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You've arrived at the homepage of Stephen Stewart. The archive is available here for those who want it. This site is happily hosted by Dreamhost. Click for more?

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Recommended Viewing

• 300†
  Does exactly what it says on the (comic book) tin. Loved it.
• Little Miss Sunshine†
  Very funny, disturbing (the beauty pageant) and completely messed up -- but in a good way.
• Laputa: Castle in the Sky†
  Story great, characterization a little on the weak side -- though the big robots are cool.
• Porco Rosso†
  Stylish, funny, exciting.
• Grave of the Fireflies†
  Very sad, which was a little unexpected since I didn't know much about it before watching it. Can be a little too slow in places though, otherwise it's very good.
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind†
  The story can get a little dense at times what with the various factions, but still really enjoyable, inventive and engaging.
• X-Men: The Last Stand†
  Opportunity, talent, money - all blown. Over 3 films X-Men has hinted of something great that could have been, this last one says "No, sorry - not going to happen". Bah.

flickr.com

ADSL Donaghadee II

Sorry, one last thing - Donaghadee has reached it's target trigger level for ADSL. The 350th person signed up yesterday and the fella who ran the campaign is hoping it'll all happen by Christmas. Intial tests show that I can get up to 512Kbps download speed and varying upload speed because I'm quite far out from the Dee. I won't be getting any 1Mbps or 2Mbps ADSL broadband services - the price you pay for living in a 200 acre walled estate...

0 CommentsOctober 30, 2003

You call some place paradise - kiss it goodbye...

Some final stuff:
SuperDeluxo4.2 wgets and curls: Dedicated to the use of the command-line tools cURL and wget.
How to write a thank-you note.

I'm asking for something bad to happen in saying so, but this is the end of this blog design. I have grown to hate it so much I can barely look at it and the new thing I have won't fit some of the older posts so it's all getting mothballed. Not that that matters, nothing really matters, the needle returns to the start of the song and we all sing along like before...

2 CommentsOctober 26, 2003

Levitated

Lots of lovely looking Flash thingies at www.levitated.net. Including the Golden Spiral to Galileo's Celestes calendar.

0 CommentsOctober 24, 2003

Contracts Galore!

So, maybe I should have taken my idea for rebuilding the Jobfinder site and pitched it to these people. They're only estimating the value of the job at 6 milllion pounds...

6 MILLION POUNDS!!! For a recruitment site???? It's a database with a web page stuck on the lid, not the QE2...

0 CommentsOctober 22, 2003

All Glory to the Hypnotoad!

Fell off my seat laughing...

The Hypnotoad

2 CommentsOctober 21, 2003

The Belfast Telegraph Jobfinder Site

...is rubbish.

I believe I could build the Belfast Telegraph's entire Jobfinder site for less than £500, and in one day, I'm sure of it. Here's my approach - see what you think:

1. Install a commercial version of Movable Type (£90)
2. Set up the employment categories, one hours work (£35)
3. Set up templates, say, 10 hours work (£350)

In one day, one person. And you know something, I believe it'd be faster and much easier to use (and it's have nifty XML feeds too!). Am I wrong?

What about the whole Belfast Telegraph site (it's just a few blogs, subdivided into categories with individual post pages) - one week enough time?

It occurs to me that the Jobfinder site could be redone for less than the Telegraph's cost of advertising and securing the contract in the first place. Maybe I'm missing something...

9 CommentsOctober 20, 2003

Donnie Darko

I watched Donnie Darko again last night and I wanted to ask you - what does it mean?

6 CommentsOctober 10, 2003

An Attempt at Local Vexillology

On the shield part of my (entirely bogus) coat-of-arms you see on the top-left of this page are the components of the flag of Northern Ireland. Of course the only official flag of Northern Ireland is the Union Flag, but this flag is the one used by the Northern Ireland football team and was official from 1953 to 1973. It was a banner of arms used by the Northern Ireland government from 1925, the star then was an acute 6 pointed star and that's why this version has such a star, also the crown is the Imperial Crown - not some fruity thing Queen Victoria wore to her son's wedding...

2 CommentsOctober 6, 2003

New Computer

I recently bought a new computer from the Dell Outlet store. It's a brand new Dimension 2400 with a 2.6GHz processor and a 40G hard drive. So far, so good. Except, when I first connected to Freeserve I got this:

This is the blaster worm apparently, attacking my new PC. I've since installed Kerio Personal Firewall (I switched on the XP Firewall in the interim) and everything is fine.

Watching the logs for my firewall, there's a lot of nasty business going on out there...

0 CommentsOctober 3, 2003