Bowery Mural

Birthdays and friends...March 2012

Tuesday, 6 December 2011

This is a bit late to be blogging but I forgot to do it, and I was wrapping Christmas presents earlier so that's my excuse. December 6. Three months til my birthday. I want to celebrate that birthday in style. Not a full on mega party or that but a gathering of some of my favourite people. I've still to work out the exact details and the exact date yet, hey I may even have two dates for you, but I'll let you know. Not all of you obviously but my favourites of course. I haven't really celebrated big birthdays before. I think I've blogged about this somewhere else. I've never had a 18th, 21st nor a 30th so next year I want a gathering, a small do if you like.

I'm feeling like this because now I feel that there are people in my life I want to share these special occasions with. Every year we normally just celebrate as a family, gathering at the house. There's chat and cake (not for me, I'm not a birthday cake fan. Jam, yuck). But now I want you all to share my day with me. Perhaps two days.

So it'll either be March 2-3 or March 9-10. My actual birthday is somewhere in between those days but those are the weekends I'm deciding upon. Keep them in your diaries, or at least the back of your minds. I'll let you know the details and the secret codes (!) once I figure them out. I'm thinking nice food, good chat and some dancing. You gotta dance!!


Angela xx


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It's all The Killing and Facebook

Monday, 5 December 2011

Look at that we're a quarter of the way through December already. Technically we're not but those days between Christmas and New Year don't really count do they. The snow has fallen. Not that bad yet. Thankfully the sun has come out and it's probably all melting. Bad news for the photographers, good news for me as i won't need to do my Bambi impression when trying to navigate my way across the ice that's been left by the stupid campus tractor scraping to top layer of snow off in the car park. Follow all that? good...

By the time your read this I'll be deciding if I either go sweating my arse off in a spin class or I'll be at home watching Home and Away. I'm scheduling this post you see. It's what we bloggers can do on this here Internet.

How was your weekends? Good. Bad. Indifferent...? I spent most of mine in shops buying stuff that wasn't for me. But we've been through that so i won't go over it again.

Yesterday, when I came home I jumped on my bed and watched The Killing II from Saturday night on the iPad. It's such a great series. In case you don't know it's a Danish crime drama/thriller series showing on BBC4. I'm loving the relationship developing between Lund (the main female lead character) and her colleague Strange (a detective working alongside Lund). He's very lovely in that 'you would for an older guy' kinda way. Anyway, I'm not going to give away any spoilers but i'm on episode 6 and can't wait for 7 and 8 next weekend!!

I then played about a bit with the iPad. I don't think i can get over how much the screen resolution disapoints me. I don't knwo what i expected but it was something a lot better than that. Especially now i have the iPhone 4S. Perhaps the new iPad will have that, along with a hefty price hike no doubt. I do like having it though as a peaceful calm has been bestowed upon the sanctuary that is my bedroom now that I no longer need to fire up the 2007 Dell Inspiron laptop with it's constantly whirring fan! Thank goodness.

Later I watched the programme about Facebook. The one that in the trailer you got a whole load of Zuckerberg talking and in the actual programme you only got about another 5 minutes of him talking a bit more. It was a lazy programme. I learnt more about people actually entering their credit card details to buy silly things on Farmville than i learnt about the Z-man himself. Oh and for good measure they threw in a question and the VP on policy (or something) looked flummoxed and of course the programme makers kept in the huge gaping awkward pause. It was a cheap shot. She was asking the question of whether a person clicking the 'Like' button were being used to advertise the brand or product they had 'liked' without their knowledge. (In case you didn't know, you can see recommendations or rather 'sponsored stories' usually on the right hand side of your news feed page and your friends may appear there some times. In fact you might appear on your friends pages as a sponsored story / advocate for that brand. Effectively, you are advertising it). The guy wasn't keen on her using 'advertising' as a word. He paused. A huge pause...Massive pause. I'm sure he paused several times during their conversation but it was only this pause they chose to show. Personally I have no problem appearing as a sponsored story on someone else's feed. I choose the brands I 'Like' with care. Therefore I reckon that even the simple act of 'Liking' that brand page is a message in itself. I wouldn't 'Like' something if i didn't really 'Like' it in real life and so I'm not bothered if folk know that. Are you following this? If you didn't see the programme you may be a bit lost. Apologies, go check it out on the iPlayer or something. Anyway... I didn't want all that from the programme.

I wanted an insight into Mark Zuckerberg, the man. His thoughts. How he decides what to do next. Everything. What i found out was that he wears the same jacket nearly every day. But it isn't the same actual jacket, he has several of these jackets in his wardrobe. Insightful! I also found out that hey! The social network is a movie. A fictional movie that may or may not have events embellished so as to make it a box office hit. I knew this already and always wonder at those people tweeting... "watching the social network again for the 50th time. I want to be Zuck!" Ok ok so they don't tweet that but you get the idea... I sometimes think people take The Social Network as being the gods honest truth forgetting the fact that its a Hollywood film. Oh, we also got a whole load of shots of Emily Maitlis strutting around downtown Palo Alto in a vest and jeans. I think she must've only spent about 10 actual minutes in the presence of Zuckerberg. The rest was simply rubbish. Well, it wasn't all rubbish. We got to see Margo from Southend-On-Sea peddling her 'business' around local shop owners. "I can set up and look after your Facebook page" said Margo. "I can do your banner". FFS! Whit?! I about fell off my chair laughing at this point. It was so crude and frankly amateurish. I'm sure they could've gotten a better example than Margo, I mean f*** knows there's plenty of them around.

Anyway, there's only one MZ. We'll probably never get to know the workings of the boy, the man, the brain of the thing that has changed our world. But I'm sure there'll be plenty trying.

Oh btw, the wife wasn't called Margo, nor was she from Southend-On-Sea but i can't quite remember so for the purposes of this post, that's who she was.

Did you watch it? What did you think?

Angela XX

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It's all snow and nail polish

Sunday, 4 December 2011

The snow never really came to much today. Thank goodness! I mean I like snow and the but this time last year when the snow fell for what seemed like months, it was monotonous. It practically brought everything to a standstill. It was nice, for about a week. After that it was a pain. A menace. It made me not want to do anything. It set back my spin and gym class schedule last year. Okay okay that s my laziness but when the snow is thick on the ground and you can't even get t your street in the car for fear of being stuck outside the weirdos house, then you just don't really want to do anything. But, not this year. It won't be stopping me this year. Admittedly, Stirling was not my destination when I left the house today but it ended up being the place I went for for of the being stranded on the motorway in the snow. Ever the optimistic eh!

Anyway I thought I'd finish my Christmas shopping this weekend. I haven't. I've still to get something each for the boys, the two angelic nephews. It's so hard though. They have lots of toys already and truth be told the things they turn to most and play with every day are wee cheap cars. Loads of them. So I'm not sure what to get them. I'll keep thinking on.

I bought some more nail polish yesterday. To metallic shades from Topshop. I've had Topshop nail polish before and it goes on smoothly and the pigment is nice. I got a dark by silver metallic that's a bit blue too, then I goth nice dark raspberry link metallic. Lovely. I meant to try the blue one today but so far haven't gotten around to it. I'll add pictures when I've done it. The other week I purchased a new Chanel polish. It's a winter 2011 edition. Not sure if it's a limited edition but when I saw it I fell in love with it. It says Christmas to me. A red with a shimmer running through it. Goes on good in one coat but two coats will be perfect.

I realise this post isn't much without pictures so check back soon and I'll have some pictures up. 

Angela xx

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