The Grax Domain

7 Mar 2010 Speed Dating Evening

22 Feb 2010 Grax Domain's 6th Birthday

Grax forgets that it's his website's birthday.... Again!



Special thanks to Float Star PX for reminding Grax about the website's birthday.

Don't forget to follow my tweets at www.twitter.com/graxbishop

26 Jan 2010 So what happened in Argentina 2009?

I'll tell you what happened in Argentina in 2009. THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF YOUTUBE!

I had to split it into three parts. A lot of things can happen in 5 weeks.







Lo and behold I've also uploaded a ton of photos to browse at ones leisure.

Iguazu Falls
The South Of Argentina
Buenos Aires
Rafting
The Coasts of Argentina
Córdoba's City Centre

22 Dec 2009 Donde esta Grax? Iguazu Falls

22 Nov 2009 Español - Me gusta/no me gusta

12 Nov 2009 Español - Estaba Borracho Anoche

10 Nov 2009 Español - Voy a viajar a Argentina

6 Nov 2009 Spanish Practice Aid Idea

1 Nov 2009 Halloween 2009

This year I went to a Halloween event at a pretty awesome nightclub in London. I can't remember the name of the club but it's right outside Angel tube station. Anyway I wanted to go for something simple and cheap for a costume this year. All black with a skull face. Nice.

I'm the guy in the middle in the photo below.



Why not take a look at all the photos from the party.

16 Sep 2009 Which Facial Hair Is Best

3 Aug 2009 Alice In Chains at the Sonisphere Music Festival

17 Jun 2009 Download Festival 2009

Last weekend I was camping with a few of my buddies in Donnington Park, Derby. Why? Because I was watching lots of rock and metal bands at the Download Festival. It was pretty awesome. No... It was more than awesome, it was epic!

Each band that I saw, from Korn to ZZ Top to SevenDust, managed to entertain me in their own way. Even Marylin Manson, who was quite obviously under the influence of some kind of drug with his screeching, tantrums and general lack of crowd interaction. But for me the best band there was Faith No More. They were everything that I wanted and more. Standing about 6 people from the front barrier I sang, I danced, I basked in their performance.

On top of all that I met some pretty fun camping neighbours as we not only enjoyed the music, but went down to The Village (which consisted of fairground rides and dancing venues) and partied until daylight each night.

It was the best festival that I had ever been to and I don't know how it'll ever be topped.

I've uploaded some photos of the festival weekend along with a video of the Silent Disco that I went to. Man, that disco was surreal. Everyone was given a set of headphone, complete with two radio frequencies and a mute button. You get to choose which music channel to listen to and the room is silent. Well apart from everyone singing along to whatever they are listening to.

www.flickr.com

Also on show is the epic karaoke performance by myself and my buddy Float Star PX. Brace yourselves...

6 Jun 2009 PXFest 2009

Back in March 2009 I went to PXFest and recorded some video footage of the event. However I never actually got around to until the main man of PXFest, Float, kept bugging me to upload it. So here it is. Hope you're happy dude, now get off my back!



Now with extra Slaps footage at the pub during PXFest 2009.

2 Jun 2009 Busy month of May

It's been a pretty busy month for me.

I've not been keeping up with my blog for the past month after that Jack in the Green entry because all sorts of things have been happening. Including working, going to Scotland for a week, finding out my grandfather has advance lung cancer, seeing a gig, saying goodbye to a really good friend at the airport, which really sucked. So unfortunately I've been neglecting my blog for a while.

But now everything should be settling down for the foreseeable future I'm going to get back on track with my blogging duties, including uploading videos that have are on the backlog. That should keep some people satisfied.

Also you may be interested to know that I have joined the masses and have gotten myself a Twitter account. I've been keeping this a lot more up-to-date. So uh.... yeah... FOLLOW ME ON THE LAND OF EMPTY PROMISES AND CREAM-FILLED BISCUITS!!

In the meantime, this is one of the things I did while I was in Scotland:

7 May 2009 Hastings Jack In The Green Festival 2009

1 May 2009 YouTube Time Capsule

29 Mar 2009 Grax's Freaky Eyes

13 Mar 2009 Red Nose Day 2009

A few days ago I watched this video on YouTube about a woman putting on some special make-up for Red Nose Day. I felt inspired and tried to do a parody of this video. This is the result (click here if you can't see the video below):



Interesting enough I went to work that same day I put that clown make-up on. This is what I found out (click here if you can't see the video below):

6 Mar 2009 "Looks like I got my work cut out for me"

14 Feb 2009 Valentine's Day 2009

25 Jan 2009 Jaw Harp

I got a Jaw/Jew Harp the other day:


And now a little tune on the Jaw Harp, performed by me:


Pretty sad huh?

4 Jan 2009 Are you still there Graxie...?

Crap, over a month. Has it really been that long since I wrote anything of any length here? The reason I didn't write anything was not because I didn't have anything to say, it's because I was bloody busy as hell throughout Decemeber.

"But what could keep Grax busy for a whole month" I hear no one cry. Well...

The first main reason was due to work. Without giving too much information away it was a major deadline for the project that we've been working on for a year and a half. Trouble is there was still loads of stuff that needed to get done and, well, standard 8 hour working days was not going to cut it. So there were many long hours spent at work and personal sacrifices of spare time, with the only conpensation being pizza practically every night. In the end we did the best we could, the deadline came and passed and we all had a nice little Xmas/launch party. Which was rather jolly.

The second main reason was...

Do you guys remember that really fit girl from Argentina? The one that I stayed with for two weeks back in 2005? Well Lu is her name and she's in England! Right now!

After a long while of saving and planning Lu is finally living her dream of being in England to experience it all (although it was a little touch-and-go with the immigration office when she landed. Even I got called into the office and interrigated to make sure our stories checked out). She's been hanging out with me for the month while I try and help her out with trying to find a job, a place to stay and, of course, showing Lu as much of Enlgand as I can muster. So far she's really enjoying being in England, especially London.

Course all this babysitting and working means that I haven't had the chance to give any attention to my baby, The Grax Domain. But that's all changing. Lu's got a new job (after getting a job on her first week and then being fired due to lack of papers, but that's a different story), which will keep her busy, and work should be less stressful (for a while anyway) which means I'll have more time to give some more Grax Domain love to the site and to you fine readers out there.

Happy 2008 everyone.

... shit I mean 2009.

30 Dec 2008 Xmas Prank 2008

25 Dec 2008 A quick holiday message

A proper blog entry is coming up soon.

But it's Christmas now, so I must be off to do the yearly Christmas rituals.

Merry Christmas one and all. =D

31 Oct 2008 mmmm.... brains.....

I knew I shouldn't have petted that Sumatran Rat-Monkey before going to work today....

26 Oct 2008 Snowdon Hike October 2008

If you can't watch the video above I said:

So what does a guy do when he's got a week off work and doesn't have much to do? Why he goes off hiking up the tallest mountain in England and Wales apparently. Last Thursday I got a spontaneous invite from a work colleague, J, to go hiking and camping up Snowdon, in North Wales, for the weekend. I thought "Yeah, I'll give it a go. Good exercise. How hard can it be?"

On Saturday morning, after a hearty breakfast, we all drove to our starting point at the foot of the mountain. But the car park was full and they were not letting anymore people in. So we had to pull over and quickly rethink our starting point (which incidentally worked out in my favour because it meant us starting on the easiest hike route, rather than the hard bastard route that J had in mind).

Once we reached the foot of the mountain and did our final check of our camping gear we began our hike up Snowdon. And man, it was hard.

Still it was a sunny day, we got to see the sights (which included sheep, grass and the train that ran up and down the mountain), and we were heading to the top of the mountain, which was deep in the clouds.

We stopped by a cafe that is about halfway up the mountain for a quick snack and to check on the map exactly where we were.

Then we continued with the hike. By this point my rucksack full of camping gear was getting very heavy, my legs were straining under the pressure, and I was lagging behind.

Then we actually walked into the clouds [show video] and the nice weather was gone, to be replaced with low visibility, cold winds and spitting showers. But the bastard hard part was stepping up those bloody stepping stones, the ones that made you lift your legs and knees up on every step, for what felt like an eternity. Suffice to say Grax was tired.

Mind you I did find it odd that there were various people walking down the mountain with less clothes than us. Even people with shorts! Not to mention all the crazy people mountain biking down the track in the wet, cloudy weather. One thing that did make me chuckle was watching this little girl bawling her eyes out as her dad took her down the mountain.

In the end we made it to the top of the Snowdon mountain. And there is photographic evidence of us at the top. We rested our hands on the sun dial thingy that was at the top.

We shortly found a quiet spot to rest up and began digging into our rations, which had a surprizingly good spread of food. I tell you Solid Snake has the good life if his rations were as good as what the MoD provide their troops. We took the time to reflect upon how the hiking has gone so far.

Feeling temporarily recharged we made our way back down the mountain, [show video] through the dense fog and with me lagging behind again. One disappointing aspect of the hike was there wasn't enough time to stop and admire the scenery and the views (even though there wasn't exactly much to see). Despite looking like a scene straight out of Silent Hill I felt strangely calm and tranquil and I just wanted to sit down, relax, and take it all in. Even if it was spitting.

But no, I was to be denied this luxury because we had to reach the bottom of the mountain before nightfall to set up camp. We all pressed on through the cloud. Quite literally; when we came out the other side we found out that the weather for all the people at the bottom was still the sunny day we had at the start of the hike. Bugger. But we were still only halfway until we reached the foot of the mountain. Bugger.

Anyways, we made it to the foot just as it was getting dark. We then drove to the nearest campsite, set up camp, finished our rations for dinner and stayed up late drinking rum and whisky whilst playing this cool dice game. I think it's called Hot Dice, but I bet it has many names.

Despite all the strain, sweat, panting, and aching muscles (my calfs are still aching a bit) it was a bloody great hike. It was me first proper hike and I'm quite looking forward to me next hike, wherever it might be.

22 Sep 2008 September 08 Update

12 Aug 2008 Reporting From The Temporary House

1 Aug 2008 Moving to a temporary place

You never really comprehend how much crap you have in your home until you move out of it. That's something I've come to terms with now that I've moved into my temporary home.

I've been evicted out of my previous home I'm renting. In fact all my housemates have been evicted. The reason for this is because my landlord and lady wants to tart up the property for renting, only this time they want to live in it too. Well it would be silly to try and sell it now, what with the falling house prices and everything.

I needed a new place to stay and I do have friends that I will be staying with. The problem is they won'tbe coming back to Oxford until September for various reasons. So I needed a place for August. After looking at some various house renting websites I found a room that would do. It's a student house off Cowley Road. It's only available for a month because I'm "house covering" for someone that month while they do their thing. In other words Im paying and staying in their room for a month while they move on.

Being a typical student house it's... Small and shitty. But it's only for a month.

So after spending all week slowly packing up all my things and tidying up the place (well it was my housemates mum that did most of the work. We didn't ask her to, it was pure mother instincts!) it was time to move out. After filling a Vauxhall Big Van™ with half my stuff and lugging it all upstairs I realized that not everything was going to fit in my room. And that bungelows are awesome. So I filled the van up with the other half of my crap and drove it to my mums house, which is an hour and a half away.

It was 3:30pm and I'd reached my mums house. It was within a few minutes of arriving that mother panicked me when I told her that I had to return the van by 6:00pm. "Grax you'll never make it!" she wailed and rushed me to call up the van hire company to find out what time the van was due back.

Turns out the van didn't need to be back till the next morning. Everyone's blood pressure returned to normal.

Mum and I sat down to lunch and she did the typical mum thing of making sure I was well fed. "Do you want another roll Grax? Do you want a hot cross bun Grax? A cup of tea? I've made shepherds pie because I wasn't sure if you'd be hungry or not. Are you sure you don't want another roll Grax?"

Just imagine what it would be like if a guy was trying to seduce a woman...

"Would you like a shag? Do you want to give me a hand job? How about if I go down on you? I bought a twelve pack of condoms and a bottle of lube because I wasn't sure if you want to try anal. Are you sure you don't want a shag?"

Oy...

After lunch and unpacking she showed me the extension she and my step dad did to the house. It's quite an amazing job they did. You'd think it was aways a part of the house. This led on to the repeated lecture of me getting a mortgage to buy a house to rent out to other people even though I can't actually afford to do so. And I'd was a bit surprised by their reaction when I told that one of my good friends that I'm moving in with this September just finished university and doesn't have a job yet (partly because I wasn't that bothered about if she had a job or not).

I mean, I know mum and step dad love me and they mean well. It's just that it would be nice if they didn't sound so worryingly disappointed in me.

Don't worry, it's the last stretch of the story.

It came to 5:30 and I drove back home, feeling less than content. In fact the more I thought about it the more angry I got because I still needs to tidy my room, it was gonna be 7:00ish before I got back to Oxford, I thought I could have actually fitted everything in my room, the whole trip was starting to feel like a waste of time (although looking back in hindsight I know this not to be the case). I became more stressed out with the situation.

Getting back to the house I found out the landlord and lady had arrived and were staying the night. Panic packing ensued. Filling bin bags with crap I was keeping I threw them into the car and began work sweeping up the carpet of dust, toenails and bodyhair that was on my wooden floor. Finally I finished with my room, drove to my squatters hole, pile the last of my things into it my room and collapse into bed.

It was around midnight when I finally went to bed and peaceically passed out through exhaustion.

The whole thing was much more stressful than it should have been. Still, I'm here now surrounded by a wall of boxed stuff, hoping to find something for next month so I can do the whole moving again.

Is it September yet?

26 Jul 2008 A response to T2 Risk Taking

Seems like my rant about T2Darlantan's Player Hater entry has caused quite a reaction. The first part has received dozens of comments, ranging from praises to hate-mail to even "WTF is with your eyes??" The second part has only received a handful of comments, which tells me that the majority of people didn't bother to watch part 2 of my rant (which is kinda important to watch as it rounds off my rant). It certainly seem to be case judging by some of the comments that have the vibe of "Don't you tell T2 how to live his life, fuck you!"

And if that wasn't enough T2Darlantan himself made a video response to my video response.



So there are lessons to be learnt from this exercise.

1. Don't split your videos into multiple parts; people will probably stop watching after the first part and ignore the rest
2. If you want lots of comments and subscribers on your YouTube account target a person that has a huge fan base, leave a video response to one of his entries and have him to respond back

11 Jul 2008 Run Twinkletoes Run!

If you can't watch the video above, you can read what I said below:

Hi there. My name's Grax and I have a friend that is going to be attempting something quite spectacuar in a few months time.

On Sunday 12th October 2008 my friend Mitu will be attempting the London Parks Half Marathon. And the reason she's doing this? She's doing it for The Right To Play.

Right To Play is a charity that uses the power of 'play' to improve health, build life skills, and foster peace for children and communities affected by war, poverty and disease. Using their specially designed sports and play programmes, and working in both the humanitarian and development contexts, Right To Play has projects in more than 20 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Now this is a sponsored run and Mitu would like everyone to give their donations towards this run. She has set herself a minimum target of £500 and I would like to do my part for her run.

So Mitu, a message for you, I've added my sponsor money to your run. And I hope it goes towards a good cause.

Now Mitu has also created a website for her to keep a video diary of her progress at www.runmiturun.com. Since she's created this website a couple months ago she a grand total of two video entries. Which is a shame really because I personally would like to see more or Mitu and see more of her video entries.

In fact, here's an idea Mitu. You can use it as an incentive to get more people to give more donations. How about this: for every £10 towards the £500 goal you recieve you'll release a new video blog. I mean it doesn't even have to be anything amazing. It can be something crap. Why it could even be something like....

"Hi everyone! Mitu here and I just got out of bed ready for my morning run! Except it's 7:15pm now and I... kinda... missed it.... Still, nevermind! I got my music player, I got my trainers, I got my Ready Brek, and I'm ready for action! It's gonna be awesome!!!"

Well... it's a thought.

If you would like to give your donation towards this sponsored run then you can. By going to www.justgiving.com/mitu. Alternatively if you would like to check out her progress you can take a look at Mitu's website at www.runmiturun.com. And hopefully by the time she sees this message she'll create some more video blogs for our amusement.

Please give as much as you can towards this sponsored run. Every penny can go a long way for the right to play.

Thank you.

7 Jul 2008 Cowley Road Carnival 2008

Last Sunday I attended the Cowley Road Carnival in Oxford. Well it was just down the street from where I live, so I thought I'd see what all the hub-bub was about.

If you can see the video clips below you can watch them on YouTube by clicking here and clicking here.

23 Jun 2008 Executing The Other Idea

Guess what I did to myself yesterday....

21 Jun 2008 Another Grax??

You can watch this entry on YouTube by clicking here.

16 Jun 2008 Red Head

Oh my....

What has Grax done to himself?

I had a friend visit over last weekend. Whilst walking through town she came up with the idea of dying my hair a different colour. I thought to myself "Hell why not. When's the next time I'm gonna do this again?". So I got some red hair dye and got it on my bleach blonde hair.

But don't get too comfortable with this red hair. It's only semi permanent, so it'll come out eventually.

Besides, this is not my other plan I had in mind. That's still left to come.

Till then....

Stay tuned.

23 May 2008 Wii thievery

My Nintendo Wii was stolen from my lounge on Thursday 16th May.

I didn't actually notice it was gone until the following Friday evening when I got back from work. But I didn't think anything of it, I just assumed one of my housemates borrowed it without asking. There was no one in the house to ask so I went about my business and went away to a friends house for the weekend as planned.

It wasn't until I got back that everyone in the house told me that none of them borrowed it. So someone stole it. Bastards.

There were two things that struck me as odd about the crime. Firstly there was no sign of forced entry. No broken windows, no damaged door, nothing. So I'm assuming that someone left the back door open so the burglar could just walk in (we've all gotten back into the habit of double locking again). But that could also imply that the burglar is someone who has already been in the house and knew where the Wii was.

