‘Tis the Season
Posted: Tue 20 December, 2005 Filed under: Festering Season, Thoughts 3 Comments »
So seven viewers complained about Gordon Ramsay slaughtering turkeys live on his Channel Four program, The F-Word.
Several points occur to me.
1) Only seven people complained? Blimey, that’s good going. According to unofficial viewing figures that edition had 2.5 million viewers. Seven complaints equals (breaks out the calculator) a whopping 0.0000028% of the audience that complained. Fucking hell, what an outrage.
2) Hmm, it’s not really a shocker, is it? Gordon Ramsay has always believed that any publicity is good publicity. Even if he’s remembered as “Gordon Ramsay, the man who killed turkeys on live TV”, he’s still remembered. And if people don’t like the way he works, that’s their problem, not his.
3) Equally, Channel 4’s never been exactly publicity shy, and tries to push the envelope where possible. So they’re not going to be upset at all the free advertising in the press.
4) As Gordon said, if you’re going to be offended, why keep on watching? You’ve seen one get killed, the odds are the rest are going the same way. Switch over, or switch off. Otherwise it looks like you’re the kind of prissy mealy-mouthed Mary Whitehouse type who watches in order to find something to be shocked about.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to see turkeys slaughtered on TV any more than I’d want to see cows slaughtered. I’ve seen it before – it doesn’t bother me per se but it’s not stuff I’d want to see. That’s what the other channels are for. Or even the off switch. But, as Ramsay has been saying all the way through, the killing is part of the process. He was using it to show his children the way the world works, and it’s really no surprise that he’d extend that to showing other people. I suspect that a large majority of people never think of their christmas turkey as being alive, or the killing and work that takes place before they get to the shelves of Tesco or wherever.
And to me, the more people that start basing themselves in reality, of knowing how these things happen before they get to their nice little hermetically sealed package on the shelf, the better.
Snowy
Posted: Mon 19 December, 2005 Filed under: General Leave a comment »Despite being closed, it’s fun to see that, apparently, it’s snowing in Uborka-land. Wintry cucumbers ahoy…
That Was The Weekend
Posted: Mon 19 December, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Travel 1 Comment »So – the weekend. All went well, the drive was OK, and I ended up doing the entire bit from Bracknell to Stafford Services before Herself took the wheel. So the driving stints are getting longer, and the motorway driving is (he said, modestly) pretty much sorted. Next weekend we’re driving to Norfolk, which’ll be fun too. I’m beginning to get into it after all…
Anyway – once Herself was driving it fell to me to navigate, which all went fairly well. As always, we took the wrong turn off the M6, although it’s never too bad a problem – we still end up on the intended M56, it’s just via an A-road instead of direct. One day I’ll get that one right. Maybe. Central Manchester was no problem either – even without a map. I suspect I’m really sad (In Oh, So Many ways) in that I can easily navigate places like that, despite never actually having driven in them. So we got to the hotel and car-park without any mistakes, and all was fine.
We were staying at the Alias, which was OK. There were good bits and bad bits about it, and while I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to people, nor would I say “Oooh, never go there”. It was OK. I’ll probably write more about it later.
Anyway, we had a good time – central Manchester was utterly rigid all weekend with people doing shopping and so on. I’d kind of expected that, so I think I only achieved three “For Fuck’s Sake”s at people all day on Saturday. Which is impressive. But we wandered around most of the centre : Affleck’s Palace, Market Street, Arndale (AKA “The Chav’s Palace Of Earthly Delights”™, Triangle, King Street, and the European markets in Albert Square and St. Ann’s Square.
Meeting up with friends for drinks in a bar called Moon was a grand idea, followed by a meal in Eden on Canal Street.
All in all, a good weekend, and more thoughts about it will probably follow.
We did a lot of talking about some business ideas and so on for 2006, which I’m not going to go into ’til they’ve started coming together – and yes, you will all know about that one when it comes through. But that’s for ’06, and not before.
The drive back was uneventful, but it was definitely good to be home, and to collapse and die a bit last night before the joys of the last week before Christmas.
Big
Posted: Sun 18 December, 2005 Filed under: Charm School 4 Comments »Knock Knock
Who’s There?
Bigish
Bigish Who?
No thanks.
Nom de Plume
Posted: Sat 17 December, 2005 Filed under: Cynicism, Thoughts Leave a comment »While I remember (and thanks to the people who asked) I would like to say once and for all that no, I have not written a book under the names Alan MacArthur or Steve Lowe.
However, if I’d thought of it first, I possibly would have done so.
Sometimes life’s shit, and there’s absolutely knack-all you can do about it.
Travelling
Posted: Fri 16 December, 2005 Filed under: Travel Leave a comment »Right, away off to “sunny” Manchester for the weekend. I’m actually looking forward to it – even the dollop of motorway driving I’m going to be doing. Should be fun.
More on Sunday when we get back, I’m sure.
Sin City
Posted: Thu 15 December, 2005 Filed under: Reviews(ish) 1 Comment »I got Sin City on DVD recently from ScreenSelect, and watched it last night. I don’t know quite what I’d expected, but for once I just couldn’t be bothered.
In fact, I only watched half of it.
Visually it’s a stunning film – one of the slickest I’ve seen, and that emulates the comic-book feel perfectly. However, just being visually stunning isn’t enough : it still needs acting ability, decent dialogue, and lots of other stuff. And to me that’s where Sin City falls down.
Overall, not impressed.
Word of the Week
Posted: Thu 15 December, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »I don’t know where the hell I’ve picked it up from, but this week’s Word is “Crufty” meaning dodgy, manky, or mucky.
I’d love to know where my brain picks these things up from, and why it sometimes fixates on them to a strange degree.
Touchscreen
Posted: Wed 14 December, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Thoughts 2 Comments »I wonder how long it’ll be before some bright spark figures out how to use a touchscreen to scan for fingerprints at the same time.
That way when you’re using an ATM to get money, and touch the screen to say what amount you want, or what options you want at the time, the screen could scan your fingerprint on the button, and lo, instant ID verification without having to twat about with PIN numbers, cameras, fingerprint scanners or anything.
Seems like a good idea to me, but I assume there must be some kind of technical problem with it. Otherwise surely someone would’ve done it already, right?
Memetic
Posted: Wed 14 December, 2005 Filed under: D4D™, Festering Season, Thoughts 1 Comment »Snaffled from Pix…
Welcome to the 2005 edition of getting to know your friends. What you are supposed to do is copy this entire blog entry and paste it onto a new blog entry that you’ll post. Change all the answers so they apply to you, and then publish! Leave a comment if you do this.The theory is that you will learn a lot of little (random) things about your friends, if you did not know them already.
- What time did you get up this morning?
7am - Diamonds or pearls?
Neither – Jade for a preference, or polished cabochon (not cut) sapphires - What was the last film you saw at the cinema?
Harry Potter IV - What is your favourite TV show?
West Wing, although there’s also a liking for stuff like House, CSI/CSI:Miami (Not New York), Have I Got News For You and a few others. - What do you usually have for breakfast?
Cereal with dried fruit, and an Orange Juice. - Favourite cuisine?
Edible - What food do you dislike?
Raw Tomato - What is your favourite CD at the moment?
Tough One – taste changes too much even in one day. - Morning or night person?
Night - Favourite sandwich?
Subway Melt or Club on Honey Oat bread - What characteristic do you despise?
Being self-centred - Favourite item of clothing?
Currently my long (knee-length) wool coat - If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would it be?
A place where no-one else went - What colour is your bathroom?
Light Blue, with White tiles - Favourite brand of clothing?
No preferred brands – just whatever fits - Where would you retire to?
Somewhere else. - What was your most memorable birthday?
Thirtieth. I’d always said I’d spend it on a beach somewhere, and did so in Lanzarote. - Favourite sport to watch?
Snooker, or British Touring Car. - Who do you least expect to complete this?
Anyone - Person you expect to complete it first?
*shrug* - Person who is least busy?
*shrug* - When is your birthday?
5th Nov. Every year. - What is your shoe size?
11 - Pets?
Two, Psychotic Cat (Turkish Van), and Hound (collie) - Any new and exciting news you’d like to share with us?
Nope, not yet. - What did you want to be when you were little?
Bigger - What is your favourite flower?
Passion Flower. Or a carnivorous one. - What date on the calendar are you looking forward to?
27th December, when the Festering Season’s over. - One word to describe the person who you snaffled this from?
Knockout.
Bastards
Posted: Tue 13 December, 2005 Filed under: Festering Season, Work-related 1 Comment »When I got in to work this morning, the office had been done out in bloody silvery streamers and so on. Apparently this is “festive”, as opposed to the correct word, which is “tacky”. Bah Humbug.
It also appears that my colleagues may have got the impression I’m not a fan of the Festering Season. Where they’d have picked up this idea is anyone’s guess. *cough* So the rotten bastards have used my desk as a nexus for all that’s tinselly and tatty.
I hereby predict it won’t be long before there is either a) a *cough* fire-test to see if the tinselly crap is fire-retardant, or b) some kind of accident where the area around my desk suddenly becomes rather clearer of twinkly tat than it is now…
Delicious
Posted: Tue 13 December, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Travel 4 Comments »I’m sure there’s a word to describe this feeling :
The sourness and contempt felt when you watch a dickhead talking on his mobile phone while driving his BMW. The humour and amusement when you watch that dickhead swing his BMW one-handed into a parking space too fast, and smash the front end into a bollard.
But I can’t think what the word is.
However, it can be defined in Simpsons-mode as Nelson Muntz pointing and chanting “Ha Ha”.
Lucky
Posted: Tue 13 December, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts Leave a comment »Last night I wasn’t in the mood for walking home, what with having done some shopping and the like, so I thought Sod it, I’ll get a taxi.
Getting in to it, I spotted a fiver on the floor. So that paid for the cab home. Can’t be bad.
Like the man said, it’s better to be lucky than good…
Postcode Finder
Posted: Mon 12 December, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Festering Season 2 Comments »At last – it appears that Royal Mail have finally let their Postcode Finder be used without having to sign up for the service first.
It may be just over the Festering Season – I don’t know – but for the moment it’s sat on their homepage. This is where it should be all the time, and I hope they’re finally learning. Of course, my registered email address of ” fuckoff@youtwats.com” is hardly useful to them, and I’m sure I’m not the only one using such useful email addresses in order to register with business…
Trade Descriptions
Posted: Mon 12 December, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts 1 Comment »Over the weekend I noticed that Gilette are now marketing a brand of deodorant known as “Invisible Stick”.
Surely this is inaccurate? If it truly was an “Invisible Stick” then I wouldn’t be able to see it…
Organised?
Posted: Mon 12 December, 2005 Filed under: Festering Season, Thoughts 1 Comment »So, in two weeks time the Festering Season will be over and done with. Halle-bloody-lujah.
In the meantime, I’ve actually been fairly organised. All the cards went off in the post this morning – bonus, another job out the way.
All the main presents I needed to get have been done, and it’s “just” small stuff now. Most of that will get done this weekend, while we’re in Manchester.
So in short, it’s actually all fairly organised this year. Certainly makes a change.
Shuttle
Posted: Mon 12 December, 2005 Filed under: Geeky, Thoughts, Weirdness 6 Comments »A while back – quite a while back, as it happens – I bought a new PC. All very sexy, a little Shuttle box, 64 bit AMD processor, blah blah.
Regular readers will have noticed that I haven’t mentioned it all that much. There’s a reason for that – it’s still not working.
I’ve tried pretty much all I can think of, short of cannibalising the hard drive out of the old PC and shoving that in to see if anything works that way. The list so far includes:
- complete disassembly and reassembly – including checking the seating/positioning of the processor
- Installing Windows XP, Xp64 and 2000
- Installing Mandrake and Ubuntu linuxes (Linii?)
- Swapping out various components, to see if there are problems on those
I’ve also changed from an SATA drive to a normal IDE drive.
The problem is that while nothing has so far installed properly or run properly, the errors are never the same. It’s normally that some file or other isn’t installed, or is corrupted, but then every so often you get an “IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL” error, or a different Screen Of Death. The Linux installs die with a totally corrupted screen, so I’ve no idea what the problem there is.
The only conclusion I’m left with now is that the motherboard itself is screwed. Unless anyone else has any other ideas about what it could be?
Another One Bites The Dust
Posted: Sun 11 December, 2005 Filed under: News Leave a comment »RIP Richard Pryor
Impressive
Posted: Sun 11 December, 2005 Filed under: News 1 Comment »Now that is what I call a fire. We’ve been able to see some of the smoke here today – pretty damn impressive.
Bad Idea
Posted: Sat 10 December, 2005 Filed under: Festering Season, Thoughts 1 Comment »During this week I wrote some posts that will go up while we’re away in the Dark End of Nowhere for the Festering Season. While this was a good idea in some ways, it also means I now have a countdown to the Day of Doom whenever I look at the pages for writing new posts on d4d™.
This is, obviously, Not a good thing.
Still, I’ve actually been fairly organised so far, with only small items left to purchase before Day of Doom is upon us. And I’ll probably sort out cards etc. this weekend as well.
Herself is wanting to get a tree over the weekend. I can’t say that this idea exactly fills me with glee, but well, it could be worse. She could like the Festive Tat™ that goes all over the outside of some people’s houses. Speaking of which, I still haven’t deflated the neighbours inflatable snowman. But I’m biding my time before the glowing white lardarse goes down for once and for all…
Complaining
Posted: Fri 9 December, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services 2 Comments »Sometimes I come across a person who makes me feel like an amateur when it comes to complaining to people and getting stuff done.
This man is a perfect example of that. Respect is due.
Passengers
Posted: Fri 9 December, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Travel 2 Comments »So, fewer people are traveling on buses, according to the Audit Commission. I wish I could say this was a surprise, but it’s really not.
Outside London and the major cities, bus services are notoriously crap at the best of times. When I was in Manchester I used the bus services a lot, and while they were fairly comprehensive, it was still a pain in the arse most of the time. (And particularly so when the company doing them was First Bus, who should be first against the wall when the revolution comes) But since moving to Bracknell, I don’t think I’ve used a bus once. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but just a couple are :
- The service is crap
- The buses themselves are crap
- They’re bloody expensive
- and it’s nigh on impossible to find out what’s running when
So overall it’s not hard to see why I don’t use them.
A perfect case in point comes when you realise that First Bus run the services in Bracknell and Wokingham, but if you look on that site, you’ll find no mention at all of that fact.
When you’ve finally found the route information and timetable, it turns out that Wokingham to Bracknell takes at least twenty minutes by bus, as opposed to five on the train. And what happens when you try to find out how much it’ll cost? You get this. Fucking hell, that’s helpful. Not.
So is it really any surprise that less and less people are travelling by bus? No, not really.
Bleh
Posted: Fri 9 December, 2005 Filed under: Health Leave a comment »Yet again, feeling rougher than a badger’s arse in wintertime.
At some point I’m going to get the time to enable me to be really really ill. In the meantime it’s more just feeling rough. Bleh.
Lennon
Posted: Thu 8 December, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts 2 Comments »Twenty-Five years ago today, John Lennon was shot and killed.
Personally, I never found I could get into Lennon’s music, whether the solo stuff or the Beatles’ stuff. I don’t know why, it just never grabbed me in the same way that other forms of music did.
It’s still tragic to get killed in this way, but my personal opinion is that it’s one of those things, rather than a tragic loss to music.
