I especially like the ad on the back of the bus in the last one.

I’m always taking snaps of any cool stencilling or grafitti I see around town. I’ve been meaning to setup some kind of site for them all and I’ve finally got around to it. Check it out here: http://urbanart.cyber-junky.co.uk.

Our latest venture at work, kilt2 has been making some waves in the press. Scottish TV recently did a feature on us and interviewed Nick (my boss). Look here for some hilarity and terrible quality clips of the feature.

Not to jump on the bandwagon with this no-www thing, but I’ve not been using the ‘www’ bit of my domain for years. It always did seem a bit silly. My browser browses the World Wide Web, why should I have to put www in front of every domain name? Chopping the ‘www’ off makes sense. I remember back in the day when a few sites obviously discovered the magic of dns suddently had ‘www2‘ in their domain. We were amazed! “Is this the second, secret internet??”.

Firefox is the best browser out at the moment. If you’re still using Internet Explorer, stop, now. Browsing around their site yesterday I found they had a new release out which fixes a couple of bugs. They don’t seem to announce the 0.0.1 releases which is strange. It’s now on 0.9.2 and has nicely funked up icons. Whilst I was there I noticed the increasing selection of Extensions. Extensions are a genius feature where developers can extend the functionality without reinventing the wheel. I’ve now get a spellchecker installed and the very useful Web Developer plugin.

First pay of proper job! Woo! Plus its all the part-time I did last month and all of this months full-time. Cha-ching. I am in my overdraft no more.

Messing around with amazon’s xml-soap interface:

http://cyber-junky.co.uk/projects/amazon/test.php?keyword=banana

replace keyword with whatever you want to search for.

Your weblog owns 18.75 % of you.

Does your weblog own you?

Been tweaking and re-coding bits of the site. As promised there is now an archives page, which lives way down the bottom there in the ‘WordPress stuff’ box. I’ve also added an ‘other blogs’ menu up on the top. These are basically all the site/blog/magazines that I read probably every day. I’m slowly xhtml-ifying and css-orising the gallery which was written back in the halcyon days of html 4 transitional. Don’t click validate on that page at the moment, it’s not pretty.

I just realised that the 20th was my two year blogging aniversary. Man, two years… It doesn’t seem that long. Anyway, for nostalgias sake here is my first blog entry. Fascinating eh? I really need to sort out the archives linkage so you can browse back over my gripping life.

One of my favourite films.

Alex at work has recently finished the companies latest pet project. We got an article in yesterdays Herald and there is a big fancy “press event” this Thursday. Should be interesting to see what the general public reaction is, some of the kilts are pretty “out there”.

I am now officially on the Ben flat hunt team. We have our max price, we know our room requirements. All that is left to do is view some flats. Wish me luck tomorrow morning on the phone…

Hrmmmm, interesting: Pattern Recognition (2006)

Jurassic 5 are on at T On The Fringe on the 1st September. I discovered these guys last year and it was one of those moments when you wonder how you couldn’t have know about them already. If you know what I mean…

I really, really need to get off my ass and find a flat. I’ve only got two and a bit weeks left here and I don’t want to be stuck in somewhere crappy.

Interesting article on Wired about designers who redesign other companies inaccessible websites.

All very topical at the moment after the morons at Odeon closed down the Accessible Odeon site.

I finally managed to get the new design online. I should I have pointed out that the post below was a photoshop mockup. When comparing it against whats online now it’s suprisingly close. The shadow on the background was inspired by Alex’s background shadow technique. The drop down menus are ‘Suckerfish’ menus taken from A List Apart. They still have some bugs on Safari and Opera but seem to be working ok on IE and FireFox. Its not perfect on IE but it’s usable. I’m making use of IE only css with the star html selector bug. I’ve also converted to xhtml mainly because I’m using it at work and cause its pretty neat. I had to use yet another IE hack to get it work in IE and yet still validate.

I’ve also moved from MoveableType to WordPress for the blog engine. Mainly becuase MT was just getting too clunky and annoying. The final straw was when I realised I couldn’t use completely custom archive templates. I needed to put php in them, and I couldn’t. I was letting MT get away with stuff because I though changing over would be a hassle. I was wrong, the WordPress install is a dream, a million times easier than MT. It also managed to import all my MT blog entries perfectly. Which is pretty darn good.

Overall I’m lovin’ it. What do you think?

“During a Q&A with id CEO Todd Hollenshead, Todd confirms the already stated plan for id’s next internal project to be an entirely new intellectual property, and drops the news along the way that some unnamed third party is currently at work on an as-yet not officially announced sequel to Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the World War II shooter originally built on Quake III technology.”

sweet

(from bluesnews)

The intelligence: flawed
The dossier: dodgy
The 45-minute claim: wrong
Dr Brian Jones: vindicated
Iraq’s link to al-Qa’ida: unproven
The public: misled
The case for war: exaggerated
And who was to blame? No one

great, that was time well spent then.

