Seen as the LJ phone system no longer works in a way that would make anyone want to actually use it, have this audio entry which I recorded in Sound Forge for your own, ur, not quite entertainment.

Yes, they are. Average days, when nothing is all that great, but nothing is all that screwed up either. Today has been one of those days. For some reason, these sorts of days leave me feeling much more sleepy at the end of them than I would feel if I had been out doing something fun with other people. Now, aint that an interestin' concept, me having a life? OK, enough of that crap, onto some other crap instead...

The highlight of today was my second drumming lesson, I'm enjoying them loads so far, and am doing pretty well (if I do say so myself). Apparently the laptop has a hardware issue, so its being sent back to where it came from. In other words, they've already been delaying my progress in music tech by not having the required equipment, and now that they have some of said equipment, its messed up and needs to be replaced/fixed/something. Oh well, its Thursday, which apparently is always a pretty lame day according to borrisinabox, but that's neither here nor there. Or is it?

So, they could fix the laptop themselves, or they could send it back. They're sending it back. What can I say in response to that, other than 'blah'? Anyway, the drumming lesson, as I've already said, was the only thing that really happened today that was worth doing. I had an entire morning of Sociology, which wasn't all bad. But, seen as this day, and this post in fact is pretty average, it wasn't all that impressive. Is it me, or does this post sound like a ramble of someone who doesn't have much to do, and/or doesn't feel like doing said nothingness? Yes, I thought it did. I'll thus hit the send button, go for a shower, and then go against my body clock and sleep a hole hour earlier than normal. How absolutely rebellious of me!

Oh, one more thing, I think the update plug-in I use in MirandaIM is making the program die really hard at this time every night. It keeps using more than 90% of my CPU power, and as soon as I restart the application, I get the 'Confirm Updates' dlg box. So maybe I'll disable that particular plug-in, it has issues anyway and I've never actually updated anything with it.

Update [09:54 PM (GMT)]: I found a definition of quixotic on the tinterweb. I'm apparently feeling impulsive? OK, really not, but I'm leaving the mood set to that, so deal with it. Also, I didn't mean to imply, in any shape or form, that my drumming lessons are connected to a screwed up school laptop. Damn my sentence structuring skills!

Update [10:14 PM (GMT)]: I just came across an article giving instructions on how to show what version of Windows you are currently running in your task bar at all times. Why would you want that? I mean, the people who don't already know what Windows version they are running don't generally really care, and if they do, they certainly probably don't care enough to have it looking at them at all times from their task bar. And certainly probably is a phrase that's not really all that correct as far as the English language goes, but who cares. I'm outa here for real, now.

No, not me. This laptop that school have given me for my music technology course, though, is one of those machines that just takes the piss at every turn. Its huge and heavy for a start, has a loud IDE CD/DVD/RW drive, and the screen is mighty bright, making it just more obvious to the casual passer-by that you've made it screw itself up, again. It came with Vista, as all self-doubting laptops do these days, and on first boot into that tragic OS, it promptly rebooted. And it wasn't one of those spontaneous reboots that occurs on system failure, either. It actually just popped up a message, telling me it was about to do it, which made it all that more infuriating that the OS had done it on purpose. There's no buttons to accidentally press or anything to make it die like that, so I have no idea what was going on there.

But that's all besides the point. I, being the one who will be using this thing for my music tech course, asked if it came with an XP CD, even if it was some OEM-branded crappy one. It did not, a fact that mystified the technician a great deal due to the fact that he was sure he'd ordered one that came with the option of both OS's. I didn't argue that any machine was downgradable thanks to the fact that XP CD's still exist and all that.

So I offered to take it home, as I have an original XP Pro CD that I bought, and that I use to create unattended setups. I created a performance XP Pro installer with nLite, tweaked the WINNT.sif file a bit to make it automatically reformat and partition the drive, and booted the laptop with the CD loaded. It took its time, spinning up the CD, loudly clicking and rattling around and generally making the point that it wasn't doing what I wanted it to. It then popped up a boot menu, asking if I wanted to install, Vista? I had apparently forced a shut-down in Vista earlier, and thus Windows thought it was under some sort of threat.

Off into the BIOS I went, changed the boot order, and it still refused to boot. To cut a long story short, I made several copies of the XP Pro CD with the unattended installer on them, to make sure the disk I was using wasn't faulty. I also burned it to a DVD. Then, on the off-chance that it would work, I let it boot to the boot menu, let the CD spin up, and then quickly rebooted. The CD didn't spin back down, and thus, we finally! received the 'Press any key to boot from CD...' message.

