Every morniing I find it very difficult to break out of my deep sleep. When my alarm goes off, most times I tend to roll over and switch it to snooze without even thinking about it. Then, there are the few rare times that I miss the alarm completely. Alarms are so jarring to me that I’ve had a few of my favourite songs completely ruinned for me by setting them as alarms.

This morning, I has that very problem. I woke up late, too late to have a shower and too late to have my morning coffee, which I sorely need in the mornings.

I hate getting up late for work, it sets me up for a terrible day, time seems to barely pass and I have trouble staying focussed. Honestly, if I had the choice and I didn’t need to, I wouldn’t ever sleep again.

I do love the act of going to sleep when I feel really tired or worn out, but I hate that I find it so difficult to wake up in the mornings.

Hopefully tomorrow morning I will manage to wake up without issue.

After much faffing about and many crashes, I think that I have finally got the new Wordpress iPhone app to behave and actually work.

I only got my new iPhone 3g a few days ago and I have already fallen in love with it. The predictive text in combination with the onscreen qwerty keyboard makes typing out messages and, in this case, a whole blog post extremely quick and easy.

The app store is really cool and I am loving all of the silly little apps on there, like iPint. What surprised me the most, was not only that there are a good ammount of free apps on the appstore, but also there are a lot of actually useful and fee apps on there.

So aside from playing with my new toy, I have also been suffering from extremely horrid toothache. I believe that it is a small crack in the tooth and requires a dentists attention. I will be putting this off for as long as possible.

Now I go back to playing with my iPhone.

Well, after that fiasco yesterday I had to shell out £115. Luckily I didn’t need a new ignition tube, so the £115 was just for the cost of thier time and for the cost of getting a new key cut.

The problem is, I am extremely unfortunate in that my keys are very thin at the start of the ridges, so it’s quite possible that my key will snap again sometime in the future.

Today, I thought it was about time I gave my car a good old clean out, vacuum the inside and wash the out, ready for my first day at my new job (since I didn’t want them to see how messy it was in there).

Just to clarify, it was VERY messy. There were old cans, bottles and wrappers everywhere, as well as some mud powder from when I gave my friend Chris lifts to and from his work, His muddy boots left a lot of muck everywhere.

So, back to today, I washed the car with little incident, cleaned it up all nice and sparkly, cleared out the trash inside got it looking as good as a 16 year old Nissan Micra can look. This is where the trouble started. I put my key in the ignition so I could start the car up and move it back round from it’s “washing spot” to its “parking spot”, as I did this, the key snapped in half inside the ignition tube and thus rendered the key mostly useless. The car was left in a very awkward place, blocking up 3 of the parking bays for the other houses in my cul-de-sac and the steering and brakes had locked up.

Brute force was not going to move the car, my parents were out and I couldn’t get any assitance from them, the only other person left was to try my Auntie. I gfot in touch with her and then she let my cousin’s husband know of my predicament. He works with cars so he offered to come round and give me some help.

Turns out I could still start the car up with a lot of wiggling about with what was left of the key fob and thankfully I managed to maneuver my car back to its parking spot. I didn’t have a spare key, since… Well, since that one had also broken a while back.

See, it seems to me, that my keys, I don’t know about other Micra keys, have a small fault in them, where the shape of them causes them to be rediculously thin at one point along the key’s length. Both keys had snapped at exactly the same place.

So now, it looks like I will have to get a new ignition tube fitted. Thank you Nissan, for your piss poor job at making keys that dont break easily.

I have been working hard on some new artwork (most of which you can find in the gallery) As well as some slight modifications too the website design. I felt that the site was a bit too dark overall, so I’ve re-done the background and headers. This is an ongoing process and I’ll be making some more changes adn tweeks as time goes on.

The first piece of new art that I want to talk a little bit about is the Nebula wallpaper. I have made three versions of it, one in 1440×900 (My resolution of choice), one in 1280×1024 and the last in 1024×768. I really do think it’s a beautiful piece, and I was inspired to create it after seeing a lot of the fantastic nebulae photos from NASA, as well as other wallpapers of the same ilk.

You can download the Zip file with all three resolutions here

The next piece is a Digital Matte edit (I believe that’s the proper term for it) of a photograph of the Syndicate Bank in London. This took me quite a while to produce, as I was learning new techniques and styles.

Working with custom brushes made from photographs that i’d taken I applied layer after layer to create a brooding, darkened, post-appocalyptic version of the bank. I’ve shown the original and my edit (credit for the original photograph is not mine) so that you can clearly see the difference.

I do love this one a lot, a lot of time and effort, and a lot of learning too, which is ALWAYS a plus.

As a sort of side note: I’ve also added a twitter box to the side bar, as well as a funky little library utility, so that (if you are interested) you can keep track of what I am reading.

-Steve

Walking up my local high street today, I almost got attacked. Not by person, but by Pigeon. Now normally, most “flying rats” have the common sense to steer well clear of people, some, on rare occasion take to flying towards people but ultimately loosing their nerve in enough time to swiftly wing it 90 degrees and away from the somewhat flustered but otherwise unharmed person.

