Yeah yeah, i know, I haven’t posted here for ages – I burned out after a couple of posts, right? Meh. Currently, I haven’t the inclination or time to post due to various reasons, so for the time being, this’ll be on hiatus. Or something.

A fairly recently-commenced hobby of mine is hillwalking. I think I should blog more about it, mainly because there isn’t a whole lot of decent stuff about it on the internet and I could offer my two pence to the world.

So, hillwalking is essentially hiking up mountains. Mountains aren’t really that mahoosive in England (hence it being hillwalking rather than mountaineering), so you may think its pretty pointless without trekking over to the Himalayas. You’d be wrong. British peaks are still pretty varied in terrain and climate, and offer some wonderful views and silently peaceful spots. I’m not normally one for hiking, but hillwalking is somewhat more rewarding and interesting.

Firstly, there’s the kit. As a self-confessed geek, I love comparing gadgets and finding the best performance-to-price ratios when buying something new. There’s a similar process involved here: getting the best clothing for the job is sometimes a matter of comparing specs and brands to find the best waterproof for the job. Finding the right clothing is more complicated than just throwing a coat on and hiking on up. You’ve got to wear the right layers for the weather, and the layers have to to do the right job and do it well, ie, wick sweat away from your body, or waterproof without keeping in sweat. This page can explain better than me through the medium of diagram.

Anyway, apart from the geekiness of fabric specifications, there’s the wonderful views, which need to be seen for themselves – photography sometimes just cannot hold the epicness. The utter silence on less crowded mountains. The achievement of making it the way up, then sitting down overlooking the world with a pasty and a hot cup of tea. Aah.

Anyway, enough waffling introduction. This Monday I went up Snowdon, and the weather was fantastic – something I’m told is unknown of up there, as its meant to be one of the wettest climates in Britain. Snowdon is something of a “tourist mountain”. It has a fecking train going right up, and a pretty big cafe/gift shop perched at the top. The top gets pretty crowded as well, even when the train isn’t running. Its not a bad mountain, as it does look spectacular, but its fairly easy from most angles and the fact that no less than fifty people are already standing at the top by the time you get there cheapens it somewhat. Regardless, here, have some photos. Unfortunately my camera broke halfway up, so I haven’t got any from the top.

Next week, we’re going for a few days in the Lake District, which should be excellent. I’ll be going up Scafell Pike and Bowfell, and maybe somewhere else. We shall see!

So, Boris won the London elections. I hope you’re all happy with yourselves.

I’m not a Londoner so it doesn’t really affect me directly, but even so, it confounds me that he got in. He’s obviously pretty well known, but known for being the bumbling idiot we see on Have I Got News For You et al. Okay, so he has a hilarious public persona, and is pretty amusing and satirical in general, but as a politician he fails miserably. He has some pretty backwards views regarding race and sexuality, for a start. Surely people don’t want to see him lead the capital of the UK as we prepare for the Olympics? Not that I really care either way about the Olympics, but the fact is we’ll be a laughing stock of the world with Boris in charge.

I saw no problem in Ken Livingstone to be honest – he genuinely loves London and believes in its inhabitants. Sounds cheesy, but its true – particularly compared to Johnson who was seemingly shoe-horned in as a well known Conservative.

Even better than Livingstone, Brian Paddick was also a very worthy prospective leader, after his self-inflicted career wrecking honesty in the police force, alongside his open and liberal beliefs. Unfortunately his candicacy wasn’t really advertised as the media frenzy circled around the two big boys Boris and Ken, so he never really had a shot-in-the-dark chance. But I guess that’s always the way.

Oh well – good luck with Boris, London!

Leading on from an earlier blog post, Joy Of Tech read my mind and provided this comic.

If only my internets had an off button… wait, what? It does?!

There is a serious issue here. Too many of these high street coffee houses, like Starbucks, Costa Coffee, et al, only offer tea in paper cups. Paper fucking cups. Now, I’d say this was acceptable if its a drink-out tea, but if you’re drinking in the shop, you’d expect a proper mug just like coffee.

The cup-using protocol seems to differ from store to store – if you were to have a tea at my local Costa Coffee, you’d get a whole pot of tea complete with a proper mug and a jug of milk, whereas if you were to sit down and drink a tea in a train station Costa, you’d get a paper cup full of hot water – for exactly the same price.

