*** THIS BLOG IS MOVING! ***

Yup, that’s right folks, after 18 marvellous months here on WordPress, I have decided to take the next step and develop a more permant platform from which to rant and marvel from.

The new stuff can be found on http://garidavies.me.uk and offers the same blog as is currently here at DarkAeon’s Demented Declamations (including historical posts) as well as a more personal way for people to interact with me, each other and my content.

I have launched a little harder than I wanted to (I had originally planned to soft launch for a month) but I really needed to get this up and running, and I also need my regular blog readers’ help please! (see below).

So, what does this mean for you guys?

• For the forseeable future, this WordPress blog will remain live, and will run in parallel with the blog pages on garidavies.me.uk. The main reason for this is that I am currently averaging 1500-2000 unique visitors a day, and I have no way of divering that traffic over to the new blog at the moment (I don’t have HTML root access for 301 files). Thus both will run together (and I will actively monitor both), though the new site will benefit from additional and more personal content.

This site will no longer be publicised by me on my various social profiles, instead any reference to my blog would be to the new site. Anyone linking to content from now on, please link to the content on the new website (all posts are the same – the search feature on the new website’s sidebar will help if stuck).

• Should I update my blogroll to include your new site?

YES! Please do!

This would be very much appreciated, and I will always reciprocate if you let me know that I’m on yours!

It would be especially fantastic as, due to the ‘new-ness’ of this site, many spiders are currently skipping over my page as it currently has no links coming into it. So if you wouldn’t mind, please please please link to me, I’ve been having a nightmare with SEO! *end of beg* heh.

• I was subscribed to receive Email Updates from this site.

Don’t fret pet, I have done all the behind the scenes work necessary to change the feed over so that you will now receive updates from the new site. In fact, if you’re seeing this post titled ‘THIS BLOG IS MOVING’ in your mailbox now, please contact me and I’ll do some further analysis! You should not need to update anything.

I’ve added a few extra features in for the email subscribers to the new site, so do let me know if you approve of them!

People subscribing via RSS – you need to update the feed address please! (see the right hand menu bar on the new site for the new feed details)

The new site is still very new, so you may wish to have a read of ‘Welcome To My New Page!‘ first as it differs from the post that I’ve posted here.

Thanks for all your support over the past two years or so, and I look forward to welcoming you across to the new site in the future!

Gari x

I made a new friend… literally!

Whilst waiting for one of our in-house Developers to fix a bug in an application that I was using (and on my lunch, I hasten to add ) I decided to create a friend for myself to keep me company on those long lonely Sundays in the office!

I’m (truly) rubbish at drawing, so comparitively, this isn’t half bad in my opinion heh!

May use my week off work to see if the internetz can teach me how to draw manga people or similar!

Winter Wonderland – Hyde Park, London (2009)

Just back from the Winter Wonderland event at Hyde Park, London – if you get chance to go to this, then I recommend you take it!

We were fortunate enough to go on the trade night, so it was a lot quieter than it’s no doubt going to be. When it opens to the public (from tomorrow, 20th November ‘09), the site itself will remain free to enter, you will just need to pay for any rides/attractions that you choose to use.

I was a bit of a wimp, and did some ice skating, went on the big wheel (which was a big deal for me!) and on the funhouse (which was the best one I’ve ever been in!). We also all went on ‘The Beast’ – frankly, don’t bother with this… you go inside an inflatable dinosaur, someone jumps out at the end, that’s it. Incredibly lame! In addition to going on the rides/attractions that I went on, the friends that I went with were far more adventurous and had much stronger stomachs and tried a few others, which they largely loved.

What I am really pleased about though is how well my Samsung Jet worked tonight when taking pictures… some of them I absolutely love! This was it’s first real test, and although I think some of them aren’t quite as good as they look on the phone, I think it’s more my inexperience with the new camera than anything else!

What do you guys think of them?

I really like this one...

Feedburner and WordPress e-mail subscriptions

Hey all,

Just a quick note to let you know that I am deactivating Feedburner for new sign ups.

WordPress have recently developed a new HTML based subscripton tool, which I think is far superior, and so I’d love for all new sign-ups to go through this list, as I think that it better showcases my content and allows my subscribers to get more out of my feed. After all, you guys are the fantastic people who read all of my posts (hopefully!!), and so you deserve the best!

