Actually I’m not, because I’m doing it on my brand new Apple MacBook Air and it’s keyboard is the easiest to type on in all the world. I am the happiest person typing on a laptop right now, with maybe the exception of fat American kids playing Warcraft in their dark basements. Or kids not doing homework sniggering on MSN to other procrastinating kids.

Buying an Apple product is a sin. I’ve never owned an iPod, I only use iPhone clones and I’ve always hated Mac OS X. There are hundreds of reasons why that I’ve never been shy about telling people. But by some miracle I forgot to care.

I needed a computer to build websites. This is my occupation. A guy that builds websites without a computer is like a builder that builds houses without their arms.

The criteria was simple. I needed a portable machine because I share my living space. Not seventeen inch wide 20 kilograms heavy only works near a wall portable, but actually portable. I needed a high resolution screen to do actual work on. I didn’t want silly things like DVD/BluRay drives, a gazillion petabytes of HDD space or anything else that really doesn’t matter in life. But I did need it not to be shit.

I’m a Linux user. I am so because I was a Windows user. Windows today is resource hungry, slow and sluggish, and works horribly. I wouldn’t be satisfied with any of today’s Windows laptops because they wouldn’t be portable or not shit. They crash all the time, catch viruses, slow down to a halt for no reason and only last 30 seconds without being charged. They use fans that are so powerful the things could levitate.

I would’ve gone for Linux on a laptop, but over the last few years I’ve spent more time setting up my environment on a silly steep learning curve than I have actually using the thing. When time is money this isn’t acceptable.

So I set about looking into the state of Macs five years since my last horrible and painful experiences with them.

Thankfully Steve Jobs makes this easy. He’s a minimalist, and this is good. You get a minimal amount of choice. For laptops, the options were Pro, Standard or Gimmick.

Goldilocks had the same problem with porridge. The Standard was too cold and just wouldn’t cut it. The Pro was too hot and overkill, plus it touches on the portability and efficiency points. But the Gimmick model looked just right.

The MacBook Air is a thin underpowered laptop. It’s such a blatant marketing gimmick. Apple is all about branding, so it makes sense that they would try to sell this thing. Marketing bullshit.

But it is an efficient and portable laptop. The screen space is really good and it’s by far the most powerful computer that I’ve ever owned, portable or desktop. It is minimalistic to a fault. And OS X today is unanimously the only good graphical operating system. Price was never an issue because it’s for business.

So now I’ve got one. And it’s beautiful.

Since owning it I think my life has changed. People in the office that I’ve literally never spoken to before because of my anti-social nature will come up to me and start talking “Apple-speak” at me. It’s horrible. I can feel that as my girlfriend stares at it when I use it, she doesn’t trust it anymore than a slutty whore.

But I couldn’t give a shit. It’s a decent piece of kit and it’s made me really happy. The hardware is excellent and I can run programs on very modest specs without having a fit. I’m not ageing waiting for things to work anymore.

The evil has overthrown me but I’m still not buying into the brand. I’m not picking up an iPod or iPhone. The MacBook Air is just a tool that I use. So far, it has been amazing. I’ve done shed loads of web design work on it, and maybe one day I can use it for music recording and performing.

So Steve, I’ll give you this one. It’s really good. Don’t get too smarmy about it though.

Recently, the BBCs well renowned Andrew Marr said stuff about amateur writers and people that post literally (literally literally) anything on the bountiful resource, the Internet.

I noticed this on Twitter, when something trends on the right side of the screen. Often it’s full of idiots believing that they’re opinion is well backed and cited, even through it’s obviously not. Things like current affairs, bad chart music, MPs, Justin Bieber and X-factor. From this sample of Twitter trends you can understand why the more intellectual discussions loose out.

It’s from here, the glorious Twitter trending topics, where I found the most recent hate for a guy involved with politics, Mr Marr.

I have to be honest here, I have the opinion that the Internet is less bountiful, more a giant, shit-filled spaghetti bowl of rambling, miss-information, spam, porn, bullshit and really bad marketing, propped up by a load of nut-jobs with either a free-and-open-truly-fucking-useless approach or money-money-money-money-kill-small-innocent-children-to-get-it approach. The subject of Andrew Marr being the latest turd in the giant toilet bowl that is the Internet.

He made the following comments, according to the beautiful Guardian web-site, who also sounded a bit angry about it (but they’re sticking up for the people, right?):

A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother’s basements and rating. They are very angry people.

Sounds about right to me.

This blog feeds Google with links and words to promote my up and coming bands. Maybe my silly little creations will, at some time, get a push from it too. The point I’m trying to get at is this. What you are reading (if at all you are) is optimised for programs over humans. The grammar isn’t particularly good and the copy is a little dry. However, it’s fun to write and I hope some day in the distant future, real people could enjoy reading it. You never know, enough practice and I might get good at it.

