A Stupid View

Stafford

Casa is situated in the heart of Stafford’s nightlife area with Love2Love next-door, Wetherspoons across the road and Zanzibar around the corner. Therefore, it has to be good to compete.

The bar had not been open for long when I visited so the look and decor was still shiny! Everything was clean and tidy too, including the toilets which were rather a surprise; possibly the best to be found on a night out in Stafford (For those that care about such things!).

Prices here are what I would pay in a London pub, so £3 a pint. However, the quality is better. This is probably because the place was new though with clean pipes. I hope the quality stays.

There were deals on spirits when I went and the quality of the glasses were quite frankly a topic of discussion as my vodka coke appeared to be in a small vase.

There was a smoking terrace upstairs which I didn’t get to look at, however, judging by the rest of the place, it would have been good.

The music wasn’t too loud considering the venue’s small size and the staff were all friendly. Seating was comfortable with sofas and the bar had lights underneath it which changed colour periodically which confused many a tipsy student on my visit.

5 Stars because even though the prices weren’t exactly student-friendly, the quality made up for it.

Check out my review of Casa - I am dhscott - on Qype

Stafford

Zanzibar is and has been the biggest nightclub in Stafford for a while. It has some competition, namely from Chicago Rock Cafe (Now Love2Love) just round the corner, but its sheer size compared to the town means that it won’t go out of business anytime soon.

However, this also means it doesn’t have to spend grand amounts of money on décor either. The carpets are generally sticky along with bars and tables. But the clientèle don’t care, and nor did I up to point. But trying to dance (I use the term dance loosely!) on a sticky floor where your feet don’t move easily isn’t very comfortable.

Prices are very favourable with Friday Nights being a 99p special night with drinks at 99p. On Tuesdays, its Student night and drinks are weirdly more expensive at £1.25.

Toilets have attendants and could do with a refit, but it isn’t too bad for the lads.

Zanzibar is going through a refit soon and changing its name to Escapade; which is probably to counter the refit and re-branding of Chicago Rock round the corner, its only real competition.

This place isn’t excellent, but it isn’t somewhere to avoid like the plague either. Worth a try to make up your own mind, but I give it 3 stars.

Check out my review of Zanzibar - I am dhscott - on Qype

It’s not until you realise how much work you actually have to do at University that you knuckle down and get to doing it! This doesn’t leave you with much time to blog about recent happenings, unfortunately!

Going back one post (A fair while ago now!), I was talking about small laptops. I found out soon after writing that post about the Elonex One. A laptop which beats even the Asus eee PC in terms of price. It is the first sub-£100 laptop in the UK. However, the price does affect the specification of the product obviously. It comes with a small 300mhz Processor and only 128mb of RAM; so runs a Linux OS. It does not seem feasible in any way to run Windows XP on this machine for those wanting something a bit more familiar. But, for £100, it seems a cheaper alternative for children to use as opposed to the Asus model.

I also decided to buy an Xbox 360 and I don’t regret it. Yet. The PS3 is getting stronger with every new game that comes out, and every new Blu-Ray movie too. Time will tell!

I was watching BBC News 24’s ‘Click’ technology program (Or BBC World depending on where you are) and caught an interesting review of Light or Ultra-Portable laptops. The premise really was to show off the MacBook Air, and quite frankly it looked good but would not be very practical at all. It has only one USB port, no Ethernet port, no Optical Drive and only an 80GB hard-drive. So if I wanted to use a wired-network, I need to use up my only USB drive on a Ethernet-Adapter… Which is nice so long as you don’t need the port for anything else. You get what you pay for really I suppose, all £1100 of it! I think that this is over-priced, but with most things Apple, you pay for the name.

The other tease I saw in the same feature was the Asus eee PC, or as it is being branded in the UK, the RM Asus eee PC. It runs a specialised Linux OS, which means it isn’t Windows and it doesn’t come with Windows faults OR more importantly it’s price-tag! It comes with a couple of USB ports, an Ethernet adapter and even wireless and a webcam on some models. Prices start from a jaw-dropping £169 as well; it is simply the most sought after piece of technology by Mums and Dads up and down the land as it is small (only has a 7″ screen, which means it isn’t exactly good for surfing the net, but hey, its no bigger than a textbook!), cheap and practically impossible to truly break unless you throw it at a wall. This is because the laptop has no hard-drive. What it comes with is a Solid-State Drive similar to your little USB data keys that you carry round in your pocket. These however are much more reliable and can be written to far more I am led to believe, so outlasting your USB key quite a bit! Trouble is is that sizes start from 2GB and go up to 8GB, not including the OS I don’t believe. So not one for big files! The media slot on the side though can support flash media up to 32GB however. Or just use that trusty data key

I am tempted to buy one, but for £200 I could buy some of my new PC… Or an Xbox! Ah, a Dilemma.

Like most people, I like to laugh. The strange and wonderful thing about laughing is that it makes you feel good. So on that basis, lets all laugh at some funny stuff!

I have to visit a couple of sites daily to keep up with the ever-present torrent of material they produce. By this I mean visiting the people’s favourite sites like YouTube or Break; but you already know these because you too visit them on a daily basis. So instead of mentioning them (Oh Sh*t, I just did), I’ll show you some stuff you probably didn’t know already!

My first site is a site you may have heard of, or at least you may have seen one of their creations floating around on some forum or in your favourite social networking website. I am talking about the dark and cynical world of the web-comic Cyanide and Happiness.

Cyanide and Happiness can be found at http://www.explosm.net which hosts not only the web-comic itself, but also a series of short flash-movies in the same genre and a forum. Cyanide and Happiness can be quite offensive if you’re a bit uptight and preachy as it deals with controversial subject matter, including frequent references to sex, death, race, disease, religion and violence. The characters rarely have names simply because for the most part they don’t need to. The humour in the comics would not pass on television or in a print-form, but online it seems to have achieved an almost viral status.

British-folk may have come across the style of drawing before in the adverts for Orange Wednesdays. These were done by the creators of Cyanide and Happiness, but, quite clearly, do not have the same level of offence attached to them!

A new comic comes out every day, so take five minutes and visit Explosm!