Volume 69
30 Dec 2005
Impressive - I always wanted a lathe, though I am sure that all I would is waste raw materials.
29 Dec 2005
RIP Derek Bailey
Cyril strikes again - though this time it is extrememly obvious how it's done, even if the person at the top of the tower is in fact him, though I don't think it looks like him at all.
New router up and running so back in business again.
28 Dec 2005
Dead ADSL router......
27 Dec 2005
I just tried this face recognition demo and it says I look most like Franklin Roosevelt, then Edward Said and Knut Hansun of all people. Not aprticularly impressed - I can see why it makes these choices but I don't think that they are ones that people would make.
26 Dec 2005
25 Dec 2005
I have a kitchen full of people all trying to do the Virgin 75 bands picture thing....
Merry Xmas
24 Dec 2005
I made mince pies today and as usual several of them fell to bits due to the mouthwateringly rich crumbliness of them. So we had ice cream and fresh mince pie with the disasters which was lovely. (I seem to recall doing this before though - but not last year since I was ill)
23 Dec 2005
The web is very dull during the "holidays" (horrid expression). Reviews of the year (why bother - we remember the important stuff, and intended to forget the rest), and other kinds of filler.
22 Dec 2005
Hmmm, I like Russ's suggestion for the meaning of moonshotting : "the act of repeatedly making smilarly named entries without the use of tags for later, easy, categorization"
Whatever you may think about the politics and attitudes purveyed by the Sun newspaper, they have a great headline writers. Todays : "Elton takes David up the aisle"
21 Dec 2005
My new ergonomic office chair just arrived. It has a ridiculous number of controls. Paired with a fancy electric desk (when it arrives) I'll probably sepnd more time adjusting them than anything else.
Listening to Alison Brown - rather fine. Just my kind of music : a melange of jazz, bluegrass and trad folk.
20 Dec 2005
Since it is the end of the year and everyone is doing it I probably should have a poll on which Hmmm was the best or something. I wonder if I should make a Hmmm page and a Good Grief page. Now if I were a good folksonomist I would have everything tagged and it would all fall out nicely with no effort. I also decided that I ought to introduce the term "moonshotting" to the world, but I haven't decided yet what it means : possibly the act of putting pointless polls on your website.
TXT glossary (useful for you occipondrians to get up to speed on txt, though the article does seem to be rather mixing txt with 1337)
Wooo, Simon Thoumire and David Milligan playing the Tipsy Sailor on the The Big Day In. Good stuff.
Damn it, gmail won't work in Firefox - must be one of my extensions or something.
When did everyone start referring to "Powerpoint decks" - it seems to have become the expression of choice when talking about a .ppt file? Why on earth a deck? Deck is for cards not slides - slides come in carousels. Grrrr.
19 Dec 2005
I have the answers to the 74 band image thing if anyone is in the slightest bit interested.
This is posted using my new jasjar PDA and entered using the handwriting recognition
Last night's fireworks in photos (one of the best things was the way that the colours reflected in the steel of the Sage)
18 Dec 2005
I've done some more Gregarius hacking so now it looks pretty much like bloglines and it is deleting adverts from the feeds. Now all I need to do is to work out how to make it filter out repeat posts.....
Sick jokes - they really are sick, and so if you are likely to be even slightly offended don't bother.
Just back from the fireworks on the Quayside - best display I have ever seen. Simply brilliant. By Group F. (I bet ILuvNUFC will have a flickr set up of them)
I reckon I'll be sticking with Gregarius rather than going back to Bloglines (unless they come up with something killer of course) : it's under my control on my machine and I can hack the code, indeed, I already have, adding a feed by feed unread items view rather than the all in one view that it provides by default. I have other hacks and plugins in mind too.
17 Dec 2005
Brett, it's weblogging. the b*** word is forever a no-no.
16 Dec 2005
I'm trying out Gregarius rather than Bloglines. It has the advantage that I have the code so I can hack at it, and seems to have mostly the same functions, but I haven't made up my mind yet.
Happy Birthday to me (that makes 18 again when you use base 45))
15 Dec 2005
A stand selling Churros in town today - lots of other good stuff on sale with French, Dutch and Spanish stalls. Loads of food on sale - should be like that all the time!