Which leads me to the second odd thing about the crime. The only thing that was stolen was the Wii, two wiimotes, Mario Kart Wii (because in was in the console at the time) and the power cable. They left the composite cable to connect the Wii to the TV, they left the sensor bar and they left the CD case full of games. So what they nabbed is kinda useless (although you can get replacement sensor bars and TV connectors easily enough). But they also left the crappy TV itself, the Playstation 2, the stack of DVDs next to the TV. The burglar left a whole bunch of stuff. Either he was startled and left with what he could, or he's just a shitty robber.

I mean c'mon! If you've gonna robbed a place take everything you can!!

So that Monday I called the police. Not the emergency 999 number because, well, it's not an emergency. They said they would send someone over that evening, or the following evening.

Wednesday morning I get a call from them apologising that no one came on Monday or Tuesday and saying that someone will be coming that Wednesday evening. I don't really blame them for taking a while to get to my case. With all these many crimes and understaffed, overworked police force that are being tied down by paperwork; it's not exactly high on their priority list to see the guy who got most of his Wii stuff knicked.

So a policewoman came round my house on that Wednesday evening, after having the courtesy of asking if now was a good time for her to come over whilst the football final was on TV. Which... I thought was kinda odd of her, but nevermind. I told her what happened, told her a list of what was taken, and gave her some kind of way of identifying the Wii if they came across one (I didn't have the console's serial number written down, but I did have the Wii number written down). She took a statement, she gave me a "sorry you've been burgled" pack (complete with UV pen), mention that she'll pass the details to the burglary team of the force, mentioned something about how it might not be worth sending in the SOCO team for fingerprinting due to many housemates and the lounge was tidied up before I reported the crime to the police, aaaand.... that was about it really. Her demeanour was pleasant but I got the impression the whole thing was a bit "I'm sorry that your Wii was stolen, but there's not a lot that we can actually do about it."

The thing is I doubt I'll see my Wii back again, no matter how much I cross my fingers, and I can't replace it for a while because A) I have no home insurance and B) I have no spare cash to buy a new one. Which is a bit crappy really. Very crappy.

11 May 2008 Pre wedding vlogs

Before my dad's second wedding back in mid April I did some preparation for my outfit. I recorded my activities as a vlog for a laugh and to show it off to people. Who knows, there might be some value to these videos. Enjoy.

Warning: the following vlogs may contain strong language and product placements.

19 Apr 2008 The new look and the wedding: The photos

I mentioned earlier this week that I attended my Dad's second wedding and that I was allowed to post up some photos of the big wedding day. Well after a hefty set of "I'm really bloody busy at work getting the demo stuff ready for demo day" with hints of "I've just got to squeeze in my ass-grooving lessons" and "wait, how does Flickr work again?" I've uploaded some photos for all to see.

It's not all the photos from the wedding day (I didn't get permission from everyone that attending the wedding) but it's the best selection of the happy couple. You can see the second wedding photo set here.

But here's one of the photo's to wet your appetite:


Did I mention how proud I am of my dad? ^_^

15 Apr 2008 The new look and the wedding

So I went to my dad's second wedding last Saturday and it was pretty fantastic.

My dad met this woman a few years ago and, to cut a long story short, she proposed to him last summer and he accepted. The date was set; 12th April 2008. Now my dad is not the usual kind of dad (as people who have seen and met him will clarify). He lives in London and he is kinda cyber-goth... or cyber-punk, I'm not too sure how to classify him (if he is classifiable at all). So the wedding was not going to be a traditional church wedding, but more like... a fancy dress party.

Therefore I wanted to do something different with my look. If I was to turn up to the wedding dressed up like I normally do I would have stuck out like a sore thumb. So after a couple weeks thinking about it and with some consultation from my dad I came up with my outfit for the wedding. And here it is:




It's amazing what some hair bleach, white contacts and temporary tattoos can do for a guy's look huh?

So I was ready for the wedding and eager to take part in the fun. This is what happened next.



However there is good news. I have been given permission by my dad to post up some of the photos of the wedding. As soon as I dust off my old Flickr account I'll be able to share with you more photos.

6 Apr 2008 Freaky April Weather 2008

So I walked out my front door today and I saw this...


... and this...


...and this...


... I mean what the hell???


It's the middle of Spring. We shouldn't be confronted with this much snow in Britain an this time of the year...


Still it did make me smile. And I thought "Ah well, when in Rome..."

24 Mar 2008 Grax's Easter Holiday 2008

Well this week didn't go according to plan, but it's been a good week none the less. I had the week before easter off work. So for me it's been a 8 day long weekend for me. The second half of that time off was spent sleeping, which I'm not too proud off. Y'know when you get the feeling that you've wasted half the day when you wake up at 1:00pm, because in a way you have wasted half a day? But the stuff when I was doing stuff it was pretty enjoyable. And it all started two Friday nights ago.

That Friday evening two main things happened to me; 1) I was taught the art of being able to hear conversation on a noisy dance floor by plugging ones earholes and 2) I got to chatting to a random drunk girl down one of the Oxford roads on the way home. Long story short she wanted some cigarettes, I couldn't help her out then, her 5 friends left her cos they got bored waiting, I took her home, bought her some cheap ciagrettes along the way (the cheapest possible. Let it not be said that I ain't a nice guy), she let me into her house, and she unloaded a bunch of rants about all the negative aspects of her life till daybreak whilst we had Natural Born Killers playing in the background. There was no bedroom action involved during this time but I found it strangely pleasant trying to be her agony aunt for the night, even though technically in all seriousness what the hell could I possibly say or do to make everything better for her. After all, she had a 10 inch kitchen knife in her purse. Well a girl's gotta keep herself safe and all.

In other news I am now officially and uncle and you all shall now refer to me as uncle Grax. For it is written... Right at this moment in time. My nephew was born 9 days earlier than expected (I had booked the week off expecting to see him during the middle of the week) so I went and visited him and my brother on Sunday along with my mum. Let me tell you something; 6 day old babies don't tend to do much. All baby nephew did when I was there was sleep, pull the occasional weird yawny stretch thing, sleep, wake up for a feeding, not really realise what was going on, stuff like that. I guess the major action happens as babies get older.

Mum was super excited about the baby as has been since the moment he was born. She would be squealing with joy proclaiming that he was so cute and so perfect and "He looks just like you and your brother did when you were babies". Every 5 minutes. Well its good to know that he going to grow up a good looking lad, just like his uncle. I tried to hold him and, at first, I didn't wuite get the hang of it cos my nephew was squirming and resisting in my arm, which I was not use to. After a little guidance from my brother my nephew calmed down and was dozing blissfully in my arm. The thing that caught my interest is how my brother seemed to be so good at being a dad, like he knew exactly what he was doing. I guess I imagined that I would be the first to have kids.

Lastly I spent some time catching up with some old friends. It was a mixture of watching DVDs, eating unhealthily, screwing around, and a birthday trip to Alton Towers with my ex girlfriend, her new boyfriend (who didn't really say too much to me, but then I didn't really want to be the hunky third wheel to his and her love-fest of uh.... sexy.... couple.... thingy... thing.... what couples do) and the rest of her crew. It was all good apart from the crappy video thing at Alton Towers not working on the day. And I was so looking forwards to doing some kick ass poses for the camera. It would have been awesome I tell thee.

Ah well, no time to reminisce. I gotta head back to work tomorrow. I wonder if anything got done there...

6 Mar 2008 Ceroc you like a hurricane

One of my New Years Resolutions was to treat my body better and one of the ways to do this was to get dancing again. I did Salsa dancing for around 2 years but I stopped doing it for 6 months because I got pinned down with work. But I am determined and I recently started getting back into Salsa again. Last lesson I met this charming girl and she invited me to try a Ceroc dance class in town. Not wanting to turn down the offer of a charming lady (and not willing to admit that I've never heard of Ceroc) I accepted and tried it out for the first time last night.

Turns out it's simple enough for me to look like a bad-ass on the dance floor.

Ceroc, for those who are not in the know (including myself), is a dance form that is based in modern Jive but borrows lots of elements from other dances including Salsa, Swing, Lindy Hop and Merengue. In fact I could spot different Salsa moves when people were dancing freestyle. The main differences between Ceroc and Salsa includes things like the tempo is slower and the footwork doesn't seem to be that important.

After a couple minutes of trying to tell my brain that I am in fact not doing Salsa I was able to pick up the basic routine. In fact I had an edge over most of the other beginners because I knew how to dance Salsa. So I was able to lead and make my many partners do what I wanted. With the occasional shimmy thrown in for good measure.

And the shimmies served me well on the dance floor as it impressed the ladies that I dance with during freestyle... Well... it was more likely due to the face that for a 'beginner' (which in the world of dancing I am not) I was able to hold my own and give the ladies a pleasant dance. Still there's nothing wrong with flaunting your chest a bit.

It felt good to be able to dance well, especially when most of the women I danced with are "Mmm, mmm, mighty fine". But I don't want to get ahead of myself here. Just because I can confidently do one Ceroc dance routine doesn't mean I'm the next [insert dance legend here]. I'm going to keep going to Ceroc lessons until I can confidently remember and do at least four routines during freestyle. Otherwise I'm dead in the water. But still, so far so good.

27 Feb 2008 But we're in the middle of a plate!

Did anyone else feel that earthquake last night as well?

18 Feb 2008 Grax Domain Birthday and the meaning of flumpy

Say, it's the Grax Domain's birthday today! It's actually 4 (count 'em) years old. So in traditional tradition I've done a little bit of artwork.

I've been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 and the picture's based on Heavy Weapons Guy, my fave class.

I also found out a new meaning for a word: Flumpy.

I was sitting around at work and a colleague (who shall be named Collie) approached me. The conversation went something like this...

Collie: Y'alright? How's it going?
Me: I dunno. I just feel... Flumpy. I don't know how to describe it.
Collie: Well maybe if you used a real word.
Me: It is a real word (I didn't think it was a word, but I played with the idea)! Look I'll prove it. Google'll know. Google knows all.
Does a Google search for the word Flump
Me: Ha! See? I told you it was a real word.... uh-oh....
Clicks on the Urbandictionary.com link
Me: "Flumpy: the act of oral sex perform on a human while taking a shit".... Hmm... I'm not gonna live that one down am I?
Collie: Nope.

So yeah, apparantly that's how I'm feeling right now; flumpy. Anyone got any ideas how I can get out of this mood?

30 Jan 2008 I don't like needles....

Apparently I did something amazing today. I donated some of my own blood.

Me, a guy who loathes having needles shoved into him for a mere moment, chose to allow a tube inserted into my arm and drain me for five minutes.

It wasn't the run down community centre that was bad. It wasn't the pin prick on my finger to get a drop of blood for an iron level test that was bad, though I did hesitate to begin with. It wasn't the overworked mature nurse that was talking to various patients that made me lose my cool. It wasn't the build up that freaked me out. It wasn't even the point just after the needle went into my arm that I panicked (I looked away at this point), although my lower half of my body did start to tingle for some reason.

It was when I looked at the red tube...

When I saw the needle in my arm...

When I saw how God damn big the was...

That I thought "Oh bum, there's a freaking huge needle in my arm"...

And I went from being slightly anxious to down right scared. Not 'throw your arms up in the air and scream' scared but a good healthy 'shallow breathing, manic laughing and shakes' scared. I was still trembling after 5 minutes and the needle was removed.

Seriously, I thought the draining needle would be thin, like the ones you get for blood tests. Not a freaking hose pipe.

And for what? To possibly save a life? Well the main reason why I did it was I wanted to do something that scared me. Needles scare me. Being brave and yadda yadda. Plus it's always handy to know at parties what your blood type is.

So hey ho, another notch on my belt of life. I hope someone enjoys my blood, with a slight ting of anxiety for flavour.

25 Jan 2008 One of the greatest t-shirts known to mankind

Ladies and gentlemen.... BEHOLD!



Thanks to the folks at the Penny Arcade Store I have in possession one of the greatest t-shirts known to mankind. Granted you need to be a Street Fighter fan to get any appreciation out of this. But seriously, if you're not a fan of the game then well... *shun*

In fact this t-shirt is so great it is in fact a replacement for my old and wore one.



Ah my old tee; so worn, so faded. It is time to retire the old dog. Maybe I can give it away to a friend or charity or something.

While I was browsing the store I noticed this t-shirt.


Shoot Him First

I've been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 recently. So because of that and because of the weak US dollar, I picked up one of these too.

That is all.

20 Jan 2008 Lessons on room decorating

I've just come back from my weekend of helping my friend decorate her living room. From this I have learnt the following:

• Painting a room does not take a couple of hours, but rather many, many hours. No matter how small the room looks.
• It's always handy to have the right tools for the job.
• The size of your tool does bloody matter.
• Attaching a Philips screwdriver head to a long flat-head screwdriver with lots of sticky tape does not turn it into a useable long Philips screwdriver.
• Screws in walls are a good way of release manly grunts and growls.
• Asking for help unscrewing a tight screw in the wall does not undermine ones manliness.
• Painting a room at 2:00am is not for everybody.
• It's lots of fun to completely cover your hands in gloss paint, but it's a bit of a pain to get off your hands. And it makes your hands sticky and tingly.
• Not everyone will appreciate you getting your hands completely covered in gloss paint, not matter how much fun it is.
• Painting a room is bloody boring, no matter how much cheesy disco pop you play in the background.

I'm sure these life lessons will serve me well in the future.

2 Jan 2008 New Years Plans for 2008

Happy New Year everyone.

... Oh... I'm a little late. Still nevermind.

Hope your guys New Years celebrations were fun. My New Years was big load of last-minute-pub-get-together-with-some-friends-with-drinks-and-a-splash-of-karaoke. Not bad. But looking at some old friends' photos of their parties made me think that maybe I should have spent more time catching up with them.

But enough about me, let's talk about me.

And I'm talking about New Years Resolutions.

After stumbling upon Secretia's New Years Resolution list for 2008 I thought to myself "Hell I'll give it a go myself". So I sat down and jotted down a list of things I think I can improve about myself.

And with that, as you all as my witnesses, I wish to present to you in no particular order, my list:

• Keep my room tidy - I thought I can cope with my 'systematic chaos' but really, the ever-creeping piles of crap is getting silly. I'm starting to lose things in my room it's that bad. No more I say!
• Learn Spanish - Just a little pet project I would like to do so that when/if I go to a Spanish speaking place I'll be ready for 'em
• Manage my time better - Between all the long hours spent at work, going to the pub with colleagues, procrastinating and playing games I felt like that I just run out of time to do stuff, or to even do nothing. I want my spare time back dammit!
• Find me a woman and keep her this time - Arguably the hardest and most important item on the list. Still I'm getting better at this woman malarkey...
• Manage my money better - Despite getting a higher paid job last year there still seems to be some plugholes where money seems to drain away. I need to plug them up and I think I know where they are
• Write my blog entries on time - I've been writing several entries in batches instead of a constant stream for a short while now. I don't know if it really a problem but it doesn't seem to be what professional do in the real world, does it?
• Look after my body better - I'm talking about getting back into exercises, eating more fruit and veg, get back into dancing. I let myself go over the months and it's starting to show.
• Spend more time playing with Flash - I've got a couple of ideas I wanna try out.
• Study the mystic arts to become Sorcerer Supreme - I'm sure I can fit that in somewhere...

I'm sure you will agree this list is quite achievable. Only time will tell.

Until 2009.

29 Dec 2007 Christmas 2007 Aftermath

Can you believe it? I sneezed and missed most of it.

The weekend before Christmas Day I spent with my friend and I took the time to spend some quality time with her... and I helped her out with sorting out her Christmas preparations to the sounds of Christmas music and movies into the wee, wee, wee hours of the night. It's wasn't as bad as it sound, she did help me get closer into the Christmas Spirit than I've been in quite some time.

Too bad I picked up a cold somewhere along the way.

So by the time I got to my mums house for the family get together I was progressively getting more and more exhausted. Fortunately is didn't really matter this year.

Normally my mum's clan get together for the usual Christmas rituals. But this year they were scattered all over the place, even as far as Thailand, so it ended up being simply my mum and step-dad for Christmas Day. After the presents and dinner I felt so shattered that I went to bed at around 8:00pm. Fortunately I sweated out most of the cold in the night (quite literally) and was well enough to visit my brother on the Isle Of Wright on Boxing Day. More Christmas rituals on his end, came back the next day, caught up with some friends in Portsmouth (including the gorgeous geek girl Mitu), and discovered the true joy of Doom the Board game! Seriously, if you haven't played it yet, do yourself a favour and try it. Bottles of red wine is optional.

After rounding up with a short visit to my dad up in London and that wraps things up for Christmas 2007. All is left to look forward to this year is New Years Eve.

Oh before I forget. This year I took a fun gamble and took part in Skeddy's Secret Santa event. I sent mine off to my victim and I hope he enjoys it. As for me:



Thank you Secret Santa, where ever you are. ^_^

24 Dec 2007 A message before Christmas

Yeah, I kinda said that I was going to do a huge blog dump after I moved servers. In actual fact all I managed to squeeze in was one week of the Alpha course as an entry. Trouble is I got sidetracked with other things, including shitty long hours at work all week where things kept breaking, trying to sort out all the Christmas presents online, do the social thing with friends Christmas and New Year, it went on and on.

Still, with two weeks holiday time off work that should give me enough time to at least do a proper blog dump (I've got a thing or two about a thing or two to write about), which will be posted before this entry right here, as if nothing unusual is happening.

Till then, it's less than one more sleep till Christmas...

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

18 Dec 2007 Christmas Prank 2007

You know those pranks that people play where they wrap some suckers stuff in newspaper or tinfoil? And oh how people laugh when the victim arrives to see all this stuff wrapped up and then unwraps everything with a strained grin on his face?

Well... I thought I'd try and bring some holiday cheer to one of the guys at work...



Gee, ain't I a stinker? ^_^

14 Oct 2007 Trip to Alton Towers

So my girlfriend, Princess, and I decided to go to Alton Towers this Saturday. It was very last minute, she's a theme park nut and I've never been to Alton Towers before, so all the signs pointed to a fun day out. It was a mixture of highs and lows.