Anyway, on to the geeking. I’ve been messing with my hosting service trying to get WordPress fixed. For various technical reasons I couldn’t update it. So it all went stale. It’s okay now though, it’s all been fixed.

I decided to upgrade my blog to the latest version of WordPress. I’ve also altered the theme again. The one as of this date is called Boxes. Because it’s got boxes in it. Get it? It’s based on my original draft for this blog, just a bit different. It’s also built entirely using CSS3. No images this time. Get me eh?

I’ve also installed a program called Disqus. It’s a threaded commenting system that is really good. Readers can log in using credentials from other web-sites like Facebook or Twitter and post to articles using those details. Disqus is also a service that tracks your comments and replies from all the blogs a reader has contributed to, and notifies them when they’ve received a reply. It also tracks opinion of your feedback, with “Like” and “Dislike” buttons. Neat huh?

Looking ahead

If I can maintain enough self-interest I’ll polish this theme up some more. The problem is my tastes keep changing. (There will be a post on that.) I’ve effectively started thinking about my next theme, even though this one isn’t yet completed.

What I’m about to write gets written by me all the time. I’m aware of this and I’ll keep echoing the same sentiments. I’m looking for a brand. I can’t keep calling me, the blog, my services etc, all madness Jack. It doesn’t mean anything! It originates from before I had Internet access. I was very young, and I dreamt of running a website called madness-at-jack dot com. Yes, I didn’t know the difference between a URL and an email address. I used to write websites in MS Word. One day I got around to writing the raw HTML. It was a good day.

The trend has just kept going, and it’s time for a destruction and a fresh start. I need something catchy, cool and anal. Like all bloggers on the Internet have. I need a strong brand. I have the ability to create it, design it, promote it; just not the imagination to make it original. Also it needs distance from the personal nature it currently has. It’s too mardy at the moment. (OMG you noticed!!?!)

If anyone has any tips to setting up an Internet brand, please let me know. For now though, do admire my cleaned up blog and nice new theme.

Attribution
Photo “The View” by Ludovic Bertron

So what have I been up to? Firstly I’ve been on holiday with my family. Where did I go? Wales. Saundersfoot, near Tenby in south Pembrokeshire, to be precise. Here’s a photo, click it to make it bigger.

This photo pretty much sums up every day of that fortnight. Well, that and about a hundred hours of gaming on my phone, something I’ll refuse to indulge in whilst at home, normally.

So apart from getting drunk in Welsh taverns, what else have I done? I’ve been recording and mixing down demo recordings for post-rock band Former Miss Czechoslovakia, for who I also play lead guitar and sing lead vocals for, a very odd mix I know.

I also got a car, but because of ridiculous circumstances, I haven’t been able to drive it to work in the seven days that I’ve had it for. It’s currently sitting in a garage, while hopefully mechanics are working ten to the dozen fixing the steering and the boot-cap (the what?) so I can take it to another garage tonight and then they can give it a full service and a cam-belt change. I kind of know what that bit means.

So for the mean time I’m catching the trains and buses, listening to really bad music while I’m on them and trying to find time to get these bloody mixes down.

For now I’ll leave you with a link to a rather intriguing tweet of mine.

EDITORS NOTE: Please read this post before referring me to a shrink.

It made me retch. I’m not even sure why I do it. It’s like checking your bank-balance after getting wrecked in town the night before (something I also did today).

What am I talking about? John Gruber. He’s a blogger apparently, which doesn’t shine him in the best light. I’m a blogger after all, but I can barely string a sentence together. So I see him more as a journalist/writer, because it makes him sound more like a writer. What I really want to say is, he’s good at writing, and he writes a blog.

He writes for his blog called Daring Fireball, which is mainly about Apple products. Anyone who knows me will know where this is going now.

He’s a self-confessed Apple zealot. I’m sure he get’s off most nights by stroking Apple logos and preying to a picture of Steve Jobs. He really loves it.

The other day he wrote a piece on the new iPhone, and how it has re-defined perfection, again. It reads like an up-market soft-core porn film. He is expressing his arousal with every word.

Now. I’ve recently signed up for a HTC Desire phone. No-one is hiding the fact that it’s an iPhone clone. On few occasions, I’ve even called it an iPhone when showing it to others. I then go home, find a razor, and add another slit to my wrists.

It’s amazing, but it’s fundamentally different. The concept is similar. You have a huge narrow screen and you touch it with your fingers to navigate through screens using menus and icons. It’s a simple idea. The difference is the approach. The software is open to all manufacturers to use and modify. Users can add their own applications to it. Of course, they’re not called applications anymore, because Steve Jobs has amended the OED and added a clause whereby if you use a mobile phone you have to call it an app. Because it’s trendy.