Anyway, I'll finish by saying, "STOP:"

Yep, it booted, copied files, and then returned a nice STOP error when attempting to begin the XP install process. I tried the original XP Pro disk, the same thing happened. At this point, I promptly lost all hope in the world, the universe, my life, and everything else. I thought to myself, 'You could open it up, to check no components have loose connections, or you could run CHKDSK or some other related disk checking thingy.' But as I'd lost hope, I didn't hold out much hope that carrying out those actions would return any worthy results, so I closed the laptop lid, took out the disk, attempted to throw 5 useless CD's across the room into the bin (and missed completely), and I will now put the laptop in its box ready to take back to school tomorrow to let the people who get paid for this sort of thing deal with it. And then I will head out of here for a shower, and then maybe sleep.

So, that's that. I refuse to use Vista for music production, the laptop's already proven that its going to be a troublesome little bugger, there's no need to add flames to the fire, or however that old saying goes. I dunno. Getting annoyed at technology makes me ramble on for quite some time about nothing all that interesting, and it also seems to make me use loads of commas in long sentences, something which I'm not a fan of doing. So, I'll go away before I cause any more damage. What I've caused damage to already I'm not sure, but it can't hurt not to damage it some more.

Update [10:05 PM (GMT)]: It seems I can't type, or use my spell checker effectively. I apologise for that, even though I've cleaned up the entry now.

Its not July, its September, and even that's about to shove off to make way for October. So why should you have a happy July? I for one have no idea, the only reason I wrote that was because July was the last time I wrote a real post in this journal. Obviously, I'm not including the thingy I posted from my phone yesterday using LJ2Me, as it consisted of 2 rather boring sentences. It was a test, even if the post subject says it wasn't. So there.

Moving on...

I could ramble on for ages about what I've been doing since July, but the truth is that I haven't been doing much of anything. I of course attended the ICC in Austria from the 22nd to the 28th of July, and had an absolutely fantastic time. I met some awesome people, did rather a lot of socialising and the like, and would've done some alcohol consuming too if the stores in walking distance had have been licensed; oh well. What with the drinking age being 16over there, I think the plan went along the lines of: "Hey, its the last night of this camp thingy, let's have one hell of a good time." We still had one hell of a good time and all, just without the alcohol. We had to survive on sugary stuff and freshly ground coffee to keep us awake, as we were all extremely tired. It seemed to be the general consensus however that we would do an 'all-nighter' on the last night there, round the camp off in style, and all that jazz. So yeah, that happened, we all felt blah the next day, but I mean, who needs to feel alert to get on a flight back to the UK?

Travel to the camp was set-up a little differently this year; first we had to find our own way to the Hilton Hotel in London, which is literally inside the airport we were flying from. It wasn't the best place to get to know everybody, it being this huge scary posh place, with three people per room and all. But it must've worked for everyone, as we got the choice of who to share a room with when we reached Austria, and the majority of us chose the same room set-ups. I think we would've loved to stay in the Hilton all week though, man that place was nice. The three people in my room ended up staying up all night anyways; we just chilled, watched TV, listened to random 3 AM radio (holy crap, the DJ's at that time in a morning on generic FM stations are terrible), and streamed random tunes via Spotify via my netbook, using a 3G connection. Yea for that, especially since I ended up not using more data than my data plan includes.

Anyway, other thingies happened that week, a lot of fun stuff, a lot of getting to know new people from other countries and a lot of fixing other people's Nokia phones. I didn't really learn much about computers in the various workshops I signed up for this year. However I did get to try out a Macbook for the first time. Unfortunately, I went through the entire week without knowing that this guy from the UK group, Dave, had one. So, didn't have long to play with it, only a few hours, but I liked it. My sister's boyfriend has recently purchased a smaller one, and I had a go on that, and this time I was wide awake, so I tried a few different applications, tried a bit of terminal stuff, and that sort of thing. I won't go into a huge rant about my opinions of Mac OSX vs. Windows, but safe to say my next big purchase, probably around Christmas time, one year after I bought my netbook, I'll probably buy a Macbook. Not sure if I'll go for a Pro yet, but, well, we'll see.