The Highs

• The good rides - Nemesis, Oblivion, and Rita. These rides did to me what rollercoaster rides should do; make me scream like a girl. Air was pretty good, but not as thrilling as the other three.
• The crazy golf - It was a fun couple of hours to waste and Princess managed to win a free game at the end. Not bad for £5 a head
• The garden area - This makes Alton Towers stand out of all the other theme parks. The gardens and the tower itself are quite stunning. Picturesque and make the whole place seem more... authentic and real. It was fun to get lost in it for a while
• One of the queues – There were a couple of people in the Terror of the Tower line that worked at Alton Towers having the afternoon off. It was a couple hours wait and we had a laugh talking about things including some of the stupid things people say to staff members (like “Does the Nemesis ride go upside down”) and some of the ghost hunting they have done. It made the hour wait a lot more bearable. Tip: Always be friendly and chat with the staff, you might get lucky.
• You Day – They started this new feature where they video you riding on selected rides and you can watch it all on DVD. In theory this is cheaper and more fun that getting a photograph. All you need to do is wear a wristband electronic sensor for the day (very Big Brother) and there's no obligation to buy. The pose I did on one of the rides make it worth dong alone.

The Lows

• The crap rides – There were a few lackluster rides that included The Runaway Train and the crappy haunted house with bolted-on laser gun game thingy.
• You Day – The sensor was not picked up on all the rides, we were not allowed to preview the DVD and on one of the ride we were not even on it! They had put some random people on our DVD.
• Terror of the Tower – It was just no scary. The cannibalistic master was not scary. Hell the bill for our dinner was scarier than that fatty. Not worth the 2 hour wait, I could have done a better job at that attraction.
• The dinner - £20 per head?? For a simple buffet meal at the hotel? Are you mad!? We'd been better off going to McDonalds.

Despite the negative it'll be worth going to Alton Towers again properly. With a crowd. And poses on all the rides.

Mind you, isn't it a tad illegal to have video footage of other people without their permission? What with the Data Protection Act and all. I would want people accusing me of anything dodgy or seedy with the footage and stuff.

5 Sep 2007 Grax Friendship Tour 2007: The Wedding

So there I was, Saturday 25th August, the big wedding day.

Not my wedding day mind, my friend Mr M's wedding day.

On this faithful day my friend Mr M was to get married to get married to the lovely Miss A. And this is actually a big deal for me because this is the first wedding I've ever been invited to. I've only ever been invited to the crappy wedding receptions, never the actual wedding. I was going to see how real people actually do weddings, like on those TV shows.

It was all pretty much how you expected it to be, a wedding at a church (they're both Christians after all, as in real life Christians), the bride was absolutely beautiful and radiant, the groom was... coordinating everything right up to the vows (which I feels a bit odd, surely the bride and groom should leave the coordinating to everyone else?), people were dressed up and looked smashing (I looked irresistible in my suit, obviously), there was music from... some local Christian pop rock playing Christian worship music...

Call me narrow minded but I can't help but feel that Christian rock being played in a church to be a bit blasphemous. What about using the traditional wind organ? Or the bagpipes? Such under-rated instruments.

Anyways.

The wedding and vows and "I do" came and went. We all proceeded to the park next door for photos where Miss A got stranded on one spot because she didn't want her dress to get ruined in the dirt. Then we got herded back into the church for dinner, toasts, etc. Because I knew virtually no one at the wedding the bride and groom dumped me on a random table where there was a rather attractive woman sitting across me. So what else could I do but be charming and socialise.

I later found out that Miss A had dumped all the single people on one table in an attempt at match making, which is the same table I was stuck on. That conniving little...

Well her plan worked.

After the dinner and toasting we got shoved out of the main hall as it was to be converted into the dance area. I was distracted by the choir who were singing some tunes with their beautiful harmonic voices. And then the hall was ready for the dance. First it was the traditional "First dance" for the bride and groom. Then it was....

.... The barn dance.

...

Well at least it wasn't a cheesy wedding disco. It didn't get me dancing though.

The night came to a close, I somehow got roped into helping clearing up the church at the end of the wedding (I could never say no to a beautiful woman), then I retired to a friend house to sleep and reflect upon what had happened that day. When I say friend I mean my newly acquired lady friend that I met across the dinner table. I left for home a few days later than I had originally planned.

5 Sep 2007 Real Life backlog

Eeesh. What a busy two weeks. Overworked, lack of fun time, two major events. It's enough to drive a guy away from his blog.

You're just dying for more details aren't you?

24 Aug 2007 Grax and the Autism Study - Cancelled

Due to personal and family related reasons I will not be continuing with the Autism study. For one thing, I hear tell that it's not a good idea to have your brain scanned in a machine unless you need to.

Best to keep those people happy.

22 Aug 2007 Grax's Friendship Tour 2007: The School Reunion

This weekend was a very special episode of Grax's Friendship Tour because Grax got to see his old secondary school friends. Well, some of them anyway.

Over the past few months these school chums have been adding themselves to Facebook and then one of them had a bright idea of having a reunion in a pub in London, which is ironic seeing as we all went to school in ye olde town of Fareham. Details details.

So a chance to see various people I've not seen in nearly 10 years to compare myself to them? A chance to show off how successful and good looking I've become (I use to be a fat nerd in school)? You bet your ass I want in on the action.

The plan was simple.

Head to Harlandos house, get the train to London, get into the pub, show off, get kudos, come out victorious. There was a slight snag with the plan...

I'd picked up some food poisoning a couple days before and it didn't go away in time. It was hard to control the toxic rotten-egg stench that erupted from my gut and the liquid that came out of my ass. But I wasn't gonna let a little food poisoning ruin my night.

So I soldiered on, with medicine and all.

So Harlandos and I got to the pub and we were greeted by two girls that we know from school, the two that organised the reunion. They were part of the hot girls group in school (you know, the kind that where obviously good looking and knew it, who didn't really talk to the nerds). It was shocking to see that looks wise they've not changed one bit, it's as if they've not grown up. They complimented on how much weight I lost and how good I looked.

Compliments from hotties. The plan was working like a charm.

So we got the drinks in and waited for the rest of the ex-pupils to trickle into the pub.

Out of the hundred-odd people in the class of '98, out of the 30-odd people that signed up to Facebook and knew the group, only 9 in total turned up. And the only person I talked to was Harlandos. And again, virtually none of them had changed since I last saw them.

More compliment about my good looks. The plan was working like a charm.

But alas my food poisoning was getting the better of me. As the night progressed my trips to the pub toilet became more frequent, the stuff coming out becoming more and more liquidly as I simply run out of food matter in my gut. It became increasing difficult to juggle having conversations with old school chums, two randomly girls in the pub I ended up talking to, and making more frequent trips to the toilet. People were ending up getting disappointed (well, more drunk really). It was taking a toll on poor old Grax.

So I bid my farewell to the group and retired to Harlandos house. After missing one of the train because I needed to hit the toilet again just before the train was about to leave and it didn't have a toilet inside it. The cads!

It was cool seeing everyone again and I'm definitely gonna do a 10 year school reunion next year, whether they know it or not. And we'll do it properly. Well make everyone go back to Ye Olde Fareham and rent out the sports hall and make everyone dress up in smart clothes (or better yet the old uniform!) and drink punch from the fruit punch bowl that has been spiked. Just like they do in the tv shows! Hopefully next time I'll be less ill.

Food poisoning; it's a pain in the ass.

30 Jul 2007 Grax and the Autism Study pt 1

I am helping mankind by partaking in an Autism study.

About a month ago I noticed a flyer from the local Oxford hospital asking for voulenteers to partake in an Autsim study. I figured "Hey why not. It might be fun to do and I might learn a bit about myself". So I called up the number on the flyer and voulenteered myself.

Last week I got the call and made my way to the hospital to show them how Grax thinks. Half an hour late mind, but Grax showed up none the less.

I was interviewed and test by a thin, nerdy (in a cute way) woman about my age. She sat me down in an isolated room and we made small talk before getting down to business. The first set of tests involved words and their definition. At first they were simple words like 'bird', 'wheel', 'day', etc. But then they became harder and more abstract. What is the definition of 'Number', 'purpose', 'haste', 'excitement'? The more words she came up with, the more I realised that I uses words without actually knowing their full meaning. I felt my charming powers against this nerdy hottie fading.

It was enough to make one feel very simple indeed.

The next test I was given a series of cubes with coloured sides and I had to copy the patterns that were shown in a book. That was simple enough to do and I got all but the last one correct, because I didn't look at it from the right angle.

By this point my mind was spend and I wanted to nap (the fact that I was up till 2:00am and woke up at 7:00am didn't help either). But still more tests had to be done. The last test involved me staring at a computer screen and copying the movement of the fingers on the screen. For 15 minutes. This test was mind-numbing. I'm sure I had actually nodded off to sleep for a split second or two several times. Afterwards the cute nerd told me that she sympathised with me. Which is nice.

There's more to the study that features a huge brain scanner of some kind, but the scanner was down for maintanance so I have to wait till it's repaired.

More to come in the future. Stay tuned!

30 Jul 2007 Grax goes Wii Wii Wii all the way home

I was at my friends house the other weekend and I got to try out a Nintendo Wii. Last Saturday I had an impulse, tripped and 'accidentally' bought a Wii for myself. It's pretty fun, though truth be told I'm having more fun playing with my Mii and Everybody Votes feature than the games I got with it.

I'm trying not to hand my credit card to the Wii Shopping channel and blowing all my money on all the Virtual Console games. So many classics. So little time...

Edit: Do you have a Wii? Do you wanna be Grax's Wii friend? of course you do and now you can! All you gotta do is register the following Wii Number on your Wii:

5884-0620-2454-0126

You can even email my Wii without using the rubbish "Wii" email address. I set up a forwarding address so to email my Wii all you need to use this the email addess below:



Easy huh? Onwards to the Mii Parade!

8 Jul 2007 Uncle Grax

I'm going to be an uncle.

I got a phone call from my brother today late in the morning. Turns out his partners pregnancy test was positive and going to be a dad in the near future. Well in nine months time to be more precise.

I'm pleased for him and wish him and his sprog lots of warm wishes.

My brother is always two steps ahead of me. The fact that he's three years older than me is besides the point.

29 Jun 2007 The Day I was 25

It's my brithday today and I am now a quater of a century years old. I'm getting on bit now.

...

I suppose I'd better find me a wife or something. Any takers?

13 Jun 2007 Dream Theater in Newcastle: Doing it for the fans

Last Saturday I was in Newcastle with my good friend Mr WiGz. What was I doing up there? Why I was seeing one of the most well-known prog rock bands Dream Theater. And I gotta say that they are pretty good. Well worth the ticket money.

They started off with a good couple of songs, then did a couple of songs from their new album 'Systematic Chaos', namely 'Constant Motion' and 'Forsaken'. Afterwards they did something special. Because it was their 15th anniversary of somethingorother they spent the rest of the night playing every song from their Images and Words album.

Like I said they were pretty damn good. It was like listening to their CD, but only like in person. It did done make me all smiley and singy and such.

It was pretty odd looking at the crowd though. It was full of old men. I'm talking grey, balding long hair, geeky looking. would partly explain their choice of playing their old stuff to please the fans. That There was not one fit looking girl in the whole place. There were some kids there too, no doubt they were dragged along by their dads. "C'mon Timmy, you'll love Dream Theater. YOU WILL!!"

Also it was unfortunate for DT front man James Labrie. His choice of cream coloured shirt and trouser really brought up his sweat patches. Most notably the one around his crotch area. I bet the front row guys and girls got more than they were expecting.

4 Jun 2007 Grax's Friendship Tour 2007

Grax has been on the road and so far it's been fun.

For the past month of May I've been hitting the road and visiting some of my past friends because dammit, it's been too long since I've seen most of my friends since moving out of Portsmouth all those years ago and I wanna see how they're all doing. Plus I can imagine seeing me would bring smiles and sunshine into my friends heart as well, so everybody's a winner.

The first weekend of May I travelled back to my old Uni town, Portsmouth, to see the roleplaying friends that I use to have fun with when I was suppose to be studying. This included the fabulous Meebles (who's website, at the time of writing, has been offline for month!) The weekend was spent catching up, going to a joint birthday party (Meebles and another guy), and playing a round of Talisman where we all got screwed over by the quiet one because we were too nice to him. Bless his cotton socks.

The second weekend of May I travelled down to Basingstoke to attend a wedding. Well... wedding reception to be exact. I was visiting my salsa class friends that I left when I moved up to Oxford. After all two of those salsa friends were getting married that day so I figured I would arrive and give them my blessings and give blessings all round... Not that they needed Grax's blessing or anything. It was rather jolly watching the happy couple for a moment, but I left qjuite early in the evening. I didn't book a place to stay in Basingstoke and... I guess I wasn't quite in the joining-in mood that night.

One the third weekend of May I ventured to Fareham to see my old school chums. This was the best time I had so far in my tour because, despite not seeing my Fareham friends for a good year or so, the moment I walked through the door it was like I had not left. We were laughing and joking away with jokes that is only funny if you happen to be there at the time (the best line of the night was "Take it Copper!"). Without a plan at hand I came up with the idea of spending the night in with junk food, beers and some DVD, just like the good old days. Pure nostalgic bliss.

On the forth weekend of May was a double whammy. Saturday I travelled to Swindon to catch up with an old friend of mine where she tells me stories of how she's getting her life back on track. Which, y'know, major kudos to her. I could tell she got a kick out of me visiting her... Well she would have gotten a kick out of anyone visiting her to be fair. Swindon is not exactly the liveliest place to be in England. I can relate to that. Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday was spent back in Fareham for a few games of Third Edition Shadowrun, where even the rain was powerless to stop our enjoyment.

Hell even last Friday I manage to squeeze in a few rounds of cider and port with an old home town friend that now lives in Oxford, where he introduced me to some of his many friends. I feel my social network rising.

The past month has been a fun tour, but it's not over. The Summer holidays are coming and I've got many-a-friends left on my hitlist.

Anyone else want a visit from Grax? Let me know.

20 Apr 2007 First week in Oxford

How's it going? I've had my first week in Oxford and so far so good.

For those who don't know what's going on in my life I was offered a new job in Oxford. It promised me a decent advancement in my career (read that however you wish) and I took it. I handed in my noticed in my old job a month ago and, although they were sad to see me go, they wished me well. Standard issue stuff; pub lunch, gift, card, cake, hand shakes, and so on. Still I am going to miss all the people downstairs...

I wonder if they've found my replacement yet.

So back to my new job in Oxford. From now on I am no longer a web developer by profession; henceforth I am focusing my skills upon Flash and Actionscript to develop games. Finally, a chance for me to pull my finger out of my ass and do some Flash games. Plus the company is brand new, so we've gotta make everything from scratch, which is good for me as I likes making things from scratch.

The guys at work are nice enough, not really had a chance to get to know them in great detail as we're focusing on work. The only real except is my boss. The weekend I moved into my new house in Oxford he invited me out to a mini pub crawl across Cowley Road to get me familiar with the area. This is quite odd for me; a boss man being friendly and social? But still I went, had a few drinks with him, chatted, and found out he's a pretty nice guy. And I'm not just saying that because my boss is probably reading this entry.

It seems to be the norm, being very friendly and social in Oxford, not like it was back in Andover. The night I moved to my new house my housemate invited me to the pub, paid for all my drinks (as I was short on cash at the time), and even paid for my takeaway (again, short on cash). The new house has two students and a hippy librarian and they have a student, laid back attitude to life, which suits me perfectly. Not sure if I like being the oldest in the house though....

So yeah first week in Oxford is good. Nice job, nice people, nice house, en suite, what more is needed?

Well I needs an Internet connection. It's been a week since I've been able to play Second Life.

Um yeah.... Second Life... That'd probably justify another article.

9 Apr 2007 Psychic blessings for the Oxford move

I'm thinking that everything is going to be A-OK when I move to my new bungalow in Oxford.

My mum helped me move the majority of my stuff from my old room in Andover to the new room in Oxford. After the packing and drive I showed her around the house then showed her all the inside. Her response was...

"Oh my God I saw this house in my dream! All these rooms are exactly the same as the one in my dream! I can't believe I dreamt this. I thought it was me and your step-dad moving to the house, but now I know it's was you Grax!"

She spent the rest of the day feeling all giddy and happy knowing that her son will be living in the house that she dreamt of.

So there you go. An omen from my psychic mummy that all will be well.

19 Mar 2007 My dancing fun up in Hull

Last weekend for me was pretty damn good.

I went up to Hull to see my old Uni friend Mr WiGz, he's doing a Masters up there so he's reliving the student life again. Most of the time we spent playing on his Nintendo Wii and now I want one. But that's not the main reason for this entry.

We (namely, me Mr WiGz and his chums) went to a nightclub called Spiders, which is located in the middle of some intustrial park. There's three or four rooms which plays rock and metal (except for one room that played various happy/cheesy tunes) and everyone was on the dance floor flailing their limbs like mad.

Never underestimate the power and joy of dancing like an idiot. You'll feel so much better for doing it.

Yes you will get mocked at (I myself was given the 'loser L on forehead' look by some random girl) but the jokes on them! Cos you know that you're dancing like a prat and it's funny, you'd doing it on purpose and not trying to act cool. So the fact that they're laughing at your antics makes it even more funny because they don't get it.

Ha! I win....

14 Mar 2007 This just in...

I've handed in my notice at work. Oxford here I come!

5 Mar 2007 Bad news (for me anyway)

Well.... uh....

My girlfriend and I....

We broke up....

Until further notice...

Last weekend we had the same relationship-ending argument that we had in January this year. The exact same argument. We could have ended it back then but we wanted to try and work things out, make 'us' better. I could see us having this exact same argument over and over again, with neither of us really doing anything about it.

So, with a heavy heart, we broke up...

Until further notice.

The best thing to happen to us (well to me anyway) and it got ruined.

16 Feb 2007 Birthday note/I.O.U.

I've written a note. If you can't read the image below then click here to see a larger version.

