Bye BMW, Hello Great North Run

Well I'm glad i decided to venture about with the camera, as i've quickly learned that not only the settings were all wrong but it wasn't working very well at all (as you will see later). Surely some of the shoddiest pictures of recent time.

On Saturday i finally bid farewell to the good ol' BMW, i really needed to sell it to add some much needed cash to the travel fund and i very much doubt I'll be using it all on my return either. It was the second car i've had and has proved to be a pretty good bargain really. Obviously it pales in comparason to the Corsa as that was like a shed on wheels but I've definitely come to the conclusion that i much prefer older crappy cars; the main reason for this simply being that if anything happens to them, then i really could not care at all. Both the Corsa and BMW were covered in dints, scratches, chips, had damaged bumpers and i really coudn't care at all. It clearly added character if anything. If i had a new car with the slightest scratch then i'm convinced i'd freak out on the causer and that would just be bad times for all. Zero self control on all fronts these days.

As you can see the photos are rather poor, they've been cropped and the size settings were too small too but the whole point of doing this now is to find out these facts rather then when i'm looking at my Bangkok photo's. I don't think it comes through in the last photo but that one really was my favourite dent. I was stuck in traffic at a car park when i noticed an older driver reversing out directly to my left and he hadn't even bothered to check if there was anybody behind him. Since the care in front wasn't the one causing the hazard, i didn't know whether to beep the horn or not so panicked and quickly decided  the best plan of action was to just scream "nooooooooo". As you can imagine, this was a immensely massive fail and he smashed right into the side. Bad times.

Since the great north run was finishes on my door step i'd planned to write about that too, unfortunately none of the photos came out which was pretty disappointing. It really was a nice day and it's always odd to see thousands of people swarm on south shields one day a year but i think it's definitely been a good advert for the town. I think when you grow up anywhere you don't actually realize what's around you so it's completely different through the eyes of an out of towner so to speak. I think the problem was a simple light setting so i'll have a play around wit it in the week to make sure its ok.

Also this week the first track from the Julian Casablancas album got released, i'm a huge Strokes fan and think this is the first time i've actually been looking forward to a release all year. I like how they make effort with the artwork too and wish more would do the same. I think stuff like that has almost become lost n the digital age so it's always good to see people try and keep it going.

http://www.myspace.com/juliancasablancas

I like how the artwork nods to older style cover work with the His Masters Voice reference but also includes different aspects that reflect the albums sound. Even if it's shit i can see this being my album of the year.

Adios.

The Original and creatively titled- first blog post

Well i think this is the fourth or fifth time I've tried to write something on here so it's clearly going about as well as i expected. I tried writing a blog about 5 years ago during the first major wave of social media (Livejournal, friendster etc etc) and when i spent all my days on libertines.org but it proved to be rather fruitless.

However since i'm going traveling i thought it would be good to give it another go; not only as i'm sure that it'll be good to look back on in a few years time but will also save me from the tedium of obtaining email addresses and writing plenty of self indulgent e-mails....so I'll just write a self indulgent blog instead.

So yeah, I'm going to try and get into the habit of writing before i go, as well as using the opportunity to fine tune my out of practice literary skills too (despite the standard of my brilliant research papers they're hardly good prose). I need to get used to my camera and play about with that so i'll start using it posting photos here too. 

I guess that's it for  ye olde introductory post, obviously these will improve drastically when i actually have something to talk about. On another note I've been listening to Papillion by Editors a lot today and think it bodes well for the new album. Much prefer the high tempo drum driven tracks to the sparse Joy Division lite they tend to fall too easily into  and I shall use it as my first attempted link..... or is it embed?

Laters