To subscribe to my blog, please click on the link in the side bar marked ‘Email Subscription’ and follow the prompts. I believe that you should be able to select the frequency that the email comes out, ranging from instantly to weekly. If you choose daily, my posts will be sent between 6am-8am GMT, and if you choose weekly, they will arrive on Saturday morning, GMT.

A sample of the new WordPress subscriber emails

The RSS feed remains unchanged and is still available for new subscribers.

If you’re currently on the original Feedburner subscription, you will still continue to receive my blog via the usual emails – I am not deactivating the service, just moving folk towards the new system. However, you may wish to consider unsubscribing from the Feedburner emails, and then re-signing up to my blog to get the new HTML based WordPress subscription emails.

Also, people who subscribe – do you have a blog or vlog of your own that I can follow? Do let me know!

If anyone has any queries or issues, do please let me know via comments

Thanks a mil guys, Gx

(PS, the only niggle with the new system is that it cannot display the thumbnail of YouTube or Vimeo clips in the email… so you just need to visit my blog (as before) by simply clicking on the title of the emailed post  to see the YouTube or Vimeo clip).

A layman’s thoughts on the current UK economy

I’m going to do something that I don’t normally do, and write a quasi-serious opinion based piece. Do bear with me dear reader, it’s been a while!

This morning, I saw a news story reporting that East London Buses staff have gone on strike because they’ve been given a pay freeze. Erm, hello, RECESSION?! (and reportedly we’ve just hit the longest, most entrenched, period of it in modern history).

At a time when the transport industry are laying off thousands of people and scaling back improvement projects etc, do a group of bus drivers really think that them getting even more money on top of an already generous salary is a priority? Does it click with them that if they want an increase, we as travellers will have to foot the bill for that? It’s just selfish in my opinion.

I work in accounting for a worldwide brand name, and despite having our best ever year last year, we too were forced to plump for pay freezes. I say ‘forced’, I mean we all willingly took a pay freeze to avoid redundancies (which, ultimately, we still had to make).

In terms of the recession itself, I don’t think that we’ll exit until Q1 2010. I’m by no means an expert; I don’t even look at the money markets, but I would like to think I have a good business head at times, and can cobble together a halfway-reasoned opinion.

I don’t think that we’ll exit in Q4 – yes it’s Christmas, but there was too much disappointment at the Q3 results to get the market moving quickly enough. I have already done most of my Christmas shopping, and I have definitely scaled back this year. Add to this the fact that the UK is a service industry lead economy, so we’re not exporting goods for Christmas, and I think it’s unlikely we’ll see improvement. That said, increased borrowing may mean that we hit stagnation, which is a bit of a duff way to say we’re looking better in my opinion (and ‘wrong’), but still by definition an ‘exit’.

I prefer Q1 as I think the post-holiday mood will be more optimistic, and also because most people get their salary reviews around this time. I believe that employers need to give modest salary increases to help people ‘feel’ richer. People may realistically be no more so, but the feeling of wealth that they get is what the country needs to get it spending and producing again.

I do think that the key to making enough of an increase is with the high street. If we can get the ball rolling with the consumer, we should easily be able to increase business confidence and get output raised, both to domestic and foreign markets.

Speaking of foreign markets – stop talking our currency down people! Yes, a weak fx rate as we have at the moment is bad for those of us buying abroad, however it is marvellous for attracting foreign investment and attracting people from overseas into buying our goods! They realise that when the UK market expands again, there is serious money to be made from their initial investment into our economy when things were low. In the grand scale of things, what’s more important? Us sorting out someone elses economy, or getting them to help us sort out our own!

I don’t think the VAT increase will have significant effect – we say the reduction had no effect, so really the increase shouldn’t either. The question is whether the public will be sensible with this or blow it out of context.

I could be completely flawed in my thoughts, as I say, I am just a layman, any oversights are my own.

And drivers of East London Buses… if you don’t wish to work for your current salary, I know plenty of former service industry professionals who will happily do it, and for less…

Geocities – My First Web Page

Just kidding....

Heavens above!

With all the social media attention going to Geocities at the moment (it closes today after nearly 15 years – strange to think it was a pioneer back in 1995), I thought I’d have a root around and try and see if I could find my old account. I honestly wasn’t expecting to be able to.

Surprises of surprises though, I did, and I was fairly ’shocked’! I was a completely different person back then – looking back at it now, I am cringing something rotten!