Caught Mapping - Canadians, eh? (My grandmother once described some distant relevant with the words "he became an alcoholic and went to Canada". Another distant relative worked at a woman's prison near Toronto)
I just ordered something online and what a pain it was. I had to create a customer account for a site where I will probably never go back again and the account creation took something like 7 or 8 screens. Their credit card payment took me to a site that started with a splash screen with no useful information on it and then I got embroiled with something from my credit card company and then there were 3 more screens just to get out. Just ridiculous.
14 Dec 2005
I rarely remember dreams but last night I dreamed that I was inside a ginger mine - it was very dangerous as the roof often caved in, and you had to smash the ginger crystals to small pieces to be able to get them out. The rock of the mine was honey coloured and you had to crawl through a very low passage for a long way to get in to it.
Dogs in tubs (actually those are baths, tubs are what you plant trees in, or buy ice cream in)
"Am sorry for the inconveniency it may curse you for using this opportunity to communicating with you for the first time.Well I shall be extremely happy if you will kindly understand the content of my proposal thereby contributing your own quarter.Its true that the message will have some characters, but I want you to choose the best character that should favour us better, so that we should forge ahead in this transaction" Aren't spammers wonderful.
13 Dec 2005
Good grief (may well offend, particularly if you are one of the people they are talking about...)
12 Dec 2005
Black ink monday - I wish I were a reader of one of the Tribune group's newspapers so I could stop reading it in protest.
11 Dec 2005
10 Dec 2005
RIP Richard Pryor
We went to British Art Show 6 at the Baltic today. Rarely have I seen so much utter rubbish collected in one place. There were a few good pieces and one or two that were brilliant, but the rest was just awful, unimaginative, rot. One piece was an aluminium pole with a black crocheted net cover leaning against the wall. It was, I may add, "Untitled". Above it was another piece, also "Untitled", which was a cone of stainless steel cut down the middle with the parts separated. Essentially identical to a shelf support I bought in B&Q several years ago. Good grief, if you are going to do something at that is the same as something I can buy in a DIY shop at least give it a name! I am sounding like an old fogey here, but I felt insulted by this tosh. It would have been poor in a second rate degree show. A lot of it, too, was video installations and don't get me started on video installations....
9 Dec 2005
Just watched One Way Pendulum - a particularly wonderful film that ought to be a cult classic but for some reason isn't. If you haven't seen it then you should really try to : theatre of the absurd at its finest (for example, the family employ someone who comes round twice a week to eat their left-overs)
Ok, so he's a fantastic bass player but what's the big deal about playing some harmonics? Some of it is pretty tedious in fact - Jaco was probably better. (I did see some other Wooten footage the other day playing with his band and that was good - big 6 string beast he was playing)
Squidoo just went public. It's interesting and I had a "golden ticket" for it, but I have just not had the time to build anything useful with it. It seemed to require a lot of effort to get up and runnign.
S & M Dangers and Precautions (NSFW obviously) (Does anyone else think the "Free Tibet!" headline sounds a little incongruous on a bondage site?)
Damn, run out of coffee
8 Dec 2005
7 Dec 2005
I just got spam that reads "Come join my network at hi5! I now have over 0 friends in my network!"
6 Dec 2005
Hah! A bit like the million-dollar homepage but made out of trees. (Actually I think it's neat and I would do it if it were a little cheaper) The website is gorgeous.
I got a new electric mandolin from Wesley Guitars - I haven't played it yet (it's probably going to be a birthday or xmas present) but I had a look and it looks fine. The point is that it cost 59 quid. I don't see how you can make an instrument like it for that money : pickups, pots, a lead for goodness sake. OK, a Lloyd Loar it ain't, but even so.
5 Dec 2005
4 Dec 2005
I've been trying to test to out NewsAlloy to see if it is better than Bloglines, but it won't even read the OPML file that Bloglines creates, which seems a tad careless : if you can't import the files created by the principle player in the market then you aren't going to win any customers. (And it is not exaclty hard to read an bloglines OPML file either)
Just made the xmas pudding - house smells nice.
3 Dec 2005
2 Dec 2005
I'm running Apache 2.2.0 and PHP 5.1.1 so god knows if anyone can see this.
1 Dec 2005
30 Nov 2005
Seems slow on the net out there today. The bits must be cold or something. Use southern hemisphere sites as their bits will be warmer.
Another stonking track by Grisman and co. off Dawg '90 : Sativa
29 Nov 2005
I didnlt know that Toyota made a car just for Geordies.... (Flash and dreadful music alert)
Top 100 b-sides (since I've only ever bought 1 single in my life this isn't that meaningful to me...)
I was looking for a link to this - 75 band names hidden in there. I have quite a few but not 75 yet.
