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Recent Comments

• Cybez on One's too many an' a hundred's not enough
• Nelly on One's too many an' a hundred's not enough
• adele on And the sky was made black with unescaped entities
• adele on And the sky was made black with unescaped entities
• sharon on Fifteens
• Nelly on Mother is it just a waste of time?
• Stephen on Mother is it just a waste of time?

links to other people's sites

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

Hurrah!

A successful upgrade to MT3.2 after nice people at SixApart, namely Sarah and Shelley, helped me. It turned out to be an old out of date plugin (mt-weatherunderground) causing the problem - and in case anyone else is looking for that same problem the error message was:

Can’t use string (“MT::Serialize”) as a HASH ref while “strict refs” in use at ../lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 29.

PS. Pirate’s Adventure Crazy Golf at Dundonald is great. International Talk Like A Pirate Day only 21 days away.

0 CommentsAugust 29, 2005

Hold

My mighty and much beloved Movable Type has ran into some difficulty during the upgrade to MT3.2, I will be careful not to use sarcasm in this post because I seem to have offended some MT people the last time I did that. So, MT is great but like all software sometimes Bad Things Happen.

This post is therefore hand crafted. Your actual HTML editing. You TypePadders and Bloggers and WordPressers don’t know you’re living, back when I was a lad we had to carry each idea (and you wouldn’t believe the weight in some of those big ideas) into the big factory barefoot over 15 miles of barren wilderness. Then the post would be assembled in giant crucibles, often lives would be lost when some young buck got too close and was immolated by the sheer power of the forming prose.

And don’t get me started on XML feeds neither. You just sit there and have everything lifted an’ laid, never getting off your backside. Back in the day we’d all go round to the Big House and gather round as travellers related online content via the medium of dance. Simpler days, but some would argue better days.

I don’t get the August bank holiday off, but that’s ok because I live on the moon.

0 CommentsAugust 29, 2005

A joke

A man is driving his car along a country road when the car suddenly breaks down. The man gets out, pops the bonnet open and stares into the engine bay when suddenly he hears a voice say “It’s the fan belt”. The man turns round and sees no-one there, thinks he imagined the voice and goes back to rooting about in the engine bay.
Again, clear as day, he hears the voice behind him say “It’s the fan belt”. The man turns round and all he can see is a black horse in the field looking over at him, and as he’s looking at this horse it says “I’m telling you, it’s the fanbelt.”

Well. The man is stunned, he looks back into the car and sure enough the fan belt is off, he reaches in and slips it back on and still in shock drives off to the nearby farm. Excitedly he runs to the farm house door and knocks, the hall light comes on and the farmer answers the door.
“Yes?” says the farmer. “Sir, the most amazing thing just happened, my car broke down just over there and a horse spoke to me and told me what the problem was!”, the man blurts out. “Which horse?” replies the farmer, “was it the white one or the black one?”, “The black one” the man replies somewhat confused. “Aye, you were lucky,” replies the farmer; “the white one knows nothing about engines.”

0 CommentsAugust 21, 2005

Notes

I am getting more comment spam these days, most of which revolves around the game of poker. As I don’t play poker I’ve just blacklisted the word ‘poker’. Henceforth none of you shall mention poker to me, not in the street, not on this site, not even in idle conversation on the bus. Poker is blacklisted.

Some fascinating and really quite revealing statistics:

• My most viewed photo on Flickr and most commented on is ‘Real men don’t wear shoes’
• My most favourited and most ‘interesting’ photo is ‘Chong’
• The most popular search terms people use to get here are ‘Lauren Bowden’ and ‘Daisy Duke’

From this I deduce you are all a bunch of perverts. The poker spammers need to change tack.

2 CommentsAugust 20, 2005

Half of the time we're gone but we don't know where

Nelly likes to walk, I like to walk. Today I will walk in the Mournes and probably sleep somewhere in there too. If I can work it I will stay there and go feral, swooping in on unsuspecting Duke of Edinburgh students and scaring the heart out of them at night. I’ll reintroduce wolves and stag and wild cats and a load of other beasties and eventually we’ll spread out from the Mournes and me and the beasties will plant trees all over the island.

Yes, the beasties will be planting trees and that’s not all, seeing as the whole lot of you as a population have gotten pretty unhealthy me and the wolves will start to manage the situation, bring about some environmental change if you catch my drift? Oh yes. I’m not saying there’d be much eating in your average spide but I’m sure the quantity would more than make up for that. Anyway, it’s up to the wolves how they arrange that one.

In the meantime however I’ll just have to do with the image. So if you’re talking to me about some nonsense and I start smiling and looking into the middle distance it’s because I’m imagining a pack of wolves chasing you up Royal Avenue and pinning you down under the gaze of Queen Victoria outside City Hall. No offence though, it’s all for the environment.

1 CommentsAugust 20, 2005

On Muppets

I believe it was 3 years ago today, after reading this article on Writing for the Web, that I posted remarks about my work place on this weblog. I was immensely frustrated at what I saw as a complete apathy towards being (most) excellent (dude). I was surrounded by talented people who I felt could do more if they were given the room and encouragement to do so. This frustration had gone on for a considerable length of time, the result was I published something less than complimentary about the managers of BlackStar to a public place, this weblog.

Writing about how I felt here was a stupid thing to do, I gained nothing from it, lost my job and got into some fairly serious financial trouble as a result. The hole in my CV wasn’t great either.

It wasn’t all bad at BlackStar, I did learn an awful lot there and the 3rd floor of Alfred House was, at it’s best, pretty good. (Though I tend to look back now and think with the talent there we should have something more to show for it than a tacky video store.)