Going Home to a Bus
Posted: Thu 8 December, 2005 Filed under: Festering Season, Thoughts Leave a comment »What an absolutely brilliant idea. Old double-decker buses converted into living accomodation. The buses, converted by a bunch called Double-Decker Living, are being used by the Centrepoint charity in London to help the homeless over the Christmas period.
With luck it might be that there’s going to be a use for the fantastic old Routemaster buses that are being phased out after today…
Weighty Issues
Posted: Wed 7 December, 2005 Filed under: 2005 Resolutions, Health, Thoughts 4 Comments »Roughly six months ago, I wrote about the weight I’d managed to lose in the first part of the year – at the time I was down to 19st 10lb. I’ve eased up on the dieting a bit since, and not been cycling to work in a while – although I do generally walk home from the train station most days.
Anyway, I weighed myself yesterday, and while I’ve put on a little bit, I’m now dead on the 20st mark. No, that’s not light – but it does mean that even without making every effort for the weight to come off, or to keep it off, I’ve still managed to maintain pretty much the same weight for six months now.
And to me, that’s still a success. Yes, I’d like to lose some more, and there’s some other stuff I plan to do in order to manage that – but equally I suspect that whatever I lose in fat will just change to muscle (I know it’s not a “just change” procedure, but the fat will go and be replaced by muscle that has developed from the exercise) so I’ll still be in a similar weight range, I guess.
These are the kind of thoughts that follow you on a day when you’re sorting out techie stuff…
Driving By
Posted: Wed 7 December, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Weirdness 6 Comments »There’s one facet of the story about South Yorkshire being gridlocked this morning due to a dead man on the M1 and a fatal accident on the A1 that’s rather more disturbing than any of the others. It’s this…
the body, which had been struck by a number of vehicles, was found near a footbridge, but it was not yet known if the man had fallen, jumped or been pushed from the bridge
Hang on, “struck by a number of vehicles“? How the hell does anyone in a car hit a body in the road and a) not stop or potentially b) not notice? Humans are bloody big things – they’re going to do damage to your car, regardless of whether they’re already dead or not. I’ve seen the mess a pheasant makes, and the one a deer makes – so I repeat, how the shit do you hit a body and not stop?
The mind boggles…
£1m. For what?
Posted: Tue 6 December, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts 1 Comment »I see today that Jamie Oliver’s new restaurant in Cornwall is to receive £1m in public money to help with the building of it.
In short – Why?
Yes, sure, it might help some people with jobs. But why fund a private enterprise – particularly one run by someone like the Lisping Mockney Twat, who isn’t short of a few quid – to get built?
Header Images
Posted: Tue 6 December, 2005 Filed under: D4D™, Festering Season Leave a comment »In a fit of pissed-off boredom today, I’ve created the header image for d4d™ over the Festering Season. It’s truly naff, which pleases me in this instance. Graphic designer I ain’t.
Still, it’ll be up as the header over the joyous festival, and will then disappear ’til next week. Oooh, how excited you aren’t by that news…
Baggage
Posted: Mon 5 December, 2005 Filed under: Charm School, Sweary 4 Comments »Shopping in a very busy Waitrose today, I was walking down one of the aisles when I got whacked in the face by a handbag. No thought at all, she’d just flung her bag over her shoulder while not paying any attention to anyone around her.
The icing on the cake though, was that having been smacked in the gob by a fairly fast and chunky dollop of Gucci Leather – and if I didn’t wear glasses I’d have had the fucking badge/clasp/fastener/whatever-the-fuck-it-is in my eye – she tutted at me, as if it were my fault.
It’s at roughly that point when all niceties and tact take the day off.
“Oh, excuse me, was I supposed to apologise for getting in the way of your fucking handbag? Did I cause you a problem by being as inconsiderate as to obstruct your handbag’s path with my fucking face?”
Overheard
Posted: Mon 5 December, 2005 Filed under: Weirdness 1 Comment »While waiting for the train this morning…
“Well, you know that orange and brown stripey t-shirt I’ve got?”
“Yeah”
“Well, it’s just like that, only blue”
Festive Good Food Show, Earl’s Court, London
Posted: Mon 5 December, 2005 Filed under: Reviews(ish), Thoughts Leave a comment »I have to say, the show itself was pretty good. I don’t mind Earl’s Court as a venue either, although they do seem to have a certain lack of insight about human psychology and behaviour, and thus put all the stands doing demos/tastings as close together as possible. People then congregate around them, and block the walkways for anyone else.
If I were an exhibitor at the show, this would piss me off quite considerably – I suspect I’m not the only one who simply didn’t bother trying some of the stuff on the stands because they were so crowded it just wasn’t worth the hassle. If you’re exhibiting/demonstrating your products, you want as many people as possible to see/try them, not to have them give up because they can’t get in.
Other than that, though, it was good. I think we probably OD’d on cheese – there was some truly fantastic stuff there – as well as bought enough to keep us going through the Festering Season.
One other thing that I found surprising is that there was hardly any mention at all of vegetarian stuff. Yeah, sure, there were a couple of places selling seeds etc. (Munchy Seeds etc.) but no specialist stands for veggie food at all. Maybe there’s a gap in the market after all…
Dragon’s Den
Posted: Mon 5 December, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts 3 Comments »Recently, I’ve been watching BBC’s “Dragon’s Den“. While I do find it interesting, seeing the various ideas and so on that are put forward in each programme, I’m finding that there’s a lot of it that really annoys too.
First of all, the format – in all the ones I’ve seen to date, the basic premise runs that everyone fails to win any funding at all, until the final presentation of the show – which gets the money after some “hard-fought” negotiations.
But the one that bugs me the most is the apparent assumption that anyone watching has the IQ of a post-cliff lemming. First the person doing the presentation explains something, then the presenter repeats it. It’s awesomely dumbed-down, and that grates to a major degree. Yes, I fucking know that they’ve been offered the money they need, but for more of the company than they wanted. It’s just been shown on screen. I’m not a fucking goldfish.
Why do so many programmes now do this? The ones with ad breaks are even worse – it seems like after every ad break, they have to rehash everything that’s gone on previously. Maybe they think the ads are utterly successful, and I’ve just gone off on the mental equivalent of a shopping spree, and have thus forgotten all about what the programme was I was watching.
It’s patronising, irritating, and makes me thankful for Sky+’s fast-forward button.
Bizarre Spam
Posted: Sun 4 December, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Weirdness 2 Comments »It’s not often I get a spam that’s completely bizarre, and makes little to no sense, but this most definitely fulfils those criteria…
Hey Angel,
Remember I told you about that e-mail I got the other day saying I could get my B/A, B/S/C, M/A, M/S/C, M/B/A, P/H/D, in 2 weeks without any study required and 100% verifiable ?
Well bro I gave it a shot and now 2 weeks later I have my BA and working on getting my Masters which I will have finished up in the next week and half!
I didn’t believe this either man, I was a bit skeptical when i first heard about it too , but the counselor made it clear it was ,.100% legit and the& op,portunity exists due to a legal loophole allowing some established colleges to award degre.es at their dis.cretion.
bro life cant get any better for me right now… I have jobs that wouldn’t of gave me a chance before calling me off the hook wanting me to come work for them, also the money i’m capable of making now is amazing!
Listen Angel,I’ve known you for over 10years man,I know you have been struggling with bills, and working 2 jobs including your wife is working full time now right ?
Well, Listen to an old friend for once , and do this one thing not just for me and my satisfac,tion of seeing you succeed , but just think how much happier you & your family will be when you are making the money you deserve at a job you actually like!
Take advantage of this opportunity right now man , the counselor told me the other day they aren’t accepting many more students for this offer so hurry and call this # 1-(2,0,6,) -984 -4134 it will be the best thing you ever did, trust me!
Just leave a brief message with the de.gree you’re interested and they will call back A.S,A,P.
Well bud, opport,unity only knocks once… and I opened the door. I’m on my way to being the successful man that I always knew I would be, just didn’t think it would be this fast and easy!
let me know how it goes
your friend, Head
The entire thing’s bizarre – and I should point out I’ve copied it 100%, weird punctuation and all. Weird stuff.
Photo progress
Posted: Sat 3 December, 2005 Filed under: 2005 Resolutions, Photography, Thoughts 1 Comment »A very large thank you to the person (he knows who he is) who sent me a monopod for the camera. I’m sure it’s going to come in very useful indeed.
Progress with the new EOS20D has been slow of late – I’m still getting there, but over the last couple of weeks I haven’t really had the opportunity to go out with it and get anything good. I suppose that over time that’s something I need to do more, is make time to go out and take photos. After all, the best learning method is practice, or so people keep telling me.
The monopod will come in handy for a lot of the stuff that I do, I’m sure. I saw one in use at the Euro OSCON in Amsterdam earlier this year, and realised that once I’d got a heavy bit of kit like the EOS20D, it’d almost certainly be something that’d come in handy.
So yes, many thanks again.
Brain-death
Posted: Fri 2 December, 2005 Filed under: General, Thoughts Leave a comment »For some reason my brain is currently feeling inactive. It’s not really woken up at all just yet.
The weekend begins here, apparently.
No idea how much updating will be done today – maybe little, maybe lots. Let’s see if my brain re-boots on demand.
Phrasing
Posted: Thu 1 December, 2005 Filed under: News Leave a comment »I saw this yesterday, and completely forgot about it. Crap aren’t I?
Still, it made me chuckle – I wonder if it was a case of “see if we can get away with it” or just not thinking about what they were doing?
Counting Down
Posted: Thu 1 December, 2005 Filed under: Festering Season, Thoughts Leave a comment »There’s one good thing about getting to December 1st. It means that there’s only twenty-six days to go ’til it’s all over for another year.
Three and a half weeks, and that’s yer lot. The Festering Season over and done with. Bloody marvellous so far as I’m concerned.
In fact, this year I’m almost organised. I’ve managed to sort out most of the present stuff already, which is kind of scary. I’ve sorted stuff for the parents, and got Herself’s main one too. Pretty good going, I reckon. Plus it means I don’t have to do too much shopping in actual shops during this grotendous month. Total bonus.
Header
Posted: Thu 1 December, 2005 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky Leave a comment »Oh, and yes, I did change the header image for the day.
There’s actually a handy little bit of PHP I wrote that means it’ll check the day, and if it’s certain dates then a different header image is loaded instead of the default one. Means I don’t have to piss about with swapping images or whatever – or remembering certain days in order to get it done on time.
All very sad, very geeky, and really rather more organised than I’d expected to be. Sad but true.
World AIDS Day
Posted: Thu 1 December, 2005 Filed under: News, Thoughts Leave a comment »
Yes, it’s December 1st, which means that it’s World AIDS Day.
It’s odd, but there doesn’t seem to be have been anywhere near as much publicity this year as last. There was no “Link and Think” campaign, for instance.
The theme of World AIDS Day this year is “Stop AIDS : Keep the Promise” – a theme that is needed, as this year we’ve yet again had a large rise in the number of people with HIV.
Today the UN said that AIDS poses an ‘exceptional threat’, and that it needed an “exceptional effort” in order to beat the virus.
The BBC also has a piece about one man living with AIDS which is well worth the read.
Wall and Piece – revisited
Posted: Wed 30 November, 2005 Filed under: Reviews(ish), Thoughts Leave a comment »Interesting to see that the book I got a couple of weeks ago, “Wall and Piece” by Banksy has now had a review in the Guardian.
I’ve been a fan of a lot of Banksy’s stuff for a long time now, and it’s good to see it getting a wider audience – even when it seems to polarise those people into “love it” and “hate it”.
More ticks on the list
Posted: Wed 30 November, 2005 Filed under: 2005 Resolutions, Travel 1 Comment »A while back I wrote about the progressions in my driving since passing the test in August. Last night I checked off a couple of the things on the “still to do”.
I’ve now driven in nearly-central London (Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith, to be exact) and done my first stint on the M25. And no problems on either thing.
Of course, it being half eleven on a Tuesday night might have helped a bit, but all the same, they’re checked off the list now.
Overkill
Posted: Wed 30 November, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »The BBC website today carries a story about people being evicted from ‘London’s oldest squat’. To remove 150 squatters – some of whom have been in the properties for 30 years! – required the services of 200 riot police in twenty vans. Talk about overkill.
According to the story, the majority of the squatters left peacefully, although “some refused to move and barricaded themselves into the properties and one man threw a petrol bomb, before dropping his dog from a second-floor window”. (the dog was caught by the man’s friend, and was unharmed) So, from the sound of that, a couple of pieces of resistance – hardly warranting 200 police in full riot gear.
Talk about overkill.
What really gets me, though, is the mealy-mouthed weasel from Lambeth Council…
It is estimated unpaid rent on the properties over 30 years amounted to £4m, plus a further £400,000 in council tax.
Mary Lynch, of Lambeth Council, told BBC News: “We can’t justify letting people live in these houses rent free, council tax free, paying nothing towards the community when we have 12,000 people on our waiting list for houses.”
It plans to demolish the properties and replace them with new homes – at least 75% affordable housing – and a sports centre.
You can’t justify the people living there rent-free, but frankly what the fuck have you done about it? They’ve been in those properties for thirty sodding years, and the council hasn’t managed to come forward with court cases, evictions, bailiffs or anything in that time. Surely that comes down to the council being lax, and not keeping track of their own properties and methods?
And how come the squatters haven’t been able to claim that the properties are theirs, as they’ve been in residence for more than 12 years?
Faithless, Brixton Academy, London.
Posted: Wed 30 November, 2005 Filed under: Reviews(ish), Thoughts 1 Comment »One of the many things that can be said about Faithless is that they do keep themselves busy. We missed the gig last December, then saw them in May at Alexandra Palaca, and then again last night at Brixton Academy. Three tours in a year – that’s good going by anyone’s standards.
Of course, doing that much touring, you could understand it if the basics were the same each time, or it all got a bit familiar. But with Faithless it doesn’t. Yes, the set-list was similar to the one at Ally Pally, but it wasn’t a match by any stretch. They started off with “Insomnia”, carried on through favourites such as “God is a DJ”, “Mohammed Ali” (never could spell that right), “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, “Bring My Family Back”, and finishing off with a stupendous “We Come One”. Of course there was a lot of other stuff too, but they’re the tracks that stand out in memory.
It’s a pity that Carling seem to have opted for becoming utter cunts when it comes to photography though. Where we were, I could’ve come up with some fantastic shots – the view was excellent, as was the clarity and distance. But after the last time, I wasn’t going to risk it again. I might make some enquiries about getting a press accreditation of some sort from them though – hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Overall, the show was something spectacular. No, the sound mix wasn’t perfect – some of the vocals were drowned out by the bass-heavy nature of the speaker stack – but pretty much all the people there knew all the words anyway. The lighting rig was awesome – I haven’t seen that many strobes and lights in such a small space in a very long time, the bass sound was the kind you can feel in your fillings, and all told the entire thing was superb.
In my opinon, Faithless are one of the very few bands you absolutely should see live, even if it’s not your “normal” type of music. They simply blow pretty much everyone else off the stage. Long may they continue to do so.
Faithless
Posted: Tue 29 November, 2005 Filed under: General 1 Comment »Off tonight to see Faithless at Brixton Academy. Second time we’ll have seen them this year, so let’s hope it’s good.
