The ramblings of a ruptured mind

but for a budding photographer like me it will surely open up some great opportunities, not least some great snow covered vistas but also a snowman made with my Daughter I'd love to treat myself to a digital slr but at the moment it's out of the question.. still the tech I have can produce some good high res images so that'll have to do for the foreseeable future.

Anyone who knows me will attest to the fact that winter is not my season for many reasons.. I will however try to see it through the lens and not through brown colored glasses but most of all I will see it through the eyes of wonderment of my Daughter and try to remember the feeling of discovery and wonderment that she sees.

hmmm I wonder if the "1 golden tip" might be to eat less?!

I found the following text some 5/6 years ago. no idea who the author was but it rang true with me at the time (and still does) as I'd just moved halfway across the country to be with new friends I'd made on IRC. I think anyone who has ever spent any large amount of time on IRC will understand much of what is here.

"I will start talking about years ago, when I thought it would be fun and interesting, to meet people from all around the world... I'm talking about IRC.

Well, what do you feel as a newbie when you join IRC for the first time?
"Incredible", "Fantastic", you are connected with other persons in real time.
You could never imagine that a computer could be "so cool". And you know that those persons in front of their computers like you, are the best thing that ever happened to you.

So you do it again, you are bored at home, your friends didn't call you.. and it's better than TV, isn't it?

So you connect again, and again, and again, and again ... and you can't stop.
You dream with IRC, Stay up late chatting about silly or serious subjects until you must get at least some sleep. You even learn about geography and different time zones (WOW, you didn't even do that for your geography class!!)

You start ignoring your friends, being negligent with your family, and suddenly you become the best typist in the world.

You start getting familiar with terms like: DCC, Aliases, URL, Eggdrop, Bot, Ping time out, Nuke, Remotes, IRCop, LOL, brb, ... People poke you and you don't mind.

People with weird names, names taken from animals, cities, fantasy creatures or even parts of your anatomy, people that you have never seen, and perhaps you won't ever see.. those people have become your best friends.

And then... finaly it happens. Truth is that you are a part of them.. you are a part of IRC, you are addicted to it. You will ask yourself... "How did it happen? I was just a normal guy". Now you cannot survive without IRC, you have only two options .. to be online or to sleep.

One weekend your ISP decides to do a service maintenance on their servers, or add more phone lines without telling you first, and you try to connect patiently... nothing.
You keep dialing without success... you start getting nervous. First thought is.. "could be the modem?". You unplug it and plug it in again .. and nothing.. check the phone line.. it's fine.. Finally you do what you should have done in the first place.. call your ISP's technical service, and they tell you what is going on, and that you won't have a connection till midnight. "phew! everything is alright" .. and you guess you can survive till then.

Finally you can connect, and your friends ask you: "Where have you been?" "We thought you where dead" (the last remark with a ridiculous at the end). And you think: "Perhaps I am dead, and now I am in paradise ... in IRC". After talking with everybody, now everybody hates your ISP. You feel great empathy with these people.

I am addicted to IRC and I don't know if one day I will be able to quit.
Sometimes I would like to know why I am addicted to this thing. I think I know why I "love" IRC so much: In cyberspace you can be yourself, or you can be whoever you want to be, and no one will care. You are a personality, not a body. You are a brain, not a resume.

No one waits for you to send them flowers, or make a phone call. Perhaps the only thing they wait from you is an email. No one waits for you to give them security. IRC is the most advanced way of meeting people, perfect place for flirting, for the romantic, for the lonely people.

You can connect to IRC completely naked (try to do that in real life). IRC doesn't limit you like society does. In IRC you are what you want to be just by yourself, and you have the advantage of quitting when you are tired of yourself.

I almost forget to mention the dark side of IRC, if you can call it that. In IRC you can experience feelings, sensations and emotions in an extremely intense way.

You can feel ignored if no one sends you a message, you can feel frustrated if your script doesn't work as it's supposed to. You can feel happiness when a friend in your "Notify list" is online too. You can be sad if a friend is having connection problems. You can be jealous if someone you love is in a PM.

In real life those things wouldn't affect us that much, those feelings make of us what we are. IRC is not just a game we play, it is more than that. We dedicate our time to it, and it becomes a part of us. And those IRC friends become real life friends. Only those addicted to IRC can understand what I'm saying, and the nature of these relationships.

We look for something or someone in IRC, and when we find it, we can't let it go. All we want is to have fun, meet people, be loved and even... to be in love.

We want "that" which we couldn't find in real life, and that is why we will never quit.
My advice is "to be yourself always", and if you can connect to IRC, you can be sure you will have a chance to be.

Some relationships on IRC become real life relationships, with a meeting or a phone call. Others will remain on IRC. And as in real life, be very careful with other people feelings. I can talk to you like this cause I have been there, and I have seen it.

When I started IRC, I thought it would be just fun and games, how wrong I was. Of course it is fun, but it is also something serious, and that is what makes it so fantastic. You'll laugh and cry too.

When I was a newbie I thought all those persons where just a bunch of nicks and nothing else. Now those people, no matter if they are more than 20.000 miles away, I can call my friends, and I can miss them. Can you believe that?

In some ways I am still new to IRC, and I have so many things to learn, but from now on I will try not to be another addict, not because I don't want to be one, but because I miss being with my family and friends.

I wrote this because I wanted to .. not because I had to.

Now I have to go, I think the line is no longer busy...

/quit"

You might need to save this one to read it all.

Opensource software is one of my passions, as is a good game of pool.. so you can probably imagine my delight when I found this excellent piece of software FooBillard There's a game comming out on PS3 around Christmas time called Hustle Kings which I was going to get, and may still do but the quality of foobillard has blown me away, just check out the screenshot and best of all it runs on multiple operating systems.. I'm hooked!

Only problem I've found with it is that it's a little bit buggy when trying to have a full blown snooker tournament, however it is free and still in development so you can't really complain. I really can't recommend this title enough. give it a go, you've nothing to lose!