert on typefaces. In fact, my design skills generally suck. However, after reading Sebastiaan de With’s article on Helvetica, I started to notice the font (and its bastard cousin, Arial) wherever I went. I changed Firefox’s default sans-serif font to Lucida Grande over Helvetica and suddenly, Wikipedia went and looked a whole lot better. Unfortunately, Google insists on using Arial for all its web pages (for old browser-compatibility, perhaps?), and it really started to piss me off. So much so, in fact, that I decided to change it. I’d heard of Stylish before, and decided to finally install it. So here’s my Stylish script to fix Google:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("google.com"), domain("google.co.uk") {

    body {

        font-family: "Lucida Grande", sans-serif !important;

    }

}

If this isn’t a reason to use Firefox over IE/Safari, I don’t know what is. Now go, install Stylish, and fix that butt-ugly website. Oh, and if you’re a Windows user, use Lucida Sans Unicode instead.

Sooooooo… it was my sister Karishma’s 16th birthday yesterday (if you say today is Friday, which it’s technically not, but shut up). To celebrate, we went out for a pretty good meal at a South Indian restaurant… meh. She’s also going out tomorrow with her friends to walk around London and get bored when she realises that there’s actually nothing to do. I also bought her a Bloc Party t-shirt, which I’m personally not a fan of, but meh - she wanted one.

But but but. More importantly than all that, we also went and saw Stomp. Now, for those of you that haven’t seen Stomp, there’s a post on my music tumblelog, Noise and Ruckus. Those of you that have will understand just how unbelievably epic the entire show is, and how much I loved seeing it again. Sense of rhythm is one thing, but the ability to create a performance out of whatever you have to hand at that level is pure genius.

Those of you that still haven’t watched that video, you’re idiots. Go now, and redeem yourselves.

Check out my awesome monitor setup, now I’m back home:

See that? That’s hardcore. Let it be known that students will stop at nothing in order to save all the cash they can - even if it involves digging out 16″ CRTs from the depths of my wardrobe and filling my desk space with them.

And yes, that’s Vista. On that piece of crap. I had a spare copy, so I thought, “Why not?” The results were… catastrophic. It can just about render wallpaper without falling over. But it’s so pretty… even if one monitor displays slightly different colours to the other (and that’s after tweaking the output with the ATi Catalyst Control Centre).

As a comparison, here’s my new(ish) setup, over at Home 2.0:

Now, you tell me: which one is more awesome?

Want to see spring in Kent? This photo was taken this morning:

That’s today, as in the sixth of April, 2008 A.D. Whatever happened to global warming, people?

I went to see Jonathan Coulton (yes, that Jonathan Coulton) perform in London a few weeks back. He was as amazing as you think (Andy has the full details) - go see him, like, now.

No, not right now, jackass. Read the rest of this post first.

Anyway, his last song was entitled First of May, and I hadn’t heard it before. It’s an absolute genius song about spring coming around (NSFW though - careful) and I loved every minute of it. One thing grated on me though: first of May? What the hell, man? Spring starts in March, I swear.

Lies, apparently. See above for proof. JoCo was right and is my new God. All hail.

So tell me, venerable JoCo, how exactly can I convince Al Gore to shut the hell up? I want some damn sunshine, and if that comes at the expense of the planet’s ecosystem, so be it.

I recently finished watching the last of a fantastic anime series called Cowboy Bebop. It’s a little reminiscent of Firefly, but tends to be much more lighthearted, and yet more adult, than the cult series we Browncoats know and love. And now it’s over, I want to watch it all again.

This got me thinking: why haven’t more people watched this? There’s more than one reason: lack of time, dislike of cartoons, the difficulty in obtaining copies of Japanese work… I’m sure the list is endless. But the main reason hit me a little while later (and it seems bloody obvious now): there’s too much crap on TV. Now, this wouldn’t be a problem in itself, but you insist on watching it like you have nothing better to do. You turn it on, sit down for an hour or three and let the magic box tell them what they want to experience.

