Something About You

As I sit 'virtually' thumbing through the albums of my past on YouTube.com I find myself following an interesting pattern – those tunes made all too familiar to me by way of 6^th form 'ghetto blasters' of my past are now strewn across you-tube by uploaders all over the world – and I can't help but mentally revisit almost every 6^th form party I ever attended through the memory of these songs.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing – but as I rejoice in the happiness of my past, looking through the wondrous annals of 1980's pop: Level 42, Erasure, Bronski Beat, Visage, Ultravox and, dare I say it, Curiosity Killed the Cat; I find my inner technologist briefly considering how all these pop videos have become 'related' on You-Tube.

The videos are linked because of the order in which other users have played them – caused by recollections of similar experiences to mine; which is a comforting thought as I pass into my 42^nd year – there are other sad idiots like myself wasting time on a Saturday night having only just recovered from a massive 3 pints of Grolsch (such is the heavy-weight I am in the world of championship drinking) from the previous night (OK – there may have been a few glasses of wine too).

This may all be interesting enough to some (I doubt it), but then it occurred to me, on the upside, that there must, equally, be numerous people out there that have happily thrown a party and gathered their favourite 80's pop to play on a full screen projector and rejoiced en masse at songs that had more to say than your standard Danish/Norwegian pop band of the 1990's: I think, primarily, of 'Barbie Girl' which seems nowadays to have more in common with CBeebies 'Lazy Town' – yes we took the format and saw that it was fit for pre-school children audiences only; let’s face it, it’s Sawadee Krahp! Thankfully, I hear it’s becoming common knowledge that, if you speed date, “Did you buy 'I'm a Barbie Girl'” is a good time saving question to ask if you don't like the look of someone...

Anyway, I digress, which isn’t unusual for me, so back to the 80’s: as I thought more and more about those happy days of teenage pop bliss, cycling from party to party with my cheap Sony imitation personal tape player, with handlebar clutched in one hand and a small bottle of Captain Morgan clutched in the other, I started to imagine all those less than happy people ‘Fading to Grey’ as they were drunkenly propped up against a luxury flat wall, vodka bottle in one hand life in the other, pouring their heart out about how unhappy their lives are now they find themselves in the ‘future’ and no longer in the happy heady days of 1980’s innocence…

Ahh well, sod ‘em – at least I know why the videos are related…

Oompa Loompas, Royal Weddings and Coca-Cola

It seems to have been an age since I last updated this blog; mainly because there wasn’t that much to say (not unusual, life sometimes throws these long repetitive streaks at you, during which the most interesting thing is that the spider that is oft seen crawling eastwards across the floor decides to crawl in another direction; incidentally: if you are really stuck for something to do you can catch that spider and make it crawl Westwards using a thin piece of thread – if you feel so inclined – but you would, indeed, have to be extra-ordinarily sadistic and bored to the point of brain death).
So: many months through the work, home, beer, TV cigarettes and peanuts routine, I ventured out onto the London Underground (that’s a capital ‘U’ there as it seems, now, to be a ‘brand’ – with T-shirts, mugs and maps – lots of maps) and I ran into some Oompa Loompas, as one would prior to coming home to write about it. Picture embedded.
I also notice that there’s been a Royal Wedding (I presume with a capital R & W, although not because of it’s capitalist tendencies… although???). Yes, sitting peacefully on my own throne reading the paper it appears I missed ‘the moment of the century’ – something I was quite shocked about. When did it happen???  Aaaah – I slept through it, I hope it held as much promise and joi-de-vivre as the last one – if not more…
Anyway – this brought me on to the next weird episode, something I had completely forgotten about; something to do with some terrorist – anyway, apparently he’s been caught or shot; not sure which; but it turned out that the president of America is very happy; no, relieved (I think is the official line).
Lastly, I’ve found a new place to live – a little sad as the old place (this place) is still great – but the new place is nearer to the things I love the most. Food and beer, mainly. Which can make an awfully big impact on one’s belly. SO I had better be careful and get fit – it had to happen sooner or later; I would have preferred later.

So, all in all, a good week – except for those Oompa Loompas, where were they going? Why was there only one female and, more to the point, since when has there been female Oompa Loompas anyway, at the last incarnation of them they were all clones of the one Oompa (and had a very unstable relationship with the world of pop music) – which all seemed rather surreal; I presume the underlying message behind the latest ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ ‘Drugs – just say no!’, which I sort of remember from my days playing arcade machines in the late 1980′s. Astonishingly, though, Coca-cola (despite the rumours one way and the other) does still contain ingredients from the Coca plant (albeit, I stress, a cocaine-free ingredient). Don’t believe me? Well here’s the extract from the Wikipedia entry:

In the United States, Stepan Company is the only manufacturing plant authorized by the Federal Government to import and process the coca plant,[34] which it obtains mainly from Peru and, to a lesser extent, Bolivia. Besides producing the coca flavoring agent for Coca-Cola, Stepan Company extracts cocaine from the coca leaves, which it sells to Mallinckrodt, a St. Louis, Missouri pharmaceutical manufacturer that is the only company in the United States licensed to purify cocaine for medicinal use.

Cocaine itself was dropped from the secret formulae back in 1900 according to this article: ‘Coca Kick in drinks spurs export fears‘. Amazing! Well – on a different topic, my photograph of the Oompas leaves a lot to be desired, I’m obviously not quite at the paparazzi level; but that’s a different story. Instead to finish with here’s some recently married Esso people – they’re living very happily together in a shop window not far from here. I missed their wedding too.

Well – thankfully, my photograph of the Oompas leaves a lot to be desired, I’m obviously not quite at the paparazzi level; but that’s a different story. Instead to finish with here’s some recently married Esso people – they’re living very happily together in a shop window not far from here. I missed their wedding too.
Oh – incidentally, the piano graveyard picture really has nothing to do with this post – but as I didn’t get off my arse to take the picture of the spider running across the carpet recently I thought I’d add my favourite picture of the moment. Who knows, this may become a running feature. But probably not.

Technorati Tags: Coca-cola,Oompa-loompa,London Undeground,Esso

Loading an assembly from a specific directory (i.e. when not in GAC)

Just like dynamically loading DLLs with C# - at last!

You do not have to put an assembly that an application must use at runtime in the bin folder of the application. You can put the assembly in any folder on the system, and then you can refer to the assembly at runtime.

My preference - which requires no configuration during installation - is to use method 3; just find your current executable's folder and calculate a relative path from there - ensuring that, even when the app is copied using a standard file copy, it still works on the new server (shedding any deployment requirements with regard to this). See here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/837908