Category Archives: Random

And tonight Matthew, I will be…

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Fancy dress, not halfMy nephew decided to have a themed fancy-dress party for his 21st birthday. The idea was to come as a character from your favourite movie or novel. With plenty of warning, we therefore had lots of time to deliberate over the character in question and the costumes.

I went as Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction, Jeanette as Tracy Turnblad from Hairspray, Kayleigh as an Oompa Loompa (from the original movie) Ross (below) as Super Mario and Euan as Harry Potter.

** New ** Photo gallery included (broken in IE6).

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Is this the smallest car in the world?

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This really is a very small carFollowing a bit of an altercation on the M8 motorway last week, I had the joy of being issued with a courtesy car by my insurers.

I fully expected that I wouldn’t be getting temporary wheels of the standard I had been used to, but what transpired is just a bit beyond a joke. Well, clearly it is not beyond a joke since everyone is openly enjoying the fact I am having to drive the automotive equivalent of a roller-skate.

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Boats, on trucks

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It's a boat, on a truck!On my drive home last night, in the dark, pretty much on automatic pilot, I noticed I was following a truck with an unusual load.  It was transporting a boat.

The Randan 2 wasn’t a huge boat, but big enough to require a flat-bed articulated lorry.

I’ve seen trucks carrying boats before, but never gave them a second glance.  Being stuck behind one in the rain made me think of how out of place it really was up there, towering over me in my car.

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Noppleganger, moi?

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My mate LynvalSince purchasing my new domain names, I started to get some strange eMails, addressed to one of the domains; the stevemccallum.com one.  I was regularly getting 4-5 per day and they all had a few things in common that ruled them out from being common or garden spam.

i) They were all addressed to ‘me’ at my domain,  ii) They were exclusively new ‘friends’ on MySpace and iii) the majority seemed to have ska/rudeboy/grrl oriented names or pages on MySpace, the latest of which being Lynval Golding of the Specials and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry.

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Is this art?

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Stumbled upon a post in design mag, and initially I thought ‘cool, that’s great’, but on reflection I reckon I’m maybe not so sure about it.

Digital art

The post is a collection of ‘digital art’; specifically portraits created by computer methods that are, admittedly, stunning reproductions of the original photographic image. They are pretty much all very photo-realistic and you’d be hard pushed to tell they are hand-crafted at all, without perhaps a side-by-side comparison with the original.

This is where my doubt comes in.  Is there much point in spending many hours faithfully reproducing an existing digital photo in Photoshop?  You could argue you may as well have the original photo and be done with it.  I’m not doubting the immense skill required to achieve the end result; I’ve used PhotoShop and it takes some work to get good results.

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New to-do

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todoThe last to-do list I published on the blog had the effect of spurring me into action fairly well.  So well in fact, I thought I’d do it again; not because I’ve stopped doing stuff, more so I have a reasonable list that I can work to and tick off against.

bimbogami

  • restructure db for better stats, better season handling & for ‘new concept’ season 3
  • separate the reg/login audit from the answers
  • calculate elapsed time and puzzling time per question on completion of question
  • calculate these valuse for past users
  • amend HoF to show both elapsed time and puzzling time
  • amend HoF to sort the players in ‘first past the post’, ‘elapsed’ and ‘puzzling time’ order
  • apply my new found CSS skills to the site, progressively (but not extensively)
  • look at the structure of things to cater for the ‘new concept’ for season 3 proper
  • see if we can bang out another wordle-based music one to keep things moving
  • run through the ideas book and see how many decent questions are kicking about

book

  • put some structure to the working concept
  • write the first chapter
  • write a synopsis
    (but not necessarily in that order)

blog

  • Write a review of CSS Mastery
  • Write a review of Don’t Make Me think

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Spares or repairs redux

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spannerIt was 21/12 (wasn’t that a Rush album?) when I kicked off the original post on this topic, when I placed an order for an out of stock item at Partsmaster.

Well it finally arrived today 9/1. Which isn’t great really, even though where were a couple of bank holidays in the mix. Absolutely no comms from Partsmaster until the point they said it had been shipped on 8/1, so points for quick delivery when they finally got it.

Fitted in jig time, assisted by the excellent new crimbo cordless drill/driver, and all back up and running within hald an hour. The radiators will no doubt be grateful.

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Hogmanay schmogmanay

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hogmanayHogmanay is a dying tradition. Nobody seems that interested in it anymore.

People still seem determined to have a party to celebrate the dawning of a New Year, but it’s really because they think they have to, it’s more like just going through the motions. I mean, we’ve just had a major celebration-fest of over-indulgance less than a week before, it’s not as if we’ve not done anything for a while

Even the ‘Last Call’ and ‘Only An Excuse’ that seemed so good in years gone by appear desperately old and tired; well past their sell by date. And all that tartan and piper nonsense, as if us Scots have exclusivity to this time of year (surely they don’t broadcast all that nonsense elsewhere).

It’s not that I don’t like a party, I can get down with my bad self as good as the next man, it’s just the reason and timing of it I have a problem with.

Getting old? Aye probably.
Do it again? Maybe not, cocoa and bed for me next year!

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Revenge of the Sloth

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zzzzzBoxing day really is bit of a non-day.

It’s a recovery day from the massive overingulgence that is Christmas day. Not like a hangover recovery day after a big night out, more a recovery from too much food, too much sitting about, too much exposure to family, lack of oxygen.

This year none of it seemed all that much over-indulgent, the self-promises that I wouldn’t eat too much, drink too much, etc. were all pretty much adhered to. But still Boxing day requires that whole sitting about doing not much really.

Leftovers, games, building things, more leftovers, you know the kind of thing.

It’s great though.

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