28 Nov 2005
Daughter is playing Daniel Marc Cohen's Walking in Memphis : what a fantastic song that is. Particularly like the choir in the background going "waaaaw king in mem fiss" in a sort of half-tempo, gospelly way.
Do the BBC listen again of tonight's I'm Sorry I haven't a Clue and hear Bridge over Troubled Waters sung to the tune of Bring Me Sunshine. Brilliant.
Mmmmm, Jerry O'Sullivan playing the blues on the Uillean pipes. Good stuff. If you don't own his album "The Gift", then you really ought to stop what you are doing and go out and get it now. It's probably more important than what you are doing anyway. Oh, and then some Monk - Bemsha Swing
I've noticed that CD packaging seems to getting a lot more creative and interesting than it used to be. Of course it will never be as good as 12" LP packaging.
27 Nov 2005
No, I don't know why there is a weird thing happening on the page at the Ting Ting link. (I do know now but I can't fix it easily at the moment - tomorrow)
Someone on a forum I am on just described Missy Elliott as the Hattie Jacques of hip-hop. Only old Brits will understand of course.
Damn, there's water dripping through the ceiling in my daughter's bedroom.
ScoopGo - might be useful. Not sure yet. (I suspect it requires me to do too much work. I looked at Squidoo and it requires me to do too much work. Maybe I'm just not passionate enough about anything any more.sd Which reminds me. I really can't make my mind up about Digg - certainly the people who post commetn seem to for the most part to be even more ignorant and small-minded than the people who post at slashdot.
26 Nov 2005
Been a long day today - I had to get up at 6.10 to take the daughter to work for 7. Bought a v. cheap DVD recorder at Tesco. Haven't found the de-regioning codes for it yet though. (A lot of the region free sites seem to have vanished into commercial enterprises now it seems)
25 Nov 2005
RIP George Best - we knew it was coming, but...
24 Nov 2005
Ole's friend's turducken recipe - this made me feel ill just reading it. Do you want dead bird with your dead bird?
23 Nov 2005
Lots more of those trucks which seem do seem to be real (even if they are all shot from the same position on the same stationary truck!!) (via Billboardcom)
I love red shoes but they are almost impossible to find (at least in styles that are not hideous : Kickers make red shoes but they just don't fit me properly)
I wonder if anyone has worked out the slowdown effect google-analytics is having on the net yet? The number of pages I've loaded recently that flash "Waiting for www.google-analytics.com" seems to be excessive.
"A USB 2.0 connection won't charge a third-generation iPod" That probably explains the problem then :-)
Ah, Monk : These foolish things
This might be even more useful (actually I listened to the sample lesson and it is not exactly inspiring, or that well recorded, it also seems to make assumptions that don't seem to be documented anywhere in the description)
Midnight in Newcastle (that's terrible actually, I ought to be able to do better than taht for a link text)
Xbox ad that is not available to the UK for some reason (Update: It's been taken off line for the moment because of demand)
How ridiculous - I hope they have a demo where everyone turns up wearing a hoodie. Why not make everyone go naked - eliminates the problem of hidden weapons too (well, almost)
Another interface to that music database thing - some weird links though. Try "Bob Wills" : who the hell are the Ayslum Street Spankers? And what is the link from George Thouroughgood to Bob Wills? Or Captain Beefheart for that matter.
iTunes has just popped some fantastic David Grisman stuff : Pupville off Dawg 90, and Calliente off Dawg Nova. Such wonderful playing.
I am entirely puzzled as to why I can't get the iPod to charge over USB. Just won't do it. Grrrr
Talking of bad things that weren't widely report, I never heard anything about the bridge being built that collapsed near Almunecar in Spain. 6 people killed when some travelling formwork collapsed on a very high bridge across a valley. Read about it in the New Civil Engineer.
22 Nov 2005
No, I'm not going to link to the xmas lights thing.
I was trying to find out did the pose on the back cover of Transformer and it turns out to be someone called Ernie Thormahlen. I searched for this name to try and find out who this person may be and the only hit that isn't a reference to Transformer is this one. Could it be the same one? (Any info on ET much appreciated)
Good list of projects that may or may not appear soon, and which will probably vanish fairly soon after they appear. I've had beta invites to quite a few such things and there isn't one that I have felt compelled to stay with.
I see that Look at this has been trying the website analyser too. Only 208286 links per page? That's just pathetic - you have to really confuse the casual user! 602, now that's the boy.