Unfortunately, the magic box is stupid.

I’m going to use my flatmate, Andrew, as a prime example. Now Andy, I love you, but for fuck’s sake, if Judge Judy is the only thing on, turn the fucking TV off and do something else. Read a book, do some revision, fix that damned computer that’s been unusable without an Ubuntu live CD for a month now… hell, do the dishes - they’ve been piling up for ages.

I should sort out those dishes. And probably take the rubbish out too.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that you don’t like most of what’s on TV. You realise that, but you persist in watching whatever jumps out at you from the damned TV Guide because it’s easier than getting off your arse and doing something useful… like learning to juggle. Instead of even popping a DVD in when nothing’s on, you insist on watching repeats of crap dramas on uktv Gold. Now stop it.

There is another way. Get a TiVo or Sky Plus, or hell, download BBC iPlayer. Actually, screw that: ask your mates for a recommendation of a good TV show you haven’t seen every episode of a hundred and thirty-one times and download it off BitTorrent (side note: piracy is bad - it wasn’t me what told you to do it). Your friends are the best spam-filter you’ll ever find: make them do the hard work of finding decent shows. If you’re doing it right, you’ll be recommending stuff to them constantly too. Because here’s the secret: there are loads of awesome shows on TV. And if you stop watching the first thing you see, you might just find them.

Now go grab a torrent of Cowboy Bebop and let the awesomeness commence.

You may be wondering what that crazy little sidebar is for. Well, part of it has my Google Reader shared items, part my Twitterstream, but the important bit up top is pulled from my Noise and Ruckus project I started in August. It was canned in October, for lack of time, but I really enjoyed it so I’m restarting it.

In August, I had nothing to do. I hadn’t started my job and I was bored. I thought about the Interwebs for a while and realised the reason I wasn’t using my blog or my tumblelog is because actually thinking up content seemed like too much work. However, linking to music videos on YouTube was something I was doing constantly over IM, so I figured, why the hell not make everyone suffer, not just the one?

Noise and Ruckus is not a music review site. Every now and again (it used to be every day, but who needs that kind of commitment?) I shall update it with a new song I’m particularly fond of. I chose Tumblr for this task for two reasons: it’s incredibly simple to post YouTube videos and there are no comments.

No comments? Well, there’s a reason for that. I’m not interested. It’s a very simple project: I put up links to music and you decide whether you like said music enough to continue visiting or subscribing to the site. If you don’t feel like it, no worries - you’ll still be forced to endure it through that sidebar over there. You won’t get updates on it through your feed reader unless you ask, though - I promise.

Head on over to the Noise and Ruckus site for more information and, of course, lots more music.

This is basically the same as a post from my old blog, which was at this location and doesn’t exist any more because I was trigger-happy with TRUNCATE TABLE blog;. Check it out.

OK, there are basically five steps to inner peace (and outer, but that’s less important). If you achieve peace at any time, immediately stop following the steps - you’re done. And as a bonus, people will think twice about destroying your peace next time.

Here we go:

1. Shout at it.
2. Ignore it.
3. Poke it.
4. Kick it.
5. Stab it.

And thus, you are enlightened. Now go, my son, and spread the wisdom.

I’ve been using Coda, Panic’s beautiful Mac web development IDE, to code up all my sites for a while now, including this blog, and while I think it’s very good, you tend to notice things in software when you use it a lot. Things you don’t particularly like, issues you feel shouldn’t be there and bugs that haven’t been fixed in far too long. There hasn’t been a patch for Coda in a while, so I’m hoping they’re working on something big, but I’m hoping even more that they include most of this list in their next update.

So, let’s go through them all. There’s some big ones and some tiny ones, but I figure I should get them all out. I’ve just been using Coda for several hours, so hopefully they’re pretty fresh in my mind.

This is an awesome post. Read on. »