Today, for the first time in my life, I had a dirty black Pigeon decide to enter into an unprovoked game of chicken with me! Out of nowhere this beast came, flying straight towards me, naturally, I stood my ground and continued forwards, with the firm belief that this bastard Pigeon would have the good grace and common sense to not even attempt such a daring feat as attacking a human. I was wrong. This winged demon would not be swayed, it aimed straight for my face, eyes glinting with firey wrath, it’s beak aimed sharply at my eyes. I actually had to duck, I bowed my head as this black feathered monster screamed just a hairs width from the top of my head.

Of course, that’s not the horrible part. it’s the aftermath, the humiliating eyes of Joe public watching you as you bring your head back up, and carry on going. Oh they saw what happened, they saw the man duck from a harmless little Pigeon, they saw the once proud gentleman be reduced to such a fool, that he was scared of a mere bird. But they weren’t in my place, they didn’t gaze into the maw of hell as I did.

I guess at times like that, all you can really do is chuckle to yourself, mutter “bloody Pigeons” under your breath, and get on with it. But you’ll always remember that moment when you were confronted by the abyss, and you backed down.

Now THAT’S Sensationalism!

I haven’t updated my site in a very long time. I guess part of that was due to shame caused by my unsucessful atempt to quit smoking. I honestly didn’t feel much like returning here to report that I was and indeed AM still smoking to this day, but alas, I must.

I managed to last a week or two without cigarettes, not a massive success I must admit. However, I now feel confident enough to admit this on here. Yes I didn’t stop but I realised that it wasn’t as important to me as I felt it was. Maybe sometime in the future I will try again, In fact, I am pretty much certain that I will. For now, I can at least admit that smoking is my vice, and I accept that and don’t need to worry about it.

As far as other updates go, I have been very busy, working on projects here and there. I have launched www.hewhodareswinsguild.com which is the official website for the World of Warcraft guild that myself and two other close friends run. If you are interested, we are on Bloodfeather-EU and are doing very well. So I’m pretty proud of that achievement.

My design work has been steadily improving and I have been working on so many unfinished projects. Little scraps that I just do, just to try out new techniques, new ideas, and to generally learn more as I go. I’ve picked up Illustrator and I’m learning so much with that. I have to say that vector graphics look stunning, and being able to produce my own, really feels great.

That’s all for now folks.

Dammit! I completely forgot how hard it is to stop smoking. Over the past couple of days, I’ve feel grumpy, happy, headachey; well pretty much all over the place. My emotions have been going crazy (mainly I’ve been feeling pretty low) but I still push on. I know I can do this.

I’m not using the patches this time, truth be told, they annoyed the heck out of me the first time, after a while they start to get really hot and then itch like crazy. I mean what the hell! Did someone just decide they were going to soak a nettle leaf in pure nicotine and then add some sticky to it? That’s what those awful hate patches felt like, so yeah, screw them, I dont need a constant itching to remind me that I want a damn smoke.

In other news, I’ve been a busy little bee, working on some new pics, I’ll get them up sometime before the weekend, I just have a few finishing touches I want to work on.

I’ve decided that today will be the day that I stop smoking.

I had managed this before, through the help of the NHS stop smoking clinic, and Nicorette Patches. I had quit for 6 whole months, however, one small car accident got me started again.

This time, I aim to do it under my own steam. I think that keeping track of my progress on the site will help me to talk through how I’m coping with it, and also hopefully help anyone else out there who wants to quit, see how it went for me.

My last smoke was just before midnight last night, I said my goodbyes, read a book and contemplated my choice. No going back now.

Day 1 is certainly going to be a bit rough, I’ve already skipped my “wake up” smoke, and I hate it. If I can get through a few days, I’m sure I’ll be fine. I can do this.

I just hope I don’t turn into one of those preachy bastards I hate so much, So if you run into me a year from now, and I start preaching about how much better your life would be if you quit, please feel free to slap me.

Ladykildare has a shop over at Etsy.com where she sells her handcrafted World of/Warcraft related items. I must admit, I’m a bit of a sucker when it comes to Warcraft stuff, and especially so, when it’s novel little things such as the Hearthstone Mobile Phone Charm.

If you don’t know what a phone charm is, I’ll give a little rundown of them. Basically, on most modern phones (and some older ones) there is a little handle or hole (typically on a corner) that I believe was originally intended for threading a wrist strap through like they have on the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS/Lite. Some rather shrewd individual thought, rather correctly, that there would be a profit to be made selling little trinkets to hang from these “strap holes”. These phone fashion accessories, have really taken off, with many different brands looking to make some money from the fickleness of the techno generation, most notably in Japan where these “Phone Charms” originated.

I’ve seen some crazy things people want to have hanging from their phones, including Lucky Golden Turds, but there are also less shocking things such as Hello Kitty, ILoveEgg and Pokémon. The sheer variety is staggering!

I also, have to confess, I have my fair share of these phone charms. Yes I know, not very macho, but I got most of them from those £1 Gashapon machine, and I tend to like gimmicky things. So to find a Warcraft themed charm, is a blessing (more macho, still geeky).

The site is American, but ship’s worldwide, so to the UK it would be $7.50 for the charm itself plus $4.00 S&H, so $11.50 or (at the time of writing) approx £5.60. Pretty darn cheap if you ask me, granted it IS rather small, and not official, but still definitely a good buy and a superb late/Christmas gift for any Warcraft fan, who wouldn’t want their own personal Hearthstone.

Of course, don’t forget to check out the rest of Ladykildare’s shop for other Warcraft trinkets and gifts.