And no, I’m not taking my camera, not after the farce last time I went to Brixton Academy…
Enlightened
Posted: Tue 29 November, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts 5 Comments »So I see that today the Vatican renewed it’s ban on gay priests. Of course, paedophilic ones are OK, so long as they’re not gay.
Frankly, what the shit does it matter whether a priest is gay or not? It’s hardly like they’re going to go out persuading the congregation to go gay, is it? I swear that the Catholic Church has done more than any other organisation in history to spread bigotry and viciousness throughout the world. Yes, it’s a personal viewpoint, but it’s one I stick to.
And besides, what happened to that bit of holy writ about “Love thy fellow man”?
10 Things
Posted: Tue 29 November, 2005 Filed under: Festering Season, Thoughts Leave a comment »Every so often it’s good to see that it’s not just me who hates the Festering Season.
In this case, Parking Attendant sums up 10 reasons why he hates Christmas.
All I can say is “Well said, that man”. I could probably come up with a bigger list, but it’d have many of the same things on it.
Oh, and after my post the other day about the happy lack of houses decorated in Festive Tat, it seems they were all out doing them over the weekend, as there’s now a surfeit of the buggers. Joy.
Timing
Posted: Tue 29 November, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Weirdness 2 Comments »Sometimes timing is strange. For instance, it takes me roughly 20 minutes to walk from home to the rail station in the morning. The train leaves at 8.50 (ish). If I leave at 8.25, I’m always at least five minutes late when I get to the station, and thus miss my train. However, if I leave at 8.15, I’m there by 8.35 and freeze my arse off on the platform for quarter of an hour.
So – why do the times change like that? To be honest, I have no idea. I’d like to know though – it’s one of those annoying things. You think you’ll be there just perfectly on time, and you’re late. You give it a few more minutes so you know you won’t miss it, and get there in record time. Bizarre.
Bad Driving – Part Two
Posted: Mon 28 November, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Travel, Weirdness 4 Comments »In addition to the stuff I wrote about in the previous post, two more things…
I’ve just seen a learner driver, accompanied by her instructor, attempt to turn the wrong way – ignoring the sodding great blue and white “turn right only” sign – into the one-way system. Fortunately, the road was clear of oncoming traffic, but still, rather than stopping her and getting her to do a three-point-turn to go the right way, the instructor instead got her to carry on down the road until the first (thankfully close) turn off to the right, and go down there.
Now, maybe it’s a first lesson, maybe she hasn’t got to the three-point-turn bit, maybe he just thought it would be an element of added danger to be turning round, but Jesus H Christ, what an example to set. “Oh, you’ve gone the wrong way. Well, just carry on doing it, then turn off when you can”.
Which brings me to the second – bizarrely linked – thing. A man died in a motorway crash over the weekend (and injured three others at the same time) driving the wrong way down the M6. Apparently he’d driven 14 bloody miles the wrong way, down a motorway. Maybe he thought he was the only one driving the correct way. Maybe he was just a fuckwit. Either way, it’s a scary process.
Bad Driving
Posted: Mon 28 November, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts 2 Comments »Apparently, from today bad drivers in London can be fined up to £100 for things like blocking box junctions, ignore road-signs, and misuse bus lanes. And about bloody time too.
I find it amazing how crap a large majority of drivers really are. I get to see it every day from the office, the people who don’t understand the one-way system, and miss the “no-entry” signs completely, then have to reverse in order to go the correct way. Truly scary.
The more people are made aware of shitty driving skills, the better. That’s my (not so) humble opinion, anyway.
PSP
Posted: Mon 28 November, 2005 Filed under: Domestic, Festering Season, Reviews(ish), Thoughts 3 Comments »A while back, Herself promised to get me a Sony PSP for my birthday. It was one of those things I didn’t really need but one of the guys at work had got one on the day of release, and I was pretty impressed with the entire thing. So yeah, it was on my “oooh, oooh” list.
Come the birthday, and it didn’t materialise for reasons like everywhere being out of stock. Fairly good reasons, to be fair. So Herself said she’d get it for me for Christmas instead – and I placed an order for one with Amazon, which she could pay for. Easy. Only, of course, Amazon are – on occasions such as this – tossers, and were out of stock, and couldn’t guarantee delivery even in time for Christmas. Bearing in mind it was ordered on about Nov 10th, I figure that’s a bit of a piss-take.
Anyway, last week I got an email from Dabs.com saying they’d got PSP “Giga Packs” in stock now, so I ordered it. And lo, it arrived the next day. Unfortunately, this was a whole month before Christmas, and I’m crap at the entire willpower thing. So Herself tried to motivate me…
“If you can not open it, and leave it ’til Christmas, I’ll buy it. However, you can open it now, but you’ll have to pay for it, and I’ll get you something else for Christmas”.
Of course, it didn’t work. I managed to wait a whole three days before cracking, but crack I did.
And it’s great – I’m still impressed with the entire thing. I’ve been playing Wipeout Pure and Colin McRae rally (you get the idea of the kind of games I like) since then, and it’s still cool. Once I’ve sorted out PC stuff, I’ll also be ripping DVDs or Tivo’d programmes onto the 1Gb memory stick that came with it, and that’ll be cool too.
I know, I’m sad – but hey, what the hell, it’s a gadget. And it was never going to survive untouched for a month. Like the man said, “I can resist everything but temptation”.
The Woman In White – Palace Theatre, London
Posted: Sun 27 November, 2005 Filed under: Reviews(ish) 1 Comment »So yes, “The Woman In White”. It’s off to a bad start in my book by being by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, but we’ll gloss over that for the moment.
All told, it was an enjoyable performance. Certainly over-done and over-acted in some scenes, but in a way that kind of fits with the entire “Victoriana” theme of the production. The set itself is technically fantastic, with sections moving around, revolving, and also having projections put on them to set the scene – very technical, but excellently done. On a couple of occasions the changes and perspective alterations became quite dizzying and disorientating, but overall it was an interesting way of providing the scenes etc.
Lloyd-Webber himself is still a plagiarising twat though. I keep finding myself identifying bits of rhythms within the songs, and sometimes that can be quite jarring. I swear that one of the main themes throughout the production actually uses the chorus chords from “Hey, Macarena!”. So you can imagine how annoying that is.
Overall though, it was an enjoyable way to spend a manky cold November afternoon. I wouldn’t want to see it again, but I’m glad that I did see it. If that makes any sense at all…
Londinium
Posted: Sat 26 November, 2005 Filed under: Domestic, News Leave a comment »Away today in London, taking the aged parents to see “Woman In White” for mother’s birthday.
Reviews and thoughts will follow. Be afraid.
Decorations
Posted: Sat 26 November, 2005 Filed under: Festering Season, Thoughts 3 Comments »Have you noticed this year that the retail version of the Festering Season seems to have started off a lot later than usual?
I don’t know why it is, or whether it’s just round here, but up until this week I hadn’t seen any sign of christmas lights/ decorations on the streets. They’ve gone up in the last few days, but I don’t object to that too much – after all, one month today and it’s all over anyway. Last year they were up by Nov 1st – so we’re definitely improving.
I did see somewhere a story about how retailers had (finally) realised that a three month Christmas run-up was counter-productive, and actually made people not want to spend money on Christmas at all – but I can’t remember where I saw it. Sometimes I’m useless.
Anyway, isn’t it nice, not being deluged already by Festive Tat?
Slip Sliding Away
Posted: Fri 25 November, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts Leave a comment »One annoying thing that’s a result of the gentrification of town centres is this :
Lots of town pavements over the years have been replaced with nice-looking brick, or stone slabs. In summer, and in general, these pavements look really nice, and are perfectly functional as walkways. Which is all as it should be.
However, come winter, it either rains, or dew/condensation happens, and they get wet. And then they freeze. At which point the entire town’s paths become nothing more or less than one big ice-rink. Funny as hell to watch other people trying to walk on it. Not so funny when you’re the one trying to do the walking…
Best?
Posted: Fri 25 November, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts 4 Comments »Well, filed under “No shock at all” comes the news that George Best has finally popped his clogs.
I must admit, and according to the media I’m in the minority here, but I really truly don’t care. At all. Yes, Best had a great talent for football, but he chose – and repeatedly chose – to piss it all away. Some say he couldn’t handle the pressure, the expectations, the fame. Maybe that’s true.
But for all the good he could’ve done, despite all the options that were open to him, he pissed it all away. And now, after umpteen years of self-destruction and trying to kill himself without recourse to actual suicide, he’s finally achieved his aim.
Chill-Factor
Posted: Fri 25 November, 2005 Filed under: Animals, Domestic Leave a comment »I must be abso-friggin’-lutely barmy.
That was my thought process at 7am this morning, walking Hound round the local park. She’d been a pain in the arse all night, primarily because Herself was out last night, so Hound didn’t get to see her. We also had Herself’s boss staying the night, which meant Hound was supposed to be on best behaviour.
Of course, that was never going to happen. She sodded about all day, and was her general pain-in-the-arse self. Mind you, so was Psycho Cat. He took every opportunity possible to wind up Hound, waggling his furry tangled backside in her face as he went out the door, and we had the full Mexican Standoff between them on the stairs, Cat glaring at Hound at the base of the stairs, and Hound hovering halfway down, not wanting to back off, but too scared to go down and run the gauntlet of Cat teeth and claws.
So this morning, rather than adding to the stress levels of all involved, I took Hound out before Herself’s Boss got up. And stayed out ’til she’d left for work. 50 minutes. In temperatures hovering around 0°C. Oh joy, oh lucky me.
Yes, I must be abso-stuffin’-lutely cracked. There’s no other explanation for it…
Bleurgh
Posted: Thu 24 November, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts 1 Comment »Note to self. When buying a smoothie-type drink, make sure you drink it pretty much immediately.
Leaving a fruit smoothie in a hot office overnight is not a way of ensuring the best quality/ experience when it comes to drinking the sodding thing.
Bleh. Warm and sludgy. Pretty much the way I feel, actually.
Feeling Rough
Posted: Thu 24 November, 2005 Filed under: Domestic, Health 1 Comment »Ah, it looks like it may just be one of those winters.
Over the last few days I’ve been feeling a bit ropy, and last night it developed into a sore throat. So it may just be that I’ve got my first cold of the season. It’s no big thing, colds aren’t something I generally worry about – but it does mean I’ll feel a bit rough for a few days.
Interlink “Express”
Posted: Thu 24 November, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Thoughts 1 Comment »Well, not just Interlink, but a large number of delivery companies in general.
In a similar vein to the Parcelforce farce earlier this month, I ordered some stuff from Jessops on-line shop last week. Nothing special, just a soft case for the “old” Fuji S5000 camera, a polarising filter for the new camera, and a couple of spare lens-covers. (I’m forever losing them, somehow, so spares are normally a good idea) I’ve ordered stuff through them before and it’s all come through fine.
This time though, for no good reason that I can find, they used Interlink Express. So on Friday we had a card through the door that basically said “we tried, we’ve taken it back to the depot”. No other information on it at all, and even the tick-boxes on the card for “we’ve taken it back”, “we’ll try again on Monday” or “we’ve left it at a neighbours” weren’t filled in. So – no help at all then. Joy.
It then turns out that the local depot is a) in the arse end of nowhere, and b) is only open 9-5 Monday to Friday. Well, that’s bloody useful. So how’m I supposed to get my stuff if they won’t even be open for me to collect it?
I rang them up, and actually ended up with someone who seemed to know what they were up to. No, we’re not at home for receiving the parcel today. No, we won’t be in during the week at all. Can I get you to leave it with a neighbour? No, I don’t know which one. Oh, I’ve got to give them a card that says they’re authorised to take the package, and only then will your guy give it to them? Fuck that – I don’t know which one will be in or not. Oh, hang on, can you deliver it to my work place? Yeah, no problem. Ok, do that.
It’s worth also bearing in mind that the delivery label when I eventually got the package also says “do not redirect – deliver only to address on label”. Still, at least we’ve got the stuff now. But why do companies insist on using delivery companies that can only handle stuff Monday-Friday? It’s something that constantly annoys me, this seemingly casual attitude towards people/customers, and a lack of understanding that people work for a living, and might not be available at home on Monday-Friday…
By comparison, I ordered a PSP “Giga Pack” from dabs.com / gameplay.co.uk yesterday, and it arrived today in the post. No problem at all, and quick and easy to do. Although Herself has insisted I wait ’til Christmas before I can use it…
Sofa-Bed
Posted: Wed 23 November, 2005 Filed under: Domestic 2 Comments »This is actually quite disturbing. The entire sofa-bed went together with little to no hassle – in fact, the only real criticism I could make is that it’d be useful to include two allen keys instead of one, so that when you’re putting the final bits together it can be done by two people instead of one.
And that’s about it. The thing looks pretty good, feels fairly comfortable, and will be road-tested tomorrow by Herself’s boss. In the meantime I suspect it’s going to be getting checked out by Psycho Cat today, and it will have received the Feline Seal of Approval if the idle furry sod’s still asleep on it when we get home this evening.
So – no sweary. No stress. No frustration at stupid instructions.
Either I’ve been doing too many of these things lately, or they’re getting easier/better made…
Firefox Weirdness
Posted: Wed 23 November, 2005 Filed under: Geeky, Weirdness 2 Comments »I’ve no idea why, but this morning when I started up Firefox it wasn’t displaying images at all. Checking the installed “Web Developer” toolbar (a god-send in so many ways) showed that I didn’t have images disabled there, so it needed a bit more delving.
Under Options in 1.5rc2 there’s now a tab called “Content” – and in there you can choose globally whether to load images or not. Somehow that was now unticked.
So – a simple fix, but why did it happen in the firstplace? I rarely even bother to go into the Options, so something odd’s going on…
Extensions
Posted: Tue 22 November, 2005 Filed under: Geeky Leave a comment »Over the last few days I installed a couple of new (to me) FireFox extensions – View Rendered Source, ShowIP, and Show Table Inspector.
Since installing them, the performance of my installation of Firefox became utterly dire. I haven’t investigated properly (mainly due to high levels of ‘can’t be arsed’) so I haven’t ascertained exactly which one caused the problems (I suspect the combination of Rendered Source and Table Inspector proved rather process-intensive) but since removing those two, the problems have disappeared.
This has been a semi-public semi-service semi-announcement. *Grin*
Swearage
Posted: Tue 22 November, 2005 Filed under: Domestic 1 Comment »Tonight there is a high possibility of bad language emanating from the house.
We’ve got to assemble a sofa-bed, as we now have Herself’s boss staying on Thursday night. Expect a rant tomorrow about sodding DIY and knacking instructions.
You have been warned…
Qoop revisited
Posted: Tue 22 November, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Geeky, Photography 1 Comment »Having posted some stuff over the weekend about them, I figure it’s pretty impressive that I got a response in the comments yesterday from a representative of Qoop…
D4D et al:
Thanks for checking out QOOP. Right now the only option for the ordering of photos in your books is in the way they were uploaded from Flickr, so that means the way the photos were ordered in your sets, etc. You can, in Flickr, edit the order of your set to be uploaded. We realize this doesn’t provide much flexibility and additional layout options are in the works. We had to start somewhere and we opted for efficiency and convenience first. Both cover and page layouts will have greater design possibilities very soon.
We hope you’ll check us out again!
Hugh
QOOP
Pretty impressive – and, as such, only fair for me to do this and print it up on the front page rather than having to hunt through the comments for it.