19 Jan 2007 The day The Grax Domain was famous

A few months ago I submitted The Grax Domain to I Talk 2 Much, a site that reviews other site and give them some critical pointers. Today I got my review from Heartless Lass and I did feel good about it. Her main pointers included "Not boring, but not exciting", "had some nice touches to it (namely the theme preview pop-up)", "had fun with the Magic 8 Ball", and "need more interesting flash than finding love or making a cup of tea". Overall I got 1 smack out of 5, which was better than I thought it would be, I was expecting a kick in the nuts.

Now you'd think that this would be enough excitement a site should have for one day. Oh no, it gets better than that.

Later one today my site got hacked.

A humble little site like The Grax Domain, getting hacked by some punk-ass kid with a kiddie-script that was probably found online and ran the script on his PC while he was jacking off to his latest daily harvest of pornography wearing his mummy's bra and panties. You can only imagine how happy that make me. And he (or she, equal rights and all) managed to pull the old 'index page switcharoo' trick on me, leaving other files intact. How talented. Truely I am blessed.

Think of the ratings!

Naturally when the people at I Talk 2 Much found out my page was hacked they rightly crossed out my review (with a strike tag) and said "Fuck off. kthxbia", thusly screwing over my credibility there and no doubt screwing my chances for a re-review in the near future. But I don't mind. I'm still feeling the high that is my site being hack. How many people can say that? I think I'll go and buy a lottery ticket tomorrow, I wanna use my lucky vibes while I still got them.

This stuff is liquid gold!

So I want to thank everyone at I Talk 2 Much for all the useful comments, I've taken them on board. But I want to give a special thanks to my hacker, Mr.BuRzUm, who has not only blessed my site, but many other sites with his 'leet' skills and his trademark front page. I wish everyone to join me in his appraisal. Thanks every so much Mr.BuRzUm, ya numpty!


That Mr.BuRzUm, what a guy (or girl). There's just not enough nice things to say about this legendary hacker. I'm feel all glowy inside.

Yes, we have no bananas!

9 Jan 2007 Help! I've been spoofed!

Over the holidays I've noticed that my email account was accumulating lots of "Undelivered Mail returning" emails from various place. The trouble is I didn't actually send out any emails to all those people. Which leads me to one conclusion; my email address is being ill-used for spam emailing.

I takes a closer look into the failed email and it's plaster with my @graxdomain email address with various characters bolted on to the begin. So far I've received 168 failed emails. I hate to think about how many successful spams have been sent out.

I am quite miffed, as I'm sure you can imagine.

I've notified my webhost provider, who says that they'll look into it. I did a quick search on the Internet and learnt that this kind of spamming is called 'Spoofing' or something like that. I need to do more research to see if it's actually possible to stop this abuse.

Has anyone else been a victim of spoofing? How did you cope/deal with it?

4 Jan 2007 Happy (belate) New Year, 2007 style

A bit of friendly advice. If you ever plan to celebrate New Years Eve on the streets of St. Ives, Cornwall in fancy dress costume (like I did, I was a pirate! Albeit a bit of a pantomime-style pirate) wrap up warm! Whether you wrap up in many layers or in a thick beer coat is purely up to you.

At least I managed to see some fireworks on the beach.

23 Dec 2006 A multi-lingual festive message

Happy Christmas
Navidad feliz
glückliches Weihnachten
gelukkige Kerstmis
Noël heureux
ευτυχή Χριστούγεννα
natale felice
christmas feliz
счастливое рождество
행복한 크리스마스
幸せなクリスマス
愉快的圣诞节

20 Dec 2006 Xmas Work Party 2006

Last night was the Christmas work party thing. We all went up to London for the afternoon, staying the night at a Travel Lodge hotel thingy, browsed around Tate Modern (where the latest exhibition is a bunch of slides that people can, well, slide down), ate at a tasty yet crowded Italian restaurant, watched the Blue Man Group, and then ended the evening with a few pints at a pub (to which four of us parted with the group and wondered around London talking about ways of making the world better till 01:00am, whilst the rest went to bed at sensible times. Pansies. They missed out on the nipple-erecting coldness of the streets.)

Nothing fantastic or interesting to report, just the same old, same old. Chances are you can just skip this entry.

11 Dec 2006 The sound of one hand tapping

I noticed that it had been quite a while since my desktop PC had seen any action. And there's a very good reason for that; it's cpu fan. My God is it loud! You could hear it when you were in the other side of the house. It's like a five year old kid screaming really loudly in a high pitch voice in the supermarket, and you're trying to sush it up but it won't and everyone starts staring at you with their disapproving eyes. It's not my fault, that was what came with the package! Stop staring!

Anyway it was time for me to do something about this. Time for a new cooling fan. Something very quiet, something silent.

Now my desktop, once in its prime back in 2002, is an older timer so I will be limiting it to be the dedicated DVD player with extra gubbins rather than a pwer gamers PC. It's an Athlon XP with a Socket A motherboard so my choices were gonna be limited. I did consider getting a Zalman Super Flower Cooler. After all it's big, quiet, made of copper, it's bound to be silent, right? But I'm feeling a bit cheap and didn't want to shell out that much money for just a fan.

Then my friend WiGz gave me some guidance. He pointed me to this charming fan, the Arctic Cooling Copper Silent 3 Socket A CPU Cooler. That's more like it. It seems to be just as good on paper and it's the third of the price.

So I got it, fitted it in my PC and, well, hear for yourselves:

Before with the old fan
After with the new fan
After with the new fan and pc case fan disconnect

A quieter PC and cooler too. Bargain! Definately worth having if you need it.

Now I can enjoy my collection in peace.

30 Nov 2006 Unconscious Mutterings 001

1. Rhyme :: Thyme
2. Substantial :: Money
3. Instant :: Coffee
4. Greed :: is good
5. Brad :: Majors (Asshole!)
6. Season :: tickets
7. Accomplished :: Accomplishment
8. Invite :: Invitation
9. Sparkle :: Sparkle
10. Rainbow :: Six

Unconscious Mutterings

29 Nov 2006 The week I was in Plymouth

Last week my girlfriend and I had ourselves a week off work to go on holiday. The exotic location we decided to go to was in the south of England, to sunny Plymouth, a few hours drive away from my house. Well it wasn't really sunny. In fact it rained most of the time we were there. That's Cornish weather for ya.

But despite the rains we had a really good, chilled-out time.

We stayed in a little cottage place in a village just outside of Plymouth. The house was great, so nice and cosy. The kind of place you just want to lounge around on those sleepy days and not do much, especially in front of the log fire. So it was ok that it rained most of the time. The only real complaint about the place was the parking. It was like trying to slide in between two round people at the supermarket, only their flesh is not soft but more like jagged rocks that'll scratch your paintwork if you mess up. The danger was there almost every day. Very cramped indeed.

A lot of time was spent lounging around the house but we did get to do other things. We saw friends in Plymouth and I was shown around the shopping centre and The Barbican, the older part of the city near the coast filled with trinket shops and other oddities. The whole place reminded me of Southsea in Portsmouth, only more posh and smarter.

I also did something that I don't do very often; I walked around the area. We set off on mini-hike around the area to take in the country atmosphere, as well as the rocky beaches nearby. I was even given a cheap pair of wellies for my feet by my girlfriend, so I could stomp around in the mud. Which I did.

I felt like how I looked; dashing.

On the day before the day we had to return home we went to our last destination; The Eden Project in Cornwall. It's essentially a huge garden in an old expired clay mine area in Cornwall with a couple of bio-domes that contain more exotic plants from place like the tropics and the Mediterranean. Again the weather was rainy and miserable but it didn't dampen our experience one bit. It was a shame there were no animals save for a few robins that managed to get into the domes but I guess the focus is plants so it's to be expected. Despite my initial reservations I ended up enjoying the whole experience, being around nature (in an artificial way). Even after I learnt another interesting fact about myself when I was skating around the ice rink:

I can't skate very well.

In fact it took me 40 minutes, the entire session, for me to actually do baby-steps (or is it baby-skates) around the ice rink rather than flaying my arms around like it was going out of style, gripping on the edge for dear life, and generally causing a traffic jam.

The last day came and we had to drive home, but not until we stop by some tourist traps, namely the Otters and Butterfly sanctuary and the House of Marbles.

So that was my week off.

8 Nov 2006 Oh S---, we ain't in Kansas no more

Last Friday was the same week as Halloween and a few days before Guy Fawkes Day, so naturally there was a Halloween/fireworks party involved. Any old excuse to get dressed up right? Anyway my girlfriend and I were invited to this party hosted by a couple of friends of ours and we thought it'd be good to go as one theme, like a couple and stuff. We decided on The Wizard of Oz, she went as the Wicked Witch of the West and she looked pretty darn good too. But what was I to go as?

Then I had a brainwave.

And this is the result...




Not the best photos ever but you get the idea. Thankfully there are some better photos taken by other.

Anyway we attended the party and it was rather spiffy. Everyone made a really good effort dressing up as various things (including a guy dressed up as Dr. Frank-N-Furter from the Rocky Horror Picture Show). For some reason the hostess couldn't stop laughing at my costume. I thought I looked rather good actually.

After a few drink a few of us decided to do a test run on the fireworks in the back garden. So a rocket was planted at the end of the garden about 5 metres away from everyone. It was a bitter cold night and I was feeling the full effects of it. Still I suffered to look good. The rocket was lit and it started to shoot up into the air.

But something went wrong.

Somehow the end of the rocket got knocked and it started spinning wildly out of control. And it headed straight for us! We all tried to scatter away from the sparkly banger but there wasn't much room. I remember doing nothing more than stepping a few steps away and cowering, fearing for my limbs. Sparks were flying and the hissing of the rocket could be heard, time was running out.

It then went off. With a nice big bang and a white flash. I bet it's the closest thing I'll get to experiencing a flash bang grenade going off near me.

We all looked around to see if anyone was hurt. Luckily no one was hurt, just a little bit deaf and shooken up. However my pretty dress got burnt and I had a hole in it! Not good.

Still the party carried on, we all mingled and had fun and we even ended the night with more fireworks, although some of us stayed indoors for safety.

Now, what am I going to do with my ruby-red Vans?

24 Oct 2006 Grax has left his mark

I wrote my entry on the History Matters website. It's going through moderation I believe and when it's available to view I'll stick on the link to it for all to see.

... Man, it was a pretty dull day. I doubt anyone from the future will get anything out of it.

EDIT: Aha! Found it. I found my entry on the History Matters website for all to see. You might learn something.

22 Oct 2006 A day out at Thrope Park, now with chunky puke

This weekend me and my girlfriend thought it would be grand to spend a day at a theme park, Thorpe Park to be precise. The other motivation was for me to see my old friend Harlandos, whom I haven't seen for a long time and also used to work at Thorpe Park, so he had free tickets and could get us on the rides without queuing. It's good to have connections.

For those people who have never been I would have to say that it is better than Chessington's World of Adventure, Legoland, and Paultons Park (it's a hoot hoot). I'm sure that Alton Towers kicks all buttocks in the field of theme parks but I've not been there yet.

Still the four of us (me, missus, Harlandos, and his missus) braved all the rides and dodgy foods and we all had lots of fun. Even me, despite me being a bit of a pussy...

Because of the Vortex...

Which I went on after having a burger...

I tried to keep it in my mouth for as long as I could but I couldn't stand the chunky stomach juice in my mouth any longer. I had to empty my mouth on the nearest bush. I was reassured that it was better to throw up on the bushes rather than in the bins.

I didn't really want to ride on anything else afterwards.

Still, keeping vomit in my mouth for about a minute. That's gotta be worth some kudos... right....?

18 Oct 2006 Grax will leave his mark

There is a calling out to all the british people. A call to record their day in a nationwide blog for future generations to read. Simply put the History Matters website is giving people the chance to write between 100 and 650 words about their day. It can be about anything, from important political events to the colour of your poo. This window of opportunity is from the 17^th to 31^st October 2006.

I intend to leave my mark in history. And I hope it to be a pretty and smelly mess.

I will leave my mark on Tuesday 24^th October 2006. I predict that day will be most eventful. Well it better be or else I'll be going into stupid levels of detail to fill up the page. But will 650 words be enough? After all, it's taken me 149 words just to write this entry so far.

Hey you Britons, this'll be fun. Why not leave your mark on history by clicking here.

Those poor future generations...

25 Sep 2006 Mystery noise of Andover

On Saturday 23rd September 2006 at precisely 04:00 or 05:00am(ish) my sleep was disturbed by a loud noise. The sound was like a huge explosion had gone off a few miles away from my home, like something had blown up. Feeling curious I donned my dressing gown and went to the front door to see if I can see what the commotion was about. I saw nothing except the night, and then it began to rain heavy. So I went to bed and thought nothing more of it, discarding the noise to be nothing more than heavy thunder.

It wasn't until today, whist at the post office was I reminded of that night. I had overheard some old man's conversation about a loud noise that went off that night. I interrupted and stated that I heard the same noise too. The more I asked the locals the more I realised that I was not the only person to be disturbed by the noise.

However it did rain heavy after the loud noise, so most people thought it was just thunder.

... But what if it wasn't just thunder....?

... What if it was something else....?

14 Sep 2006 Pancake: test run

I've just done a test run of making pancakes (wholemeal style). I've used the recipe described at cooks.com.

I've eaten one of the pancakes.

I feel like I've gained 50 lbs instantly.

I've still got another 8 pancakes to get rid of.

A good test run methinks. ^_^

5 Sep 2006 Steve Irwin: RIP

Steve Irwin died on the weekend of the 2^nd September 2006. He died from a stingray attack.

The world has lost a truly entertaining man and a gentleman. He will be missed.

5 Sep 2006 5 day weekend, featuring Patrick Stewart and Cardiff

Ah the Bank Holiday Weekend of August, the last English bank holiday that we get for the year. Many people take this opportunity to go away somewhere for a break, a mini vacation if you will. Course I'm no different.

MY girlfriend (M) and I decided to go away for the weekend, taking a couple days off work to give us lots of time. The vacation came in two halves; the first half (handled by me) was to head on up to Stratford-Upon-Avon to see a theatre performance, whilst the second half (handled by her) was to stay round her friends house near Cardiff, Wales and to chill for a few days, take in the local sites, etc. So how did the two halves fit together? How was it? Was it all jolly?

After spending a night in Warwick in a cheap motel we headed out to Stratford-Upon-Avon to get to the Royal Shakespeare Company theatre. It was my first time in Stratford and I quite liked what I saw. Old school Victorian look to the buildings, quirky street performances and monuments, generally clean. I didn't understand why some high-brow newspapers called Stratford a money-grabbing hell hole. Though the crank driven ferry to cross a 5 meter river that you had to pay 50p a head, when there was a bridge that crossed the river ten minutes walk away, was a bit too gimmicky for my liking.

Anyway we got to the theatre in plenty of time and sat in our seat ready to see the performance. What were we to see? Shakespeare's last ever play, The Tempest. Why? My reason was because it had Patrick Stewart as the one of the main actors! Damn straight! And he was, nay is a fine actor indeed. The way he acted made you forget all his previous works and concentrate on the now. My only regret was that we were too far to see him in great detail. Go see him if you ever get the chance.

After seeing the show M and I had several hours left until we needed to drive to Wales. So we decided to look at a few things, have a meal and even do a little bit of rowing on the river. We hired out a boat, I grabbed onto the oars and I began our voyage. It was then I learn something about myself.

I'm very, very bad at rowing.

And that my girlfriend is better at rowing than me.

As she smugly confirmed as she took over and spent most of the time rowing us around the river.

(Course what she might not tell you is that she sails a lot in her spare time so of course she's had lot of practice. It was my first time.... essentially. That's my excuse.)

After our fun time in Stratford we headed off to M's friends house in Wales. So two hours, lots of singing to music in the car and several calls from a stalker girl later (which my girlfriend handled beautifully by answering the phone and confusing the stalker) we arrive. For the next three days we spent our time chilling, watching DVDs, looking round shop, taking in the local countryside (which is beautiful mountain range), and drinking lots of wine. Not to get completely bladdered, but it was a case of drinking wine at every moment. We only saw things near the Cardiff area, it'd be nice to see more of Wales.

We even managed to get a chance to visit the Avebury Stones as a detour before going home. As well as the usual stone sights there was a stand that was selling yearly memberships to the National Trust. M and I looked at each and though "This is something you join when you're officially old."

It was a pretty fun 5 day Bank Holiday weekend. Granted that was on the 25^th-29^th August, two weeks ago. But hell, I've been busy with stuff. Including cooking my first ever roast over the last weekend. I am truly a man of the house!

25 Aug 2006 Twinkies: The final verdict

In my teenage years I went to the USA with my Dad and his girlfriend at the time for a holiday. I also took my old school friend along. We had
fun during the two weeks. One day my Dad bought a twelve pack of twinkies. I was excited; I was going to get the infamous twinkie I've
heard so much about on TV (mainly the Simpsons quote made by Apu "Silly customer, you cannot hurt a twinkie!")

However my dreams were to be shattered when I discovered my friend had eaten them all like a glutton. I didn't even get to look at a twinkie,
let alone try one. To this day I still hold a faint feeling of animosity towards him, and a heavy feeling in my heart that I may never get to try
the golden treat in my lifetime...

Until now. Thanks to my girlfriend, after her two week training/holiday in America, she brought me back a packet of twinkies! My face lit up with joy. Ladies and gentlemen I present to you The Twinkie™:



I unwrapped the packaging like a child on Easter with a grin on my face. I carefully peeled one from the wrapper and I took a bite out of it...

It was the taste of disappointment.

It didn't taste very good at all. The cake and the cream had a really nasty chemically sensation. It felt really artificial in my mouth. The
more I chewed the less I liked but I had to finish the twinkie I had in my hand. So I ended it, thus my dreams of enjoying a twinkie had ended too.

All this for a buck 25. My girlfriend and I got ripped-off.

This is the cake-like delight that has Americans ranting on about it? It's nasty! What's wrong with you people??

15 Aug 2006 It's a-coming... Something... Newer...

Bear with me a while will ya?

