Word of the Week: Rapture

Apart from it being the name for a band. It is now the word of the week, or was... because this is more of a retrospective word of the week. It will be used for a few more days but thats about it.

In conservative Christian eschatology, the Rapture is the name given to an event in which Jesus Christ descends from Heaven, accompanied by the spirits of all the saints of God, both from the pre-incarnation period and after, who have passed on prior to this event, and then the bodily remains of these saints are transported from the Earth to meet the Lord and be rejoined with their corresponding spirits in the air. Immediately after this, all Christians alive on the earth are simultaneously transported to meet the Lord and those who have preceded them in the air. All are transformed into immortal bodies like Jesus' body, often referred to as the "resurrection body". This doctrine gained popularity in the 1830s, and more recently in the 1970s, with proponents of the premillenialist, and in particular the dispensationalist, interpretations of scripture. However, proponents of the doctrine have argued that it can be found in the early Church fathers and the New Testament.
[Wikipedia]

I also find it weird that you have a band called The Rapture and on the first LCD Soundsytem album you have a track called Tribulations... And from my limited and patchy hearsay knowledge they would have been working together when their albums were released.

People tend to use the word when people or lots of something eg dogs go missing. Or it could just be all a subconcious thought on buying a computer game

last.fm

I would like to anounce my sign up to another profile type site. last.fm

last.fm captures your music history and recommends more music for you to listen to. It also has loads of other cool features (statistics) of your listening behavior. I have also put a little badge of my listening on the side bar. The social part is in how you can look at your friends listen habits, write reviews, create your own radio station based on your listening. Playlists (mixtape...), and other sharing of music love.

oh. and they have cool widgets...
























(drawing by Kelly Vivanco (Patches))

No Answer

Whenever I ring people on their mobile and I don't get an answer I always assume they are at the movies. That gets me thinking about what movie they might be seeing and if they had pop corn or m&m's or what beverage they might take with them. I'm not sure why I think the only reason they are not answering their phone is because they are watching a movie. There are an infinite number of other possibilities that are way more plausible. But for some reason the movies is the first thing that pops into my head.

Purging

The great purge of 2007 has begun. We have a garage sale this weekend and so the whole house is getting a big clear out. When you go through your old stuff you get a bit nostalgic. But I have stuck trying very hard to stick to my goal of getting rid of the junk I don't use. Stuff that you haven't used or unable to fix your self is the easy part. The hard part is getting rid of slightly more personal artifacts/items as they may hold some nostalgic value but that is all. I also tend to keep all of my old study materials/notes. Even though I have never gone back to them and probably never will I had kept them. eg tafe stuff which I did not know existed. This obviously means I have had no use for it since actually studying and have not had since then. Often it can be easier to just store the information in your brain or on the computer. So, I have ended up throwing away about 4 boxes so far, with one box full of stuff that I still need to sort through, as they are notes which haven't been filed properly. Uni stuff is a little different, as I am going to be referring to them through my CPA course to refresh my memory for 'assumed knowledge'. So all of that is staying, I also use my tax and company law notes for work, so they actually get used. All that is left is economics and management stuff. Economics I'm keeping for when I do my economics degree/postgrad thingy. But the management stuff is pretty useless to me so, I think I will keep my text books and revision notes, but not all the other junk.

I'm also not sure what to do with photocopied books/notes as some of those articles are actually quite interesting and I paid 10 cents a page...

I should also probably get rid of some of my crappy toys like pogs/matchbox cars/Pokemon which I have no interest in collecting anymore.

My plan if it doesn't all sell, is to donate/throw it away. And maybe with books I could sell it on eBay and get money from overcharging for postage. But my Mum wants to have a garage sale untill its all sold.

Why People Stop Blogging

Why People Stop Blogging, as apposed to why Bloggers stop Blogging. Is an interesting question. People don't necessary run out of things to talk about because we all know a lot of blogs that talk about really stupid and mundane things like how you changed the font from Times New Roman to Arial. And there is always something new happening on the Internet/realife that you could comment/rant on. Ideas are not hard to find.

Blogging tools make it oh so easy, its even easier then using something like Word. In Word you have to think of where to file it, what to call it, there are a bazillion buttons on the toolbar to customise your writing etc. And things like Blogger are free so theres no excuse in accessing the tools necessary to publish your rubbish comments.

A recent trend is the use of social networking/profile sites to fill in your audience with what you are doing. Amongst more hardcore bloggers Twitter seems to be the flavour of the month. These sites require less time to update your fans of what you are up to and isn't as bad as signing up to a dating site... So time is a factor, even a small rant of a few paragraphs can take 30 to 60 mins depending on if you redraft your writ ting. And if you think about it these bloggers just got busy. A few years ago people were:

"wow you have a blog?"
"yeah"
"You must have a lot of time on your hands"
"Its pretty awesome it has jokes on it and a picture of my cat and a link to altavista and hotbot just in case you forget how to type/loose an arm and animations. I could probably work for Pixar but I dont want to because they are a bunch of sell outs working the Mickey destroying the minds of children."
"Ok, I'm gona go over here now..."
"cya"

As if it wasnt obvious enough, the nerd went and got jobs.
And for the rest people like to say something, but don't want to write an essay about it. Hence myspace/facebook/twitter. Low cost of time.

Bandwagon theory/evolution of the Internet

When new things come out people want to be associated with the new shiney things. The web evolves and maybe blogging is only good for people who still like to rant. Facebook makes it easier to tell people what music you like and have dialogue with people. Not many people will leave a comment on a blog or comment on their own blog about a recent blog of your own. Too much effort. Things like facebook make the whole Internet situation smaller. Kinda like how aeroplanes made traveling to Brisbane viable. But what I don't like about it is that its a bit thin. As in you can't delve into something like you would on a blog. You can post a pic and a description. Basically, it can lack substance. But its still really quick way of getting your personal 'brand' out there. If you have a blog that people actually read then you probably don't need to change much, but for people starting blogs, all these web 2.0 tools are pretty important.

A lot of the decent blogs are actually written by a team of people. This helps in terms of reviewing/editing, more in depth research into the posts (more time for each writer). Frequent posts. Essentially all the things that help a blog become awesome and have a decent reader base.

So my blogger template is dead, but maybe its a good thing. Now I have the new fancy archive menu and lables in the side bar. The most amazing thing though is that the pictures display properly. Hooray. Ofcourse, its still oh so wrong to use a default template, so I will work tirelessley untill I have my new template. Hopefully I can have shadows. Because shadows contain ninjas, and ninjas are awesome and awesome.

The saga continues, part 37.

New Template

I am now in the process of updating the template for this blog. As it was getting a bit old and there are a few mistakes which are annoying to look at (eg side bar margins, there isnt any...)

And over all the template is simple and nice but it would be nice to ad a bit more texture/depth. So I am now on a quest to find some shadows effects. And after a small preliminary search on customising blogger all I found was sites which were really ugly. I'm not really sure what persuaded these people to start blogs giving advice on how to customise/desing a blog, because clearly they shouldnt. Either the colours are just wrong or the page doesnt fit on the screen, these are most likely the fools that made myspace so ugly.

edit: Turns out there is a difference in seaching for 'customize blogger' and 'blog design'.

edit 2: ok, so, I did get some good sites in blog desing, but they are mainly sites that are owned by designers selling their services...

I also have a funny feeling that my blogger code is wrong because pictures dont display properly within the post, but just sort of go wherever they like.

So before I go an make drastic changes I have updated this template and tried to clean it up as much as I could

edit 3: looks like I have fucked up my own template somehow. So here is a blogger template untill I fix the problem.