It's a factory photo frenzy!

Here are some pictures that I took when I went up to an abandoned factory near where I live.

You can click on the photos to enlarge them.

Enjoy!

If you liked what you saw it would be awesome if you could click the Stumble Icon in the top right hand corner of this page and recommend it.

Of course, all images are copyright Thomas Dulieu 2010, but feel free to download them if you wish to use them as desktop backgrounds.

Cheers!

EDIT: Replaced the old photos with edited ones.

How to shop cheaply and eat healthily on a student budget.

For those of you with a laptop.

Laptops are pretty common now-a-days, they can be relatively cheap, they're easy to move from place to place, they're light and they're fast. Because of these attributes they are the machine of choice for students, but what happens when your laptop, containing within it your virtual social life, music and entertainment, breaks?

Why wont this tiny laptop work?! Take that small plant!

Most people would go to their local stockist, the place from which they bought the laptop, somewhere like Comet or Pc World or the Apple shop if it's a mac. There they would find a quote for a couple of hundred to get it fixed and a long wait to get the bits in, or get it sent away to get fixed.

In most cases the stockist would tell the customer that it's probably cheaper just to get a new laptop than wait around for your old one to get fixed and pay the hefty charge, and so people, as is basically common sense, do.

Of course this makes perfect sense to the companies doing the repairs, and fair enough, if their aim is to make money then they've done it well, and there's no law against it.

Aah ha ha! Money for my eyes!

However, by a stroke of luck I ended up not going to the Apple store like I was planning and instead got told of a small shop down an old back-street in Derby town centre that did laptop repairs specifically for students.

I biked my way up there and met Matt, I could tell from the first few seconds of conversation that I was talking to a good man, he told me he'd built this business from the age of sixteen and had just recently procured a venue for the shop.

I felt safe giving away my laptop and he assured me he'd have it back to me the day after with a bigger memory at an easy price of £120.

Absolutely incredible service and price in comparison to the couple of hundred I would have had to pay taking it to an Apple shop, not to mention the extra time it would take them as a big business with lots of slow turning cogs.

So the next time your laptop breaks or you decide you need a new one I humbly suggest that you check out UK Student Laptops.

Plugged.

Being without technology in a technologically reliant age.

It's something most people don't think about in their day-to-day lives, but our society and our culture is being wrapped around technology without us even noticing it.

When I found that my lap-top wouldn't turn on, I wont lie, I was pretty pissed off. However, I resolved that I would get over it and would live on life as normal, I promised myself I wouldn't simply keel over at my lack of a prosthetic technology-limb and begin crying softly into a sock.

How am I supposed to move on with my life

when I'm still in disbelief as to whether or not it's butter!?

As some of my friends know I've had a period (huh huh) without a laptop for the last two days and it's strange just how much I've missed it. I found I needed it for entertainment, for music (which I very surly missed) and to keep up-to-date on current affairs.

I did literally find myself in my room, staring at a blank wall. I tried to snap myself out of it, I got a small wind up radio from the bath-room and placed it atop a box, turned it on and tried to think of something to do. I lit some incense, sipped some fizz, scratched my head, laid down, sat up, made noises with my mouth, coughed, sniffed, did a small dance to no music, and just generally existed.

Existence...

This was ridiculous, I liked to think of myself as someone who didn't need technology to fill my life, I liked to think of myself as a free-spirit bouncing from place to place on life's drifting whims. But indeed I'm more of a shell fish, deciding that actually it's bloody cold out there and i'd rather stay inside with my technology thank you very much.

In the end my super productive day consisted of not going out anywhere because it was windy and rainy and, besides, I had nothing to do, sitting in-front of the TV looking for something good to put on, which, of course, there never is, and staring dumbly into space, playing with my belly-button.

Although I did make this for my tomato plant.

Oh look, a tomato plant.

So it wasn't all bad.

I think it's interesting to consider, though, the amount we rely on technology now-a-days to live a normal life; people once dreamed of a time when computers would do all of the menial jobs for us, leaving us free to pursue far more important things.

Maybe all those dreams of android housemaids and cyber-kenetic prostitutes are closer than we think...

One day...

Pretty Purple Plimsolles

Here's a performance poem I wrote last year and just got round to recording :)

In My Day

Here's a little something I found as I was archiving some of my older stuff on this site. Hope you enjoy :)

In my day, we kept ourselves occupied with networking sites, or computer games, with lag, that would sometimes just turn themselves off for no reason.

In my day, if the internet went off, you just got on with it, or you had to go all the way downstairs to turn it on again.

In my day, if you wanted to get somewhere you got in a car, with petrol that exploded, and you would sit in traffic jams for hours on end and everybody crashed.

In my day, bad weather would bring the whole country to a standstill, and everybody got a day off work.

In my day, news papers would twist the truth to sell more copies, and everyone was afraid of guns and drugs and teenagers.

In my day, we were afraid of terrorists and reliable energy and global warming.

In my day, the whole world was unstable and everyone was quarreling about everything.

In my day, things were simpler, better.

BLacK NoIZe

Interesting things going on with the black project at the moment, finally managed to procure a mixing board from a very kind man from next door.

If you haven't already heard UD233 then you can HERE. It's the first song from the Black Noize project which when finished will probably contain around four or five tracks, all with a different specific feeling to them. At the moment I'm working on the second song, which has a far more airy and dreamy feeling about it, and am into my second version (basically the first one turned to pot, but I put it down to experience and am starting afresh with some of the better ideas from the original).

I'm using www.last.fm to host all of my music, and putting it all up on there for free download, I will also, however, be putting higher quality downloads up on megaupload, the links for which will be displayed on this website.

There's also a possibility of at some point releasing the tracks on CD, although this is far off in the future and the music will remain free to download. Big plans ahead, lets see how it goes :)

Other than that not much going on in the world of writing, just a whole load of boring uni work like book reports (Urgh). Had the family round yesterday which was nice, had a lovely meal and went to see a comedy act in the city. Anyways, now I have a printer so I can build up a pile of printed work (Yay).

Ps. I've had to change the original name from Black Noise to Black Noize for copyright reasons.

Pss. Also, hopefully soon we'll have some artwork designed for UD233 up soon, courtesy of David Pringle, a photographer whose work can be found Here.