The rest of the summer? Rather depressing. Not only did I have nothing to do, but I didn't have the money to spend on random gadgets to fill my time with something interesting. So, I just sat here, being unproductively boring. That meant, of course, that I had lots and lots of time to write in my LJ. But when you have nothing at all to inspire you, you don't feel all that creative, neither do you feel like even bothering to get out of bed some days. Oh well. That's all over now, twelve weeks of nothing, apart from a week of fun, has now passed by. Gone. Forever.

So: what now?

I'm back at school, now studying AS level courses. If you don't live in the UK, and have no idea what AS levels are, too bad. Go do some good ol' internet research . I'm studying Music Technology, ICT, and Sociology. I only chose Sociology for a lack of anything else remotely cool to do, but it doesn't seem too bad so far. Anyway, enough about the courses, I don't feel like going into a huge monologue about what I think of them, and I'm sure you don't care. If you do, ask me. Its not like I do much outside of school anyways, so I have loads of time on my hands still. In fact, the only difference between a school term and a holiday period is that when school is on, I have small bits of work to complete that don't fit into my free time that the school provide. Academically, its all good. Socially, school sucks!

So, now, I'm sat here, waiting for my Zoom H4 to be shipped. Its taking its time, I tell ya! When that gets here, it will be something to have fun with, and all that crap. So stay tuned for something else relatively uninteresting for you to enjoy, or not.

Anyway, maybe I'll go away now, I had to reinstall and reconfigure Semagic to write all this in a decent interface; was it worth it? I certainly don't think so, you may disagree, but I doubt it.

Ok, so actually it is, but whatever. I, being a procrastinating bad person, am trying out this weird Lj2me Live Journal client for my phone. Its rather weird and unlabeled in places, but it works. So don't download or install it, and remember this isn't a test! Ok, I'm off to install XP on a school laptop. Fun?

I had to laugh out loud a moment ago; I have just received the following email message:

From: Annette Busby
Subject: Your internet access is going to get suspended
X-Mailer: Microsoft Windows Mail 6.0.6001.18000

Your internet access is going to get suspended

We are aware of your illegal activities on the internet wich were originating from You can check the report of your activities in the past 6 month that
we have.

http;//bothbird.com/

We strongly advise you to stop your activities regarding the illegal downloading of copyrighted material of your internet access will be suspended.

Sincerely
ICS Monitoring Team

These people, if in fact they are people (which is doubtful) must think that we are stupid. I mean, I hate spam as much as the next guy, which is why I have a very strong spam filter monitoring all of my domains, however if you are going to put in the effort to get past that filter, at least try and make me believe you are for real. "which were originating from you can check..."? Seriously, they expect me to be even annoyed by that? I'm not annoyed, not in the slightest. Its not often something gets past my spam filter, and this just makes me glad I'm not as sad and pethetic as these freeks obviously are. By the way, the URL, which I purposely didn't directly link to, takes you to a site entitled: "Order The Cheapest Medications Now!" Yeah, like we didn't see that coming...

p>Anyway, that is all for now, I hope you share in my astonishment of how desperate for a life these idiots really are, and feel free to spam that email address all you want; I'm sure receiving spam will really brighten up their otherwise dreary and quite laughable life. Wait, make that lifestyle, they clearly don't have lives... Or maybe existence is a a better choice of word...</p>

Note: my netbook is now in full working order once more, took me long enough to fix it didn't it?! Will post more about that in a future entry. Out...

So last week, I think it was Friday, woke up to some error message or other, saying something about drives not found and all that stuff. I figured it was a USB issue again, or some other weird issue that I've had before. So, I played around with cables for a bit, but found that everything was connected properly. It was then that I realised my WD 1TB external drive wasn't spinning up when I plugged it in. To cut a long story of fear and uncertainty very short, I got someone sited to look at it. They noticed that the light on the power supply was flashing on for about a second, then flickering off again, so off I went in a search for a new power supply. Of course, WD being the crappy company that they are, they can't just sell you a power supply, oh no. They've got to replace the entire drive. Well, no thanks.

After a day or so searching the web, reading various forums, etc, I had 4 options:

1. By a new external drive enclosure and mount the drive in that.
2. Remove the drive from its current enclosure and mount it inside my PC.
3. Purchase an unofficial power supply, and put something together with that.
4. Bug WD until they sent me a new power supply.

Well, didn't feel much like bugging the morons at Western Digital, nor spending money on a power supply or new enclosure, so I went for the 2nd option.

