Anyway, I thought I’d do a quick update on everything that has been happening recently.

PPUK

I recently joined PPUK, and decided to get interested in politics, and I’ve picked Pirate Party UK to invest my time in, as their stance on copyright reform and surveillance is in line with my beliefs.
I’ve been following the party since they registered last year, and only decided to join now they are taking donations.
They’ve got 10 candidates running in the general election on the 6th of May, so if you’re in any of these constituencies, please get involved and support your candidates.
The party is also currently fund-raising and taking donations to support our candidates so if you can spare some money, and feel strongly about the issues involved go here and either donate, or become a member. At the time of writing we’ve raised £4000/£10000
It’s in your best interest to do so!
I guess I better finish off those posters from last year.

University

If you haven’t already guessed I turned down my place at UACB I was offered last year, due to it not being a particularly interesting course and having to pay for it.
I applied at several universities this year for degree courses, and got accepted onto Web Design at UWE and Digital Media at Portsmouth University.
So if all goes well I’ll be heading off to one of those soon.

Music

Uh, I reached 86,000 plays on last.fm recently I guess that’s cool.
Coheed and Cambria‘s new album leaked recently – I got the opportunity to hear it, and it sounds like it’s shaping up to be an awesome record. The levels on this release are not great, the vocals don’t seem as defined as in other albums but I bet it’ll be fixed for when it’s released officially.
Below is track 2 of the album, which I assume is the single. It’s pretty cool.

I might as well plug Chris Watts’ new musical endeavour, a solo acoustic project. Ex-Son of a Fox vocalist has fun with guitars and his brothers.

Obviously by now everyone has heard of The Midnight Beast but their new video is genius. “Lez be friends”

Anyway, with that I’ve run out of interesting stuff to post.
It’s good to be back.

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

Then they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
I did not protest;
I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me.
- Martin Niemöller

This rewrite of the original poem by Martin Niemöller is particularly relevant these days.

Oh also, if you’re as pissed as me about the BNP’s seats in the EU, go sign this pointless internet petition.

Here’s my testament to them.

Myspace
Messily coded, horribly designed and always broken. “Tom” kept adding features to an unstable website, and something was ALWAYS broken.
The only thing that was good about this website was that it wasn’t bebo. The “profile” customisation wasn’t so much customisation, more like “copy paste HTML from 1000′s of websites, and add glitter text.”
This site seemed to be used mainly by older/alternative people, mainly because the music section of the website is used by almost every band in the world to promote their music.

“I preferred bebo because myspace had all the stupid, annoying code things, for like.. layouts and stuff”
Kizzie Hall – Bebo and Facebook user.

Bebo
For code and design this site seemed a bit more organized, all of the site followed a consistent theme, and there was an “easy” way to customize your profile. You were able to pick from thousands of user generated themes, and could create your own by uploading images to replace the original ones. However this site was still full of glitter text and “WHAT MY LITTLE PONY ARE YOU?” quizzes.
As a whole the users of bebo seemed to be the more than 90% “Chavs” and people that were put off by myspace’s complexity.

“I don’t even know why anyone uses bebo any more. I always get emails from it but I just ignore them since they are all from fake people anyway, it’s always spam”
Tom Barnes formally from myspace, now from facebook.

The Solution
In comes G-13, we set up a consistently designed, functional, secure social networking site using OpenID, AJAX and other relativity new web technologies to create something that was fresh, attractive and simple to use.
Originally Codenamed “Olympus” we aimed really high with what we wanted to do – many of the features we had working in an early alpha state have recently been implemented into Facebook and Myspace. Most notably “facebook chat”. Another concept we were using is the 2 bar system, a menu at the top and information and chats on the bottom bar.

Used concepts
I wanted to talk about some of the stuff we wanted out of a social network in 2005, and how it has ended up on the web today. The concepts we had below were all part of our much larger plan for world domination.

• Favourite Contacts

recently added to Windows Live Messenger, Favourite contacts allowed you to group your friends into groups like “Family”, “Friends” “Other” etc, but you could pick contacts out of those groups to appear in a group that is always at the top of your contacts list called “Favourites” so they are easy to contact at all times.

• Favourites

Similar to services like del.icio.us and magnolia, Olympus would allow you to have a “stream” of bookmarks, that friends could see, along with private bookmarks to allow you to transport your bookmarks to any computer you used.

Unused concepts
I’m going to write a little bit about some things myself and Sam designed/planned on doing with Novus.
By this point the codename for our social network had changed to Novus, this was due to the imminent release of PHPbb 3 also named Olympus. Anyway, onto the concepts.

• Site wide music playlist

The idea behind this was to add a playlist to the bottom bar of the website, for example next to facebook chat, with a playlist, and all the other features you’d want from a music player. The idea was to allow you to add tracks to a playlist from bands profiles, like how youtube allows you to create playlists, but it would allow you to continue to use the site without having to stop listening to whatever band you liked. Other sites that follow a similar concept have started up, Last.fm and Pandora, along with Spotify, but not what we had in mind at the time.

• Useful Applications

The creation of external applications was going to have very strict rules on what could, and couldn’t be added to the site. This was to stop all of the spam, and the “WHAT MY LITTLE PONY ARE YOU?” quizzes. There was also going to be applications created by us, as sort of “addons” to the website, thinks like calculators, clocks, etc.

• Homepage

A useful homepage, which allowed to to add your own “widgets” to it. RSS Feeds and the like. The best description of this would be a kind of iGoogle and Facebook home mashup.

I’m going to include a video from Scared of Dinosaurs new EP. Just because this song made me giggle.

First mewithoutYou‘s new album “It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All A Dream! It’s Alright.”
It’s very different from both of their other releases, and I was pleasantly surprised. It left me wondering what some of the band members were doing on some tracks, and if it’d be less exciting to see this album live. However the fact that every track tells it’s own little story is really nice, and it appeals to my love for concept albums.

Trophy Scars have also recently released a new album called “Bad Luck”, unfortunately it was also leaked, bad luck – shit pun intended.
When I first heard the song “Anna Lucia” I genuinely thought that it was based on the back story of Anna Lucia from LOST. If you are a fan of lost, you’ll probably get where I am coming from with that.

I’m also waiting for the new Billy Talent album “III”
The track below is written by Billy Talent and preformed with Anti-Flag. I’m pretty impressed and it’s got me really excited for the album.

Coincidentally I am also waiting for “III” by Maylene and the sons of disaster. I’ve not heard any of the material of their new album, but I really want to.

Callum Read
A good friend from college, plays his guitar and sings some stuff.
Myspace
Last.fm

Son of a Fox
brootal 2 step ryvims and shortz
Myspace
Last.fm

Supercommuter
Wheelie Cyberman’s new project after the Optimus Rhyme break up
Myspace
Last.fm

It’s basically a breakdown of our deepest fears; masked men, homoerotic dancing and healthy food.
Jamie Norquoy

Original Youtube Page
“Fox Mask”
“Cumslut”
“Camerawork”

When Professor and media researcher Roger Wallis left the stand yesterday, the court asked whether he wanted to be reimbursed for his appearance. “You are welcome to send some flowers to my wife,” he responded. In the hours that followed, many Pirate Bay supporters took this suggestion to hand.
TorrentFreak

According to Wallis’s website, his wife has so far received 4100 euros worth of flowers. I guess that’s a double blow to the RIAA since that money could have been spent on it’s music. Heh.
On the right hand side of that site, it shows how many CD’s the current gifts amount to.