Now, you might be asking: why does this matter? Tea has a delicate flavour – it essentially soaks in the flavour of anything that comes into contact with it. Coffee, on the other hand, has a much stronger overpowering taste and paper wouldn’t affect it noticably. Example in hand – if you were to use a cheap wooden stirrer (another problem with coffee houses) in a cup of tea, your tea would taste all crappy and wooden. Even plastic cups are an improvement, but I suppose paper is used for the environmentalness of it.

Even so, the case is that coffee houses just don’t understand tea. I know that they are designed to cater for coffee primarily, which they do fairly well, but most of the time I just want to sit in and drink a nice cup of tea. Unfortunately however, the prevalence of good tea rooms isn’t quite as widespread as it was a hundred years ago.

For instance, when I’m waiting for a train I have to make do with a chain coffee house. I usually walk around the station in question and study the cup use throughout each store to discern whether ceramic or paper is in use. Sometimes its immediately easy to tell, but often its difficult. I don’t think any Starbucks stores offer tea in ceramic mugs, but I could be wrong.

I think each franchise should at least have a blanket policy for cup use, so I know what i’m getting for my money. But essentially my point is, tea + paper cup = suck.

I’ve been finding recently that I’m often stuck when deciding what to do in a bit of free time.  Not because there’s nothing to do, but that there’s too much to do. I’m talking about media: television, film, newspapers, music, blogs, podcasts, video games… you get the idea.  What I don’t understand is how any individual with a reasonable interest in anything can be expected to consume at least a reasonable portion of the media that a)  is intended for the consumer, or b)  the consumer would like to.. consume.

The problem I see is that audiences aren’t necessarily limited by consumer interest or the product’s reach anymore, but limited by the individual’s capacity for media intake. This is even more important with the dawn of “new media”, and particularly Internet content, where a practically unlimited amount of content is available to the consumer at any one point.

In my experience this means that my RSS reader is constantly overflowing – whilst simultaneously, I want to play an Xbox game, watch a DVD or TV programme, catch up with the last few weeks of the Totally Rad Show, or listen to music. And with all this media surrounding me, I just cannot do all of it.

Currently, the average game takes me a few months to complete – even one Sam & Max episode took me about two weeks. I have at least a couple of thousand unread RSS news items at any given time, and a queue of DVDs i’ve bought and films I’ve acquired but yet to watch. There have been several movies this year already that I haven’t had the time to go and see before they vanished from the cinema (and that’s a different rant entirely), as well as a few TV episodes that I missed.

And I’ve barely scratched the surface – if I wanted, I could find a lot more content that I would like to consume, but simply haven’t the time to. And I haven’t even included other activities such as social networking, forums / comments, and of course, y’know, going to work and having a life.

Strangely, there are many people who seem to be able to watch every movie they desire, get through any game in a snap, keep up to speed with the news, and have a trillion tracks played on Last.FM. But there’s no way on god’s earth that all of these can be the same person. I have an inkling that a lot of people find one type of media and stick to it.

Maybe I’m just being too broad when wanting to take on everything I can. But I’m sure this must be a real problem, and I doubt they’ll ever be a solution. As time goes on, there’ll just be more media available and being crammed down our collective throats – willingly or not.

Oh, that first awkward blog post. Well, firstly I suppose I should say “Uhm, yeah, hi.”

Secondly, I should explain. I’ve been intending to create a new blog for a while now, for various reasons. Sometimes I just have things to say that need to be said. So I suppose, this will start off as my soap box on life, work, and technology. As it progresses, it will perhaps mutate into a travelblog of sorts, or whatever I’m up to.

I intended to create my blog on its own domain, so I can have complete control of its content, layout and functionality without relying on restricted third party web 2.0 tools. However the months passed and it never materialised.. and in the end I just decided to fuck it and make one already. I might in the end move this elsewhere, but for the time being it stays here.

So — in short, this is the world as I see it, in all its frustration. Not necessarily a personal blog, and definitely not a diary; just another perspective on the little things, and possibly even the big things.

Does the whole wide Internet need another blog, particularly one with little to accomplish and with little existing audience? No, but that’s what the Internet is for – incessant extraneous content. But at least I’m not just videoing my pets for YouTube.

Right.. first things first – I need a name for this. Any ideas?