Secret Satan
Posted: Tue 22 November, 2005 Filed under: Festering Season 1 Comment »Oh God, it’s coming up to that time of year again. Yes, the Festering Season is truly upon us, what with ads for compilation albums and kids toys all over the TV stations, Christmas Crap in the stores, Tesco advertising a “super-thin” tree for (I assume) people who live in rabbit-hutch houses with no room for a normal tree, and the like.
And lo, into my email box did fall an invite to Secret Santa 2005. *Sigh*
Timepiece
Posted: Tue 22 November, 2005 Filed under: D4D™, Thoughts 1 Comment »I’m a bit of a fan of watches, although currently I actually only have the one. (A Seiko Kinetic, not that anyone cares) However, I’m looking at others, and wondering whether I should increase my selection a bit.
And then (semi-via Gordon) I saw this. Oh yes, indeedy do – the perfect D4D™ watch…
Quiz Night
Posted: Mon 21 November, 2005 Filed under: Domestic, Thoughts 1 Comment »On Saturday, the quiz night we were organising actually went really well. Of course, there was a lot of “running round like blue-arsed flies” beforehand, and even during the night, but that was stuff that only we knew about. To the hundred-ish people who came, it all went smoothly, and they all had a really good night. And really, that’s what it’s all about.
We’d had to get some stuff at the local Cash and Carry during the afternoon (luckily getting there before the 1pm closing time, for once) and then went over to get the hall sorted out. 9 rounds of questions (plus an evil bastard of an anagram round) later, the table we were on finally came second (primarily thanks to my utter bobble-hat of a father, who managed to score us 38/40 on the British Wildlife section – and *tut* at him for not knowing a mole has 42 teeth. Like, who doesn’t know that? *grin*) and all had gone well.
Sorting out the food was interesting – we’d organised (and confirmed in writing) that we’d give them the final order at 7.45, and pick up the food an hour later. At 7pm they called me and said “We haven’t had your order yet”. *sigh* But still, all was fine – they had taken a bit longer to do the food, so we were about 20 minutes later than expected to return with it, although some of that was also due to epically manky weather with thick fog on all the roads.
Still, all went well, and everyone enjoyed themselves. Once the quiz was done, and we’d tidied the hall, there was an hour’s drive to get home – again, through interesting fog for some of the way before it disappeared completely as we got to the M40, and didn’t see any more at all – and finally got to bed at about 1.30am.
And we’ve already got people asking when the next one will be, so I guess that can be counted as a success…
Brainblock
Posted: Mon 21 November, 2005 Filed under: Geeky, Thoughts, Weirdness 3 Comments »Why is it that my brain consistently gets mixed up between Kinja and Flickr? I’m forever mixing the two up, and saying Kinja when I mean Flickr (and vice versa)
Does anyone else have this problem? Or is it just me?
Stopping
Posted: Mon 21 November, 2005 Filed under: Domestic Leave a comment »Yesterday was a day where everything just kind of stopped. Having run around like the proverbial flies on Saturday, Sunday was definitely coming up on the calendar as “Day of Rest”.
Of course, that still entailed stuff like cleaning/hoovering out the car, tidying the house, doing bundles of laundry, washing Hound and the like, but in general – well, in comparison to most of last week – it involved doing very little.
Much needed – and I don’t think the PC even got powered up all day. Hence no posts and so on.
Harry Potter IV – Goblet of Fire
Posted: Sat 19 November, 2005 Filed under: Reviews(ish) 1 Comment »Hmmm – so, what to say? Well – have you ever watched a TV programme with the Ceefax subtitling on, even though you could hear what they were saying? The new Harry Potter film’s kind of like that.
If you’ve read the book (and obviously most of the people who’ve been dying to see it have read the book multiple times) then the film is like watching the subtitles. You get the main ideas, but there’s a whole shedload of detail missed out.
It’s a perfectly serviceable film – played a lot more for laughs than the other three have been, although with hindsight there could be an air of “the light before the storm” about that. But all told it’s a good film – and at 2½ hours, it certainly goes on for long enough. If your regular cinema’s uncomfortable, pack a cushion.
All told? About 4/5 I’d say – it’s fine, just there’s a lot missing.
Portfolio Printage
Posted: Sat 19 November, 2005 Filed under: Photography, Resolutions 3 Comments »Arse. Remember that post about resolutions? Where I said “I’ve got the portfolio itself, but not done anything with it yet. I’ve also recently found another way of doing it that I haven’t yet experimented with – but I intend to do so before the year’s out.“?
Well, I just tried it out – and failed.
I was quite optimistic when I saw Qoop‘s page, which supposedly made it easy to print a photo-book from your Flickr photos. And yes, in many ways it does make it easy – you can simply select a bundle of photos (either entire sets, or individual frames) to be printed.
But – and, in the context of printing a portfolio-type book this is a bit of a big issue – you can’t organise how they’re going to be laid out. It seems to work from an alphabetical point of view, that the photos are done in order of the alphabetical names of the sets. So really it’s more hassle than it’s worth to come up with something viable.
I’ll keep on looking around, because I do like the idea of a printed book as an alternative method of portfolioing (is that a word?), but I’m also going to have to work on completing that proper ‘folio now as well.
Still, it was worth a try.
HP IV
Posted: Fri 18 November, 2005 Filed under: General, Reviews(ish) Leave a comment »Off to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire tonight. Review and Thoughts will follow either tonight or tomorrow. Most likely tomorrow.
Or Sunday. We’re at a quiz night that we’ve helped organise tomorrow night, so that may account for a fair amount of time tomorrow too.
Children In Need
Posted: Fri 18 November, 2005 Filed under: General 3 Comments »I was going to write a small rant about Children In Need and the like today, but what with one thing and another, just never got round to it.
So add your own swearwords in here for the moment about the pox-ridden event, and I’ll probably write something more about it over the weekend, or on Monday. It all depends how I feel, really.
If at first you don’t succeed…
Posted: Fri 18 November, 2005 Filed under: News 1 Comment »A wonderful story of determination in the face of 10 years of failures : one man’s struggle to devise coloured bubbles. Including mention of a nitric acid bubble which “ate through clothes” – the mind boggles.
Excellent stuff, if completely obsessive and barmy…
Mancunian
Posted: Fri 18 November, 2005 Filed under: Domestic, Thoughts, Travel 1 Comment »Last night I booked our hotel for a weekend in Manchester before Christmas.
Herself and I had talked about doing this – and it’ll be good to go back there for a couple of days – and had speculated about whether it would be easier to drive there or take the train.
Anyway, having booked the room, which should be very nice, I looked on The TrainLine to see what the cost of train tickets would be. Two people, booking a month in advance? A minimum of £80 for the two of us, which would also put us on a rigid schedule of when we could take the trains.
Any kind of normal ticket, rather than pre-booked and rigid on train times? A minimum of £120, and more likely £190.
Frankly, stuff that – so we’re driving instead.
Wol
Posted: Thu 17 November, 2005 Filed under: News, Thoughts 2 Comments »Yes, that is an intentional spelling of the title.
Anyway, did anyone else see the programme last night on BBC2 about the return of Eagle Owls to the UK? Apparently there’s at least one breeding pair on the North York Moors, and since 1997 they’ve produced at least 23 young, which have then gone on to spread as far as Exmoor and Northern Ireland. How utterly fantastic.
Bizarrely, at the moment they’re not listed as being a protected animal, because the British Ornithological Union wants to see proof that they are “native” to the UK before adding them to the British List (which would then automatically give the owls legal protection). The BOU believes that the owls are simply errant visitors, or “foreign birds”, rather than a reintroduction of a species that had been in the UK before becoming extinct in this country. The necessary proof apparently needs to consist of drawings/illustrations of the Eagle Owl going back to the 1600-1800s – a simple textual description apparently isn’t enough for these bureaucratic wonders. But until they get their proof, technically anyone can trap or kill the owls, or destroy their nests, with no legal comebacks.
Which is – frankly – bloody farcical.
Most Wanted
Posted: Thu 17 November, 2005 Filed under: Geeky, Thoughts 2 Comments »In the news, the UK’s first FBI-style ‘Most Wanted’ webpage was launched today, at www.mostwanted-uk.org.
As per usual with a new IT idea from our wonderful government, the bloody thing crashed almost immediately, due to “unprecedented numbers of people wanting to visit the site”.
Hmm, advertised on BBC website, mentioned in just about every news broadcast this morning, and they didn’t expect people to want to see it? Hey, well planned, guys.
Common Sense
Posted: Thu 17 November, 2005 Filed under: News 1 Comment »Hallelujah – it’s always good to see a dollop of common sense breaking out.
“My angle on ID cards is that they may be of some use but only if they can be made unforgeable – and all our other documentation is quite easy to forge.
“If we have ID cards at vast expense and people can go into a back room and forge them they are going to be absolutely useless.
“ID cards may be helpful in all kinds of things but I don’t think they are necessarily going to make us any safer.”
Of course, the Labour government have just come back and said “She’s entitled to her view”.
Knackers
Posted: Wed 16 November, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts 3 Comments »I know it’s probably a sign that I’m just a very bad person at heart, but this caused me an utter fit of the giggles today…
Watching a man walking along, talking to his mate, not looking where he was going.
Whannng!
Right into a bollard, strategically designed to be of the right height for a man to whack his bollocks right into it.
Pure, pure comedy. Painful, and brought tears to the eyes – but mainly of laughter, rather than sympathy.
I’m so going to hell…
Resolutions – Progress?
Posted: Wed 16 November, 2005 Filed under: 2005 Resolutions Leave a comment »Way back in January, I posted a list of my ’05 Resolutions…
- Making a photo portfolio, and taking it to a couple of agents, seeing how I do
- Sorting out the Driving Test
- Doing a few more bits of proper writing
- Taking time out, and not running round like quite such a silly bastard
- Enjoying life in its new facets
- Debating whether to close my current company and restart with something new.
- Lots of other things that I’ll list as I go on
- Change jobs
So, with six weeks to go, how have I done?
- Not much progress – I’ve got the portfolio itself, but not done anything with it yet. I’ve also recently found another way of doing it that I haven’t yet experimented with – but I intend to do so before the year’s out.
- Done and passed
- Nope, not even close. Not even begun, if I’m honest. And no, NaNoWriMo wouldn’t help either
- Yes-ish. I have had more holidays this year than last, so I guess that’s pretty much a “check!”
- Ditto
- Company completely closed and shut down
- Yes, Job changed, and much happier in the new one.
Which means I’ve completed five out of the seven resolutions, with a couple of odds and sods still to go. At least I’ve managed to get most of the big bits completed (except that bloody portfolio)
SAD
Posted: Wed 16 November, 2005 Filed under: Depression, Thoughts 3 Comments »It’s a long time since I’ve written anything about Seasonal depression – in fact, having checked, the last post tagged with the “Depression” category was way back in December last year. So I guess that’s a pretty good sign that all’s been going OK.
Over the last couple of weeks, the closing in of nights and mornings has really affected me again. In general we’ve been so busy that I honestly hadn’t noticed it creeping up, but Herself pointed it out last night, and yeah, it’s true.
I feel flatter than I have in ages, mentally and physically exhausted, and just generally blah. The flip-side of that, though, is that I’m starting to get a lot of creative ideas – which is, for me, another sign of the SAD leeching its way into my head. For some reason while I’m still flat and tired the creative juices flow, which is a bit paradoxical as half the time I’ve got the idea and can’t be arsed to do anything about it.
I’d thought I was doing OK this year, actually. (And in a way I am – it’s midway through November before it’s started to hit) While I’m at work I sit by a window, so I should get a fair amount of light from that. At lunch-time I tend to go out and sit outside whenever possible. I haven’t set up daylight bulbs at home this time, which is possibly something I’ll have to look at for next year – but the problem there is that you can’t get eco-friendly daylight bulbs. (or at least, I haven’t found them anywhere yet)
So – I don’t know what else will happen this year with the SAD. If I can keep it at this level then that’ll be a small battle won, and will be A Good Thing. I’m aware of it again now, so I’ll just have to see how things go.
Infamy, Infamy
Posted: Tue 15 November, 2005 Filed under: Music, Photography, Reviews(ish), Thoughts 3 Comments »Well, now there’s a turn-up for the books.
The semi-review mainly-rant I wrote last week following the Tracy Chapman concerts has been put up on the Tracy Chapman site, for the day we went. Now that’s kind of scary – a whole new bundle of people who might just link here having read the review/thoughts. Well, unless they were some of the lower primates solipsistically convinced of their own importance above all others. In which case they may be just a tad offended (assuming any form of self-awareness or introspection at all) and leave nasty rude comments here.
Who knows?
And frankly, who cares? *grin*
Now, maybe I can start angling for press credentials, which’ll let me get my Canon past the door-gorillas.
1.5 issues
Posted: Tue 15 November, 2005 Filed under: Geeky 5 Comments »I recently upgraded to FireFox v1.5 – and there’s something I’ve found in it that’s bloody annoying. About half the time I click on a link to open up in a new tab, the first time round I get a “Firefox couldn’t find the server” message – yet when I click “try again”, it goes straight to it.
Is it just me with this issue? Or is it more widely experienced?
Oh, and Adblock’s still being a pain in the arse, and won’t play Flash files at all. Sodding thing.
Wall and Piece
Posted: Tue 15 November, 2005 Filed under: Reviews(ish) Leave a comment »One thing I got for my birthday (well, through the joys of gift vouchers) was a copy of “Wall and Piece, by Banksy. I’ve been a fan of Banksy’s work for a long time, and this book is a fantastic collection of the work to date.
There’s a lot of good bits within the book, but my favourite is probably on the outside of the back cover.
“There’s no way we’ll give you a quote to go on that book”Metropolitan Police 2005
Pavement Parking
Posted: Tue 15 November, 2005 Filed under: Charm School, Sweary 3 Comments »Last night, I was walking home, and the path I was taking was blocked by some numpty who’d decided to park on it. There was maybe two feet of room to go through. Being rather more than two foot wide, I went through it.
*crack* went moronicus’s wing-mirror. Not broken, just bent back (in the way it should do) against the car’s window.
Driver : [getting out of car] Oi! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?
Moi : Walking home. Only some twat’s decided that the path is a driveway.
Driver : Well you could’ve walked round the car.
Moi: Onto an unlit main road? At night? Wearing all black? Don’t be a fuckwit all your life.
At which he shut up, got back in his car, and fucked off, wheelspinning away to show how tough and macho he really was.
I wasn’t impressed.
The Internet Is Shit
Posted: Sat 12 November, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts 1 Comment »(via Daisy)
If it’s not her dad who wrote it, I suspect it may have been mine…
The Internet Is Shit.org. And yes, the irony of a website with that name hasn’t escaped me.
Cringe-inducing
Posted: Fri 11 November, 2005 Filed under: News, Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »Is it me, or is placing an advert to find a partner for your daughter just a bit plain weird? Particularly when said daughter is 24, and – one assumes – perfectly capable of finding someone for herself should she want to?
I know I’ve a dodgy sense of humour, but I’d love it if the daughter were to turn round and say
Thanks for the thought, Mum, but actually I’m a lesbian and not interested in any of ’em.
Lights Out?
Posted: Fri 11 November, 2005 Filed under: Cynicism, Festering Season Leave a comment »
Ah, it’s good to see the spirit of Christmas is alive and well in Sonning, Berkshire.
