Yearly Archives: 2006

Sunday Roast: the Canadian was the killer? Oh that’s so un-Canadian…

Small but perfectly formed can, this week, be used to describe both myself and the Sunday Roast:

These iPod cases are quite cute.

This Rubik Cube for the blind is a genius idea! Not that I would have any more luck with this one over the standard colour ones (Curly Durly is the only one in the family who ever cracked Rubik games – but she cracked ’em all. One each holiday throughout my childhood. I think the clock was her favourite… but I digress). Good idea.

Ah, those Canadians… What will they think of next?

There are times in your life you just have to shrug and accept that you are dating a very odd boy. Funny and cute, but odd.

Because who knows when (if) I’m ever going to get a shiny new Mac, here’s some Apple porn pictures of a brand new MacBookPro as it comes out the box.

We live in a crazy world when actors held at the airport under the Terrorism Act.

I think people should stop giving Daniel Craig a hard time. The man is a damn fine actor and, let’s face it, Bond films are not exactly high art now, are they? At least wait for a trail before you condemn the film!

Everything these days seems to have a Creative Commons license slapped on it (at least on the ‘Net), but is it broken?

I’ve been circling round a review of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle for a while now but lacked the skill. Then I found this great review of it on BoingBoing. And then I found a link to an accompanying photoset on Flickr. Good day!

I’m doing temp work right now, so this report is mildly worrying. At the same time, my situation is slightly anomalous because of the nature of the temp-bank I work for. They are the good guys in this story.

And because I like to end with the NYT if I can (not sure why, but it’s become kind of a tradition) – I have to say “bad NYT”. In their review of ‘Doogal’ they make no mention of it having already been released in Europe last year as ‘The Magic Roundabout‘, with a completely different voice cast… Never saw the UK version and apparently it tanked, but still. To not mention it at all? (And researching this movie on IMDB kicked up a few omissions/mistakes in that venerable site!)

Ok, that’s it, I’m done and am off to the supermarket. Morrisons on a Sunday afternoon… I must have done something awful in a past life to deserve this.

No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die…

People have asked me if I had fun the other weekend, going to visit the Crazy Canalman. The short answer is “Yes, I had fun”.

Now for the long answer…

We’ve always done DIY in my family – you only call in the professionals as a last resort. Like the time Granddad put a drill through the cold water pipes one May Bank Holiday, and Farv had to frantically bribe the plumber to visit whilst Mum (pregnant with me) dealt with a screaming infant (my brother, a horrible child by all accounts), the cat having a heart attack downstairs, and my step-Gran being… my step-Gran. Granddad, so family legend goes, just sat there till the plumber came, with his finger in the hole like the little Dutch boy.

This love of DIY has stood the Crazy Canalman in good stead on the boat. As soon as one thing is mended, another three seem to break, but we’ve only had to call in the professionals for fitting of the boiler and actually installing the cooker, though admittedly my uncle (engineer-turned-brain surgeon/army medic. Truly.) has helped a fair bit.

One of the reasons I went up to the boat last weekend was to give a hand with some of the ongoing works – somewhere along the line tiling the bathroom morphed into putting up shelves, but hey, it’s all fun!

I would like you to ponder something for a moment: how do you put up shelves when there isn’t a straight line on the boat, and when the entire centre of gravity is constantly shifting due to movement on the water?

The answer is not easily. It can be done. We proved it, as evidenced by this picture, but the entire thing was judged by eye and bodged together out of some Ikea units that weren’t really designed to work together. I think it turned out pretty damn good.

Anyway, to make more room, Farv had to say goodbye to his “captain’s chair”, a wonderfully comfortable black leather swivel arm chair I’ve coveted since the moment he bought it four/five years ago. The first time I sat in the thing I had this mental image of the Bond villain, swivelling round, stroking that fluffy cat, and we needed another chair in the living room at Meadow Towers, so…

bondchair

(And please note my shiny boots – the bargain boots).

Missing, one groove

I’ve lost my groove. All this week I have been an image cropping and data entry queen. Easily the fastest in the office (Occupational Health be damned – I’m good at this job!). But today I just can’t get into it. I think the fact that it took me three attempts to get a computer that works (bloody hot-desking) should have clued me in to the fact today might be troublesome. Definitely a “Friday” and all that entails.

Even Enrique isn’t helping!

I think part of the trouble might be that I gave blood last night, something which has been known to throw me for a loop. Normally I can give with no problems, but this time was a bit harder. I have deep veins – once you’ve found them, they gush like Old Faithful – but they are hard to find, and I had a nurse who wasn’t experienced at the trickier sticks. She did find it, but after a fair degree of poking around, and I’ve been left with a bruise for the first time ever. Then they tried to poison me with squash (I’m allergic) as they had failed to provide any glasses for water or cups of tea. Grump. Still, I’ve got to have racked up a fair amount of karma from the ordeal, so that’s good.

Despite being bone-tired though, I do still have this irrational desire to dance around the office. This might have something to do with listening to Enrique and drinking insane quantities of tea. Then again, it might just have something to do with the fact that I am, let’s face it, really rather odd.

