It’s been an odd week, what with frantic office moving, 9rules related fun, and other assorted stuff, so it’s nice to get back to routine with the Roast. Before I do though, a big shout out to the Crazy Canalman – happy Fathers Day, and congratulations on loosing an amazing 2 stone (28 lbs) and more since the start of your health kick. (The only problem is now that there’s no zealot like a convert, and he’s always on at me to get fit again. *sigh* I have no excuse, I am just lazy).
*warning* the following will only interest Mac users. You silly Windows users can just skip on to the next link.
Before I updated to Tiger as my operating system I had a small clock displaying the time and date on-screen. It was very handy considering the amount of time I spend at the computer and that I rarely have a calendar to hand. With Tiger, however, there was no such handy display – I had to use the Dashboard. Whilst I could display the Dashboard at a single key-stroke or mouse gesture, it wasn’t as handy as a single glance at the corner of the screen. And then Paul came to the rescue with a tip on how to display the date in the menu bar. Yes there are other ways to do it, and some people might be happy with using the Dashboard, or find this takes up too much room on the menu bar, but *I* like it and had been wanting to do something like this for an age. Who knows, you might find this useful too.
I’ve got a question for y’all – is blogging your dream job? I’ve thought long and hard about this and I really am not sure. At the moment my blogging is purely a pleasurable exercise. I learn things from it and meet wonderful new people, but it is not my whole life. If I had to rely on blogging to pay the bills, would I still enjoy it? Guess it depends what I was blogging about. If anyone has any ideas how to make Bright Meadow earn me oooooodles of money, do let me know 😉
Last week three prisoners at Guantanamo Bay committed suicide, an act that the US called ‘an act of war’ instead of the act of desperation it was. What baffles both Moose and myself is that, whilst the blogging community has latched onto the idiocy of the language used, not a single mainstream news outlet that we can find has. So Moose put out a plea for help to get the Bush a thesaurus. And I do recommend you follow the link you’ll find in the comments of that post – very, very funny and says everything better than I ever could 😀
For no reason other than I want one, I bring you the solar powered helicopter. My desire for this object is out of all proportion to its function (it has no function).
I was always a little suspicious of Care Bears when I was younger – I mean, shooting love at people?! That’s just got to be plain unhygienic. So when I saw the Vampire Care Bear over at Red Monkey I near fell off my stool I was laughing so hard.
I keep hearing about the Flock browser. Some people seem to love it, others hate it. I’ll probably get around to playing with it soon, though the timing sucks (I’ve *finally* got Firefox tweaked to my satisfaction). Until then, and because I doubt you’ll find a more comprehensive review, have a read of Paul’s review of the Flock Beta 1 browser.
It’s been a while since I bought comics – if one crosses my path I’ll read it, but I don’t as a rule shell out hard earned pounds on them. But with the news that Spider-man is to remove his mask I am suddenly thinking of buying comics again. We were talking about the Civil War series at a BBQ yesterday and it turns out I’m not the only one who’s spine has got a little tingly at the proposed story arc…
Two grammar articles caught my eye this week:
Rich on apostrophes
and
Those things we do to the humble comma.
I’m the worlds worst culprit, especially when it comes to the poor comma. My only saving grace is that I know I’m abusing the English language, and that I’m seriously considering going back to school to give my writing skills a brush-up. Still, in a world where Dan Brown can gain such massive popularity regardless of the fact he couldn’t write himself out of a paper bag, you have to ask yourself does it really matter? (Yes it does. There is no excuse for bad writing. Grrr).
This past week saw Yorkshire winning the bid to host next years Bollywood awards. I know that Bradford, Leeds, Sheffield, York and Hull all have large Asian populations so this isn’t actually so surprising, but… Yorkshire! In my mind is the memory of a good family friend from Yorkshire, and Bollywood is quite the last thing you would associate with him.
Not that I really need any more distraction, but I came across this great helicopter game this morning (link from David). It reminds me of a game I used to have where you had a King-Kong-esque monkey in a New York skyline and you had to destroy buildings by throwing exploding bananas at them. It was quite tricky as you had to take wind speed, velocity, and angle of throw into account as well – in fact I remember my brother trying to persuade Mum that the game helped him with Maths. Can anyone remember what this game was called?
And finally, here at Bright Meadow we take safety very seriously: don’t drink and drive; always wear your seatbelt; wear a helmet when cycling; and don’t run with scissors. So when concerns were made over the safety of one of our denizens, I got right to work and made him a parachute.
Eric look so much happier… ah the power of the web – it can even make the life of sticky bugs better.
That it can 😀
A Sunday Roast with my name in it! Twice as nice.
I would hate to be a full-time blogger, personally. Blogging, to me, is a nice way to kill some time and air an opinion or two. If my livelihood depended on it, it would just get frustrating.
Rich, I’m with you (I think) regarding blogging for work. I can’t see anyway Bright Meadow would ever pay the bills, and I don’t think it should, so that would mean I would have to start a second blog, and do I have the ideas for a second blog?
At the same time, I do want to write for a living, and what is blogging if not writing?
Ack, definitely one of those situations where you won’t know till you try it. I’m coming across far too many of them lately!
cool helicopter game
Hello JR, and it’s great, isn’t it 😀