Was all going fine; we opened up the PC case, mounted the drive, connected up the SATA cables, and then realised that the cable from the power supply to the drive bay wasn't long enough. I ordered a new one, the order got canceled due to a lack of stock. Ordered another one yesterday, it arived this morning but I was sleeping. It will probably arive tomorrow, so maybe then this drama will be over.

[[Update 08:52 PM: This offer is no longer valid. People were taking advantage of it; this shows how Microsoft think. They let people have access to all their software for free, and they expect for people not to take advantage? Really smart, MS.]
Well, a Microsoft TechNet Plus subscription is pretty cool, but its even better when you can get it for free. You are hearing me correctly, all the Microsoft software you could ever want, for free. Operating systems, servers, Office, etc all for £0, $0, or 0 any other currency you wish to trade in. Well, that's not technically true, its only available to people living in the UK, US, or Canada, so...

Anyway, Because I'm lazy, you can go and read an Ars Technica article about it. It tells you what to do to sign up for the offer, and also gives some info about catches of using the service. This just shows that free stuff can be good sometimes; who ever said nothing in life comes for free was an idiot IMO. Enjoy!

WWW: Wake by Robert
J. Sawyer

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
I started reading this book because of the talk about it on Twitter. At first I scanned through the text, thinking it was a
joke. Being visually impaired myself, I was overwhelmed by the attention to detail as far as the main character being blind was concerned. The author has
obviously done his research into JAWS, Braille Displays, etc, and once I started actually reading the novel I managed to put aside my original opinion
in favor of adopting a different view. It occurred to me that the amount of detail regarding blindness had been used by the author in place of the amount
of detail he could have included if he had chosen to write about a sited character.

Once I had adopted this view, I did not find it hard at all to start enjoying the actual storyline. When I do read mainstream books, this is the type
of book I read, so the plot appealed to me. And once I'd started reading, I couldn't stop. Not because I was astonished at the quality of writing, or at
the huge variety of vocabulary used. In fact, not even because of the plot, as I still believe the storyline to be decidedly average. But it was the type
of book that I had to read in large chunks, otherwise I would have lost interest very quickly. And that is why it has only received a 3 star rating from
me. 4/5 star ratings will be reserved for books that, for lack of a better phrase, blow my mind, and really make me want to read them, no matter how long
the duration between reading sessions is, or how many chapters I read during said sessions.

Many people chose to be offended by the portrayal of visual impairment in this book. And while I see there point for the most part, the fact remains
that this is a work of fiction, and that no matter how much research the author may or may not have completed before writing this text, he will never be
able to accurately portray blindness from the perspective of a blind individual. He is not blind, and has grown up in a sited world. No amount of Googling
or interviews can change that.


View all my reviews.

Hey folks.

I know, its been a long time since I've updated this thing. Well, 2 weeks could be classed as either a long or short amount of time, depending how you look at it, and how often you blog yourself. On my friends page I see people who update every day, and then people who update once a month, so to some people 2 weeks of no writing won't be all that big a deal. Anyways, moving on...

I of course attended the trip I was talking about earlier in this journal, and it was fun. Although, I have to say, when I got home on the Sunday night I was probably more tired than I've ever been in my life. Seriously, I could barely muster up the energy to eat food when I got in. But I spoke to people I haven't seen in a while, grabbed new music off people, and of course did some activities. After all, I wouldn't be tired if all I had done was chilled out and sent stuff via Bluetooth, now would I? My phone would've been, and in fact was. But that's a different story.

So what did I do? Well, there's not really much I can say, apart from we didn't do many water activities this time. We did a lot of climbing though, and abseiling. If I've spelt abseiling incorrectly, live with it. I think that's why I was tired, as the activities were very physically intensive. I'm off on another trip this Friday, same sort of thing, but less little kids to ruin it LOL.

Have been revising like crazy here, well, not so much at home, but at school I have tonnes of free time so I'm using it productively, or effectively, or whatever. My first GCSE exam was on Wednesday; Music Integrated Assignment Evaluation. Its one of those exams which isn't really based on fact, but you still have to know stuff to get a good mark. Basically the integrated assignment is a composition, a part of the coursework. Basically you choose what to compose, compose it, annotate it, then do this evaluation exam thingy. I think/hope it went kinda ok, but we'll have to just wait and see I guess. Next exam is this Wednesday, Music Listening, which is the one that's based on music theory. Revising for that one the most out of all my exams, as some stuff I just keep forgetting. Oh well, we'll see how that goes too.

