Party

Last Night we had a house party. It was awesome! It was a birthday party for my housemate and a friend who have recently turned 21. There was epic preparation – every thing got cleaned! Somewhat ironic given the state of the place in the morning, but still, at one point it was the cleanest the house has been all year. We mixed the most awesome drinks. There was fruit and juice and fruit juice and juicy fruit and all the alcomahol you can imagine -  we seem to have amassed a pretty varied and interesting collection. Recently I’ve taken some advice from the D-O-Double-Gizzle himself and have been enjoying all kinds of Gin & Juice type concoctions. They’re the most of the yummy. That said, it should be noted that Frank mixes the best drinks of anyone I’ve ever met and some of his were awesome. We also spent hours creating a spotify playlist for the party so we all added some of our favourites and then left it on random (well, we were supposed to anyway!). We bought one of those day passes for 99p to avoid adverts – clever business, you know. Worth it too – we had 11 hours of music in the end! So there was a clean house, plentiful supply of choons and buckets of cocktails: the stage was set for a pretty good time…

And it really was! If you are friends with the right people on facebook there are tons of photos of the awesome dancing and people and fun. Even better the whole thing was relatively without serious incident which is jolly good.

All that remains to be said is that the C.A.T.E.M.P.I.R.E has G.O.T. a par-ty H.A.P.P.E.N.I.N.G…. Oh, and thank goodness we didn’t open the sky lights.

Spread your love

Like a fever? Not only do I love it when a plan comes together, but even more so when people see the vision. When you find something which you think is pretty neat which other people would appreciate, how satisfying is it when they listen and agree? Pretty awesome. So, come, join my growing army of converts to songbird! and Last.fm in fact. Just…do it now. OK? and then add me – my user name is sauntimo.

Fastdial

Ok, Fastdial does need a special mention because it’s awesome. I decree that you all use it.

Developed by the lovely people at User Logos (I think) fastdial lets you put together a homepage with links to all the sites which you frequently use. Effectively these are a set of bookmarks displayed visually by a series of icons and logos. Mine are all sorted in to categories because I’m really cool. The User Logos site has icons and well, logos for just about anything that you could possibly imagine and so you can make your whole page look awesome. Which is incredibly satisfying if you’re a perfectionist like me.

The second shot is of my social networks & communications folder – most of the online communities I’ve found my self associated with in some way. Anyway, appreciate the awesome logos and the fact that it’s better than yours.

Notice as well the lack of clutter on menu bars at the top of my firefox – I can never understand why people have a ridiculous number of menus with things they never use. I figured I paid for my screen so I may as well use it.

First things first, why aren’t you running these? You are? Great. Let’s be friends.

Free software which is more customisable, more reliable, more friendly and more exciting than expensive software which is…not free? Winner. So you should clearly use these:

[Web browser] Firefox
[E-mail client] Thunderbird
[Calendar] Lightning (for Thunderbird)
[Music] Songbird
[IM client] Pidgin
[Web Video] Miro

So those are the basics and I’m sure I’ll add to them because I’m just discovering this whole new world. For a good starting point, check OSalt which suggests open source alternatives to propriety software. Good work, people!

What makes open source stuff actually awesome is that anyone can write add-ons for them. Way more discussion about this later when I shall bore you with which ones I use.