I'm working on an update for a part of the Grax Domain. Fact is I've been working on-off it for the past few months (mostly because I've been distracted by everything).

Anyway, there's a fair bit to do but it's the home stretch.

Here's hoping I get something by the end of this weekend. ^_^

6 Aug 2006 [insert good title here]

*Steal funny idea for entry from this site*

[Insert funny and witty entry here]

*Feel a wee bit shameful and naughty*

13 Jul 2006 The sensations of a battered Mars™ bar

I feel that it's my civic duty to tell people aroud the world about the wonderous sensations of a battered Mars™ bar, a traditional food from Scotland. Fortunately their happens to be a place in England that also served this mystical fried log and I was in the right place at the right time.

I was with some of my friend last Friday night. We were at a pub, had a few drinks (except for me, I was designated driver) and had a jolly good time. And what better way to round off an evening than to go to the local kebab house for a greasy, disgusting and unhealthy kebab or burger. So that's what we did. I wasn't feeling particularly hungery when I noticed on the menu that they were service the battered Mars™ bar. Feeling curious as well as adventurous I asked for a battered Mars™ bar. This is what I was presented with...



I admit it's not much to look at, but watch the following reaction below...




The sensations of a battered Mars™ bar

Says it all really does it?

Oh yeah one last thing. Is it me or does this poster seem a little wrong?

7 Jul 2006 Mobile Phone Test

Hmm... I wonder if I can make entries from my mobile phone... This is a test from my mobile phone.How quirky would that be if I could. :-)

5 Jul 2006 The Aftermath of the Day I Turned 24

Right, now that's out of the way (and I'm in front of a computer with a net connection) I'm gonna tell you all how my birthday celebrations went. It's a tale of t-shirts, cakes, a sword, and an award show. There's pictures too.




EDIT: Good news, I've finally got my Internet connection back in my house again! Huzzah! Now I can get back to the routine of things again.

29 Jun 2006 The Day I was 24

It's my birthday as of right now. There's only another 14 hours left until it's over.

Let the praise and present giving begin!

26 Jun 2006 [Generic "I'm still here" title #1]

It's amazing the kind of stuff that happens when you're away from the Internet for two weeks.

I'm still not properly connected to the Internet in my house yet. I'm still resorting to stealing my neighbours wireless connection using the laptop that I really should be returning (it's like the guy doesn't want it back or something). But I'm still gonna write anyway.

Since I've been gone for two weeks I've been on a bit of a forced detox of Second Life. I've not been able to play the game at all and act as resident British DJ for various Second Life clubs and such. Also, I've been out of the social loop for far too long, and I wonder how easy it will be to shoe-horn my way back into the game. I'm not sure if I want to though. Which is a shame in a way seeing as I've just paid for another four months of game time. No biggie, it's only about £12. I love the strong british currency sometimes. But the truth is I've not missed Second Life for one simple reason...

There's finally a woman out there who realises that I'm quite a catch and she said "Go out with me" and I said "Luv to". And frankly all the other women in the world have missed out. Sorry, y'all had your chance, but you can't have me anymore. I'm off the menu. I've got a good feeling about this woman, and it's not just the one in my pants. I'm going to do all I can to return the favour to her in any way I can.

I've also been having lots of dreams that I can remember when I wake (I'm still not used to falling asleep with another person yet so I tend to wake up easily after only getting a few horus kip.) Fortunately I've make a note of them and I'll write them all out for your viewing pleasure over the next week. Gives you've a reason to keep coming back.

Finally (the main reaon why I'm writing despite not being officially online) I've been listed on 25peeps.com so I figure that I'd make a mention of it here. It was a fun thing I registered for back in April and now I finally got put on it... Bout time too.

11 Jun 2006 Wot?? No net?? Not again!

Ah crap

One of my housemates is moving out of the house in a few days time to a bigger place. Good for him I say. There's just one little problem... He's taken his Internet connection with him too! I now have no net connection as of yesterday. That selfish sonovabitch! The fact that he warned me about this two weeks ago, giving me plenty of time to sort this out, is besides the point.

This is not all doom and gloom however. My other housemate has a laptop that has a wireless network adapter built in, and it just so happens that one of our neighbours has a wireless network that has no form of protection on it. Soooo.... ^_^

I'm only 'borrowing' the connection very briefly so that I can write this out.... And check on my mail... And look at my regular sites... That's it. Hopefully I'll have something sorted out by the end of this week.

8 Jun 2006 Hair update 1

I'm still loosing my hair.

It's not good. I try my best to style it using gels of stiffness. But every morning, as I wash my hair ready for the new day, I see strands of hair. Not just a couple, I'm talking about a dozen individual hairs removed from their siblings. I get the feeling that my scalp is now starting to get a tan.

What gives?? I eat (kinda) healthy, I'm not as stressed at work as I was about a month ago, I've even forced myself to stop playing Second Life as much so I can get decent nights sleep (that was a toughie to pull off). But still I see my fringe and hairline recess further and further back, revealing my thick bone-head.

It's not that I mind going bald. In fact I'd be quite happy to shave my head and hate my baldness with pride. Hell I'm looking forward to the moment when I can say things like "I'm a mere child of 82" so that I am young at heart. But these are things I'm expecting when I'm in my thirties and beyond, I'm in my early twenties and I need to look good 24/7 (ha!). I struggle enough to look half decent. I don't need the extra hassle of making my thin hair lok half decent. The molting needs to stop now!

I tell you this much; I am not going to resort to surgically grafting my pubic hair from my ass or crotch onto my head. The texture's all wrong for one thing.

4 Jun 2006 Lets go fly a kite...

I went to the Annual Kite Festival in Basingstoke yesterday and I got sunburnt by the hot sun. How's that for random?

20 May 2006 A quick to-do list

OK now that I have some free time on my hands (in theory) I'm going to use this time to sort out various web projects of mine that really need to be finished. These are the things I plan on resolving:

1. Update my Cv (most important)
2. Update the Magic 8 Ball (it's looking shoddy and I'm getting sick of cleaning out the spam every 10 minutes)
3. Give The Art of Grax site a complete restructure (it still uses tables! *shudders* Bad Grax!), as well as trying to throw in some pictures into it
4. Tweak The Grax Domain in various ways

The first point is the most important thing that needs to be dealt with and I hope to complete it by the end of this weekend. The other stuff can be dealt with at a later date.

In unrelated news I've been loosing a couple of things; first off I'm still loosing my hair. Not a good thing, I was hoping by some miracle it would be growing back now that stress levels are not so high. But oddly enough I've also lost some weight somehow! I've lost an inch off my belly in the past few weeks. I dunno how I did it; I haven't really done anything like more exercise to loose it, but I'm glad its gone. Perhaps its down to the lifestyle of staying up stupidly late playing Second Life every night (and thusly not eating as often as I should). Mind you my eyes look terrible... =/

7 May 2006 Soy Loco!

It's Sunday 7th May...
I just got back from work half an hour ago...
I've been working on a site all day that has to go live very soon...

And I have been slowling going more insane...

It's really bad. I've been trying to talk to my work collegue (who is also been working with me today) and explaining to him what needs to be done to fix various bugs, but he couldn't understand me. It's not that I was muttering, its that the things I was saying didn't make any sense. I guess I wasn't speaking in English; I was speaking in a language that requires few words and the ability to read my thoughts.

... Good God I'm talking in riddles like a woman! :-P

3 May 2006 Stupid mistake at work

So I did something rather stupid and insensitive to the wrong person today. I insulted the Bigboss at work this morning. I'm not sure if it was by accident or on purpose, I'd rather not thing about the reasoning behind it.

The basic idea is that it was our daily morning meeting; the kind that brings everyone up to speed about how everyone is doing. I was generally in a bad mood, mostly because I'm thinking about the big project I'm working on, partly due to the lack of sleep I've been getting for the past few days. Totally self inflicted I might add, so I deserve no sympathy.

It came to my turn and I became very, very sarcastic. I ran down the list of things to do but said it in a sarcastic overtone ("pulling a miracle out of our ass", "palming work to him upstairs", etc). It was mean to be talked to everyone but I was looking mostly at Bigboss; so I could see how she thought it was aimed at her. I was trying to be light-hearted and not try to be too serious. But not did I cross the line; I took a shit on it as I passed. Suffice to say that Bigboss was not happy. She looked at me scornfully and said "Is that sarcasm I hear?!" and carried on at me in a raised voice about how what I said was very inappropriate and how hard she's working trying to keep everyone happy. Which is technically true.

Anyway we went our way and I went about making me tea rounds. My immediate boss took me to one side and told me about how unwise and inappropriate I was talking that way and that I should go apologise to Bigboss. I'd told various work colleagues what I had done. Not in a boastfully way, just so they know what was going on. I will admit it now I would be lying if I didn't feel a sense of satisfaction that anybody would have felt talking back at their boss while they're in a bad mood. I just had the audacity (read stupidity) to do so. It wasn't until I told one work colleague when I felt the full guilt of what I did.

I got to the last person on my tea round and cheerfully she asked how I was. I told her what I did. She replied with a disappointed "Oh Grax..." and looked at me with a mothers disappointment; the kind that cuts right into a childs heart. I felt so guilty and terrible, I was actually quite horrible and I didn't mean to be. My mind was beginning to flood with all these afterthoughts about the consequences of my actions. I blocked them out the best I could, I had work to do and I was going to apologise to Bigboss. Just walk in for a few minutes and explain that I was wrong and that I am sorry. Which is harder than it sounds, considering that is Busy Season at work and people have to do a dozen things at once, especially Bigboss.

A few hours I finally got to see Bigboss in her office. I closed the door, we sat down and I apologised. I told her that it was wrong of me to act that way, me being busy was no excuse (especially as how she was comparatively more busy) and that I am sorry. She said that being sarcastic is no way to talk to a human being and that it's horrible to be at the receiving end. She then told me that everyone else who was at the morning meeting had gone up to her saying how appalled they were at me. I was shocked. I tried not to be, but I was visibly shocked. I didn't think they gave a shit.

Afterwards we went back to our work. She seemed okayish really, but basically I don't think I'll be recovering from my moment of recklessness anytime soon. I wonder how many people I've offended unintentionally in my life with my sarcasm and bluntness. I'm only trying to be funny and light-hearted. Mind you I never said that I was a funny guy. :(

Oh well.... so much for my bonus this year...

17 Mar 2006 When Christians go mad

I was looking through the web and I happen to come across this video footage from Trading Spouse. I was stunned:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5464505634137914176

I find it amazing and disturbing that there are these kinds of people out there that call themselves 'Christians'. She's so narrow minded and angry and she has a massive gap in her teeth.

Now I know for a fact that not all Christians are like this woman, they're all friendly guys and gals who are willing to listen to what others say without going ape-shit. But this woman...*shakes head*

Man, I hate to be all those people that are dork-sided.

12 Mar 2006 The day I stop biting my nails

... Or at least try and stop biting my nails.

I went out to a birthday bash shin-dig thingy at a nightclub the other night. It was all fun and the birthday girl got a giant rubber duck for a present. Anyway we all ended up in a friends night and I had the pleasure of talking to this girl all night whilst everyone else had passed out. Well she did nearly all the talking whilst I sat and listened. She was fascinating because she seemed to have experienced and done so much in her life and yet she's only as old as I am.

Anyway we got to chatting and I started to bite my nails out of habit. She lightly slapped my wrist and told me not to do it. Then she told me three reasons why not to do it:

1. Biting your nails is a sign of nerves and lack of confidence, which is unattractive to women.
2. Biting your nails is a sign of you not caring about your health. And what woman will want to let you put those fingers inside her?
3. There's all sorts of bacteria under your fingernails. Imagine putting that into your body.

It was at this point it clicked into place. I hear this kind of advice a lot and ignore it as most people do. But it was one of those moments where the right person says the right thing in the right way at the right time. It meant something and it stuck. (I like those kinds of moments, it's what makes people better themselves). It would greatly benefit me if I stop biting my nails.

So I promise to stop biting my nails from now on and have them trimmed in other ways. If I'm caught biting my nails I give permission for people around me to give me a little slap to stop me doing it.

I wonder how well I'm going to keep this promise now that I've written it down.

1 Mar 2006 Been slacking...

Whoops. Is that the time already? I got a little distracted, what with it being Valentines month and me without a person to seduce and spoil and pamper and such (I'm available weeknights and weekends by the way) and being caught in a game I recently got; Second Life (I'll tell you about it later). And I forgot it was the Grax Domain's birthday again! I'll do something for this for you little site, I promise! But I had an interesting experience over the weekend. Lots of swear words. I've written it out as a seperate entry.

1 Mar 2006 The night of the mini-chavs

It was a Saturday night in the city of Portsmouth and I was invited to a
house party by an acquaintance that I hadn't seen in a long while, called D. He and I, along with a couple other guys and gals, were walking along the street heading to a guys house to pick him up for the house party. Across the street there were two drunk chavs heading towards us, fully kitted out in fake ADIDAS-style tracksuit clothes and 'designer' caps. They couldn't have been more than 15 years old. One was a fatty with a pubic-stained, crappy excuse for a moustache and the other was a skinny little runt.

The fat kid went up to D and said with a slur "'ave ya got a fag??" (He was asking for a cigarette, not a homosexual) D said that he didn't, he was smoking the last of his cigarettes. "C'mon, all I wont iz one fag" the fatty whined. We said no and kept walking. The chav kids decided to shout some abuse as us as we walked, including "Why doncha go and fuck ya mum??!". Me and another guy in the group mutter to ourselves jokingly, "Yeah, after we fuck your mum" and had a little chuckle.

One of the girls in the group thought this was funny too and decided to say it out loud to the chav kids.

Oddly enough they didn't like this comment.

So they decided to follow us. And shout at us. And even throw something at us (and miss).

This carried on for a few minutes and we basically ignored them. After all we didn't want any trouble, as adult are not really allowed to beat up kids. People would confuse it with assault for some bizarre reason. Anyway the chav kids followed us all the way to the guys house. Then we saw in the corner of our eyes the chav kids running at us and were going to hit D with something. Instinctively D grabbed the nearest heavy rock he could find and was going to smack them across the face. The kids stopped in their tracks and the runt waved a flimsy pipe at D. He said "It's only a bit of rubber!" and gave an annoying machine-gun laugh, thinking he was all big and clever.

Then Chunky decided to have a go at us for insulting his mother. He streamed off a lot of shit from his mouth including:

• I know where ya live, so yooz betta watch yerself
• My house is over there, I'll get me machete and gunz and fuck yoo up
• My mum's seriously ill, don't 'preciate your talk
• I'll get me fuckin' step-dad on ya, and he's black!
• Tell dem bitches behind ya to stop laughing, we'll fuckin' rape 'em we will.
• I know the drug lords of Portsmouth

And so on.

Me and the other guys were just staring at these little punks unimpressed, thinking "What? Just shut up and go already". We were trying really hard not to slap them about like they deserved. I was even thinking "Please, give me a reason. They'd believe that it was in self-defence wouldn't they?" Soon the chav kids got bored and decided to leave us alone, but after the lunchbox said "Y'know wot? Ya ain't worth it!" and gave us a threatening stare.

So there you go. At least it gave us something to talk and joke about during the party.

30 Jan 2006 One two cha-cha-cha

So yeah, I've just got back from my third week of salsa dance lessons. It was pretty good, though not as good as the other weeks, partly because there were so many newcomers and there wasn't much room to dance around. Still I'm learning some new stuff, that's the important thing.

Oh, didn't I tell you I've been doing salsa? I thought I did tell you... Oh well. I've been learning to dance the salsa for the past three weeks and I quite like it. My housemate wanted to do salsa for a while and I found a place, so... we went. It relatively simple, just a case of remembering all the moves and keeping in time with the beat and giving the right signals and blah blah blah. Trust me, it sounds more interesting and challenging than I am describing it now. Do a video search on salsa to get an idea. Plus there are usually a lot of women compared to men, the ratio is about 3:1. And a lot of them are pretty fit. There's certainly a lot more attractive ladies in a salsa dance class than there is at church. That's what Christians need; sexy ladies!

On a side note I've also been learning Spanish from a book; Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish in fact. This book is interesting because rather than using the boring "listen and repeat" method of teaching, it basically states that lots of English words can be translate to Spanish by changing a few letter here and there, and it encourages you to think about how to create and form phrases. So far I can say basic things like "I prepared dinner" or "Did you invite your mum to the party tonight?" but y'know, baby steps all the way.

Man, women can make me do the strangest things.

24 Dec 2005 T'was the night before Christmas...

It's Christmas Eve and I'm fully stocked with my gifts to people for the year. And I got EVERYBODY'S gift on Christmas Eve. And it was relatively hassle free. Who says shopping on Christmas Eve was a nightmare? :-P

Merry Christmas everybody.

^_^

2 Dec 2005 Mystery Package: The plot thickens

So you know in my entry I received a book through the post, and I still don't know who gave it to me. But I'm reading it now and I'm a little surprized on how good it is. There hardly any description about the football matches themselves, it's all character building. And it mentions the Great Cthulhu, which was a nice surprize.

But the thing that caught me off guard was one of the extra characters in the book. I'm about halfway through it and, without revealing anything about the plot, one of the characters has my name! Even the surname was exactly the same! I had to re-read the chapter again to make sure I wasn't seeing things, but it was there in black and white. I'm in the book.

Now is this an amazing coincidence? Or is it more than that? Did the mystery person who sent me the book KNEW about the character with my name, and they just HAD to send the book to me? Is this a sign of some sort....? We may never know.

I'll write a review about Knees Up Mother Earth when I finish reading it.

22 Nov 2005 Mystery Package

I received a package through the post while I was on holiday. It's a fictious book called Knees up Mother Earth by Robert Rankin. I don't know what it's about but its little blerp says that it's a story featuring magic, time travel, and football.

The weird thing is, I have no idea who sent it to me. It didn't come with a note of any kind, no markings, nothing. The only clue that I had was the handwriting on the envelope. I asked my family and some friends if they sent me the book but they had nothing to do with it. The other weird thing is, according to the postage stamp, it came from Wales. Who the hell do I know in Wales?? I've even checked my bank statements to see if I bought the book when I was drunk. Nothing.