John Gruber is amazing at writing. The issue my stomach contents has is his absolute belief in all Apple products being beautiful and usable and without flaw. I’ll give him the first two, but there’s a shit-load wrong with that company. It’s attitude towards being exclusive sucks. I’m not sure if Steve Jobs has a complex because it’s products lack the market-share acquired by Microsoft based machines, or if he feels that Macs are unsung because kids want to use MSN on their laptops or they consider it broken, or if he was bullied as a child for being so water-tourtureingly irritating, or whatever. It hurts me, because it’s a belief that hates diversity. It lives in a world where everything has an Apple logo embedded. It’s like the Aryan race in electronics form. A hundred years from now we’ll be teaching kids about a holocaust where everything Microsoft or Linux or Android or unlucky enough to not be pre-fixed with the lowercase-letter “i” got obliterated because it wasn’t good enough, because it dared to be different.

Every time I hear about Apple suing companies for daring to stand up to the hype, or Steve Jobs bragging about an innovation that’s been doing the rounds for the best part of a decade but it wasn’t relevant then because it didn’t have an Apple sticker on it, or see someone on the train telling me how their existence beats mine because they have an iBag or an iSock, my stomach goes again. I just know with a chilling certainty that in a few years I’ll have to conform and be affiliated with the rest of them whilst pledging my allegiance to Mr Jobs or be stripped and gassed to death, then my body ejected into space with all the porn and Adobe Flash software boxes where we all belong.

So yes. Apple have amazing products. They’re beautiful and flawless if you don’t care about doing things the same way that Jobs preaches. I understand. I’m just scared. Plus I have a compulsion to spend my money on alcohol and take-aways, so at the end of the month when the next new “iPhone 6.5G LS mkIII” comes out I can’t afford to fork out another grand to pay to the Apple-tax man. A crime that will surely be punishable by instant decapitation this time next year.

So John, as much as you dis-prove every little point that people try to make against your deity, and do it so well, I hate you. I don’t care if you’re right. When I wake up in the morning, my HTC Desire, a piece of unique electronic/plastic hybrid that is truly mine, that I customised, where I chose how it works or which hand I can hold it in, gives me so much joy and happiness. You give me so much pain and hate by rubbing in my face how wrong I should be. You give me so much pain and hate, that I had to compose a pie-chart to vent it all out.

If a hadn’t already written a million words I’d continue to explain every point. But I can’t. For now, I’ve ran out of hate.

And to make things clear, I copied that idea from this wicked cool website. If I was Apple, I would call it an iChart and patent it and then sue that guy instead. And he would sue me back and the world would be full of hate.

Disclaimer: Not everyone with an iFinger or iHairbrush is a twat. Some folks that use them are genuinely nice and have human feelings that don’t represent the Borg collective mind. My girlfriend has an iLaptop, and she’s very nice :).

I’ve already scared one member of the house-hold by shouting and clutching at a pillow with more vigour than I’ve ever know. I’ve gotten over-emotional at a silly episode of Doctor Who, and shouted at a politician on a rolling news channel.

So how long’s it been? 11 hours. Not even a day.

Why am I giving up? I’m skint. Also I need to sort my life out a bit, and I guess cutting out the crap is a kind-of start to it all. Wahoo. I’m also getting a car and don’t want to crash it because I was too busy rolling one at the junction. (I can still remember the points in the roads and journeys where I used to light up.)

Couple months back I did a fortnight before crashing on a really sticky night out. I smoked because I was in town I was drunk and looking for highs. I didn’t pick-up the fags during my hangover the next day like I thought I would- I got over it and carried on without them. But then something happened and I marched to the nearest shop for 20 Embassy number 1s. And I was back to my ten-to-fifteen a day.

I stayed indoors last week for the Sunday and the bank holiday. I was playing on my new phone and it did such a good job of distracting me I didn’t need to smoke. But then I had to get the bus really early the next day and the absence of nicotine from my system made the physical pain distracting. I had too much work on to loose concentration.

But now I’ve not got much work on because I done it all. I was quitting this morning, and there was a point where I was really happy I hadn’t gone out for a smoke at all, and then, something happened.

These “something happened” moments suck, but they’re not related to my smoking (except they only seem to happen when I’m trying to quit) and I figured I need to get over them. Shit will happen in life, and a cigarette seems so insignificant. So I’m going to learn to take news like a real person, and talk when things are upsetting instead. Also, the less I try and quit the less these catastrophic events will happen. I’m sure of it!

So why am I blogging this? Why is this being broadcast? Why have I dramatically changed my grammar?

BECAUSE I’M GOING FUCKING CRAZY!