The picture seems to have gone (thankfully!), but the basic text content remains the same (along with the horrible advert bar at the side). My site was last edited in 2003 (six years ago), and would have been created around that same time, so I would have been 16/17. I don’t think this was my first attempt, but it is definitely the attempt I seem to have decided to settle with. It makes you wonder how bad the other attempts were!

As with most people, Geocities was my first attempt at building a website, and to be honest, I thoroughly sucked!

That said, I am VERY pleased that I had a flash of inspiration to look and see if my old account was still on there, as it was a completely unexpected reminder of how I used to be, and just how much I have grown up since then! It’s like one of those letters written to your future self, in a  weird way.

Oh, and straightacting.com is now an application on Facebook apparently… my, how times have changed! If I bothered using apps on Facebook, I am dead cert I wouldn’t get a ten these days (and certainly wouldn’t wave it around like a badge of honour heh!!). Europride at Manchester? Gosh!

What, you want to see it? Have I not stalled you long enough? Oh goodness, go on then…

Oh, and xkcd.com have a marvellous Geocities themed webpage in honour of the closing of the Geocities site… it looks fabulous! (have a look today – 26 Oct 2009 – though… I don’t want to take images of sites I don’t own!)

BYE BYE GEOCITIES, U WOZ LOTZ OF FUN! *WAVES*

[I wish there was a midi of the funeral march that I could upload here!]

vLog – 25 October 2009

It seems that my new phone may take nice quality images, but is absolutely awful at recording sound… gah!

Whack the sound up please folks!

For those people viewing this post via RSS, please view this post on my blog directly through your browser, or visit http://vimeo.com/darkaeon ~ thanks!

Busiest ever day!

Hurrah, yesterday (Sunday 11th October 2009) was my ‘busiest day’ – finally beating the record that I set nearly a year ago on 18th Oct 2008.

Last time around, it was my post on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider that proved the most successful (with over 500 page views on that one page alone), however it is nice to see that my stats were a little more spread out across my blog this time, as I think this shows it wasn’t just a ‘one off’ post that did it.

Some of the most popular posts yesterday were:

“Upcoming Film – Fame 2009“

“Attitude – The Naked Issue“

“Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride [2005]“

“Joanna Lumley: Northern Lights“

“Howl’s Moving Castle [2004]“

and “Criminal Justice – BBC Drama“.

As always, thanks a mil for visiting/tracking my blog folks – really appreciate all this traffic to what is essentially a personal blog for me to splurge my thoughts out onto heh!

MJ – This Is It – Movie Tickets Booked!

Previously, I blogged about the trailer that was released for ‘This Is It’, the Michael Jackson documentary/film that is coming out on October 28th.

(I recommend watching the trailer in full screen HD – awesome!)

Following on from seeing the trailer, a few friends and I decided that we simply had to go see this, so I stayed up until midnight Sunday to book on a local cinema’s website.

Booked us in for a cinema in Greenwich, London, which is just outside the O2 Arena – kinda apt really! The showing that we’re booked into will be on the first evening and is on an IMAX screen with ’superior digital sound’, plus we have Premier class seating – woo – the only way to see this, I’m sure!

As an aside, I really disliked the confusion that surrounded the release of the tickets for the movie – it caused me no end of headaches, and I don’t see why cinemas couldn’t have been allowed to have announced listings the day before, for example. Plus, several cinemas had tickets onsale on Saturday afternoon (wrong 12:01 I guess!) and all had tickets on at 23:55!

Hopefully ‘This Is It’ will live up to the hype, for now I remain most excited!!

last.fm – 10,000 plays

Hurrah! My last.fm plays have just passed 10,000!

Although this sounds like a monumental number, I assure you that it is not! Alas last.fm is only picking up stats from 9 Feb 2008, and I often listen to music on devices that do not have connection with last.fm, especially on my mobile and at work.

Recently, I was given an iPod and acquired Spotify, so my stats that were coming from my home PC have taken a much needed boost so that I am now in five-figure play numbers like everyone else that I know heh!

For anyone unsure of what last.fm actually is, it is a profile based social networking service which aims to keep a log of all the music that you listen to (on compatible devices/their website) and produces lots and lots of glorious stats and recommendations based on what you’ve been listening to. It’s partly like iTunes Genius, but last.fm got there with Audioscrobbler about 7 years earlier!

10,000th song was ‘Leave Right Now’, by Will Young – a very fine song indeed!