The can only think of two things; first off somebody bought it for me as a gift and didn't tell me (but then how do they know my exact address). Second it was some mystical, devine intervention by something 'larger than life', and I have to read it as it has some significant message to it.

Oh well. It might be a good read, even though I don't like football.

20 Nov 2005 IDONWANNAGOBACK!

That's the faint sound of the common animal "whooping slacker", which it cries whenever its hibernation season is over.

I'm back from my holiday in Cordoba. I won't go into too much detail because that would be too long. But it's safe to say that I had a great time, despite not being able to speak hardly any spanish. I did make notes on it though so I may just write it out for y'all. My foreign friend/hostess was very nice to me, as was her family, friends, and just about anyone else she introduced me to. It was weird, I'm not really use to such friendlyiness from near strangers. I'm not sure if it's because I was english and thus they treated me like a celebrity, or it's due to the fact that english people tend to be somewhat racist and anti-social. Either way I like it and it makes me want to come back sometime soon.

Maybe I could start a Paypal charity of some sort...

Anyway, I've taken some photos of the experience and if I get enough time I'll knock up some sort of holding page for all to see. They're not that interesing really, just lots of shots of me.

Oh that reminds me. I made a promise while I was in Argentina and I aims to keep it. These pictures below are some of the kids that my friend teaches english to. They a rowdy bunch of little punks, but they're good overall. Thanks for inviting me over.

Class of Grax 1
Class of Grax 2

That older girl in the second picture is the hostess I was staying with. She's fit, isn't she? ^_^

7 Nov 2005 Hola, buenos dias

Morning folks. Here I am in sunny Cordoba, Argentina.

I´ve been here for about 24 hours now. During that time (and a bit before) I been cramped into a plane next to a fat man that stank of a public toilet for 12 hours, tried to sleep in a freezing foreign airport for 8 hours, realise how much spanish I DON´T know and how fustrating it is not being able to talk to people, found out that Argentinian road are quite chaotic (to put it nicely), that my hostess is quite fantastic, and that I hate this stinking pseudo-spanish keyboard layout where the keyboard is english, but some of the important keys like the "at" symbol is put somewhere else that I can´t find! So far so good.

I doubt I´ll be able to write anymore until I get back in two weeks time, in which I´ll tell you more detail. In the meantime, try to picture me having a great time sorrounded by beautiful women who want me.

Adios.

20 Oct 2005 Stress - Hair = Holiday

I'm loosing my hair. :-(

I first noticed earlier this week, when my hair was way overdue for a haircut. I was moving my fringe away from my eyes and I thought "Hey... didn't this use to be thicker? Is there more hair coming out now when I brush through it?" Against the light you could start to see the scalp through the withering forest that is my hair. It's thinning around the forehead/temple part of the head, and a little at the crown of the head I think. When I got my haircut yesterday it only confirmed my fears. My now short fringe is not at strong as it once was. I'm only a mere child of twenty-something, surely I shouldn't be loosing it now?? Maybe I'm using the wrong shampoo. Maybe all the gel is pulling out the strands of hair.

Or maybe its the stress I've been feeling at work recently.

I've had this website that I've have been working on that had to be finished for Tuesday. For the past six days I have been working late into the night trying to finish each of the pages needed. Every night. Even on Sunday. Each passing day I got more and more anxious and stressed. The day arrived and all the pages were done. I made some minor tweaks to the last pages and I transferred the web site from the development area to the live area. Everything was on schedual, it was all on time. I put up a holding page for tell people that the new site is coming soon, and me and a work collegue went to work on testing each page to make sure it was all gravy.

Long story short some of the pages weren't working properly and it took me and my collegues all day to fix. It's all fixed now but I wasted my time and theirs. I feel bad for wasting their time.

I've never been under this sort of pressure before, not at this grand scale... Wait... I think I said that before.... Anyway I felt angry and sick with every passing hour. Not to mention exhausted. Plus I'm loosing my hair. I feel like I need a holiday.

So I'm going to have one.

I booked me a couple of weeks out of this country. I'm heading to Argentina! I've got a friend over there and she's let me stay at her house, eat her food, shit in her toilet, the works! Thing is I don't believe this is a free lunch. She studies English at University and I bet she'll want to show me off to her friends and collegues like some sort of monkey in a cage. "[in spanish] Oooh look at me! I have an english man. Where's your english man? Oh that's right you don't have one. It's OK, you can touch him if you want. Wait NO NOT THERE!! Aw now look what you've done!"

I'm trying hard not to build my expectations up, but it hard because my mind tend to wonder alot and I think about many possible scenarios that could happen. Good and bad. Truth is I don't know what to expect. I've been trying to learn some Spanish and get myself fit and lean, but it's tricky to do, especially now as I have only 2 weeks until its go time. Only time will tell the results.

But at least I know what my hostess looks and sounds like, so that's always a bonus whenever you go to a foreign country and you don't know how to speak their language.

3 Oct 2005 Quick life updates

I felt like quickly jotting down some of the things that have happened to me over the past five days or so, so I can look back at them more than anything else.

Remember back in February I got my elbow injured in an Aikido accident? Well it still hurts to this day when it's fully bent and stuff. So I went to a sports therapist to try and get it fixed. Unfortunately all she could do was stretch it a lot, cause me pain, but not actually fix it. So I'm being referred to her "mentor" this Tuesday to see what he has to say about it. Chances are I'll need an X-ray. She was actually pretty attractive, young too. She can't have been more than 26. I seem to think there's a pattern relating to fit women doing physiotherapy. She also gave me a shoulder massage because she finished on my elbow and there was still about 30mins of our session. Man if I was a little thinner, more toned, more handsome, wealthier, and if she didn't have a boyfriend of 7 years, then I feel that there would have been a lot of mad monkey sex going on. I would be very jealous of that monkey.

Also went to see me friend in London. That was quite jolly. Bunch of same old, same old stuff, but still a welcomed break. Mind you I did a lot of dreaming over the weekend while I was sleeping on her floor. I won't go into detail but some of the things it included were huge rooms, a huge cubical shower that flooded a lot, me being naked and everyone seeing me naked, Alvin and the Chipmunks, my London friend, pregnancy, sex, adultery, old Uni friends and her friends that don't exist, reunions, Venom (from Spider-man fame) graphic novels that don't exist, tornados, and the inability to wake up from being asleep.

Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo... Hay!

15 Sep 2005 Dyke dilemma

Let me ask you a question. It's a question about love. If you wanted to attract a certain type of person you would present yourself in a way that would make that person attracted to you, right? For example if you wanted to attract a science buff, maybe you could brush up on your science knowledge to have a good conversation. If you wanted to attract a blond bimbo you could train yourself to get toned muscles and a wash-board-type six pack. If you wanted to attract an Emo you might try dying your hair a crappy jet-black colour that drapes over your eyes, wear some generic black nu-metal t-shirt and lock yourself in a room and listen to something like "My Chemical Romance" for 7 days straight. Actually forget that Emo part, nobody likes them.

My point is I have this friend and she is a lesbian, which in some sense is a same because with her looks she could have any man she wanted. Anyway she's a lipstick lesbian, the kind of girly-girl that loves red lipstick, perfect skin, long sexy hair, and she is nearly ALWAYS in a short skirt. The thing is she's attracted to dykes. Dykey lesbians. Manly lesbians. The more butch and 'rugged' looking the better it seems. However these powerful creatures don't seem to be attracted to my lipstick ladyfriend. Me and my good buddy believe that it is because of her general appearance she is doomed to failure. The solution, she needs to turn into a dyke. And a good starting point would be to get a dyke haircut. So I thought I'd come up with some suggestions.

Now I would have liked to have taken original photo's of her and messed about with the hair with Photoshop, or even with a pencil. However I do not have permission to show her photo and I respect her privacy. So I drew her portrait and altered that picture. I can get away with this because, contrary to popular belief, I'm rubbish at drawing. ^_^

Without further ado, here's the original look:



And here are some of the looks I've come up with:








Personally I like the 80's Jem look, and not because it was the first drawing I did. I believe it would suit my lesbian friend well. It can't fail! Lock up your dykes, she's on the prowl. Oh and try loosing the skirts and wear some trousers. Camouflage combat would be a good start.

I give this advice because I care. What do you think?

3 Aug 2005 Just when I got out

Hello, my name is Grax...

It had been about 2 years and 6 months since I played a MMORPG game, that game being Star Wars Galaxies. I was a human Master Artisan heading towards being a Master Droid Engineer. Grax Jacpor was my name. It has consumed my life during the 5 months that I played it during my final year at university, grinding away hour upon hour to slowly reach my goal. It had affected my social life and it probably would have cost me my degree. Fortunately I grew bored with the endless grinding and limited gameplay and stopped playing it. Over time I pretty much stop playing games altogether, short of mini flash games on the internet, occupying my time with other activities. I also tried playing Planetside, but that did not last as long. For a time, life was good. But a few days ago something happened.

When I went to the comic convention I picked up a 14 day trial disk of City of Heroes, but I didn't do anything with it until now. I installed it, spend a short while creating my character, making sure that every pixel of my 3d avatar was my version of perfection. Coming up with a character concept was simple. It would have been crap for me to do some cheap knock off of an existing character (like so many people have done in the game), or to think of a whole new character with an in depth character background. The only man to get the job done;

I created myself, in all its toned glory.



Once jacked in I felt my around the virtual city of the game, which strangely felt like I was playing Grand Theft Auto, albeit has a hulking mutant in a city of superheroes. I slowly began to remember the feeling of running to and from the same place, repeating the same task of beating the bad guy over and over again, using the same button combination over and over again, all in the name of slowly getting enough experience to get the next skill that will make me just that little bit better. I know its yet another grinding game, I know it will all be a waste of time with nothing to show for in the end.

And right now I don't care.

It's already starting to take over my free time. Whatever free moment I get I'm on in the City, like an alcoholic screaming "I'll tell you when I've had enough!" I'm not working on pet projects that should be done, I'm starting to 'forget' to talking to my friends online (you know who you are and I'm sorry). I even said today "I'll just go on for an hour, just to get to the next level, it won't take long". Before I knew it the evening had done. An entire evening in which I could have been saving all the stray kittens in the world, gone. I have another 9 days until I'll have to start paying for the privilege to play. Damn right I'm going to make the most of the free trial period.

Oh, if anyone happens to be on the European server Union and you happen to spot Grax, stop him and tell him "Get back to work, ya lazy bum".

12 Jul 2005 Live from Andover...

It's about time I said something. But what to say? Where to begin?

To start off with my new job and home. So far it's pretty good. They've got me making stuff in Flash, which is always good practice. The people I work with are all pretty cool too. I've managed to settle in and mingle in with the groups there. They've each got a 'minor quirk' but who hasn't to be honest. As for the small town of Andover it's nice.... but it's dull! There's not a whole lot going for it. Sure there's about a dozen pubs, a whole nightclub, apparantly, but I've not really made any friends here yet and I'm not the sort of person that goes out on his own. Call me a coward if you must. And Andover is tiny! I bet if you were to come here you could figure out which house I live in. At least it's a short walk to work.

I got an internet connect at home. Which is nice. And to celebrate, I've finally made some skins for this site. That's right, now you can change the look of this very site, with the magic that is CSS (just like I promised, told you). Choose from a list in the top left corner of the screen. So far there's only two other skins to choose from, and one of those could be argued as being rather "homo-erotic". Why no explore the site with the new skin on. It doesn't effect every part of the Grax Domain, so you'll not see any changes in places like the Magic 8 Ball or The Art of Grax. Comment and stuff are always welcomed. I've got a few more skin designs in my head so there'll be more coming sooner or later.

London Underground Bombing. 7/7/05. Hmm... Much Badness. My heart goes out to those who were effected by it. I wouldn't mind saying more, but I'll save that as a seperate rant for another day.

29 Jun 2005 Happy Birthday to me!

Happy Birthday to me
Happy Birthday to me
Happy Birthday dear Graxie
Happy Birthday to me!

... and many more....

26 Jun 2005 Another Page in the Book of Me

Well I guess that animation I did for the job interview was good enough. I got the job! My first day will be the 27th June two days before my birthday. Guess I really didn't think about the whole birthday thing. Thing is the job is in Andover, which is a good hours drive away from my house. So I decided to move to a closer location. Just like that. I don't have many ties in my old town so it won't be too emotional. Plus I won't be far from the people I know so its all good.

The thing is the rent of the place is about £60 more than what I was paying before in the old house. But seeing as it's only 5-10mins walking distance from the place I'm working thusly saving petrol money, I figure it's a good trade-off. The other bad thing is there's currently no internet connection at the house yet so I'll have to sort that one out.

What? No internet again?? What will you all do without me? Don't worry; I've made a little something for you all to remember me by while I'm gone. Let's just say it's something for all my lady fans out there. All three of them, you know who you are ;-)

Good Morning Ladies

Hmm... There's a website skin in that drawing...

I've updated the "How to make a cup of tea" flash animation, just like I said I would! The things I did include fixing the narration/subtitle sync, animated the milk being poured, tweaked the shape of my head at the end, added some credits and I threw in an extra scene after step 7. There is one more scene that I wanted to add but I think it's at a satisfactory level now. Maybe I'll add the scene after I move into my new house and submit the animation to Newground to see what the public think. Any problems with the animation please let me know.

Hot to make a cup of tea (update)

I've also written a few movie reviews for you to browse through.

I think that's everything I need to say and do. Talk to y'all soon.

16 May 2005 A Rather Jolly Weekend

This weekend was a refreshing break from the norm. Partly because I ventured out my home county twice rather than stay at home and waste my weekend away, and partly because I was doing a couple of things which I have never done before. First off, on Saturday I went to the Comic Expo convention in Bristol with some of my comic-loving friends.

I've always wanted to go to a comic convention, like the big ones they do in America, so this was a step in the right direction. After the long drive to Bristol we entered the big room where we were exposed to a market. A market with thousands of comics. Old comics, new comics, great comic, crap comics, porn comics, they had it all! I spent hours in that one room, sifting through the molested items to get the comics I wanted. In fact we spent so much time that we forgot about the presentations/talks that were happening. We missed talks about Tranformers! Besides that I managed to do well, getting a big pile of comics for £25. I was worried I would spend more, especially as there was something for everyone, tempting you with materialistic object, trying to syphon off your cash from your wallets. I'm definitely doing this again next year, if not sooner.

On Sunday I took a trip to see The Avebury Stones with another group of friends. So not quite Stone Henge, but just as good. I feel my friends got a bigger kick out of it than I did, seeing as they practice the Pagan/Wiccan Religion. But it was still good. It was a nice sunny day and you can experience the green and calmness of the countryside. It kinda makes you depressed when you drive back into the city where you live and you notice the cold, grey, concrete surroundings. But I did win a small bundle of wax candles in a raffle, so it was all good.

Right, that's enough of that.

12 May 2005 Be Careful What You Wish For

You remember a few weeks ago I was talking about my job and how I wanted to move on and do something else? Well looks like I got my wish; I've been made redundant at my job and I have four weeks left.

Without going into too much detail my company had its major 'Make or Break' sales event over the weekend, the one that would decide how things would shape up for the future. And even though we did twice as well as we did last year, the best year we've had so far, it was not enough. So the company has had to reduce its cost and unfortunately that includes letting people go. Unfortunately they happen to pick me.

I'm not too upset about the decision. These things happen in the real world and I accept that. Granted it would have been better if this'd happened a couple of months later in the year but hey, shit happens. But I was ready for change anyway. Even during 'The Talk' I had with the boss, I was all calm and not visually upset about the situation.

So now I've got the fun task of dusting off my CV, updating it, and spamming as many companies as I can find screaming "Look at me, I'm brilliant! Give me a job!" I'd much rather take this time to have a break from work and just chill for a few weeks, but that ain't gonna happen.

Four weeks to find a new job? *pff* how hard can it be...?

9 May 2005 Grax's Detox Journey: Day 7 (Detox Challenge Failed)

I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!

After seven long days of purifying my body, my mind couldn't take the pressure. I had missed the tastes of all my favourite food, including bread. The situation was made worse when I was with my roleplay group earlier today and they were stuffing themselves with chocolate and crisps. It was driving me mad.

I had to finish it, I couldn't last another three weeks. So I thought I'd finish it in style. When I got home I ordered a meat feast pizza and slice of chocolate cake from Perfect Pizza. Hungrily I waited for the delivery; I threw the money at the delivery guy and sealed myself in my room with my food. I took the first bite of the first slice and... Oh my god it felt sooo good. It was the best pizza I have had in a long time. It was perfect. And the cake slice was nice too. It felt like I was committing a sin but the sheer rush I felt whilst tasting it all was intoxicating. My tummy was full and sore after the feast. But my taste buds are fulfilled once again.

Now would be a good time to reflect on the week I've had.

I feel like I've gained a slightly better appreciation for all vegetarians, vegans, and all the people who generally avoid certain food groups like meat. I know how hard it must be for them to resist all the food that is surrounding them. But I can imagine them being able to carry on because they have a strong purpose to do so, like not killing animals for example. I had no strong purpose to carry on my detox.

However I think a week doing a detox is better than not doing a detox at all. At least my body is partially cleansed of all the toxins (hopefully). Besides I've read somewhere that a person should aim to do about a weeks worth of detox anyway, and there are some articles that state that detoxs can be bad for your health:

LOOK
LOOK

And to be fair I didn't see too many great benefits from the detox anyway. Only two things came of it; 1) I lost about 5lbs in a week, which is something I wasn't looking to do anyway, and 2) I didn't have bad morning breath. Big deal! It doesn't stop me from being nearly always hungry! However I will try and continue to eat the fruit and vegetables in roughly the same amounts from now on because that can only be a good thing to do.