Or I’m just being a bit of a wuss…

So there’s a few aims here. Firstly, to communicate events I want to share with the public. Honestly, this doesn’t cover a lot at the moment. Not because I don’t get out much, but because I’d rather not share! Or because I’m too lazy to write the stuff up. Secondly it’s for when I want to rant, assist or review. Say how I do things and share my opinions with the aim of helping others to make their own minds up, be it music or web-sites or something else vaguely interesting. But also it’s an SEO blog. This relates to search engines. Putting more content on my blog makes it rank higher because it attracts more people from a variety of fields. Simple!

As I can see at the minute there are a few issues making the above effective. I don’t have many followers! Now I’m getting a fair few hits from the Ubuntu comunity (where I participate occasionly) and a few folks from Facebooks and King Brick, but not much interaction. I can tell this blog gets looked at from the statistics.

But that isn’t one of my main aims! I wan’t an archive of my outings, put reviews up for a few geeks and musicians but mainly so I can reference them. I’m quite a self-centred person ;)

The SEO bit is working well. My only issue is having it on the King Brick domain. That means King Brick ranks in Google for things like Linux and Firefox.

What’s the plan Batman?

Potentially get a new domain. That requires effort and money so I probably won’t bother. Plus the band is the main thing I want to big up! Talking about geeking and web-design doesn’t relate at-all to my band, but it’s one of my fortes so I want it to! I want to set up a personal brand for my music and digital musings. It’s something to do right? :P

One way to counter all this is to split the categories up into almost seperate blogs. At the minute stuff bleeds into each other too much. So one article will explain about a wicked band I saw, the next about JSON and AJAX management and the next about how much I like the weather today.

So I’ll re-brand, re-skin and re-organise. That’s the plan! :)

Ubuntu is heading for a milestone. In April they will release the latest version of their Operating System called Lucid Lynx. Every 6 months Ubuntu release a new version but this one will be a Long Term Support release, a version that is released every 2 years and supported for 3 years. This might not sound a long time (especially if you’re using the 9-year-old Windows XP) but in this modern world of the Internet and technology- it seems forever! :P

So what’s changed?

Well the thing that’s got e everyone in a fuss is the re-branding. Ubuntu previously sported a very friendly look, using “very large, almost Comic sans MS” font as I once described it. Now it’s moved on, and even the OS theme has been given a reboot.

When I first saw this screen-shot I described it as “overall looks like vomit”, but after installing the theme, turning the fonts down to 8px and using it for a few weeks, I love it. It’s beautiful. :)

The title-bar buttons being on the other side doesn’t bother me- I think I’ve gone to click on the right-hand side by accident three times in total so I’ve no idea what all the geeks out there are fussing about. I love the use of monochrome icons and the purple is certainly a lot better than the dullness of the brown previously used. If I could change anything about the new theme it would be the sprites used for the scroll-bars (I think they look a bit amateur-ish) and the buttons I think are too dark.

All in all- congratulations to the Ubuntu team. Looking good :P

Links
Brand – Ubuntu Wiki
LTS – Ubuntu Wiki
Ubuntu Branding revealed – Ubuntu forums
Inital Ubuntu forums poll

This website and everything else in my life in under construction

It couldn’t be more accurate!

Blog-wise I’ve got ten topics waiting to be penned. Seven will require screen-grabs, two will need photos and three of them are going to be Linux tutorials. So what am I waiting for?

For one, madnessJack desperately needs a re-brand. Even just some form of brand will do. (That’s eleven topics now! :P) I need to sort it out!

However, if I didn’t work full-time, handle private projects, play in and direct bands, commute by public transport and drink so much I would probably get this blogging thing down!

Expect more, just not right away :P

I’ll let my profile on my family’s website introduce this one [warning: very outdated information can be found on this page - I'm talking about 6 years out here!].

John Christopher Nigel Gutteridge was born September 26 1988 5:30am. [...]. After a long debate by the family he was named John but informally called Jack.

My actual name is John. If I’m being formal, I’ll use John. So at work, my colleagues call me John for example. If I’m talking to my bank, registering something (you get the idea :P).

So let me set this straight, I’m called Jack but my actual name is John, right? My parents called me Jack, my family called me Jack, my friend called me Jack. Simple, right?

This used to prove very confusing to pupils in the same class as me back in the day. In Primary School it was okay, because I only had to explain the situation to one teacher a year. However, by Secondary School and into College I was having to explain myself to a tutor about once a week.

My fellow learners would be amazed and bewildered by this two-named freak :P

But it’s completely justified! All these morons thought I had some weird naming complex. Even the Wikipedia article on “Jack” agrees with me:

In English it is the diminutive form of the name John [...]

It was used back in the day (I’m talking around the Great War here) by a father called John calling his son John, but to avoid confusion would use the nickname Jack. Yeah?

So there! Get over it :P

Image source: BBC News Magazine – 7 questions on baby names