Moving away from exams now as that topic is depressing me slightly, I got my new PC. After 3 failed deliveries at the house due to people not being around, we went to pick it up. This place was in Leeds, like 13 miles away or something, and all I say is, thank God for Wayfinder Access LOL. Its bigger than my old machine, which isn't surprising as the old one was one of those crappy compact things that just don't work. I had to tidy up this place a bit, and I decided to put it under my desk instead of next to the monitor. Basically, specs are:
Intel E8400 Dual Core Processor, running at 2 x 3.00 GHZ
4GB RAM
Windows XP Pro SP3
160GB HD

Its been running great since I got it, which is nearly a week ago. The old machine couldn't even last 3 days of constant running, and this is going on 7 without any problems or drops in performance. So overall worth the money, as having a PC that works, and is quicker, really makes a noticeable difference. Yea for custom built machines.

And that's about it for this entry I think. There's probably more that I've left out, but I have a crappy cold, feel pretty awful, and there's drilling and stuff going on downstairs so my concentration levels aren't really what they should be. Until next time!

Hey all. You know you have those evenings, or days, where nothing goes wrong, there's nothing to stress you out, etc? Today's been one of those days. I'm going away at the weekend to the Lake District, where fun social times will be had. Thus, have loaded up my N95 with music, the E71 stays music-free and is only really used for internet radio, as far as multimedia goes. Its my main phone, and although the speaker is good for what it is, I see no point in wasting the battery if I have a phone with stereo speakers available.

Was talking to one of the guys who's going on this trip, I taught him how to use bittorrent yesterday, and we've been trading tracks back and forth, discussing phones, that sort of thing. We've decided that, due to the unreliability of phone signal around where we'll be staying, that we're gonna take 5 phones; 1 on each of the 5 major UK phone networks. He's taking 2, I'm taking 3. The E71 on 3, the N95 on Orange, and a 7 year old, but miraculously still functioning, 6600 on O2. He has Vodafone on an old 6310I, and a 6233 (awesome speakers on that phone) on T-Mobile. So, we'll just see which one has the best signal, if any signal can e found on any of the devices.

This weekend trip is being setup by an organization called The Outlook Trust. They run a number of trips each year, we all know each other for the most part, but occasionally there's the new person to get to know. We all know the staff, and its a nice way for people to get together who don't get to see each other any other time due to school, work, or any other commitment, or simply just because of a lack of time. The trips are based around outdoor activities, they provide blind young people with the chance to try out activities that they usually wouldn't be able to do without paying an arm and a leg or something of that nature. To some people, the trips might seem lame, but honestly it feels good to get away from home, and to do something other than hide behind my computer screen. I'll obviously update about what we all got up to when I get back on Sunday, but for now I just wanted to share the good feeling vibes or something with you all. I had originally planned to write more, but I kinda broke off in the middle of writing, and just can't get back into it, you know? Laters!

BTW: New PC has been dispatched, should get here tomorrow, but I'm at my dad's tomorrow, and going away Friday night, so will set it all up next week, probably on Monday.

Update (05:54 PM): Oops, I guess the subject for this entry isn't really relevant anymore. Will I change it? Probably not.

For once I'm feeling kind of bored, so I thought I'd have a rant about the stupidity of some people, post a few little interesting things, etc. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), I can't be bothered typing out a rant right now, so maybe later. My urge to rant about this particular topic will probably pass anyway. So on with the news.

I woke up this morning, checked the time with TALKS on my phone like I usually do, and then got ready for school. While drinking a 'good ol cuppa' I decided to check my Facebook feeds, and my Twitter replies. I unlocked my phone's keypad, and was greeted by the message:
'Licence has expired'.
Thinking my phone was simply acting weird, I rebooted it. I opened up the TALKS settings box, and was told my licence was no longer valid. Well, I won't go into any more detail about what happened next, as really I don't have to. All I'll say is this. Forgetfulness is a bitch. I'll give you a hint, I purchased this phone 30 days ago...

Interestingly, when I read the time a few minutes earlier, TALKS didn't tell me that my licence had expired. So either my licence expired as I was getting ready for school, or the function to read current time and date works regardless of whether you're copy of TALKS is registered or not.

Onto other things, preferably not involving acts of stupidity by me...