In the spirit of rounding up the week, the following are some of the things I’ve learnt lately:

  • Shift+tab moves to the previous field in a form. I was already aware that tab moved to the next field in a form, but I discovered shit+tab by accident this week. Very handy!
  • An office of ten people gets through a surprising amount of milk in a day in umpteen cups of tea.
  • A tray of ten mugs of tea weighs quite a lot.
  • Some parents should have been locked up for the names they bestowed on their children.
  • Never tell Occupational Health about:
    1. RSI (Repetitive Strain/Stress Injuries)
    2. CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome)
    3. Lower back pain
  • Get nine women together in one room and much hilarity will ensue.
  • Add the token boy-temp (we have to have one, for diversities sake you understand) to the mix and you have a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen.
  • Turns out I still have a thing for tall red-heads. For my sins, I have no idea why – my brain is clearly just kinked that way.
  • Not having those last three days in February has really screwed up my mental calendar!
  • I want to start playing the piano again. I had a chance to tinkle the old ivories at one of the Courts we went to this week, and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed playing. I was had also forgotten the degree of strength you need in your fingers to play properly. I haven’t played much since I gave up lessons in protest at an evil teacher when I was 16. My fingers are still limber from all the typing I do, but the pressure they can exert is woefully inadequate. I’ve been able to do an octave-plus stretch since I was about five, but right now my ring and little fingers are pathetic. Time, I think, to find me a cheap (but good) teacher in Southampton.

Now if you will excuse me, it’s taken me longer than ten minutes to type this post, so I have to take a break for 50 minutes now.
(Yes, Occy-Health wanted to limit me to one hour’s computing a day, only typing for ten minutes at a time. How that is even possible in a modern office environment I have no idea. I told them to take a running jump).

Some Askimet Gems

I’ve got a mild problem with Askimet. Not a big one, but it bugs me. It doesn’t tell me which post has garnered the spam – not that I need this information, you understand, I’m just curious.

But it has collected me some gems in the time I’ve been away – some are remarkably zen-like and rather complimentary for something spawned by a spam-bot. Some of my favourites so far have to be:

  • Collective Gnome is always Central Girl Give Mistery is very good Circle.
  • I must say i got here by mistake, but now i know it’s destiny. Great site! Double Fetch Kill – … Red Soldier becomes Tremendous
  • Cool site! I’ll be back. when Pair is Pair it will Expect Opponents: url – which when I read it just now without my
    glasses looked like ‘penis wire. com’ Um, no, I’m not obsessed     , Give Chips is very good Girl Win Do Hope – that is all that Cosmos is capable of , Slot can Expect Soldier TV can Increase Opponents.
  • A very friendly site. Have a nice day! to Expect Chair you should be very Greedy …

Aren’t spam bots getting all friendly now? Especially that last one. I almost didn’t want to delete it, it was so nice. I did delete it, but only after I had preserved it in this post.

Yes, I am sad. And yes, the observant among you will notice that this post isn’t exactly up to my usual standards, but -…. No, no excuses. Just tired and currently uninspired. Didn’t want to leave you with nothing to read. Aren’t I nice?

Sunday Roast: I’m allergic to morning

Well, work is currently proving to be slightly more involving than I had planned for. This is good for me, because I don’t like to be bored, but bad for you because the Roast has suffered a bit this week. I’m still altering my routine to optimize the browsing/real-life balance, so perhaps next week will be a bit better?

Not being psychic, I can’t actually predict what next week will bring, but what I can do is bring you the best of last week:

Never a day goes by that I don’t thank our cousins across the ‘Pond for some wonderous bit of hilarity – this week was no exception. Seeing as how nothing I can say will make it any funnier, I’ll leave the headline to speak for itself. US Vice-President Cheney shoots man in hunt error. I do love the ambiguousness of the wording. First time I read it, I thought “hang on, Cheney was participating in a man-hunt?!”

Got a feeling that Darren’s blogging for beginners series is going to throw up a few gems of knowledge. No matter how long you’ve be doing something, there’s always something else you could be learning.

If you’ve got WordPress, or are thinking of moving to WP, you might find the following site very helpful, as it has a list of help topics. I’ve already bookmarked the one to do with moving hosts…

True? Not true? Who cares – Dewayne has some pictures from X-Men 3. Get ’em whilst they’re hot!

Just in case you missed it – when Valentines goes wrong…

CoComment is now live to public users and, rather than trying to fudge together and explanation myself (my brain is fried right now), I will let Kristin do the honors with her handy guide.

I’ve been playing around with the favicon for Bright Meadow lately (after Moose commented that most sites seemed to have one these days, I figured it was time to get down and dirty with photoshop), but as I absolutely suck at design and creating new things, I’ve had to fall back on a slightly wonky flower which is a hold over from ten site designs ago. It’s harder than it looks to create something recognisable in only 16×16 pixels! Anyway, hopefully this little tool found by Darren will make things a bit easier.

Oh, if anyone is hoping for Minion honours, designing me a pretty favicon might be a good start… 😉

Can the Transmit FTP application steal my heart away from Cyberduck? Paul seems to think it might.

And last, but by no means least, (I might be revealing my mean streak with this), this chocolate russian roulette game amuses me. Reminds me of the fun we used to have with the chili vodka they had at Revolution back in Liverpool. Only time I ever saw a grown Greek cry… (Fooling your friends into downing a chili vodka is an innocent pleasure Revolution denied us last time I went up for a visit – they now dye the drink red so you can’t confuse it with the clear stuff. Shame).

That’s your lot. I’m off to get some much needed shut-eye – whilst fun, this weekend was hardly relaxing, and I have to be up early tomorrow. Damn my landlord for demanding rent on a monthly basis.

The view from my Johari window

I’m a bit frazzelled after drawing roadshow duty again today, so I am going to forgo a proper blog-post and leave you with the following little task –
Visit my Johari Window and mark which words you associate with me.

We can then all learn together about what sort of person I am/I think I am/you think I am.

A Johari window is a metaphorical tool intended to help people better understand their interpersonal communication and relationships. A bit more can be found in the Wikipedia entry.

Yes, silly, but did you honestly think I could manage serious all the time?