In one private road (very posh, don’t you know?) the majority of the householders are hoping to pay off the houseowner with the glowing Christmas house decorations. This guy collects from this, and then gives to charity – last year he raised £5000 – and now the residents are hoping to pay him off. Which, frankly, sucks.
It’s no secret that I’m no fan of the Festering Season, and that I think the Home Alone-inspired glowing house decorations should all be trashed and burned. But while I dislike/despise them, I don’t try to get people to take the things down. They’re nasty, manky, and cheap – and I’m intrigued by the comment in the story that “Thames Valley Police said more than 40 crimes committed in the area last year were “directly linked” to the lights” – and I despair in general of the people who have this kind of tat and think it’s attractive.
But it’s still beyond me that people would try to pay someone off in order to stop them having this kind of thing on their house. Twats.
Afterthought : Of course, it’s also made me quite tempted to go over later in the year and take some photos, just for the hell of it. I probably won’t , but it’s made me think about it.
Tracy Chapman – London. The Concert
Posted: Thu 10 November, 2005 Filed under: Music, Reviews(ish) Leave a comment »So yes, as Gordon pointed out, a bit more about the gig itself.
First of all, the Hammersmith Apollo is a sod to get to. OK, the parking in the area isn’t too bad, and it’s dead opposite Hammersmith Tube station, but it’s still something that, at street level, is a sod to get to. And we’ll gloss over £7.50 for parking.
Inside, the venue’s pretty stunning. However, as with a lot of the Apollos, and older venues in general where they seem to have been converted from theatres, the seating is a) tight and cramped, and b) uncomfortable.
Despite all that, the concert itself was stonking. She doesn’t do much on stage, yet there’s a certain amount of presence, for want of a better word. Not showy, just three people (and a bit of unidentified (pre-recorded?) percussion) doing what they do – and doing it bloody well. The standard well-known tracks (“Fast Car”, “Talkin’ about a Revolution” etc.) were all done, as were various items from all the earlier albums as well as the new one.
In addition, a couple of covers, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” added some variety, and a very much more rock-driven “Another Sun” which kicked things up a gear.
All told, an absolute stunner of a gig. Not much talking to the audience – although some members still insisted on yelling for tracks, or talking to her – just a pure-breed performance. Well worth the money, and the effort, and even of having to tolerate the fuckwits. Although it would’ve been better if I’d had a stungun…
Tracy Chapman – London. The People
Posted: Thu 10 November, 2005 Filed under: Music, Reviews(ish) 2 Comments »It’s been a long time coming, but last night we went to see Tracy Chapman in concert.
And bloody hell, she was good – but the audience were a nightmare. In fact, a very similar crowd to that experienced by Skytower.
I don’t understand why people pay £35 per ticket to go and see a sensational concert, only to talk to their mates all the way through it. Or to text people all the way through – and believe me, in the dark, the screen illumination can be sodding bright, and fucking distracting. I also don’t understand the point of keeping on going out to get more drinks etc. You’ve paid thirty-fucking-five pounds to see this gig, yet you spend half of it walking to and from the bar, and/or fucking off the people around you by constantly moving. You stupid self-obsessed bastard.
As for people with cameras, I don’t quite understand why they’re incapable of turning the flash off. Quite honestly, the flash at that range isn’t going to do anything, although it’s quite likely to screw up your photos. The camera thinks it’ll be getting a lot more light (due to the flash), then doesn’t – because the flash is swallowed up by the distance – so you just get screwed up and dull shots. And then try, and try again – but always with the flash on. Twat.
Oh, and why is it that people insist on singing along with all the songs? You’ve paid to see the original artist sing them, not attempt to drown them out with your own toneless/tuneless attempts that – more than occasionally – also have the wrong words too.
Still, despite all of these tossers, the gig itself was stonking.
Driving Force
Posted: Thu 10 November, 2005 Filed under: Resolutions, Thoughts, Travel 1 Comment »It’s now three months since I passed the driving test – doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? (Still, at least it didn’t take me 33 years, like this woman)
In that time I’ve done a fair amount of driving, including fun stuff like motorways. I haven’t yet done the M25 at all, nor driven in Central London – there’s still plenty of stuff I haven’t done, in fact, but I’ll get round to it. For the first piece of time though, it’s been more about gaining more confidence on the road, and being comfortable with driving.
Quite honestly, driving isn’t something I enjoy. It’s something I do. Maybe I’ll grow to enjoy it, but it’s not something I love doing. My brother, on the other hand, passed his test as soon as possible, and covers about 1,500-2,000 miles per month now. He loves driving. I don’t.
But I still do it – and I’ll keep on doing so. Maybe with time I’ll get to like it. For now, though, it’s just something that I do when necessary.
Out again
Posted: Wed 9 November, 2005 Filed under: Music Leave a comment »Tonight we’re off to see Tracy Chapman in concert.
Looking forward to it? Me? Nah, as if…
Review tomorrow, although probably not photos after last time…
Parcelforce
Posted: Wed 9 November, 2005 Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services 1 Comment »When we got back on Monday, there was a card on the doormat (along with about a thousand other things) to say that Parcelforce had tried delivering something to me, we hadn’t been in, so they’d left it at the local post office.
Only it wouldn’t be at the local post office ’til Tuesday. Yes, apparently it takes 24 hours to drop off something just down the road.
So I called up the *ahem* Customer Services people at Parcelforce to try and get it redelivered to the house today – because of course I’m not at home for the rest of the week in the hours that the post office is open. Nor are we there at the weekend when it’s open, so frankly, the delivery’s knackered.
[I’ve cut out lots of the preliminary stuff – it was all just obstructive and a pain in the arse]
“Oh yes, it’s on the delivery truck today”
“OK, so can you get it redelivered to my home address today”
“No, because it’s on the truck already”
“Eh?”
“We can’t contact the driver to tell him to redeliver. He’s tried, you weren’t at home. It’ll be at the post office tomorrow”
“But I won’t be. So you’re telling me that you can’t contact your drivers at all?”
“No, we can’t. They’re not allowed to take mobile phones out in the trucks. [sarky] You see, it’s illegal to answer them while they’re driving”
“Yes, I know that. Obviously the concept of ‘leaving a message’ is beyond your experience.”
I tried getting it delivered to my work address on Tuesday instead – you know, so I can at least receive the sodding thing. But first “we need the postcode” which, frankly, I’ve no idea of. I can give the address, but they also apparently don’t have anything that can find a postcode from the address. Oh, and they charge £5.50 to change the address.
So, it’s waiting at the post office. With luck I might get there at some point in order to collect it. But you can be fucking certain I will never ever use Parcelforce, if that’s the attitude they’ve got. Fuck ’em – there’s better services out there that charge far less.
Photo-Manipulation
Posted: Tue 8 November, 2005 Filed under: Photography, Thoughts 2 Comments »Hmm, not often I do this, but in the comments, Wulvern wrote:
Like the photos. Are they ‘as taken’ or did you do any bodging in Photoshop or similar? Am thinking of upgrading from a basic digi camera but the reviews in magazines and at dpreview.com (top site) suggest that the output digital SLRs need ‘working on.’
So – as with previous photos I’ve put online either here at d4d™ or on my pages at Flickr – no, I don’t do a great deal of alteration to my shots if I can help it. I tend to limit myself to cropping the images if necessary, and resizing them. I’ve done some aspects of editing them in some cases, or converting from colour to black&white, but even those are a bit of a rarity.
However, I also probably don’t use the camera to its fullest power, because I tend to shoot photos as JPGs rather than in the RAW format. RAWs take up more room on the card, and need to have an amount of processing done on them on the PC before they can be usable. Quite honestly, that’s beyond my current skills a lot of the time, but also I don’t like knobbing about too much with images. Yes, sure, I could take a RAW image and do any amount of stuff with it – but I know I wouldn’t do so.
I like to keep images as close to their reality as possible. OK, maybe in the future I’ll play with images and saturation levels etc. so that I could come up with images such as this, but at the moment it’s just not my thing. I like to use my own creativity and the power of the camera to produce something like the shot of the log in the waterstream – I don’t want to be sat in Photoshop for hours blurring the bloody things to the correct consistency.
So – to go back to answering the question – no, I don’t mess about with the images. The ones from the weekend have only been altered to rotate some of them through 90°, that’s it. Yeah, some could do with some trimming or cropping, but I haven’t done so yet. As for the images needing processing from a DSLR, yeah, they can do. But it’s up to you – I stick (for now) with JPG images, and don’t need to stuff about the same way I would with a RAW. I could do, but I chose not to. As with most things on SLRs, you can make life pretty much as complicated or simple as you want and/or as your skills let you.
A Weekend
Posted: Tue 8 November, 2005 Filed under: Animals, Travel 3 Comments »So, yes, that weekend away. What did we do?
To be honest, in some ways it can probably be summed up using the phrase “Not a great deal, really”.
Friday was mainly taken up with the drive down to Somerset – which I’m pleased to say I did the majority of. Two-ish hours of motorway fun on the M4, and then through Bristol (a minor navigational hitch which we’ve learned a lot from – primarily “Never go this route again”). Having got down to the place we were staying, Hound then got a run on the beach, which was much needed. Then some shopping for food etc., and a “Bloody hell, we’ve stopped” moment which led to complete exhaustion.
Saturday we were determined to exhaust Hound before any fireworks started. First off a quick walk round the park, then off to Lake Wimbleball for another hours-ish walk, then to Combe Sydenham, down to Dunster beach for another one, and then back to the beach at the park for another hour. So all told about four, four and a half hours of walking the Hound in order for her to be knackered. But it worked – she slept for the entire evening, and didn’t even twitch at most of the fireworks that went off. Mission accomplished.
Overnight it absolutely slashed it down, so Sunday didn’t involve much at all – a couple of walks when the weather allowed, and a relaxed day of reading papers, organising mailing lists, and similar.
And then Monday was just the drive back – now all we need is a rest after the holiday…
Photies
Posted: Tue 8 November, 2005 Filed under: Photography, Resolutions, Travel 2 Comments »Well, I’m back in the land of the living. And photos have been uploaded to my Flickr page so you can see them there. I’ll probably add more to it later, but for now that little selection will do.
As should be fairly obvious, I’m beginning to get the hang of the new camera. It’s an amazing bit of kit (and no, Andy, all the offers etc. on it don’t mean it’s a crap camera by any stretch!) that I hope will be able to keep pace with my development for a few years at least. There’s still a long way to go at the moment – and I definitely intend to sort out a macro lens early in the new year, along with (possibly) a Lensbaby, which could make for some interesting ideas and creative odds and sods.
I still find an awful lot of my inspiration comes from people like Chromasia, although there’s also a lot of other sources involved. And I’ve got a couple more shots that are going to get submitted to Amateur Photographer in the next couple of months and so on too.
So yes, photographic development (pardon the pun) is progressing, and I’m pleased with the way it’s going. I haven’t done a whole lot of photos this year, but I intend to change that in 2006 again. And I’ve *still* got to put together that portfolio…
Back
Posted: Mon 7 November, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »More later, once we’ve recovered and dried out a bit.
Floating Wind Farms
Posted: Mon 7 November, 2005 Filed under: Green Leave a comment »I saw an interesting idea the other day, and kind of kept it over for while we were away. Sad, but true.
Anyway, this piece details the invention of a floating wind-turbine farm, which seems to be a pretty good idea. It means it doesn’t have to create/build the expensive moorings for the wind-turbines, and that they could be sited further away from the coast.
In addition, they could be moved should they need to (for example, in the US during hurricane season) and generally just seem to be a pretty good idea. The only thing I wonder about is how well they’d need to be anchored in order to not topple over at some point…
Ooooh, Aaaaah, Pretty
Posted: Sun 6 November, 2005 Filed under: Animals, Domestic, Thoughts 2 Comments »Despite the fact I was born on November 5th, and thus kind of see fireworks as something special, I have to also admit that every year I like them less and less. I still don’t feel I’ve had a birthday until I’ve seen a proper fireworks display – on one memorable occasion that didn’t actually happen ’til December – but with every year I believe less and less that fireworks should be sold to the public.
The season for fireworks now seems untenable long – particularly when, as we do, you have pets who seriously don’t like fireworks. It appears to start at the beginning of October, and really go on, admittedly slightly sporadically, ’til mid January. And that’s too long.
As I’ve said in previous years, I believe that fireworks should be withdrawn from public sale. They simply shouldn’t be on sale in shops – simple as that. The only people allowed to purchase fireworks should be qualified people, and instead fireworks displays should be public events, organised and done safely.
Yes, there’s still the potential for accidents, but I’d rather that that potential for accidents happened in an environment where there are already people from St John Ambulance, first-aiders, or whatever, along with all the proper extinguishing equipment in easy reach, rather than the current events where accidental injuries (and not-so-accidental ones) happen in suburban gardens, or on streets where some dopey little fucker has thought it’ll be a good idea to throw a lit firework through a letterbox, or at someone on the street, or to chuck them into pubs.
In fact, I believe that the public displays should be funded at least partially by local authorities, who would be able to get money from national government. Where would the money come from? Well, all of a sudden there wouldn’t need to be any firework safety adverts on TV – I’d guess that there’s a fair amount of money spent there, for instance.
So yes – much as I love them (and much as Herself hates them) I’d like to see them utterly banned from sale to the public, along with suitable fines/punishments for any unlicensed person in possession of a firework.
I think it’d make a lot more sense, and allow everyone to celebrate Guy Fawkes (and just how fucked up is it to celebrate a terrorist, let alone a failed one?), Diwali, or whatever, safely, in public, without the nightly risks of walking the streets and coming across some stupid little bastard with an explosive device and a lighter…
Canon Can
Posted: Sun 6 November, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Photography, Thoughts 1 Comment »Buying the new camera has been an interesting experience in a number of ways. The sheer number of offers related to the purchase has bordered on the ridiculous.
Not content with Jessops offering the lowest price around for the kit I got, if I registered with the Canon Image Gateway (a kind of Flickr-like service for users of Canon cameras) I got a 256Mb Compact Flash memory card free. Not bad – so of course I did it.
Also, if you buy a Canon DSLR before the end of the year, they’re offering a cashback offer of £100 / €150 which obviously brings the price down even further.
Oh yeah, and as well as all that, you also get a booklet with a further £625 of cashback offers on lenses, flashes etc. if you buy them before the end of the year too.
Anyone would think they were trying to give the damn things away!
400 years on
Posted: Sat 5 November, 2005 Filed under: General Leave a comment »Four hundred years ago today, Guy Fawkes entered the Houses of Parliament with the intention of blowing it up. Some would say he was probably the last person to enter Parliament with honest intent.
If the plot had succeeded, life today would almost certainly be very different. (although on a cynical note it’s worth pointing out that that article was published on the April First)
Still crazy
Posted: Sat 5 November, 2005 Filed under: Music, Thoughts 5 Comments »It still should be my theme song, I think – which is why it goes up for my birthday. (and did two years ago, too. Just in case it seemed familiar.)
I met my old lover
On the street last night
She seemed so glad to see me
I just smiled
And we talked about some old times
And we drank ourselves some beers
Still crazy after all these years
Still crazy after all these yearsI’m not the kind of man
Who tends to socialize
I seem to lean on
Old familiar ways
And I ain’t no fool for love songs
That whisper in my ears
Still crazy after all these years
Still crazy after all these yearsFour in the morning
Crapped out
Yawning
Longing my life away
I’ll never worry
Why should I?