School was ok. Not great, but not one of those days that makes me want to act like I've listened to Coldplay's X&Y album, followed by the All American Rejects discography. Got back to school from the Gym kind of late, but got to Maths on time. We didn't go through anything new, so I suppose it wouldn't have really mattered either way. English this afternoon was boring as hell, though. While it wasn't the most depressing English lesson I've ever attended, it sure wasn't full of laughter, happiness and other generally good things. I really think that I won't be taking it at A Level next year. I might e good at writing if I put my mind to it, but analysing, poetry or book analysis etc just isn't my thing at all.

After that, I headed home, got a heap of spam MSN messages over night from people not adventurous enough to try MirandaIM. Ah well, that's life I suppose, not everyone can be expected to have a good taste in IM clients LOL. I read all the email from mailing lists, as well as a few LJ notifications, and emails telling me that my new PC has entered testing. I also read my friends page, Facebook News Feed, and Twitter timeline. Downloaded the latest episodes from my subscribed podcasts, amongst them is a review of the new Zoom H4N voice recorder, so I'm off to listen to that now.

Oh and before I go, have just noticed that my new layout changes have now taken effect in Semagic, I guess a restart did good things to it. The tags field for posts now shows up in the tab index, a tab index which I should point out is now also in the correct order. It retrieved my current music from Winamp too, so yea for that. Off I go to study how the H4N sounds. Catch you all later.

Just a short note to say that thanks to blindraver I now have an LJ paid Premium account. OK, so I don't know why its thanks to him, all he did was tell me that you can purchase the accounts via PayPal, but still. I needed to use the lj user tag to get used to it. LochJournal had them built in, assigned to hotkeys, but I'm really not lazy enough to use something like that. The tags are easy to learn so...

Update: The JLS Radio site now redirects, rather speedily thanks to PHP's header functions, to this journal. Also, does anyone know how I get my current music from Winamp to show up in Semagic? Currently, the current music field is hanging around not doing much of anything.

So, to start off, if you're reading this, I assume you already know who I am. If not, I'm James Scholes, live in Bradford in the North of the UK, and find technology and music most interesting.

So what's this journal all about?

A while back, nearly 2 years ago in fact, I created my first blog. It was hosted by WordPress.com, and I updated it steadily for about a year. I then discovered that WordPress could be run on a server, bought the JamesScholes.com domain, imported all my old entries into the newly hosted blog, and continued to update steadily for another few months.

This blog was a failure. Why, I hear you ask? Because I didn't update it regularly enough, and seemed to think it mattered that I always have a lot to say. Updates slowly ground to a halt, and were replaced by Twitter updates. Yes, you all hate me, and to be honest I don't blame you. I wanted to keep the blog going, and was always updating my Twitter status, so it seemed to be the right thing to do at the time. After reading blogs where the main focus was Twitter updates (such as this one), however, I soon learnt the error of my ways.

What happened next?

I started a new blog, over at my recently disbanded online radio station, JLS Radio. This was again powered by WordPress. But I had no motivation, no drive to update it, and after 2 days of constant updates, that too, died.

So why am I doing this again?

LJ has always impressed me. I love the idea of social interaction through basic things like comments, which of course all blogs should have. LJ is widely used, which is probably the main reason why I'm trying it out for my blogging home on the web. Because its things like friends pages, trackbacks and memories, and voiceposts that really inspire me to make the effort.

Hosted blogs are all very well, websites like Blogger and Blogspot are amazing for those who need the functionality that they offer. But I feel isolated when I use them. LJ allows me to be in the centre of what both me and my friends are doing at all times with minimal effort. There's no RSS feeds to keep track of, its all on the LJ website. Plus I have a nice little client which posts for me. And soon, when I can be bothered sorting out credit card-related things, I can upgrade to LJ Premium. Its a pretty good deal for all the stuff you get, and all the damn adds that it gets rid of. Yes, I hate adds, even if I have an add blocker to get rid of them. Other people still have to look at them when they visit my journal, so premium solves all that.

Anyway, I'm going to go off and find people I know on here and befriend them. If you're interested in what I'm using to post and all that its a client called Semagic. Originally I was using LochJournal, but my appreciation of it went off and died pretty hard when I realized that it can't do tags, amongst some other inconvenient things. So Semagic sits here in my system tray, making strange sounds when a friend posts, as well as having some pretty awesome features like spell checker and some other crap.

Peace out!