About This
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?
More!? OK then, but I can't help feeling that this will be a disappointment to you.
I work as a web designer in Belfast, and I live by the sea in a shoe. You can see me here, doing my livejournal pose as idoru called it. If you need to you can email me at carisenda -at- gmail -dot- com.
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Recommended Viewing
- 300
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Does exactly what it says on the (comic book) tin. Loved it. - Little Miss Sunshine
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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
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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
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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
Ex-Girlfriend Review with Google Maps
Warning: May Contain Irony!
So to go with the movie reviews and the food reviews and the new found Google Maps fu I’ve added an Ex Girlfriends Review section, starting with this post. You can see the map here, I’ll populate it as I get time. (Honestly, I have more than 1 ex girlfriend!).
Lynsey Campbell
Posh and North Down as this may seem I met Lynsey while water skiing at Coney Island in Lough Neagh. Her family were out for the day on their boat and me and my mates were having a barbeque on the island after a good morning water skiing. This was in the summer of 1998… anyway, long story short, we dated for about 2 years, it was probably the relationship that affected me most in life and probably the one I had the most trouble getting over.
So to the review: great body, really pretty, very witty, a little too moody (even for a female) but incredibly rich (note the pointer on the map in on the Warren Road!). 4 stars.
6 CommentsMay 31, 2006
Gruff
Tonight I wanted to do something with Ruby Sparklines but I couldn’t get it to install so I somehow ended up playing with Gruff instead. You will now be impressed as I show a graph of words and comments in each of the posts for this weblog:
Well, perhaps not. I was though.
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'gruff/base'
g = Gruff::Line.new(360)
g.title = "I'm just playing with gruff"
# this is only a subset of the above image
g.data("Comments", [0, 0, 0, 0 ]
# again, this is only a subset of the above image
g.data("Words", [257, 125, 87, 46 ]
g.write('comments.png')
I had to require grruff/base as require gruff wasn’t happening. Works though. Perhaps someone can tell me why require gruff didn’t work? I’m guessing RMagick or ImageMagick…
0 CommentsMay 25, 2006
Amazon Dynamic Countdown Message
I just noticed that Amazon have added a timer to product pages which updates inline to tell you how long to go before you can order an item and get it guaranteed delivery by a set date. You can see it here on DNS & Bind Cookbook the section which reads:
Want guaranteed delivery by 1pm Wednesday, May 24? Order in the next 17 hours and 4 minutes and choose Express delivery at the checkout.
The time details update inline in the page, which is a nice touch.
0 CommentsMay 22, 2006
FoodStar - Own It, Love It, Eat It
We need a star system, a constellation of value for our fooderies:
 | Avoid at all costs |
| Few redeeming features but acceptable |
| Workmanlike, average, the common denominator, recommendable |
| The best example of something in particular on the menu, something to talk about |
| All round excellence |
Or something like that. Guidelines only, the management reserve the right to ignore all guidelines when hot chicks are serving.
0 CommentsMay 21, 2006
Where to eat in Belfast (and further afield)
OK, so I’m showing you this knowing that it’s not complete, but here’s my google map of good places to eat in Belfast. There’s only a couple of places added so far and the icons are not really representative of anything (yellow, pink, orange…) but basically it works like this: someone reviews a place of eating on this weblog, adds a lat long to the post, includes it in the ‘food’ cat and hey presto it appears on the map.
Since the ‘Christmas Dinners I Have Know and Loved’ series I’ve been thinking about a way to do something like this that is useful, and hopefully this is the start of it. I’ll round up all the usual suspects to submit reviews, it won’t be an entirely open system (I’m more of a benevolent dictator sort than a full on democracy sort), so hopefully it’ll be cool.
Let me know what you think, you’ll see a few example posts after this one.
0 CommentsMay 20, 2006
The Pain
10 men almost held out, and the pain may only just be starting…
0 CommentsMay 17, 2006
The excitement
Champions League Final, Barcelona v Arsenal, Henry & Ronaldinho, the greatest game on earth…
0 CommentsMay 17, 2006
Opera Mini!
The Opera Mini™ for Mobile is so good it needs a post on it’s own rather than just a link on the left. Here’s this site on Opera Mini:
Now I know maybe you’re thinking that’s not very exciting but it was fast! Easy to use! Didn’t break! Did I mention easy to use?! All of a sudden I’m interested in web pages for mobile devices!
Can I get another exclamation mark in? Yes I can!
0 CommentsMay 13, 2006
Google Mini
This week we installed a Google Mini for a client in the BT Data Centre in Belfast, we’d tested it out in the office for a few weeks before hand and it was finally time for it to move to it’s new home in a shiny new Dell rack. I’d get a great weblog post out of this if there was anything complicated about the process but really it’s as simple as it gets. The hardest part was getting our own bolts to attach to the rack. You buy it, read the tiny manual, configure it via a web interface and then start indexing some documents. Pretty boring really. :)
0 CommentsMay 13, 2006
Google still loves me
A few Google searches have my Linkedin profile at the top:
Which makes me laugh, but there it is. It’s better than the hits I get for naked pictures of Lauren Bowden (I don’t have any naked pics of Lauren Bowden!).
0 CommentsMay 13, 2006
Spring Clean
I made some graphical changes. I hope they make all the hot single women of the world want me.
Also I I’ve added some more links to the ‘Friends, Romans & Countrymen’ section:
- Basia - with whom I worked in BlackStar, Basia is an excellent writer has excellent tastes.
- Hannah - Nelly’s daughter, met once in Starbucks, she made fun of my Victoria Sponge.
- William Crawley - I knew him before he was famous don’t ya know. If the BBC safety net doesn’t blunt his pen I would expect this to be the weblog to watch this year, this fella has a Wesley sized brain.
PS. Some people are probably muttering dark words under their breath that I’ve had time to make changes to my site and not to do any work on theirs. Ermm… Look! Look over there! ∗runs away∗
0 CommentsMay 13, 2006
This isn't going to end well
Yesterday I was driving into Belfast along the M2, travelling a shade under 80mph in light traffic. All at once there was a shudder and a louder-than-you’d-like noise from the rear driver’s side, as I looked into the rear view mirror I saw dust, a few bits of black stuff flying into the path of the following car and that same car maneouvering into the inside lane like something from NASCAR. The tail end of the car is fish tailing left and so little time has passed that it’s only now I’m having thoughts that sound like english. First thought, “This isn’t going to end well.”
As it happened it was all OK, dramatic but OK, it kept pretty straight and it ended up just short of the inside barrier. I was white as a ghost to be fair, images of me and car barrell-rolling sideways down the M2 at speed were fairly large in my mind.
As you can see it was pretty nasty, the tire is split and delaminated, the only thing holding it together is the bead. The tire well is half destroyed too, mudflap assembly was inside the tire well and pointing 180° in the wrong direction and had to be torn off a long with a few other lumps of plastic in order to make it home.
The interweb says that during a blowout you need to keep at least constant pressure on the accelerator or even a bit more in the first instant to counter the pull of the dead tire, then keep the car straight and slowly bring it to a halt. Which is pretty much what I did, so 5 gold stars to me.
1 CommentsMay 1, 2006