It’s all gonna fadeNow I sit by my window
And I watch the cars
I fear I’ll do some damage
One fine day
But I would not be convicted
By a jury of my peers
Still crazy
Still crazy
Still crazy after all these years© Paul Simon. All rights reserved, blah, blah,blah
Here’s to the next one.
Wilderness
Posted: Fri 4 November, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Travel 3 Comments »Away all weekend in the arse end of nowhere. AKA Somerset.
With luck there’ll be no fireworks at all where we are – although I’m not counting on that. Last time we did this, and went somewhere that fireworks were actually banned by the company, the bloody groundskeeper for the local stately(ish) house that owned the property we were in decided to have a mini-display in the garden. The fucker.
So we’ll see. I’m sure I’ll write more about it on our return. (not that anyone cares, but that’s the way of the world)
And when I come back I’ll also be 34, a birthday having occurred too.
Measure Map
Posted: Fri 4 November, 2005 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky Leave a comment »Currently I’m experimenting with a new web stats package on d4d™ While I’m still keeping Nedstat WebStats4U, some people have noted that it can cause pop-up problems. (To my knowledge they haven’t yet hit me with that issue, but I’m waiting…)
Anyway, the new tool is still in alpha development (i.e. “Don’t hold your breath”) and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to be a tester for it. It’s called MeasureMap, which currently seems a bit of an odd name – then again, I should think “Amazon” for a book-seller was originally deemed to be a bit of an odd name too…
While it’s demanded slightly more work in putting everything in place – a whole three cut-and-paste jobs instead of the standard one – it makes for interesting reading, and appears to be slightly more accurate than the other stuff, in that it ignores repeat visits from the same IP address. So it’s recording unique visitors instead of actual hits – both of which can be useful. It’d be nice to have both coming from the same package, but maybe that’s still in development somewhere along the line. We’ll see.
Multi-day Writing
Posted: Thu 3 November, 2005 Filed under: D4D™, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Today’s one of those odd days. We’re away from tomorrow ’til late Monday, so not only am I writing stuff for today, but also trying to add in some posts for while I’m away.
Basically, what this means is that I get to do five day’s worth of posts in one day. Which is a bit of a mental struggle sometimes.
Maybe I should just let d4d™ be a bit quieter over the weekend, but well, I still find I like writing stuff for it, so we’ll just have to see how it goes, won’t we.
Bucking Farmy
Posted: Wed 2 November, 2005 Filed under: Animals, Thoughts Leave a comment »As some regular readers probably recall, this week is one of the worst in the year for Hound. She’s absolutely petrified of fireworks, and the run up to November 5th is a nightmare for her. Admittedly she’s a lot better this year than last year, when she pretty much had a total mental/nervous breakdown. We’ve been seeing a homeopathic vet who has prescribed her lycopodium, which has had an amazing effect on bringing down her anxiety and stress levels in general, but still this time of year isn’t a good one. In fact, for this week we actually have her on sedatives in the evening – it’s not something I like doing, but it’s far preferable (both for her and for us) than the effects we saw this time last year.
However, it doesn’t mean we’re any less barmy. This week I’ve been leaving the office at about 2.30pm, so I can get home and give her a decent long walk/run round the local park, so that we can then be home and she can be doped up in plenty of time before night comes, and along with it the legions of bangs, whizzes and whees that seem to make up the majority of small-scale fireworks.
Today was the final straw in that concept – it’s absolutely chucked it down with rain, and I don’t feel it would be far from accurate to call it torrential. Hound is now soaked – well, she’s been dried off a bit, but the poor sod was absolutely dripping – and with luck it also means that we won’t have any fireworks tonight.
But yes, I still feel decidedly crackers, knowing that I’m leaving work early in order to come home and walk the dog so she’s had some exercise and can hopefully sleep a bit through any fireworks that do happen. So really it’ll just be me and Herself who worry about the fireworks this time…
24 Little Hours
Posted: Wed 2 November, 2005 Filed under: News, Thoughts 4 Comments »“What a difference a day makes”, indeed.
Yesterday : “I am not resigning, says Blunkett”
Today : “Blunkett resigns from Cabinet“.
Nothing like a good healthy political U-Turn. Still, I don’t suppose you can say he saw it coming…
Pity
Posted: Wed 2 November, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts Leave a comment »There are days when I feel really sorry for our postman. Today was one of those days…
Having already received a sodding great package of dried fruits etc. from RedMoor (they deliver free if you spend over £30 at a time, and when the delivery is about £7.50 on its own, it’s worth doing in bulk) , the postman then delivered:
- Large package from Amazon
- small (but still too big for letterbox) package from Amazon
- Padded envelope containing three 225g packs of seeds from Chase Organics so we can plant out some stuff in the garden (of which more later)
- about five other items
The poor sod must’ve been about 3stone lighter after dropping off that lot at our place…
First Results
Posted: Tue 1 November, 2005 Filed under: Photography, Thoughts 1 Comment »Well, I’ve just looked at the first photos with the new camera, and my conclusion is this :
“Fuck, I’ve got a lot to learn“…
*sigh*
Like an Arrow
Posted: Tue 1 November, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts Leave a comment »Eh? What’s that? First of November?
Fark, that means it’s only a few days ’til I’m another year older. Bloody hell, where’s this year gone?
Fuckwit
Posted: Tue 1 November, 2005 Filed under: News, Thoughts, Weirdness 2 Comments »Sometimes you read a story, and wonder if you’re even the same species as some other people.
This story is an example of that. I defy people to not go “Why?” when they read it…
Pedestrian Mind-Control
Posted: Tue 1 November, 2005 Filed under: Sweary, Thoughts 4 Comments »Have I missed something? Are a large proportion of the population actually telepathic?
Every day I have to cross the road near my workplace, and I (generally) use the pelican crossing in order to do so. For those not in the know, this is the crossing with the “walk/don’t walk” red man/green man lighting system, that tells you when it’s safe to cross the road, because the traffic light has been set accordingly.
This system is not intelligent. It can’t – to my knowledge – detect when people are stood there waiting to cross. In order to tell it, you have to press the button, at which point a light on the box goes on, effectively the crossing saying “Ok, I know people are here, so I’ll get working on changing the lights”. It’s not difficult.
Every day, there’s at least one person just standing waiting for the lights to change. It’s not always the same person, but it’s always the same scenario – they’re the only person at the crossing. Now, I get to the crossing and I admit, I tend to make an assumption. I shouldn’t, but I do. I assume that the person has at least one brain-cell of their own, and has pressed the fucking button. But no – they seem to be assured of their own telepathic abilities, and think that the crossing will just know that they’re there and waiting. Occasionally common sense will suddenly strike them, they’ll look at the control box, and then press the button – even more occasionally looking sheepish at being such a twat.
More often, though, it’s down to someone else – usually me, in the end, when I’ve realised that my assumption has again been proved wrong. So they’ve waited – and still someone else has had to activate the crossing. Maybe they’ve all got servants, and are used to not having to do anything. I don’t know. But it’s certainly bloody annoying…
Corollary : By the way, the button only needs pushing once. To the fuckwits who stand there continually pushing the sodding button – it doesn’t make it work any quicker. It doesn’t think “Ooh, there’s lots of people pushing me, I’d best do it quicker”. So just press the bastard thing ’til the light goes on, then fucking well leave it alone!
Trick or Tr-bzzzzzzzzzt
Posted: Mon 31 October, 2005 Filed under: Animals, Sweary, Thoughts 3 Comments »Ah joy, for tonight is
- All Hallows Eve, when darling little munchkins wander the streets done up in fancy dress, knocking on people’s door to chorus the jolly inhabitants with the traditional cry of “Trick or Treat!”
- bloody Halloween, when snot-gobbling little chavvy tosspots stalk the streets done up in cheap tat masquerading as fancy dress, bashing on doors to yell “Trick or Treat” when people open them, in the method known to all and sundry since the late 80s when ET made the fucking festival popular across the Atlantic
- Hallowe’en, when all (in)decent witches and pagans go out and sacrifice goat/child/dog to the gods of all that is unholy
I tend to be of the attitude that b) is the way to go. It’s not enough that Hound is currently stressed by fuckwit arseholes setting off fireworks at all hours of the day/evening/night, and is currently making use of vet-prescribed sedatives. No, we’ve now got to have the fucking doorbell going off to stress her out even more, closely followed by shit-for-brains hellspawn in sheets demanding sweets. Well, bollocks to them.
I’m considering linking the doorbell to the mains for the night. That should be an ample Trick to see the little sods off crying into their goody bags…
One step forward, two steps back
Posted: Mon 31 October, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Sweary, Thoughts 1 Comment »Recently, my bank‘s online banking section finally took a turn for the better, and made use of a lot of accessibility and usability recommendations. Halle-fucking-lujah, I hear you cry – about time one of ’em did.
Last Friday I upgraded my installation of Firefox up to the latest 1.5 beta release, which in many ways is utterly stonking, and great to use.
Today I went to the online banking and got back the same message I used to get…
The Internet browser you are using is not supported by Digital Banking. Use the link below to see the complete list of browsers we support.
- Microsoft® Internet Explorer version 5 and 6
- Netscapeâ„¢ Navigatorâ„¢ version 7.1 and up
- Mozilla 1.5 and up
- AOL 8.0 and up (AOL subscribers only)
- Firefox 1.0
For fuck’s sake – so it’ll work on 1.0, but not on 1.5? Useless bastards…
Wallace and Gromit – Again
Posted: Mon 31 October, 2005 Filed under: Reviews(ish), Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »Yesterday I drove over to the Parent’s place, and took them to see Wallace & Gromit – Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I’d already seen it once, and loved it, so had no problem seeing it again.
As it is, I’d sent them a message when we’d seen it, telling them that they really should go. However, I know my parents, and while they’re normally horrifically busy, it’s still somehow a struggle to get them to go and see stuff at the cinema or whatever. Strange, but true. So I gave them a couple of week’s grace, then ended up just getting it organised for a free afternoon, driving over to their place, and dragging them to the cinema.
Ye Gods, Aylesbury is still an ungodly cackhole. It’s never been on my list of favourite places – although it’s frequently been seen on the list of “places to avoid at all costs, and reject any jobs that happen to be in the vicinity”. Yeah, sure, it’s been redeveloped over the last few years, but that just moves it from “irredeemable shithole” to “redeveloped, but still a shithole”.
Actually, though, the time around Halloween is probably the best time to visit the place. This way the vacant stares, shambling walk, and slight drool from the mouths of the inhabitants just seems topical, and you can (almost) write it off as bad make-up. If George A Romero ever wanted to remake “Town of the Dead”, Aylesbury would be the venue of choice.
As for the film, it’s just as good on a second viewing, and the parents loved it.
Then we made our escape.
However, on the way out it did strike me that it was somewhat ironic. Most adults there were taking their children to see the film. However, I was the child taking my parents to see it. And thus goes the process of *ahem* “growing up”.
Outage
Posted: Mon 31 October, 2005 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky 1 Comment »Apologies about d4d™’s lack of availability yesterday – apparently the server at 34sp had some major problems with its power supply, so everything went tits-up ’til they moved the server’s hard-drives over to a spare machine.
Still, apparently all is well again today, so that’s good news. It did have a pretty major effect on the stats though – I think yesterday d4d™ got a whole 60 readers, instead of the normal 150 or so.
Kitchen Stuff
Posted: Mon 31 October, 2005 Filed under: Domestic Leave a comment »Finally, over the weekend, we got the water stuff sorted in the kitchen. Thanks to our Very Nice Plumber, who is – it has to be said – an absolute godsend. Heaven only knows what he thinks of us, but he’s been very handy to know. And reasonably priced, which is always a good thing too.
So now it’s just tiling and painting to do, and the kitchen will be completed. At last. Herself did a huge amount of the tiling yesterday while I was out, and it looks fan-bloody-tastic.
EOS 20D
Posted: Sun 30 October, 2005 Filed under: Photography, Travel 1 Comment »Yes, I’ve now got the digital SLR I was aiming for – the Canon EOS 20D. I managed (after some struggle) to get the package that included both the Canon 18-55mm Lens and the Sigma 55-200mm lens – and all for less than the RRP of the body on its own. Camera pricing is weird.
Of course, the learning curve on this thing is going to be enormous. I’ve actually taken the radical step of reading the instruction manual – that’s how steep the curve’s going to be. I’m over the moon with it, and looking forward even more now to being away next weekend.
Yes, we’re off again next weekend – well, a) it’s my birthday on the 5th, and b) it should hopefully reduce Hound’s anxiety about fireworks. We’re going to be in the backside of nowhere in Somerset, roughly where we went earlier in the year.
I got some fantastic stuff last time we were down there, several shots from which have been printed up to A4 size, framed, and now populate some of our walls. So it’ll be interesting to see what I can get with the 20D…
Gastric
Posted: Sun 30 October, 2005 Filed under: Health, Thoughts Leave a comment »Hmm, I can honestly say that combining left-over veggie curry with chinese Special Fried Rice can produce some *ahem* interesting gastric side-effects.
It all tasted pretty good at the time – and was definitely filling – but it appears to have combined into some kind of substance that would’ve been logged as a chemical weapon in some countries.
Canonical
Posted: Sat 29 October, 2005 Filed under: Photography, Thoughts Leave a comment »After much hooing and haing, and assuming that the store has some still in stock, I’ve finally decided that I’m going to get the Canon EOS 20D.
Yes, the decision has been made, and the price at the moment looks pretty good – particularly from Jessops. So we’re going to have a look at the local branches, and see if we can get one. And then we’ll just have to see what kind of stuff I can come up with, won’t we?
Chocolate
Posted: Sat 29 October, 2005 Filed under: Reviews(ish), Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Well, having tried out the chocolates I got from Puccini Bomboni in Amsterdam, I have to say that despite the recommendations, I (and Herself) still think that the chocolate from Hotel Chocolat is far superior.
So there.
Dangerous Driving
Posted: Fri 28 October, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts Leave a comment »Having just seen not one but two fuckwit bastards parking right on the corner over the road, thus blocking half the traffic flow and making a right screw of the entire thing, I wonder what the response would be if I were to start taking photos of the bastards when they park illegally, make a hazard of themselves, or just generally act like cunts?
I don’t know if there’s anything that would come of it – although it could be interesting to find out. After all, there’s just so many of ’em. I reckon I see at least five to ten cars per day doing that kind of dumb shit, and a similar number who don’t seem able to follow the concept of the signs that say “no entry ahead”, “no through road” or “no right turn”. It’s as though they think the signs don’t apply to them.
</victor_meldrew>
Adblock
Posted: Fri 28 October, 2005 Filed under: Geeky Leave a comment »Well, Adblock’s failure turned out to be the start of a bundle of problems with Firefox.
As it is, I’ve now moved from the “current stable” Firefox 1.0.7 up to the nextest bestest 1.5, which is still in beta version.
So far though, it looks pretty good. More importantly, all the things that were going tits-up have now been fixed. Which is definitely A Good Thing.
Best
Posted: Fri 28 October, 2005 Filed under: Health, Thoughts 1 Comment »I have to confess, I find it extraordinarily difficult to have any sympathy for George Best. Yes, he was a talented footballer, but couldn’t handle the pressure/adulation/whatever. He’s had more chances to change than most, including a liver transplant.
