Don't worry, I'm still here

It's been a while since I last posted on my blag, and I feel guilty as I have several topics in the pipeline, sitting as half-finished Word documents on my hard drive. I might do a posting spree at some point, but finding the time is difficult.
On the cards are my forays into Ubuntu Linux (codenamed "Ubunwha?"), Eurovision 2009 (it hits us this weekend), a film review of Watchmen (which I saw over 2 months ago now), then probably some random spiel about stuff on the iPlayer I view these days (e.g. the cluster-fuck of a plotline that is Heroes). Oh, and that "Blog Fu" topic I should have done yonks back, hehe. And finally, the momentous occasion of my easter vacation, when my hard drive crashed.

Cambridge has hit Easter Term, mostly known as Exam Term to anyone who isn't on a slacker subject like Land Economy, so certain things have to take priority sadly.

Image of choice is xkcd's 'Useless' T-shirt, which I have been meaning to order for a while, and now have a more compulsive desire to. The first four items I have known for a minimum of two years now (matrices being the last of the four I encountered), but now the engineering mathematics lectures have hit the 5th and final one - Laplace Transformations. Filled with the power of ornate L notation! Side note: the comic strip original goes for a Fourier Transform.

You may also want to know that I post intermittently on Twatter... Dobblesworth resides here in the tweetiverse.

<3
<=4
!=5

Project Title Under Construction

Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt your internet browsing experience for a potentially important announcement.

My associate Noelor and I have been considering the launch of a new project. This project is as yet untitled, but the concept we have in mind is fairly solidified. Essentially we intend to carry out a blogging version of the ‘Masters of Song Fu’ contest through our respective sites. This was an online contest participated in by the legendary geek folk artist Jonathan Coulton [see subscription bar on the right], who likes to inform us that all he wants to do is eat your brains. So, here's the lowdown:

At either defined periods, or whenever the hell we feel like it, a discussion topic shall be agreed upon between the two of us. Then both shall depart to Notepad/MS Word/OpenOfficeWriter/other text editor of choice and proceed to compose thoughts and feelings on the topic. Still, a few things remain to be decided...

Project title? Noelor has proposed “Blog off”; I’ve managed to come up with “Blog Fu” so far. Maybe one, both or neither shall be used, but I have other ideas. I'm thinking a potentially witty merge & subversion of both our blog titles. Potent Rant Titles Constructed? Or maybe not.

Choice of topic? They would need to be unique and interesting, not "should WoW bring in Classic Realms?"; something both can talk easily about, i.e. if the topic were “random pen ‘n’ paper RPG”, he’d make a dissertation of it, while I’d probably just type “LOL DND” and leave it at that.
You’ll probably see stuff like the certain memes crawling over WoW blogs these days like “post your 6^th screenshot in your folder.” That’s a bit difficult for me, as up until 2006-ish WoW saved its screenshots in Targa (.tga) file format, before switching to JPEG. About half that folder on my desktop is .tga. Which proves how long I’ve been playing WoW/how much of my soul I have signed over to Activision-Blizzard [delete as applicable from your perspective].

So yes, if you have ideas, comments or suggestions, use the relevant box or toss an e-mail. Keep you posted, we shall.

Blogging the Roll; Rolling the Blog

I felt it was time to get BTUC fleshed out a bit, so what I believe they call "a blogroll" in the lingo has now been compiled. So on the right-side you'll see a listing of weblogs that I follow: a mix of those from the World of Warcraft community, professional opinion from BBC News & The Times, and also some random ones like a fan-produced news-blog for the Cloverfield film of 2008.

The second listing is a spread of various webcomics from several genres: WoW, gaming, or nerd humour in general. Listed here too are database and search engine tools I find useful in WoW or the Internet as a whole, and links to several one-off sites that I whole-heartedly recommend.

N.B. I am in no way being paid to plug these sites, I'm just boosting their traffic out of the kindness of my heart.

I'm currently working on some form of basic banner image and logo for the site, but the WoW Model Viewer software I feel obliged to use is rather temperamental. Stay tuned, readers.

"... and in the game!"

A dear friend and colleague of mine, alias Noelor, has joined the Web 2.0 scene and the Blogger Bandwagon. Like myself, he's a strong fanatic for World o' Warcraft and currently taking a vaguely-CompSci-ish course in the Devolution Paraside of Scotland. I don't quite know which of our two interblags will come out with the higher readership turnover (besides us ourselves reading our subscriptions to our counterpart's RSS feed); possibly mine as I shamelessly export Blog Title Under Construction to my Facebook notes!

Regardless, his 'domain' can be found here: http://thenoelor.blogspot.com/

I think two posts on BTUC in the space of a day is a new personal best.

We got tagged!

Like most committed hunter players out there in WoW, I'm a regular reader of our great prophet, BigRedKitty [commonly found venting his spleen at http://www.bigredkitty.net]. I'm not specifically certain which articles I have offered my thoughts on, but he offers a service whereby "you post comment with link to your blog, and BRK will hopefully reference you later."

So, on this averagely grey Cambridge Sunday afternoon, as I trawl through electromagnetics while listening to the Newcastle-Everton game on BBC [I follow the former], I hit my Firefox RSS feeds...

BRK: "Massive Linkage Time" (http://www.bigredkitty.net/2009/02/22/massive-linkage-time)
So towards the end, I see this line...
http://murlocking.blogspot.com - English Enginerd
I suppose that sums me up quite nicely. While I don't quite think I have explicitly stated English, I do use Enginerd. English-speaking Briton residing in England, yes; English, not necessarily. Although, I am, so yeah.
Enginerd itself I didn't come up with, rather I saw it as a user title of some randomer on the xkcd forums, and figured that summed me up rather nicely as well.

I, for one, welcome our new dobblogger overlords.

Observant readers may possibly notice a subtle switch in poster profile names from this point on. Here's a low-down for you, comrades.

Up until now I have been working on Blog Title Under Construction using a Google Blogger account derived from my Hotmail e-mail. As one can never have too many e-mail accounts (I operate off four these days), I initiated a GMail account, which of course comes with the Google Account items such as Blogger profiles.

Now, as signing in to two Google Accounts frequently during sessions for keeping tabs on my GMail and posting here/wallowing in self-pity seeing "Comments (o)", can get quite tiresome, I followed a mini-tutorial for switching blogs between accounts (http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41448&topic=12500), so did a bit of a switcheroo. Dobmeister/Dobmiestre derived from my HMail GAccount, ceded command to Dobblesworth d'GMail.

All three are seamlessly connected online entities of yours truly, so don't expect any change in editorial stylings.

Wow, two postings in the space of a week, I feel this calls for a celebration... Toblerone anyone?

Well, let's get things rolling then!

Good morning/afternoon/evening and welcome to episode 1 of my interblag posting saga. Enjoy your stay, but don't eat too much of the cake.

~Insert writer's block here~

I guess I got round to this after noticing I have years worth of frustrations and spleens that need venting, so this, albeit possibly slightly generic, blog is the result.

Stuff that might get a regular mention:
- News articles, usually from delving through BBC News or other online media
- Thoughts for the Day/Week/Month/
- Rants, possibly derived from listening to crackpots on the morning radio or reading about crackpots in the morning paper [read: British urban newspaper The Metro that gets distributed for free on public transport]
- Gaming, with a range of topics from developments in World of Warcraft or any others in my collection, to other related news items in general
- Nerd/Geek stuff
- Charvs, and how much I despise them

Anyhoo, I can't really think of much else to say, so I'm gonna leave it there.