Thursday 14 October 2010

"WTF is nephology?"

When I am at Airsoft sites, I am not the centre conversations, I enjoy listening to the other players laughing and taking about the games, their new guns n gear and just life in general, so doing a blog is not something that comes easy to me, by nature I am not the most talkative person you will ever meet, most of my school report cards said "John is very shy in class" one card states "Johns future may be in nephology" "WTF is nephology?" You may well ask, that is the branch of meteorology in which clouds are studied, this was because I was always gazing out of the window watching the clouds go by.
Over the last few weeks at sites I have met people I know and they ask "When are you gonna update your blog, I like it, I read it all" and that does surprise me because with only a few hundred followers I just guessed no-one was bothering to read it, if anyone from Eblogger is reading this, can I get a view counter on here please!
Someone even asked recently if I tweet, if I ever start using Twitter and Tweet you have my permission to slap me, do I look like Paris Hilton? Don't answer that.
Can you imagine if I did use Twitter it would be something like this.

Made a Coffee..
Let Cat Out…
Editing a video
Let Cat in..
Editing
Let Cat Out
Editing
Ignoring cat at Door..
Let Cat in
Fed cat
Bored editing..
Opened Bottle of wine..
Let cat out
Finfished di wvine
Founded su m beerz
cats bakin
drunnnnnk zi bbeeerrrrzzzzz

Not exactly a thrill a minute rock n roll lifestyle, so there will be to tweets from me.
So we managed to buy a new house WOO HOO, we got it for £22,000 ($35,000) less than the original asking price, I had a great old house before with the best neighbours in a good quiet area, the mortgage was almost finished on that and I sold it for more than double the amount I paid for it so buying a bigger house was not as much of an expense for me as you may imagine. Now here I am in a big house with four toilets which causes me some confusion, more so after I have had a bottle of wine, I have to sit and think where am I going for a pea.
I usually head for the toilet which is nearest and which happens to be the domain of my two and a half year old daughter, its kind of strange when your in there standing staring at a big "Peppa Pig" poster surrounded by big "Fifi & The Flowertots" stickers while trying to make sure your aim is true, if you know what I mean.
The benefit of the new house is that I can have a room to set up all my video and computer gear and there is a lot of it. One big mistake I made with this house is the internet.. At my old house which was almost 40 years old, I had broadband, my usual speed there was about 10mb I could have had up to 100mb if I wanted it but 10 was fine.
My new house which is almost five years old has a max speed of 2mb this is a speed that I had at my old house over ten years ago. The company who are my ISP phoned when we moved in and said "we will give you 20 mb internet speed and if you don't need it we can drop it down to ten and save you money" It was after the first week of constantly being cut off from our supposed broadband with youtube uploads taking about four times longer than usual that I smelled a rat, I ran a British Telecom internet speed test which told me my average was 2mb with an area max of 3mb, that is ridiculous in this day and age.
I called them up and the operator says to me "Oh your quite far away from the exchange" Oh really" says I, so I went upstairs to my sons bedroom, looked out of his window, past the horse in the farm yard which is just in front of my house, then its a football pitch and just past that is the phone exchange, I could walk to it in about five minutes max and I told him so.
"OH" says the operator, yeah fuckin OH thought I, needless to say that after being told a pile of crap he admitted there was nothing they could do other than put in a whole new telephone exchange which British Telecom are starting to do. So how does this affect me, uploading ten or more minute HD videos is out of the question, what took two hours to upload before can now take eight hours and thats even if it manages to upload because my internet tends to get cut off a few times a day, line faults Im told by the ISP.
This also means that I cannot for the moment start the Ustream live broadcasts that I had intended to do when I moved house for which I had already bought microphones etc.
So when viewers moan about videos not being very long any more you can tell them why if you want.
Anyway back to Airsoft, for years my friends have been at me to go down south and try out sites such as Catterick which is ran by Stirling Airsoft or The Mall in Reading which is ran by First & Only Airsoft . Catterick is out for me, lots of my friends go there, so well over a year ago I emailed asking if I could film there and was told no because they have their own film crew, fair enough but free publicity is good publicity.
So Im going to the Mall in Feb or March with a bus load of players from Section8 and I will give you exact dates for that once I have it just incase any of you can make it on the same day.
But in a few weeks I will be down at another site owned by "First & Only" its their Anzio site which is in Staffordshire, Airsoft International magazine in conjunction with Airsoft World are running a big game there called "The AI500" I should be down there on Friday 5th November and I will be returning home on the afternoon of the 7th so there should be plenty of time for readers or video viewers to say hello, you can show off your guns n gear and I will be taking loads of pictures for my FaceBook page. The hotel I am staying in has Wifi so I will put up pictures on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
A lot of the people you see in my videos will be there, names I can think of include SlothKingSteve, JAi, Kenny & Jarrod our resident Australian, I will let you know more names ASAP.
All those guys will be more than happy to talk to you, they are all staying at a hotel in Stoke, Im staying in Leek where the site is located and no doubt the guys will be having a drink to two of an evening, where as I will be uploading pictures to Facebook and maybe some video each day. If I had stayed in Stoke with the other guys then I know for sure that I would have ended up out all evening and been unable to drive to the site the next morning.
You might have read on FaceBook that I got a new Canon 550D camera, its nice, very nice, but its already broken, not due to Airsoft, I think. I was driving home when I heard this odd noise like a little spring being released and when I got home the lens release button was missing from the camera, I cannot find it anywhere, hopefully I can get it fixed under warranty.
Im already looking at another camera, a camcorder this time its a sony NEX-VG10E its just been released in the UK, if any of you have one LMK what you think of it.
OK gotta go, I will update next week, I promise.
John