Yet still he’s insisted on pissing it all away. And if he does recover from this latest hospitalisation, I can pretty much guarantee he’ll continue to piss it all away.
It’s sad to see someone doing that to themselves. But it’s also very hard to be sympathetic about it.
Barking
Posted: Fri 28 October, 2005 Filed under: Domestic Leave a comment »I think that last night the Hound decided we were utterly barmy. Not only was the house a total disaster-zone when she came back (having been in kennels while we were sorting out most of the kitchen) but we ended up taking all the washing-up upstairs to do it in the bathroom. Hound ended up looking at us both with the collie expression of “What the fuck are you two up to?”
Actually, it all worked out pretty well – everything’s been washed up, and we were able to get a lot of stuff moved back to where it should be. In fact, we almost have the house back. That’s a good feeling after this week, I can tell you.
Now it’s “just” making sure that the Plumber is still coming out tomorrow to do the water/waste stuff in the kitchen, and tiling the walls. Then we can be about sorted. Yee-Ha.
Adblock
Posted: Thu 27 October, 2005 Filed under: Geeky 3 Comments »On my FireFox browser I use the AdBlock extension – in fact it’s one of the first things I download on any new installation. Over the last few days, though, it’s been doing deeply odd things, so I can’t block certain adverts, or it won’t let me view Flash files.
Is anyone else having this problem? Or is it just my installation that’s gone tits-up?
DIY
Posted: Thu 27 October, 2005 Filed under: Domestic Leave a comment »As for the kitchen, and the work we did yesterday? Best not to ask, really…
Read the rest of this entry »
Surrender
Posted: Thu 27 October, 2005 Filed under: Geeky 1 Comment »OK, I admit it, I’m giving up. After another day where the SATA drive on the new PC refused to format properly for reasons unknown, I’ve now ordered an “old tech” IDE drive for the PC instead. It won’t need special drivers, so the floppy disc drive can sod off back to the old PC too.
So, the drive should arrive tomorrow or Saturday, and then I can get on with setting it up, installing everything, and just getting it all sorted. I haven’t decided yet what I’ll do with the SATA drive. Time will tell.
Windage
Posted: Wed 26 October, 2005 Filed under: Green 2 Comments »The BBC has a couple of interesting features at the moment about wind-power and green energy.
The first concerns whether having a wind-turbine at home can make financial sense as well as ecological sense. It’s something that we’ve been looking at, particularly for once we’ve moved – there’s no point spending *cough*thousand pounds on a wind-turbine etc. only to sod off twelve months later. I also think we’ll be making use of grants and so on from organisations such as Clear Skies, and taking advice from the British Wind Energy Association. There’s a lot of other stuff that’ll go into the process, and in that context the article makes for interesting reading.
The second piece details the story of one installation of a domestic wind-turbine, and the trials and tribulations of the process – again, something interesting for future reference.
Two Months To Go
Posted: Tue 25 October, 2005 Filed under: Festering Season 4 Comments »Two months today, and it’ll be Christmas Day. Two months and one day, and it’ll all be over.
Now, who’s to say that’s not a good thing? Not me, that’s for sure.
I’m sure it won’t be long now before the first domestic signs of Festive Tat will be out there, flashing cables on houses, manky lights across high streets, and so on. For now, though, I’m just enjoying the lack thereof.
Festering
Posted: Mon 24 October, 2005 Filed under: Festering Season, Thoughts 2 Comments »You know, I have to say that at the moment the level of Festering Season guff around really isn’t too bad – or hasn’t been for me, anyway.
Normally by the start of October there’s been Festive Tat all over the place, but somehow this year I seem to be not seeing too much of it. Yeah, the bloody DIY stores have their displays out of manky neon and sparkly Santas, but the shops haven’t (yet) started overflowing with tinsel and toss. No bad thing.
Instead they seem to be going for Halloween in a big way – the local Tesco in particular has huge numbers of jack-o’lantern buckets and all sorts of rubbish. But I don’t mind that too much, even though it’s an Americanisation (is that a word?) that owes its entire UK existence to ET.
If nothing else it’s meant I can get to within a fortnight of my birthday, and not yet be sick of Christmas. That’s better than it has been in the last couple of years…
OEM
Posted: Mon 24 October, 2005 Filed under: Geeky, Thoughts Leave a comment »One other (hopefully final) thing that annoyed me during the installation of the new Shuttle PC was this :
I ordered the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) version of Windows XP Pro to go with the PC. Basically, for those who don’t know, the OEM version is basically just the software without all the bells and whistles of packaging, manuals, and all the nice customer-friendly stuff that you don’t really need. It’s packaging for people who are building their own PC – and it’s a buttload cheaper than getting the full “consumer experience”. And that’s all well and good.
However it comes in a cardboard box that’s plastered all over with “Don’t open this box ’til you’ve verified that you’ve been sent the correct version, as an opened box is non-returnable” and “if you open this box, you agree to the following licence agreement” – all the normal guff. But of course on the box there’s nothing on the outside of the box to tell you which version of Windows you’ve got. So you’ve got to open the box to find out, at which point you can’t return it if the suppliers have fucked up, and you’ve accepted the licence at that point too.
Fortunately, I’d received the version that I’d ordered – but I didn’t know that until I’d already accepted everything by having to open the keffing box.
I thought that these “you’ve got to open the box to read the licence that you’ve agreed to by opening the box” methods had been retired, but it looks like they’re still going strong.
Floppy
Posted: Mon 24 October, 2005 Filed under: Geeky, Thoughts 2 Comments »Out of interest, why do we still need to use floppy discs for driver installs and the like? The CD drive works fine, so I could use that. A USB stick would work fine too – but no, the Windows installer insists that the drivers be on a floppy in drive A: – no other options exist. Why?
It just seems like such an archaic thing to have – and it’s a pain, too. I don’t see the point in having an up-to-date latest-tech box that still needs a floppy drive. Up ’til this weekend I haven’t used a floppy in years – with the one exception of the server installs at CrapCo, which had the same thing, they needed a driver installed for the RAID stuff. And that’s it – the floppy drive will never be used again. Everything either gets burned onto a CD (or even a DVD now) or saved on the USB stick.
So – what’s the use of having a floppy drive, other than putting in these one-off drivers?
Chuffers
Posted: Mon 24 October, 2005 Filed under: Travel Leave a comment »Bloody trains – after doing so well for most of the year, as soon as the weather officially turns to shit, so does the service. On Friday I was half an hour late, and today it was quarter of an hour late.
The thing is, I swear you can hear the Random Excuse Generator kicking in…
Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m sorry to announce that the 8.50 to Reading is delayed by 15 minutes because of …
[clickety clickety]
… a short problem with the signalling equipment.
And you can just hear the thought process of “Oh, yeah, signalling equipment, that’s a good one. I’ll use that, and we’ll stick with it for this train. Now, what can we have for the next one, that’s basically “delayed because it’s behind the one that’s already running late“, but we can’t say that…”
File Moving
Posted: Sun 23 October, 2005 Filed under: Geeky, Thoughts Leave a comment »Note to self : Even using a portable hard-drive, moving 40Gb of music files along with 10Gb of photos takes a long long time.
Although it’d almost certainly take longer to do over the network, so I suppose that’s a silver lining to this cloud…
Serial ATA
Posted: Sun 23 October, 2005 Filed under: Geeky Leave a comment »Hmm, bugger. The Shuttle box now works and instals the relevant drivers etc., but still comes up with an error about “failing to format/partition the SATA drive” which is a bit of a cunt, as I’m only using the one drive.
I’m going to leave it ’til later, or even tomorrow, in order to have another go at it. It’s going to be one of those set ups, I think. Grrrr.
Shuttle
Posted: Sun 23 October, 2005 Filed under: Geeky 2 Comments »Well, the new PC got assembled pretty easily.
However, installing the OS is a nightmare. First of all, I forgot (well, didn’t think I needed) the floppy drive. OK, I’ve got one in the old PC. Not ideal, but it’ll do. Install the drivers for the SATA drive – not so easy. Despite it being a board for a 64bit processor, they haven’t included the drivers for XP64 – you’d kind of think that was a logical addition, but no.
So it’s back online with the old PC, having swapped the floppy drive back, so I can write the drivers to floppy, then move the floppy drive over to the Shuttle box and give that a thrash.
I’m in the process of downloading those drivers now. I’m sure there’ll be other ones I need to (particularly networking etc.) so I may get those at the same time – seems like a smart move. With luck though I won’t have to install those ’til I’ve got some USB support and the main bit of the OS is installed.
That’d make life easier, anyway. In the meantime, I’m wondering if XP64 was the best option – maybe I should’ve just gone with XP Pro. We’ll see…
N20
Posted: Fri 21 October, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts 4 Comments »I can’t believe that that execrable pile of shite known as Neighbours has now been on our screens for twenty friggin’ years this week.
Mind you, I also can’t believe the number of people who have nominated (and by definition, remembered) the 20 favourite obscure Neighbours characters. Although I do think it indicates that I’m not the only person who needs to get out more – in fact, some of these people need to get out far more than I do!
Of course, I also can’t believe I read that article, considering I’ve watched less than ten episodes of Neighbours in my life…
Sorkin’s Back
Posted: Fri 21 October, 2005 Filed under: General 1 Comment »According to the Media Guardian, creator of the West Wing Aaron Sorkin is coming back – unfortunately, not to the West Wing.
NBC has committed to 13 episodes of Studio 7, a behind-the-scenes satire set in a Saturday Night Live-style late-night comedy show, which is shaping up to be one of the hottest new properties coming out of the US next year.
“This project is a noisy, compelling combination of bold drama and laugh-out-loud comedy,” the NBC entertainment president, Kevin Reilly, said.
However, Studio 7 may prove a little close to bone for NBC bosses. The pilot opens with an executive producer of the fictitious late night comedy show launching into a tirade about the current state of TV, with people eating worms on screen – which is regarded as a clear reference to NBC reality show Fear Factor.
© Guardian Newspapers 2005
Well hallelujah – it’ll be good to see what Sorkin comes up with.
Destroy, then Rebuild
Posted: Fri 21 October, 2005 Filed under: Domestic 2 Comments »As part of our plan for sorting out the final bits of the house, the kitchen currently resembles a bombsite.
Last weekend I took off all the tiles on the walls, and Herself has painted the ceiling. We’ve also taken off the doors to al the units, and Herself painted the unit carcases themselves. And then work stopped for a couple of days, as Life kicked in with a vengeance.
Tonight there’s another (hopefully final) coat going on the units, and then we can look at putting on the new doors. Over the weekend, the new tiles will be going on, and then there’s repainting the walls, Then next week we’ve got the fitting of a new kitchen worktop and sink.
It’s all going pretty well, to be honest. But in the interim period, the kitchen looks like a bomb’s gone off in it.
Just to add to everything else, we’ve also had the turf in the garden taken out, so we can level it off and reseed it this weekend. Of course, as soon as we’d got rid of the turf, the heavens opened, and it’s been heavy rain since. So the entire back half of the garden currently resembles a bad day in the Somme.
Some would say that if we’d had more sense, we’d have done all this one stage at a time, but well, where’s the fun in that?
400,000
Posted: Thu 20 October, 2005 Filed under: D4D™, Thoughts Leave a comment »Yee-ha, my word count’s just gone over the 400,000 mark. Gods I need to get out more…
Flights
Posted: Thu 20 October, 2005 Filed under: Sweary, Thoughts, Travel 1 Comment »After last night’s flight, I found myself wondering – yet again – what it is that makes people completely ignore the booking regulations, and carry on two (or, in a couple of cases, three or four) bags as hand-luggage? The booking confirmations etc. clearly say
“Baggage allowances: Hand baggage – 1 piece that should not exceed 115cm (sum of length, width and height), maximum weight 7kg, plus 1 laptop. Hold baggage – maximum 2 pieces, total weight of pieces must not exceed 20kg, excess baggage will be charged at £5/€7.5/$9 per kilo.”
It’s not rocket-science. But a good 80% of the travellers last night had got at least two bits of hand luggage, and so the entire plane was jammed rigid with the stuff, and the fucking twunts were walking up and down trying to find a space for their stuff. Not that they remembered where they’d finally managed to put it, so when we landed they were still trying to walk up and down, and remember where they’d put their super-essential can’t-go-in-the-fucking-hold piece of tat, forcing their way past the people who were standing waiting to get out.
And that’s another thing – what’s the bloody hurry? As soon as the door opens, everyone’s standing, waiting to get out, getting stressed, and they’re not going to get there any faster. In fact it always amuses me to see these twats who’ve been so “I’m so important, I’ve got to get off the plane, I’m an a hurry” then still waiting at the luggage collection when I get there – and yes, they’re getting even more stressed. Which turns to apoplexy when – as last night – I can stroll up ten minutes after they got there, just as the bags start rolling out, pick mine up within the first five bits (there’s an advantage to a bright yellow Cat® holdall instead of the anonymous black roll-along thing that seems to be de rigeur among the business execs) and wander through to departures while they’re still waiting for their stuff, and/or deciding which one of the ubiquitous roll-alongs is actually theirs. Comedy in the making.
Rasmus
Posted: Wed 19 October, 2005 Filed under: Euro OSCON 2005, Geeky, Thoughts 3 Comments »Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Be Lazy
I really like a programmer who can stand up and say “I hate programming”. Rasmus Lerdorf, who created PHP is one such programmer.
I’m sat here watching him do a presentation on PHP – definitely a very interesting guy, and some very interesting developments in PHP5 and 6.
Frustration Is…
Posted: Wed 19 October, 2005 Filed under: Geeky, Travel Leave a comment »being over here in Amsterdam, and knowing that that nice new PC is waiting at home, ready for the bits to be assembled into a working shit-hot PC that’ll do me for another three or four years.
Of course, it’ll be fine for when I get home tonight – but like any boy with a new toy, I want to put it together now.
And yes, there’s other reasons for looking forward to being home too. A sane waking-up time not least among them.
Choccie
Posted: Tue 18 October, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Travel 1 Comment »One thing I really shouldn’t do is head in to excellent chocolate shops on my own. While wandering around last night I found the Puccini Bomboni shop in Singel, Amsterdam. Adrian had mentioned about this a while ago on the currently-defunct-and-thus-no-link Uborka.nu so I made a mental note to go back.
I had some time spare today where nothing was going on, so I wandered back – and oh dear, oh dear. €35 later, and I’ve got a selection box of some truly evil-looking (calorie-wise) choccies, as well as some caramel nougat, and chocolate-covered orange slices. (Think grand-scale jaffa cakes) – and I’m being dead good, and not even opening any of it ’til I get home.
The shop is fantastic though – you can almost get high on the smell of the chocolate. The staff were lovely too, translating the Dutch labels (who’d have thought that rabarber meant rhubarb, eh? Ha. ) and generally just being really nice. I’m sure I’ll do more of a review of the chocs themselves when we’ve eaten a few, but I can say already that some of them look deeply tempting. Getting them home intact will be an achievement for sure.
Reaping
Posted: Tue 18 October, 2005 Filed under: News, Thoughts, Travel 4 Comments »Fantastic news in the Guardian today, that the government has announced a reshuffle that will mean Virgin fucking Trains losing their franchise for the cross-country from 2007.
And it’s about fucking time too – they’ve been running the service so badly over the last couple of years, they deserve to lose it.