All in all it was an 'interesting' experience, but I think I'll stick to my balance diet and gym exercise thank you. Here's a last screen grab of the Detox chart before I broke my detox:

7 May 2005 Grax's Detox Journey: Day 6

Right now I'm feeling pretty good and confident that I can complete my detox at the end of the month. But that wasn't the case yesterday.

First off I drove to the Badminton Horse Trials for work and I didn't eat much for the majority of the day. Mainly because all the food caravans were filled with foods of the devil; bacon sandwiches, cheesy baguettes, sweets, the works. And I was suck with my rice cakes and bottled water that I had smuggled along to the trip. But despite feeling a little ill still from the day before I was able to cope fine, especially when I found out that my work colleague spent £5 on a crappy cheese baguette and a 50ml bottle of water. No, the worse was to come later that night.

My friends were all going out to their local pub/nightclub called the Dungeon, so I thought I'd tag along. After all I'll happily drive them home seeing as I'm on water and water's free so it would be a cheap night. Little did I know that the smoky area would aggravate my sickly body. As the enclosed rooms filled up with people and smoke I found it harder to breath. Every time I coughed my lung pipes felt dry and sore. I wanted to stop coughing but the smoke kept irritating my throat. I progressively felt weaker and more like shit, I had to leave early. As soon as I stepped out into fresh air I immediately felt better.

I've been going to the Dungeon for years, with the same smoky atmosphere, and I've never felt that bad before. It's probably because I still had the lingering effects of Man-Flu (aka cold), but perhaps my body is becoming cleansed of the toxins and thusly made myself less resilient to passive smoking. Could it be that detoxing my body with make me less capable with the polluted real world? Is the detox turning me into a pussy?


Which leads me to the following question; when you're on a detox you have to give up various things to purify your body, including smoking. Now I don't smoke, but because I was exposed to passive smoking does that mean I've failed my detox challenge? It'd be a shame if it was the case, after the week I've sent being a good boy.

Has there been any benefit from my detox so far? After all it has been 6 days. Well so far I have lost 3lbs in weight.

5 May 2005 Grax's Detox Journey: Day 4

Man I'm feeling tired. For the whole day I've had barely enough energy to do anything today. I'm not concentrating at 100%. And I have suddenly got a mini cold, or 'Man-Flu', which rarely helps. I can't really think how this could have happened considering the fact that I'm eating raw fruit/vegetables, which last time I checked is full of vitamins and junk that prevents this sort of thing. The lack of energy doesn't help when I'm packing up boxes to be delivered. Or talking to a bunch of incompetent delivery people on the phone. Trying to make me do a run-around on the phones because they can't be bothered to do their jobs. Bastards.

My work collegue says that the reason I'm feeling weak is due to my diet and how little energy there is in it. She said this whilst munching on some Monster Munch and a chocolate cake bar. FOr a split second I wanted to pounce on her and devour the food from her hands. But I resisted.

Only a few more hours to go until the end of the work day.


... It would have felt so good to do it...

3 May 2005 Grax's Detox Journey: Day 2

It is the end of day 2 of my detox and I think I coped with it well enough. But there is one thing that shocked me. There were no headaches, weakness, mood swings, etc, but there was the hunger. Seriously from the moment I woke up to the moment I'm writing this I have been hungry! I've never been hungry for this long before. I knew that it was going to be hard and I'd proably get hungry but I wasn't expecting to be this hungry.

And it's not like I've been starving myself, I have been eating lots of food like salad, nuts, fruits, chinese chicken egg fried rice, etc, but they don't fill you up. They say that you get side effects while being on a detox like headaches, feeling less energetic, etc. Well here's one they don't mention; you get bloody hungry!

Oh and for all those people who have been taunting me with them being able to eat proper food like Mars Bars and Reese's Buttercups, cut it out you bastard! Don't make it harder than it already is. *shakes fist*

2 May 2005 Grax's Detox journey: Day 1

Ok, so far it's day one of my detox and nothing too major to report. I've got my food from my supermarket but I've only got enough for a few days, including a small array of fruits (I know my earlier list says that I shouldn't eat fruits but I've read in another detox book that I can have fruits, so to hell with the old list!), goats yoghurt, some nuts, and some Oat Cluster cereal. Now that list would seem fine, except for the cereal. For some reason when I was buying the cereal I thought that oats didn't contain gluten. But they do.... So.... I now have a box of oats cereal that I can't eat...

But apart from that, and that it cost me about £25 to buy food for about 3 day (no wonder there's so many fat people in the developed world. It's cheaper), I've been ok. Absolutely fine... I am a bit hungry though... I could do with a chocolate bar to finish off that dinner I had...

I'll continue to update the Detox Table to the right, as you would have no doubt noticed, and I'll think about chocolate updating the food list as well for anyone else wanting to go on a detox.

25 Apr 2005 Grax's Detox journey: Preparation

I've decided to attempt something quite spectacular, unlike me and possibly dangerous. Unlike Mia's run, which actually means something; I am doing to attempt the following: I am going on a detox for 30 day. My first day will be the 2nd May 2005That's right, my body will become purified of all the toxins that I have forced-fed it for all these years. But why bother? Well I thought that it's something I've never done before and everywhere I look people rave on about how great it is. So I thought I'd see what all the fuss is all about. Who knows, it might actually make me a lot healthier and have better skin. Personal reasons, don't ask. But before I run in headlong into this mammoth task I will do some background research. I found a list in the Daily Mail which has a list of food that you can and cannot have, as shown in the link below: The Detox Do's and Don'ts The first thing that crossed my mind was "Fuck, I'm going to starve!" Regardless I will attempt it. Nay, I will complete it! I will triumph, and I will record my process to warn other people if they want to attempt anything stupid like this themselves. I'm doing a public service here people. You owe me! Next thing I ought to figure is what meals I could make with my limited palette of food. ... Why do I get the feeling I don't know what I've gotten myself into?

10 Apr 2005 Stag Weekend (or how to make the most of the freedom you have before being attached to the old ball 'n' chain)

My old school mate, Kiz, is getting married soon to a lovely Norwegian woman. Getting to the wedding ceremony it gonna be a bitch seeing as it's being held in Norway but that's a different Story. And the missus wanted to the traditional Hens night thing with all her girlfriends and basically wanted Kiz out of the picture so that the girls can play with dildos and stuff. The natural thing for him to do is for him to have a traditional Stag night, or in this case a whole weekend.

And the only way to celebrate his last few moments of freedom? Me and five other good friends of his took him to Blackpool.

This is a long entry so to save screen space I stuck the rest of the entry in the comments bit of the entry.

3 Apr 2005 Modems: The Bane of Modern Technology.

I never have any fun with modems. I can never get them to work first time when I plug them in and try to connect. I always have to work up a sweat before it works properly. It's like some sort of curse or a sick joke being played by some higher power. And what happened the other day is no exception.

On Saturday I went to my mums house to reformat her computer, so she can have a fresh computer and a clean start. Now bear in mind this an old computer with 700mhz process, 64mb RAM and a 3 gig harddrive, which means its a good 6 years old roughly. Regardless I backed up all the needed files, cleaned the hardrive, and installed Windows 2k with all the other bits and pieces. And for a time, it was good. Then it came to the modem.

Now my mum and her partner are not very IT literate and don't use their computers much, just to check emails and other simple things. So they didn't really need things like broadband, they used a dial-up modem. Fair enough their choice. But there was a problem...

For some bizzare reason Windows 2k didn't recognise the old modem, even though I installed drivers for it from the CD. It just said it was an unknown PCI card or something similar. And every time we tried to dial out there was no dial tone. Not even a beeping noise to dial the number. So after an hour of clicking on the 'Connect' button, uninstalling and reinstalling, and cursing I called my friend up and he happened to have a newer modem that we could use.

So after a 30min drive there and back to retrieve the worthless device I slapped it in the copmputer and it installs properly. I plug in the phone line into one of the free sockets and we got a dial tone. Huzzah! So we dialed the number that Microsoft uses to bring up the selection of available ISP providers. However after dialing the number it wasn't making the usual modem noises. It wouldn't connect. It was then I realised it was plugged into the wrong phone socket at the back of the modem. I'll hold my hands up and say that was my error.

Once that was sorted it was time to get the dial up settings set up. "Right then we've got username; check, password; check, dial-up phone number..." Once again hands are in the air. I should have known better than to not take notes of the phone number and assume that they would have the details noted down somewhere. So after calling u p my mum's Internet providers to get the number I finally managed to the modem working with the right details and everything was hunky-dory.

It wasn't suppose to take all bloody day to sort out. I'd figure that it would take a few hours max to sort out their computer, which would allow me time to catch up with my mates in the afternoon. I had to cancel on them after I'd spent the week bigging up meeting-up event all week (much apologising the next day). The whole thing nearly broke my spirit as a computing person, I was almost ready to renounce my faith in computers and isolate myself in a dark cave and become a hermit. Really.

Well there's one thing for sure; my mum won't ask me to fix her computer any time soon. :P

p.s. This weeks SimpleImg will be a few days late due to me being super busy, but it is on it's way. Here's a preview; this weeks word is lazy.

29 Mar 2005 Grax Domain Special Offer, Sale Must End Soon!!!

Disclaimer: The actual price for Grax Domain is stated at the end of this ramble, not whatever you saw beforehand.

I was messing around on google searching the word 'Grax' and I made an interesting discovery. According to Froogle I'm worth £0.79. I feel so cheap!



After showing the boys this phenomenon we managed to work out why the Grax Domain is got listed like that. Turns out in one of my entries there is a price tag of £0.79 in the entry, and the Google Spiders found this and decided to stick it on the page to be searched by all. I'm still not 100% sure why it decided to choose the Dream's image, showing all my hairy-chested glory. Oh well.

And it's simple to put your site up 'for sale'. All you need is a page with a price somewhere on the page. Put your site up for sale, see how much you can get for it.

By the way, if you do want to buy Grax Domain off me, it'll cost and low low price of £1000,000,000, and not a penny less. You know how to contact me.

5 Mar 2005 Grax Domain is One year (and 15 days) old

Good God it's been a year already!? And you lot completely forgot... OK I forgot too but that's not the point.

A whole year. Where has the time gone? Now's a good time to reflect on the site and see if it's achieved anything within that time.

... There was that 8 Ball thing that seems to amuse people.....

... There's always that mess I like to call an art gallery....

...

Not much else really.... Wonderful.

Anyhoo I thought I'd draw a picture to commemorate this occasion, a sort of belate present if you will. If any of you have an uncontrolable desire to give a gift for its birthday, then I won't stop you.

28 Feb 2005 Dammit, Why won't my elbow heal??

Man I'm pissed off about my elbow.

So I was doing an Aikido class (Yeah I do Aikido, don't believe me? Check out my Bio) and my training partner was a little rough on me. He got in a arm lock move that really threw my arm and elbow out of place. Now I get this pain in my right elbow whenever I bend my arm to its maximum limit or straighten it to it maximun limit, though any other position is fine. It looks like I've strained/twisted the muscles around my elbow. This was over a month ago and the pain won't go away.

This is getting silly! I went to the doctors and all they 'recommended' was to take painkillers for a while. I did for a short while and it didn't work. Doctors are rubbish anyway; unless your dying they don't give a crap. And they always have bad news. Sorry if I've offended any doctors who read this. I'm not bitching about you, just the profession.

Does ANYBODY know a way to stop this pain?? It's affecting me badly. I've stopped going to the gym because I can't do weights on it. I know I could do other things like running but that's boring! I go to the gym to work on my guns. I'll try anything (sensible) to stop the pain. Hell I'll even be willing to give you something back in return for this favour.

Anyone got any bright ideas?

2 Feb 2005 NERDS!!

Damn you Mia, making me waste my valuable time with silly tests like this nerd test for example... Oh well.

Here's me score:






I'm not sure what to say about that. I thought I'd be a little more nerdier than that but I guess this "highly accurate" test proved me wrong.

Too bad it had nothing to do with comics. Now that's were my nerdy skills would shine. :)

22 Jan 2005 Affirmation; Coincidence?

As you may or may not know I've been trying out the Power of Affirmation since mid October. Well I was until about Christmas time. By that point it was getting harder to dedicate the time to write it out, purely because I couldn't be arsed. So I stopped writing out my goal. After all nothing had happened... A few days ago something happened to me that is suspiciously close to the thing that I was Affirmating about. I'm now a lot happier for it, but I gotta wonder, is it just a coincidence? Or did I somehow affect the way things work simply by willing it? I should try something else and see if it was a fluke or not. A big constant supply of money would be nice.....

10 Jan 2005 Back into the routine of things

*Sigh*. Well it was fun while it lasted. All that holiday free time I wasted, mostly sleeping in bed. But I'm back at work now. And I've only about two weeks holiday time left for the rest of the year. But still it won't be too bad right? I've done all my work before the Christmas break. I made a carefully layed plan for the things that need to be done for the next few month. I know exactly what's coming up, just a nice casual slip back into routine right? What actually happened was; Get into work half an hour late due to surprizing bad traffic (I swear it's true), find out the last mailing list I set up to be sent out during my holiday didn't work, and that I have to design some fliers and web stuff to be done by the end of the week...! I need ter go back to bed....

25 Dec 2004 Merry Christmas Everyone

Now get out there and enjoy it!

15 Dec 2004 Day 4 of the New House... Again?

Well this is a bit sudden. I've moved into my new house a week early due being kicked out of my last house (long story short I wasn't suppose to be there and the landlord was to inspect the house in a few days). So it was quite a rush packing everything in my last house and moving it within a space of 24 hours. But I did it. And I'm glad I did. My room is HUGE! Well the biggest room I've ever had. It fits a double bed (I've never owned a double bed before. mmmm..... space....). The house is not perfect, but I like it a lot better than the last one. The only major worry is the people I'm living with. I've never met them before (apart from when I looked at the house). But they all seem cool. Multi-cultural too. A white landlord, a black guy, a dutch girl, and a guy with some kind of accent, I can't tell what it is. On top of all that I got broadband again (yay)! Now I have no excuse for not updating my sites regularly, apart from work sapping all my time... Honest 0_o

7 Dec 2004 "O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree..."

Like I said I would, here are the pictures of that Magic Christmas Tree I got the other day. It's so cool!


Tree 1

Tree 2

Those shots are about a week old. The tree is still alive (of sorts). The green-ness is slowly fading to white though, and if you touch it bits fall off the tree. I'm definately getting one next year. ^_^

4 Dec 2004 I'm still here people!

Sorry I haven't written anything in nearly a month. I've been mega busy with work, what with all the work and the deadlines and stuff. God I miss all that free time I had. *sigh*

Anyway, since the last time I wrote the following has happened:

• I'm moving into a new house! It's a nicer place than where I am currently living in, I'll have a much bigger room (mmm.... double bed), and I'll have broadband again! Which is good, because I think I'm starting to ride on my brothers (the guy who I am living with) last nerve. o_0
• Computers are still shit when they don't work. I had a really stressful time at work when I tried to simply install Windows Server Small Business 2003 at work and the e-mails didn't work properly. Or simply adding broadband the other day and the whole network decided to not work. It took me a few days to work out all the kinks. Bloody computer...
• I now know why Photoshop is the industry standard for all things print, web, and etc graphic design, rather than Paint Shop Pro (my fave). In Photoshop you can set the program to CMYK mode, which is the mode used for high quality print. You can't do that in Paint Shop Pro, not even in version 9.0. I found that out the hard way, when I designed promotional postcards at work in RGB colours and the printers wouldn't accept the postcard because it wasn't in CMYK. So I had to redo the whole thing in Photoshop 5, which doesn't have vectors of any kind, in a few hours. Oh yeah, that was fun...!
• But despite all the crap at work, I still like it.
• Three more Saturdays until Chrismas! Crap! 0_0
• I got a free 'Magic' Christmas Tree from a crappy work-related exhibition I went to. It grows moldy-crystal thingys and it really works. I'll post pictures up of it at work later.

Other than that, not much else has happened.

19 Nov 2004 I hate Cowboy Coders

Good God, if I ever meet the guy who last designed the site I'm working on I'm gonna tear him a new one. It's so bloody diffcult to work with!

I tried to add some new sales shopping pages to the site and it seemed to work fine. But once it was made live and people started using it, the damn site mixed up all the stupid order codes and stuff. I've managed to fix the problem now, but that was half a day of checking/fixing/testing/repeat that I did not need. Why thew hell do people write code that's so damn hard to work out what's going on?

Of course the exception would be if you were trying to keep a secure thing secure, like military documents or something. But this is just a shopping cart function for Gods sake (and some DHTML drop down menus while I'm at it. I hate people with use single letters for important variables!). It's practically freeware, you can make it yourself.

"But maybe I'm being too hard on this guy" I probably should keep reminding myself. After all he might be a beginner who's new to the programming scene. We've all been there before, I know I have. However one of the things that annoy me is the fact that someone payed this guy to make this pile of crap. And probably a big lump of money too. It just seems wrong that these cowboys can get away with this sort of thing. They should be on Watchdog or something.

Dammit, I haven't started on what I was supposed to be working on. >:(

8 Nov 2004 Skool Dayz (because I couldn't think of a better title...)

Sometimes I hate subliminal advertising. Prime example is that today, while at work, I was listening to the radio and they were talking about Ben Elton who has written a book about a guy who tries to solve murders that are related to the Friends Reunited web site. By the end of the day I'd signed on to Friends Reunited and got me an account with them. Damn you Radio Two *shakes fist*.

Still it wasn't all bad. It was interesting to see what everyone one else was doing with their lives, both the popular and the unpopular kids at school. I wouldn't mind doing a big-ass school reunion with my old school-mates to see how much better (or worse) my life is compared to theirs.

They have their lives, but I've my own web site. How many people can claim that....? (*shakes head in shame*)

28 Oct 2004 "The Beauty of CSS Design"

I was browsing the web doing some research on how to optimize framed web sites for search engines. I know I know, frames are bad and should never be used. But that's what the last guy did to the site I'm working on. Oh well, ce la vie. Anyway I stumbled across CSS Zen Garden. It's a site entirely design using CSS (or so it claims). It has the neat little feature of applying different cascading style sheets, which were designed by other people, to the site. I'm a little impressed. I'm sure other people has done this sort of CSS managing before, but this is the first time I've seen this sort of thing before. I'll add it to the Links page for future reference.