I am still frustrated by the same things today as I was then, I am still no closer to the ideal (or even being able to fully articulate that ideal), I still see talent wasted, I still rant and I still rage. The difference now is that instead of getting into fights I can’t win I just turn around and leave people to it. I don’t know if that means I’m wiser or if it just means I’ve given up.

2 CommentsAugust 16, 2005

RGB Distance Calculation

When you pick colours for a mobile device on your fancy 16-million-or-so-individual-colours monitor you need to be sure the mobile device with it’s much smaller colour depth can represent your colours distinctly, that the device’s palette will be able to ‘see’ the difference between your 2 stylish grays and not turn it into a big blob.

For the Sony Ericsson K750i any 2 colours with a RGB distance greater than 12 will survive.

So, to calculate the RGB distance between two reds for example, RGB (164, 12, 0) and RGB (195, 38, 26) first calculate the differences between the individual colours:

R: 195 - 164 = 31 G: 38 - 12 = 26
B: 26 - 0 = 26

Add the squares of the three colour differences together:

31² + 26² + 26² = 2,313

The RGB distance is the square root of the sum of the squares above:

RGB distance = √2,313 = 48

48 is greater than the stated threshold of 12 for this device so we’re laughing. Of course, trial and error is probably quicker but I just thought this was kind of interesting.

2 CommentsAugust 13, 2005

Foghorn Leghorn Speaks

Nice girl, but about as sharp as a bag full of wet mice.

4 CommentsAugust 12, 2005

The Cricket

There’s no doubt that the Ashes has (for me) lifted cricket out of the dull-as-dishwater category, but it’s still hard to understand. This was written of one of Vaughan’s shots:

One early attacking shot off the leg-spinner was a classic of its type - a shot played late off the back foot, going with the spin and hit just in front of square on the off-side.

Someone please, tell me what that means?

1 CommentsAugust 11, 2005

The magic word is 'cancel'

At the Carphonewarehouse this afternoon…

Me: “I’d like to upgrade my phone to, um, that one.”
Her: “That’ll be £80”
Me: “Oh, um, why would I do that? I’ll just cancel my contract and get a new contract with the phone I want.”
Her: “OK. Next please…”

Later that day, on the phone to same…

Me: “Hello, I’d like to cancel my contract”
Him: “Certainly sir, may I ask why?”
Me: “Um, well I want to upgrade to a newer phone and I was told it would cost me £80, so, um…”
Him: “Which phone was that, sir?”
Me: “Um, k750i I think”
Him (without missing a beat): “I can offer you that phone for free, sir…”

Last year I said I was cancelling because my bills were too high and the guy put me on a “special” monthly tarriff of £8/month and gave me 50% off that for the first 6 months. I went to cancel my SKY and they offered me a 12/month package (which I didn’t take, I pay £0/month now and get all the Beebs, all the ITVs, Extreme Sports and some music channels). The magic word is ‘cancel’.

1 CommentsAugust 9, 2005

Jessie's Diets

This week I have mostly been listening to:

• Imogen Heap - Hide and Seek
• Tiësto - Adagio for Strings
• Faith No More - War Pigs
• Norman Greenbaum - Spirit in the Sky
• Bobby Womack - Across 110th Street
• Gwen Stefani - Cool

I thought of actually telling you what I had to eat each day in an attempt to shame myself into eating less, but that’s a step too far. Eating out each lunch time is a bad idea for your waistlines children, staying in each lunch time is a bad idea for your sanity, oh for some covered parkland in Belfast city centre.

Did you feel the summer starting to falter this week? That slight northerly dropping the temperature just enough to let you know time is moving on. Made me think of autumn. It’s funny how the quality of a summer can be decided by just a couple of days. Maybe that’s just my perspective, my commute into Belfast on venerable Ulsterbus pretty much rules out anything happening during the week so it’s all on the weekend to escape the great toad (I hated Larkin in school, then a grudging respect, now a nod of approval).

Red sky tonight, the shepherds will be happy.

0 CommentsAugust 5, 2005

This is a story about Penelope. Poor, poor Penelope..

So, I had this notion whereby I would start a story and then send someone the last line or two of that beginning and get them to add to it, then they’d pass it back to me and I’d pass the last line of their bit onto someone else, and so on. Eventually we’d end up with something or other.

I tried it out on the #cabal, it went from boring to sci-fi and then into male lesbian fantasy and never really recovered. There’s no way I could publish it here.

Anyway, I thought I might try again. If you want to be someone I send a line to leave a comment.

1 CommentsAugust 5, 2005

Belfast Web Workers Forum

If you are a webby type, that is anyone involved in the production of a web page - designers (UI, IA, graphic, etc), programmers (Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc), content wranglers, writers, editors, systems administrators, even project managers - feel free to join the Belfast Web Workers Forum for The Chat.

The ‘Belfast’ part is a fairly loose title, that would be the main direction of discussion I would hope, you know, in an effort to improve the state of local webbishness, but feel free to join if you’re from further afield and want to contribute.

By the way, it’s an application thing so you might want to make it clear you’re not a raving loon when applying…

0 CommentsAugust 4, 2005

0x20

Today is, if we believe my birth certificate (not something we should do without at least a small measure of scepticism according to my mother), my birthday. I am 32 today. Thirty-two.

Above me right now Stephen Robinson is doing some tiling, I can see a big black cloud moving west over Queens but the sky is mostly clear blue. I’m listening to F.E.A.R, trying to concentrate on work, trying not to think too much.

5 CommentsAugust 3, 2005

I predict a riot

If people don’t ease off playing this song then that title will become a self fulfilling prophesy. We’ll turn up at the home of the Kaiser Chiefs like some angry mob from an old Frankenstein movie, pikes, torches and spades waving in the air, demanding satisfaction.

1 CommentsAugust 2, 2005