Fascinating title but to the point. In case your a little slow I have just created a new news category for Japanese related articles titled, wait for it, "Japan". I can tell you dying to know why so I shall enlighten you. Quite simply put I have an interest in Japan and Japanese Culture and have done for some time, however only of late has it become more interesting to me.

Any tech loving, gaming kid grows up with idea firmly implanted in his/her mind that Japan is akin to nirvana for both gaming and technology. When I were but a lad, not so long ago, I was quite into games. Not so much now (perhaps through lack of time or better things to do) but it leaves a lasting impression on you. Pretending to be a short, moustache-touting, mushroom eating plumber leaves a lasting effect on anyone to be fair.


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Nearly a month ago I decided to give up drinking beer for a month, why? Well two reasons, one was that I wanted to know how easy it would be to do so, I have become quite a habitual drinker and two is that I wanted to see whether or not it would make me feel better, I often feel lethargic and know that beer supposedly stops you from entering a state of deep sleep so I thought it was worth a shot.

I would class myself as quite a fan of beer. Now, before I continue I would just like to make clear that I do not drink beer to get drunk. I never drink so much as to be adversely effected by beer, perhaps a little merry but that's all. I drink for the love of the taste I drink a few pints when I go to the pub on weekends, and a pint every night. I decided, perhaps it's too much? Well yes it is according to medical advice so I have decided to cut down. First things first, I need to drop the habitual every night drinking session. Hence the monthly ban, it was a bit hard at first, not having a drink every night, no I was not addicted, just it's nice to have a drink at night. I don't really mind it now however, I have also visited the pub with friends and drank... Coca-cola. Which is an awful drink in my opinion.

Well it's been an interesting challenge, well if I can call it a challenge as it wasn't really hard at all I have found out that beer probably doesn't have any effect on how sleepy I feel, actually the amount of sleep I get is the biggest problem. I shall continue to miss the every night drinking session but change it to the occasional drinking session. Maybe once a week or so, the few pints of the weekend shall continue once more (yay!).

The ban shall end a little early this Friday (I think as I forgot to take note when I started the ban lol) as it is my friends birthday so I shall honour the occasion with a pint or two. Can't wait...

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Tiscali are supposedly an ISP in the UK. They are in fact a waste of time in the UK. Since moving to them a year and a half ago my connection has constantly dropped every few days and on bad days which occur around every one to two weeks the connection can drop every few minutes or just disappear for minutes, sometimes hours.

Several months ago a lovely problem has cropped up, late at night. MSN, GTalk and Gizmo all fail to work along with Guild Wars, IRC and probably anything that doesn't come over port 80. The problem is partially explored here: http://www.tiscali.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=124854 but it's been like this for months!

So I decided it's time to phone (why didn't I phone before? I did, tried to get hold of them for five days and gave up). This time I phoned them and go through. Only to a monkey. After explaining the problem he goes off (presumably to have a word with people who know more than just how to answer phones) and comes back to tell me that everything is working fine but I should contact my computer manufacturer.

Well that's great, since I have put it together myself I can cross that one off the list! So I asked why, I then got some stupid explanation along the lines of "We are an ISP, we only connect you to the Internet, if your having a problem with MSN Messenger we would ask that you contact Microsoft". That would be funny "Hello Microsoft, MSN Messenger has a bug, BTW it only affects me at night and only affects Tiscali users". I explained that the problem was infact with Tiscali and that in their very own forums a member of staff had admitted this. So he told me (again) how everything was working fine and (again) told me to contact Microsoft or Google. Now is it just me, or should even a complete cretin realise that THREE programs disconnecting at the same time might be a problem not with all THREE pieces of software that have a magical "disconnect at the same time" bug just might be a problem with my connection? Actually no, guess what he said when I explained this. Yeah, everything is working fine.

I could see this was going nowhere, I was speaking to a grade A moron. I made it simple for him "So what your telling me is that you don't know what's causing this problem your having and you don't know when it's going to be fixed?". The answer, short and simple. Yes.

So that's all there is to say really, I told him the service is unacceptable and that I would most likely change ISP. Now for those of you who don't know talk of changing to another provider usually brings these privative creatures to life with an overwhelming desire to help. Not this one, silence. The type of, oh really? I don't care silence.

Well that's all there was to it really I'll be looking into changing ISP.

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I remember it like it was yesterday, twas a seemingly ordinary day, the 21st of January 07 to be precise and at 16:06 and 50 seconds to be too precise. I was playing a game of Tetris when it happened, this is perhaps the most astounding thing you are ever likely to see whilst playing Tetris.

In what was either a glitch in the game or more likely divine intervention, a Tetris block defied gravity until the game was over!

The picture I am about to show you has not been doctored, amazingly this really did happen and here is the proof. Check out the long piece on the left.


I realise this has most likely changed how you view the meaning of life so I'll leave you with some time to take this in

P.S. If you noticed a slight hint of sarcasm in the tone of my text pertaining to the importance of this discovery, pat yourself on the back.

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The keener eyed amongst you will notice that the current web address from which you are viewing this blog is http://blog.riddian.com. What is this all about then? Well, I'm testing things out. My blog is normally run from home from my own very old (think P120) server. It's now running on my paid hosting account at dreamhost.com. The reason for this is because, I am currently updating my blog, code wise. I have upgraded to a more current version of the blogs engine plus I might end up changing the theme a bit more than I already have (notice the shadow?).

Yes there is a Poll block! You saw it eh? Well that's all thanks to my good friend Marco who coded it a long time ago, it's never been put to use on my blog until now though. Another feature that I am in the process of completing (hence the real reason for this temporary move) is comment reply notification. My server doesn't send emails at the moment so that's not much use to me when I need to test a system that emails people

UPDATE (22-03-07): The news categories block has vanished, but fear not for it has been replaced by a "Tag Cloud" box. The first of few developments perhaps? Am I about to embark on another project using the source from my blog? Who knows, but I will say this. I will be releasing my blog's source code soon Also the site has had a slight layout redesign, goodbye block, hello navigation bar complete with icons. Look, a new background, rather nice for my near total lack of art skills.

That's all, nothing exciting sorry just a general "heads up".

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