21 Oct 2004 From Web Programmer to Web Janitor

Goddamn the site I'm working on is such a mess!

And I'm not talking about the front-end stuff. The HTML coding behind it is terrible. It follows no basic W3C rules and there are pointless tags everywhere (damn FONT tags), nested within each other! I've spent most of my efforts just tidying the code up and making the site look presentable, like some sort of janitor (or casual technician). I would have just dumped the site and start again, if it wasn't for the fact the I'm gonna be sending off a bunch of e-mail to lots of people tomorrow saying there's new stuff on the site.

The site will be ready for the mailing list in the evening tomorrow. Then I set to work on updating it and making it better. It'll be super-efficient by the time I'm through with it, like German Sex™.

20 Oct 2004 The perks of Barn Life

There's two things that I have noticed when you work in a converted barn house next door to a farm. The first thing (and my employer did warn me about this) is that it gets damn cold in the winter. I'm talking ice cold hands and feet at the desk kind of cold! The second thing is that farmers tend to have fields. Fields which they cover in animal poo. Lots of poo. The stink around the place is actually pretty bad So far the closed doors and windows have blocked out the smell from entering the office space.

You can smell the poo when it's cold. I dread to think what it'll be like in the summer time, when it's sweaty hot and the poo gets to bake and spread it's super-heated aura of stench around the surrounding area! I dunno if the not-so heavily fortified doors and window can hold out.

I'll let you know next summer.

18 Oct 2004 I got something to say about cars:

Cars. Cars, cars, cars... Oh dammit, I can't think of anything to write about. All I wanna say is that I gots me a new car on Saturday (a Nissan Primera, lovely cars they are). But it bloody broke the same night that I brought it. I really really, can't think of anything interesting to say about it, apart from the fact that it's in repairs, and I got a Vauxhall Vectra as a courtesy car, which is nowhere near as good as my lovely Primera. I'd think of something better to say but I'm distracted by my neighbour and her friend. They're at my window right now, in their "cool" poncho's. What's the deal with those damn poncho's?? They look like something that my granny would knit. And people pay £40 for them!! Women....

What was my point again...? Oh yeah my car. £3000 for something that broke within 24 hours. Still, at least it's getting fixed under its warranty.

Oh, I also gots me a new job too, as a Internet and Mail Order manager! At last, my dreams as doing web stuff for a living is coming true. I'll be working for Pukka Clothing and that's the site I'll be working on, amounst other things. The Mail Order side of things will be interesting because I've never done anything like it before and I have no idea what I'm doing! I'm sure I'll pick it up as I go along.

Well that was random.

27 Sep 2004 A quick site plug-in.

I just finished creating that illustrator's web site all in flash. Right at this very moment! You can see his work at nezis.co.uk. It took a little bit longer than I had hoped, but the result is pretty good, even if I do say so myself. :D

Remeber, that address again is nezis.co.uk. Take a look, feedback is always good.

(P.S. It's a Flash web site, totally done in Flash. So you'll need the latest version of Flash to view the site).

25 Sep 2004 I did my time

I finished my last day as a data enterer with that company yesterday. During the week they got me to filter out any unneccessary records from their database, and also got me to make phonecalls to many, many different garages to ask information about the various vehicles they did. They didn't wanna do the updates and, in the end, I didn't wanna do the updates either. I left that building quickly at the end of the day. Which leaves me with this final thought: "Data entry; and interesting experience, but I wouldn't want to do it all the time. It's one of those "I've done that" moment, like being a paperboy, a shopfloor keeper, or a pimp, for example".

20 Sep 2004 The Life of a Diary Manager

I've done my first day as a data entering person, or "Diary Manager" as the position title states. It's for a third party motor insurance company. It's only a temporary job to get me some spare cash for rent and stuff, it'll only last to the end of the week. So far so good. It started out ok in the morning, it was all online and I did nothing more than clear out a few dosen claims. Then they started applying rules to look out for, that you'd only know or understand off by heart if you've worked with that kind of thing for years. Stuff like "look out here to see if a repair company exist, then push this, type in that protocol, etc". They put a lot of faith in the people they pull off the street with none of that experience to organise all their files, hoping that they don't put the files in the wrong place, or worse. One down, four to go...

13 Sep 2004 "Not now son, I've got work to do..."

I've got me a little project to work on. It's for a friend of my brother. He's an illustrator by trade and he needs a web portfolio to show off his work. And he want's it all to be done in Flash, mainly for 'security' reasons. So I took up the job. After all it'll give me the chance to try out my mad Flashing skills I picked up about a month ago. Hopefully the whole thing won't take more than a week or two to complete.

I've also been thinking about getting a Graphics Tablet, much like this one. I've tried one before and they're so cool to do art stuff with. If I did get one it'll make my artwork much better...*pff* yeah right... But can I justify paying £35+ for a tool I'll end up not using when my drawing phase is over?

4 Sep 2004 Those Filthy Animals!

Sorry about this site being out of order for a while, but it wasn't my fault. Honest. The people who provide my domain name decided to change the name server from what it was to what they wanted. It's all sorted now.

23 Aug 2004 Stinkin' public access places and their rules

Curses! Just when you try and get something done something decides to screw with you. I've thought of a solution to get my ASP stuff working again, but I can't FTP files to the server I wanna use via public internet points, like the library. They won't allow it, probably because people could screw around through the FTP process or something. Buncha pansies. Also, the Marvel Database domain name doesn't seem to wanna work either. So that's another thing I gotta fix, on stinkin' public internet terminals! It really sucks not being in control.

14 Aug 2004 Bonjour ma petite formage frait (pt2)

I'm back from my two weeks holiday in the South of France (in Isle-Bouzon for those interested.) It's good to be back on familiar ground again:

• Not a great deal happened for most of the second week, since half the group left, due to various reasons, leaving three people including myself. This gave us more opportunities to lounge around and do nothing.
• We visited the town of Condom. That's right, there is a small town in France called Condom. Look it up on a map, near Toulouse. The irony is not lost on the French residents, as they've created a small museum for the rubber application. It's not very good though, it mostly consists of art pieces that portray the old "AIDS is bad, people died, practice safe sex" message.
• We went back to that swimming pool with the swimming trunks ban, but I came prepared this time. I went out of my way and bought myself a pair of Speedos! Not the Y-front variety, the boxer-brief variety, which (according to my lady friends) doesn't look too bad. It was nice to swim around legally, even if the speedos were riding up me a bit.
• We went to a mini village festival. At least we think we did. It looked more like a family barbeque, and we were all too embarrassed to ask the locals what was going on, so we left it alone. Saw some dodgy man break into one of their cars too.
• My car is in pretty bad shape, especially on the long drive back to England. Problems range from bad radiator, dodgy tires, car wouldn't turn on, car wouldn't turn off, and so forth. Pretty stressful.

So overall it was a good holiday. It was an experience. But next time I'm flying.

Now I'm back in England I should be able to sort out all the current problems with my web stuff. Stay tuned.

8 Aug 2004 Bonjour ma petite formage frait

What do you know, there is an Internet connection out here in the middle of no where, South of France. It's been a week now, with me and some of me friends, and stuff has always happened pratically each day:

• A ten hour drive to the house, and we got very hot, got lost in Paris after taking a wrong turn (it's utter chaos on the roads of Paris! Not recommended), my rear tyre blew on my car and had to be changed, and also got a little lost in the French villages due to a crap road map we brought on route. All this before we got to the house we're staying at.
• Went to a local swimming pool in a local village, but you're not allowed to swim in baggy swimming trunks. You have to swim in a pair of Speedos. Tight, fitting Speedos... Quite a sight to see.
• Went to a local Fest (a mini village festival) one night and it looked like we'd crash a family gathering. After we'd left we saw someone breaking into someone's car in the darkness. We kinda left it because none of us could speak french. I'm just glad my car wasn't broken in to.
• While it's been mostly hot and sweaty, there has been a few days of rain and thunder and lightning. Red lightning on one of those nights.
• My car sun roof got fixed! Yay! =D

That's it for one week, I'll try and write something else before the ten plus hour drive home...

31 Jul 2004 I'm outta this stinkin' country!

I'm heading on holiday this Monday with me old Uni friends. Gonna spend two weeks in one of their other homes in the South of France. I don't know exactly where in France, all I know is that it'll be about a 10 hour drive from the top of France. And I'm one of the drivers! Talk about a Road Trip. Fortunately I'm fully prepared and nothing will go wrong *touch wood*. If they got a phone line in their house (not to mention a working computer) I might be able to keep posting stuff. But don't hold your breath on that one.

I've also gotten rid of the bad cat smells in my room. Yay!
ASP stuff now works on the server my stuff's on. Yay!
MY ASP stuff still doesn't work yet. Boo! (I think I know where the problem is, its just finding the time and constant connection to sort it out.)

26 Jul 2004 Day 4 of the New House

It has been four days since I moved out of my old home into the new accommodations I am now in. The flat is tiny. My bedroom is only about 7'x12', in which most of that space is taken up by my vast junk including my computer. The room also seems to have a permanent smell of cat litter. Turns out this is where the two cats that live here use to go to the toilet. And since I moved in they still think it's their room. I'm sure I'll get rid of the smell eventually...

Another thing to note is not only is there no Internet connection of any kind (I'm using my local library to write this), but there are no TV channels, not even the standard channels 1-4! This is because the people I live with don't have a TV, nor do they want one (after all, what's the point of paying about £100 a year just to watch crappy TV?) Unfortunately this means I don't have the option of rotting my brain at home with TV. Looks like I have to find something else to do, like practice the baffling arts of XML and Flash, or even go outside. Yes, it's nearly gotten that bad :).

It was hard to settle in to begin with; mainly because of the many boxes that I had to unpack into my tiny room. But I've gotten use to it all. It'll certainly do until I can find a job and move there. Worse comes to worse, at least living here might give me something to write about. My feelings about the situation range from "This ain't so bad" to "Where is that f****** smell coming from??!!?"

In other news you might have noticed that the Magic 8-Ball and the Marvel Database are not working properly. I am aware of the problem and I am trying to fix the problem as quickly as I can, which is kinda hard with no home Internet connection. Please just bear with me.

19 Jul 2004 Grax Domain is on the move

I'm gonna be kicked out of my house at the end of this week, and I'll be moving in with my brother for a short while. He doesn't even have a telephone line, let alone a broadband connection yet, which is gonna suck big time. Why does this matter to you lot? Well all my web sites run off a crappy little computer in my room that uses a broadband connection, including THE ART OF GRAX and THE MARVEL DATABASE. Simply put no broadband connection, no web site. So I'm gonna move my stuff to a different server temporarily.

Luckily I have a friend who has their own server that I can use their web space (thanks mate), until I can get another dedicated broadband connection. It's not as good as having a server in your bedroom to tinker with, but it's the next best thing. I might not be able to post updates often either because of the lack of internet connection at my temporary home (but then, how often do I actually update anyway. :D )

I can bet this won't be a smooth transaction so if you notice anything weird going on with any of my pages or nothing seems to work properly, now you know why (sorry about any previous screw ups you've experienced already).

All normal services will resume shortly (I hope). ^_^

15 Jul 2004 I had a Graduation Ceremony and all I got was a lousy hat.

That's it, it's officially all over, I got the piece of paper today saying I got a good mark at my degree, I even wore the graduation gown and got to keep the hat, I'm done! Now onto the next phase in my life; getting a proper job with proper people. I'm gonna miss Uni life... except for the exams and the work we did and stuff. ^_^

4 Jul 2004 WTF?

"A tricky business. A very tricky situation. At the time it seemed like a good idea, not that there was much thinking involved. But now, what is the right step? This whole performance is most confusing, and it doesn't do the body much good either. A slight advancement one way and it is turned away by guiding hands saying "Hey, steady now." But still it carrys on because, despite its bad nature, it feels good. It's felt needed by the people involved. A bold step must be made." Ha! If my friends can write random rants without any form of clear understanding about its meaning like THIS and THAT, then so can I (Warning: contents of links contains bad language and sexual stuff.) In other news I haven't done anything like SimpleImg for a couple of weeks now. My only excuse is that I'm taking a breather on that, give myself a little time to relax. Besides, it was my birthday the other day, cut me some slack. :-P There will be more pictures in the very near future, I promise. I noticed the other week that one of the requirements of SimpleImg is that the image has to be done in paint with 24bit colours. My drawings are not 24bit colourings... D'you think I should change the name of the meme to something else?

30 Jun 2004 Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday..

It was my birthday yesterday. I'm an old man of 22 now (still the youngest out of my friends though). To celebrate I figured I'd got out with my friends to a nightclub called Time. I'd never been before and I wondered what it was like. I did get annoyed though when we go to the club and it turned out to be closed! We'd forgot that when all the university students are gone outside term time, Portsmouth turns into a damn ghost-town. Still it wasn't a complete lost. We managed to find somewhere else to go and ended up having a good time, despite not everything going to plan (nothing ever does really, does it?) T'was much drinking, dancing, grooving, etc. What more could a boy want? Roll on 25.

21 Jun 2004 My Code-Fu is rusty!

Man, I didn't realise how bad my skills had become in ASP till today. I was asked to do write a simple website in ASP with a database for a job. They said it wouldn't take more than an hour and a half. "Sounds good" I thought, "after all I did this for over a year in a job and I got a whole personal site made of the stuff. I can do this"... A few hours later I had finally completed the three-paged website. It took twice as long as expected! I spent most of the time look up site and bashing my head shouting "How do you do that again?" or "Why won't you work??? Spawn of Satan's rectum!!". I hadn't used ASP in months, not since I've been playing around in PHP making stuff (it's so much easier to make web pages and stuff in it). But the more I wrote out the ASP code, the more I could remember, which is nice. I must do more training soon.

12 Jun 2004 Blue: live at the Graduation Ball

Now that I've had a bath, feeling all refreshed, I feel I should let y'all know how the Graduation Ball (held by the Student Union, outside of Portsmouth) went last night. My friends and I arrived at the scene fully kitted out. Everyone was looking fabulous including yours truely. There were three large tents, one of those carnival rides where you rotate up-and-down 360 degrees (I forget the name), and bumber cars! And you heard me right; the boy band Blue was there live in all their miming glory. I watched them with some friends (not that I'm a fan of Blue or anything ^_^) and they seemed to enjoy themselves. Even though I didn't see it at the time, I'm sure people were chucking stuff at Blue on stage, including urine-filled bottles. All in all the Ball was good fun. There was much socialising and booze drinking, I blew all my fake money on the fake casino, and I even got to try out the bad chat-up line "Hi, my name's [name here] and I like to f***" (with a success rating of none). But it wasn't as good as last year. The area was smaller compared to last year for one thing. No all of my friends were there unlike last year. And they missed out things that the Union said that they would do, like karaoke (I was quite heart-broken about this)! Besides the Graduation Ball happened in June, yet I don't offically graduate until mid-July, Surely I've celebrated pre-maturly. What if I messed up real bad and I have to redo the year (heaven forbid)? Oh there was also a special breakfast held at the Union, but I didn't attend it cos I was held up on the way back home. Still, no big lost. I probably would have had to pay for a crap breakfast.

11 Jun 2004 A little web cleaning

I got the web creating bug and I had the urge to do something to this web site. So I thought I'd clean it up a bit by adding these little tables around each of the entries. Hopefully it'll make reading each piece of literate genius (ha!) a bit easier to read. Oh, I also corrected a few errors that I spotted. But I bet there some more somewhere. o_o

10 Jun 2004 To the Ball!

I've finished drawing this weeks SimpleImg in the Art of Grax. The reason why I posted the picture earlier this week is because I've got to do some preping for a Graduation Ball I'm going to tomorrow and I doubt I'll have much time to post the picture tomorrow. Hopefully the Ball will be a laugh. Hey, any old excuse to get all dressed up. :)

2 Jun 2004 End of (Uni) Days

This is the end... I had my final exam today and now I'm finished! No more Uni life for me. It's weird because in some ways it doesn't feel like I'm done, like there's something else I gotta do. But yeah, in a few weeks I'll be getting a piece of paper that sez that I am a young professional (?!) Now all I have to look forward to is getting a real grown-up job and do grown-up things. :-S

27 May 2004 *Phew!*

Well I'm glad that's over. I did my exam today and it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. The format (and some of the questions) were pretty much the same as the past exam paper we were given. I knew what was coming and I blitz the questions I could do and bull-s***** the questions I didn't know (as you do). All in all ah rekin ah passed. :-)

26 May 2004 Stress...Stress...!

I've been stressing out for the past couple of days. I've got an exam tomorrow on a subject that I find incredibly boring, Advance Software Engineering (Lots of theory based hoo-ha), and I've only started do revision for it a couple of days ago. I feel better now that I've done a past paper on the subject. but still, I can't be bothered to do it. I kinda wish I did another unit. Oh well, too late now. :-|

5 May 2004 Sorry bout that

Yeah... So I finally finished my final year coursework for University. Man that 12,000 words of Uni work took up a load of my time especially towards the end. I couldn't really do anything fun like, go out, watch TV or say.... update my sites.... Honest.... o_o Lame excuses aside, now that it's all done I'll have time more time to dedicate to my sites. That includes tweaking, adding new stuff, and generally.... stuff... Expect new things over the next few days. Like this for instance: I did a search on the web for the name Grax. Turns out my name is not as unique as I thought. I found that there a CCG card called Grax. Me, a card game card! I wonder what the game is called. Check it out here.

10 Apr 2004 Rock...et...Man...!

A friend asked me to send them a funny video of William Shatner doing 'Rocketman' but I thought I'd post it for all to see. Very high tech stuff! Check it out here. Edit: In the interest of tidying up I removed the link from here. Go to the 'Stuff' section to find the file.

18 Feb 2004 #1

What's new? I just got this site up, that's what's new! Only a couple of things on it so far. But it'll grow, mark my words... In the meantime, check out the links.