Attendance 2
Posted: Tue 18 October, 2005 Filed under: Euro OSCON 2005, Geeky Leave a comment »On a far geekier note, it’s also been really interesting to be talking to, or seeing presentations from, so many of the people whose IT experience, programs and knowledge I’ve been using for years. People like Rasmus Lerdorf, who wrote PHP, Tim O’Reilly, the CEO of O’Reilly publishing ( the tech books with animals on the cover – and if you don’t know them, don’t worry) and Larry Wall, who created Perl.
That’s just a tiny subsection of the people here, obviously – but all the same, it really is pretty cool.
Attendance
Posted: Tue 18 October, 2005 Filed under: Euro OSCON 2005, Geeky, Thoughts Leave a comment »One thing that’s interesting here (well, I find it interesting, anyway) is how many women there are among the attendees. It’s nowhere near a majority (yet) but I’d say about 15-20% of the attendees are female, which is a huge leap from what it was five years ago.
Definitely a good thing, when so many of the keynote speakers were banging on about (among other things) equality and open-ness in all things.
Confusion
Posted: Tue 18 October, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Bloody Hell, is it really only Tuesday?
My brain’s been confused by flying out on the Sunday instead of the Monday – I’m a day out as well as being an hour out. Either way, it’s just not very good really. Grr.
Themes
Posted: Mon 17 October, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Weirdness 1 Comment »Is it me, or are the theme tunes from BBC’s “Spooks” and “Waking the Dead” disturbingly similar?
Mentally Slow
Posted: Mon 17 October, 2005 Filed under: Geeky, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »It’s 9.15, and already I’ve been in this tutorial for 45 minutes. However my body clock is still insisting it’s an hour earlier, and thus it’s not even vaguely conscious as yet.
I can see the benefits of Ruby on Rails, and can see the speed with which stuff can be created, but both my brain and laptop are seriously lagging. I want to do more with it, but this tutorial is being done by a guy who really knows his stuff – I’m going to have to play catch-up once I get home, and work on it a bit myself.
Oh joy, another new language to get my head round. Still, it looks petty easy. Ha, I’ve said that before…
Wallace and Gromit – Were-Rabbit
Posted: Sat 15 October, 2005 Filed under: Reviews(ish) 2 Comments »All I can say about this film is : Go and see it. It’s absolutely brilliant.
I haven’t laughed so much at a film in far too long. The entire thing is fantastic – and so utterly, utterly British. I was thinking about it afterwards, and I just can’t see Hollywood ever doing a film so blatantly quirky and – frankly – insane. And that, believe me, is a good thing.
It’s also interesting to compare it to the animated short before it, “The Madagascar Penguins in A Christmas Caper”. Equally brilliant, but also utterly different – and quintessentially American in a lot of ways.
The two together make for a lot of interesting comparisons and display their differences superbly. And both are well worth the money.
Simply put, just get your arse in gear and go see the film. It’s worth it.
Grammar
Posted: Sat 15 October, 2005 Filed under: D4D™, Thoughts Leave a comment »A while back I sent an email to Grammar Nazi regarding a question about punctuation in a certain situation.
And now he’s replied – and the question remains unanswered, although I do like his half-assed theories on the subject. (Hey, he called them that, not me)
Wolves! Where! Werewolves?
Posted: Fri 14 October, 2005 Filed under: Domestic, Reviews(ish) 1 Comment »Tonight we’re off to see Wallce And Grommit : Curse of the Were-Rabbit. More thoughts afterwards, I’m sure – but it’s one we’ve been looking forward to for a while now.
God, that’s really sad, isn’t it?
Gadgets
Posted: Fri 14 October, 2005 Filed under: Geeky, Photography, Thoughts Leave a comment »It’s obviously “Devices Day”, as Pix has just taken delivery of her brand new Digital SLR too. Hope she has fun with it, and it’ll be interesting, seeing what she thinks of the thing.
Poo
Posted: Fri 14 October, 2005 Filed under: Geeky Leave a comment »Why is it that as soon as you finally get round to ordering a new PC, you find a laptop that you really want too? (via Graybo)
Gah.
At last
Posted: Fri 14 October, 2005 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky 4 Comments »Well, last night I ordered the bits for the new PC…
- Shuttle SK83G box
- Athlon 64-bit 3400+ processor
- 1GB PC3200 RAM
- 16x 16x DVD Dual Layer +/- RW
- 200Gb Seagate S-ATA hard drive
- Windows XP Pro 64
At some point I’ll probably end up getting another hard drive as well, but for now 200Gb should be all I need.
And that should do me for a while. The current PC was one of the first 1Ghz athlon chips, so I’ve had it about four years now. As yet I’m unsure what I’ll do with the old one, although I do know I need to completely flatten it once I’ve moved all the relevant data over to the new PC.
Still, that’ll all be a job for next week, once it arrives…
Bias
Posted: Thu 13 October, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, News 1 Comment »Some companies just don’t seem to learn from their mistakes, do they?
A case in point – good old RyanAir. Not content with having had to go to court about their failure to provide free wheelchairs for their disabled passengers, they’ve now refused to allow a group of blind- and partially-sighted people to fly.
Supposedly it’s because “Ryanair has imposed a limit of four disabled passengers per flight”. Brilliant…
Airguns
Posted: Thu 13 October, 2005 Filed under: News, Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »I notice today that the Government is thinking of restricting the sale of air rifles to ‘licensed firearms dealers’ only. This is primarily in reaction to the death of Andrew Morton, the 2 year old boy who got shot in the head by an airgun pellet fired by a fuckwit.
Will this reduce the number of air rifles? Possibly, in the long-term. But for now, no, it won’t – people will still own them, and unless the rifles are over a certain power (12 ft lbs at the muzzle, if memory serves – that’s the energy required to lift a pound weight 12 feet.) they don’t have to be registered at all. So no-one will know who has one, and whether or not they’re the kind of fuckwit who thinks it’s “fun” to shoot them at people.
The last firearms legislation came about in 1996 as a result of the Dunblane shootings where Thomas Hamilton (43) walked into Dunblane Primary School armed with 4 legally held weapons. In the space of 3 minutes he shot 3 staff and 28 pupils, of which 1 staff member died and 16 children were killed. Because of this, it became illegal to own any handgun in the UK, and anyone who owned a handgun was supposed to surrender it to the police/government, and receive in return compensation for their guns that amounted to about 10% of their value.
Since then, the number of gun-related crimes has increased exponentially. The import of illegal weapons has increased too, and in fact illegal handguns are now far, far easier to obtain than they ever were before the legislation came into place. In short, the legislation didn’t work.
Personally, I’m not an advocate of shooting. I used to shoot competitively, but had given it up before the events in Dunblane. But I do think that the knee-jerk response to the shootings helped to pave the way for the huge increase in the market for guns in the UK – partly because the compensation offer from the government was so poor, an irate gun owner was better off selling their gun to someone privately (and illegally) rather than handing it in. And of course the people buying those guns were likely to either be criminals themselves, or have contacts with criminals. It would have been better to have insisted that people kept their guns at the local gun club, and could only shoot them on the premises, or at competitions. To make it illegal to store a firearm at home, to make them harder to access easily would have been a far more sensible legislation.
This new air-rifle legislation looks like it’ll go the same way. Great, it’ll be harder to buy one. So instead they’ll go from one person to another, sold or given without any checks, without having to go and buy one from a retailer who at least has some idea what to look for in a person, and can refuse to sell to someone.
And all the time, it’s still possible to buy bows and crossbows with no legislation or registration at all. OK, a longbow is harder to use “quietly” or “unseen” – they’re not the most subtle of things. But a crossbow? That’s a different picture altogether. And let’s face it, crossbows were originally designed to go through chainmail at half a mile – far more dangerous than any air rifle…
Doom
Posted: Thu 13 October, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »Why is it that I see an advert for “Mrs Jessop and the Maths Lesson of Doom” (a play/musical comedy, supposedly) and straight away wonder if it was written by ScaryDuck?
Energy Transfer
Posted: Wed 12 October, 2005 Filed under: Green, Thoughts Leave a comment »Over the weekend, we looked at USwitch for some comparisons on changing our electricity supplier to one who uses renewable energy. It’s a bit of a complex thing really, but basically what happens is that the energy provider promises to provide the National Grid with “clean” energy (i.e. from a renewable source, such as hydroelectric, or wind-farm) for the amount that’s been used by us. Not perfect, but better than nowt.
In the end we’ve changed over to Npower‘s Juice programme, which uses power generated at the North Hoyle wind farm.
It’s going to be interesting seeing how the transfer goes etc., but it stands to save us about £50 over the year, as well as being part of our “Green” objectives…
Hiatus Day
Posted: Wed 12 October, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »Blimey, it must be the day for it, or something. First Uborka disappears for a break, and then off goes Gordon ’til November.
I wonder who’ll be next…?
Fuckers
Posted: Wed 12 October, 2005 Filed under: Sweary, Travel 1 Comment »I was supposed to be going to see Alabama 3 at the London Astoria last night. I’d got the ticket, and was looking forward to it.
Then I got to the ticket office.
“You do realise we’re not running any trains from London after 9pm tonight, don’t you?”
“No, no-one’s mentioned that, even on trainline.com, or on your *cough* helpful notice board”
“Yeah, no trains tonight – there’s some maintenance work we need to do, so there’s no trains”
Fucking great.
I did try finding out whether trains would still run from Paddington to Reading, where I could then get one back to Bracknell, but once the woman in the ticket office tried telling me I’d need to go via Guildford, and might get back to Bracknell by 1.30 if I was lucky, I just though Bollocks to it.
So – another concert missed. I’m beginning to wonder if this year is cursed for gigs. Better not be, as we’re seeing Faithless at Brixton Academy at the end of November…
Figurehead
Posted: Tue 11 October, 2005 Filed under: News, Thoughts 1 Comment »There aren’t all that many CEOs and Managing Directors that I generally feel are worth the money they’re paid, but one of the exceptions to that rule seems to be Stuart Rose, the MD of Marks and Spencers. I’ve seen him on the TV Business programmes/sections a couple of times now, and he always manages to get his point across, and seems to stand up and say what he thinks.
Today’s instance of this was regarding M&S’s latest sales figures, which while still slightly down (a whole 0.2%) are doing a lot better than previous quarters. Prior to the interview, he’d brought in a rack of M&S clothes, which conveniently managed to be in-shot with the interviewer – straight away, a pretty smart move. They then talked about the sales figures, and the interviewer then came up with some comment about how their clothes were still expensive, that M&S weren’t taking on the supermarkets in their clothing pricing. Rose picked up four or five items off the rack, and told the interviewer “This one’s £15, this one’s £25, this one’s £30, and this one that you say is expensive is cashmere – yes, it’s £65, but it’s still the cheapest cashmere sweater on the market. We’re not going to compete with the supermarkets, but we want to give our customers value. That’s a combination of price, longevity, and style. Not just price.”
I can’t deny, I’m quite impressed with an MD who actually knows the prices of the stuff his shops are selling. Oh – and wears the stuff himself – the last interview I saw, he could honestly show the label of his suit jacket, and say “Yes, I’m wearing an M&S suit – what kind of MD would I be, to come here not wearing my own company’s clothing?“.
Definitely a refreshing viewpoint…
Mandrakeiva
Posted: Mon 10 October, 2005 Filed under: Geeky 4 Comments »
A long time ago, I installed Mandrake Linux on my home PC. As a set-up it was OK, but I did make a major fuck-up of the bootloader, where linux was the default install, so you had to choose to go to Windows within the first ten seconds or bang, you were autoloading into Mandrake. Most of the time this didn’t actually bother me, which is why I left it the way it was. After all, the first rule of techies is “if it works (after a fashion) why bother fixing it?”.
Read the rest of this entry »
Travelling to Disasters
Posted: Mon 10 October, 2005 Filed under: Cynicism, Travel, Weirdness 1 Comment »While I can – kind of – empathise with people who are worried about their relatives/ family in situations like the earthquake in Pakistan, I really don’t understand what it is they think they can achieve by travelling out there.
It’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed more recently, and particularly since last year’s Boxing Day tsunami, where the news seemed to cover a lot of people doing this. Yes, sure, some of the people travelling over will have uses (on the news this morning I saw bits about doctors going over with supplies, that kind of thing) but the majority seem to be people saying “We’ve not heard from x, y and z so I’m going over to see if I can find out anything”. Why? Surely it’s best to stay at home, rather than adding to an already disastrous area by going over and getting in the way while looking for one’s family.
Frankly, to my mind I can see better priorities than going over there yourself. But hey, what would I know?
Mutterage
Posted: Mon 10 October, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Weirdness 1 Comment »Sometimes I just despair of human beings. Today’s cause of this despair was a woman using her Switch card to pay for her Daily Mail.
Yes, a Switch transaction for about 40p. No cashback, and a definite jangle of change from the purse as the card came out. (although, of course, I have no idea whether the change amounted to 40p’s worth or not)
*sigh*
La Brand – redux
Posted: Mon 10 October, 2005 Filed under: Reviews(ish), Thoughts 4 Comments »So yes, Jo Brand. Fortunately (due to Herself having a brain error, and forgetting to turn off the oven) there was a support comedian on as well, which meant we still got to see all of Jo Brand’s performance despite eventually turning up half an hour late, just before the interval.
And while she was quite funny, and I enjoyed the night, I still found myself a bit dissatisfied, to be honest. She was only on for an hour, and out of that hour I reckon I’d heard probably half of it before. Not just over the last couple of months, either, but some was quite a lot older. Now, I don’t think a comedian should do a completely new show every night, or whatever, that’s fine – but when they’re on for an hour, and supposedly it’s a “new” tour, I do feel it’s a bit of a let-down to hear a load of stuff that’s been around for a while.
Was it good to see her ? Yes. Was it worth £15 each for the tickets? Um, no, probably not, to be honest.
Disparity
Posted: Mon 10 October, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Weirdness 1 Comment »Is it just me that sees the slight difference in these ideas?
One ) “US aid for the people affected by the Pakistan earthquake arrives within 48 hours”
Two ) “Some people waited two weeks for aid after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans”
So – 48 hours to get aid together and transport it half-way round the globe. 2 weeks to get it to the place it was needed within the US…
La Brand
Posted: Sun 9 October, 2005 Filed under: General Leave a comment »Tonight we’re off to see Jo Brand at the Reading Hexagon. I’m sure I’ll have some thoughts to post about it later – or more likely tomorrow.
Have fun!
Getting Back
Posted: Sun 9 October, 2005 Filed under: Resolutions, Thoughts Leave a comment »Well, after my second session of archery with the new bow, I can definitely say I’m back into it. There’s still the old skill/talent there, which is something I’m pleased about – I wasn’t sure whether it would be after 15 – 20 years, but obviously it is.
The other shooters at the club thought I must’ve been doing this for a lot longer than two sessions, as the shots were consistent and pretty much on target. Of course, I’m still “finger shooting” (i.e. not using all manner of new and wonderful technology in order to be more of an archery robot) so it’s not perfect. There can be a lot of difference between shots when you’re sticking with the manual method, but I still find it quite satisfying knowing that it’s you that’s doing the work, instead of release aids, mechanical stuff, and the like.
All things considered, though, I’m really happy to be getting back into archery.
With one exception – despite leather boots, outdoor archery at this time of year doesn’t half lead to soggy feet…