From www.independent.co.uk

What do you think?

Its a bit plain at the moment, but I’m lovin’ the fixed-width centred column look. I really want a largish image on there somewhere (with my own photos) and some nice vertical scrolling for the blog text. I may try moving away from shades of grey (gasp!). Basically I just want cyber-junky to be my blog and then I’ve got a separate portfolio site in the works. I’ve also got to put some effort into the ninjahosting site and finish the “ninja gallery” that Alex, Ian and I are supposed to be developing.

HULK’S DIARY – made me laugh

Defense Tech – military technology blog that is full of interesting Iraq news at the moment

Federation of American Scientists – huge site that contains oodles of information about intelligence, weapons etc

Many thanks to Jed for pointing out that the Film Festival programme is out for this August.
Some good stuff aswell: Tokyo Godfathers, Primer and Mirrorball Japan all look very interesting.

and many more here.

Oh man, that rocked my socks off. Highlight of the weekend has to Orbital live on the Sunday night. They played all the favourites including Halcyon And On And On, with new Darkness remix action! Their kick-ass Dr Who theme remix was in there aswell. I had to go see it on my own which was cool as everyone else was seeing The Pixies on the main stage. It all seemed pretty well organised, no troubles getting in or anything. Had to queue a while at the bus station in Edinburgh but even there they had loads of staff on-hand. Other people who rocked were: Black Eyes Peas, Faithless (uber rocked), Electric Six. Lots of folk on the Sunday clashed and on the Saturday the main stuff I wanted to see was in the Slam tent which was ridiculously under-sized and therefore always full. It completely filled up for Basment Jaxx, Felix Da Housecat, Chemical Brothers and Groove Armada, which sucked. Now, on with the ass-tastic camera-phone photos:

Told you they were good…

Hey everybody! Just eaten a very nice pie with mash and peas, mmmmmmmm. Just a quick blog from the virgin tent-thing here at t in the park. Laters!

Toot! toot! T in the park today tody and tomorrow! Need to get ready soon or we’ll be a bit late…

My main man Brad has had a very funky redesign which is inspiring me to get my ass into gear and clean this place up. Anyway, go check out his much less eyeball-melting look.

I am now officially Oliver Jackson Bsc Hons. At frickin’ last! Only took five years! Yesterday seemed like the longest day ever, stuff just kept happening. I woke up far too early as I was all excited and nervous about the day ahead. Kerry and I got all dressed up and then went to Favorit for breakfast, where I could hardly eat anything. Then we met my parents and I went and got robed-up and chatted with my buddies. At about 10:30 we decided we’d better go in to McEwan Hall and take our seats.

There was an organ recital and then they got down to the task at hand. What follows is basically an hour of clapping and shuffling along seats. Getting their degress with us was the Engineering school and they all went before us. When your name is finally read out and you’ve successfully shuffled along to the end of the row you march up to the stage (without tripping) and get hit on the head with a ceremonial hat. You then exit stage left, get your certificate and shuffle back into your seat.

After graduation there was lots of milling around outside while everyone’s Mum cried and the family took photos. We eventually managed to organise a group of us into a photo, not the easiest of tasks. Check out the gallery for the photos. After I’d handed back my hired robes (not cheap!) we went back to Favorit for lunch where they managed to annoy my parents by completely forgetting their orders, pretty dumb if you ask me. They did eventually get served, needless to say the tip was a big fat zero. We now had time to kill before the reception in the afternoon so we mooched along to the Royal Musem where I sat down and spaced-out for half an hour.

The reception in the afternoon was in Surgeons Hall which is pretty impressive on the inside, filled with interesting paintings and rooms. It was a fancy affair with canapes, champagne and little sausages. There were some prizes awarded and we were told to have a good time. At this point we were knackered so we went home for a wee rest and then got changed for dinner at the grainstore at seven. The grainstore was very, very nice. I had smoked haddock and pea risotto to start and then aubergine, courgette and something lasagne with red pepper fondue. Both were fantastic and didn’t leave me room for pudding. Kerry and I then took my parents on a mini pub tour of Deacon Brodies, Whistle Binkies and then finally Beluga. My parents then went off back to the hotel and we went to find the new-graduate gang. There were still at the pear tree where we rapidly formulated a plan to go to Why Not? on George street. After much faffing and two almost bar fights we eventually got taxis there. Quite a few of our number were too pished to get in unfortunately but they’d had enough by then anyway.

Kerry and I were still sober enough to get in (of course) and had a great time with the gang. Kept seeing more and more people from c.s. through the night. Kev and Rab were busting some legendary moves on the dance floor and Ian and Daniel was splashing out on some £50 a pop champagne. We lasted until 3am when we got a taxi back with Kev and collapsed into bed. Only for both of us to get up for work this morning. Ouchy.

graduation gallery

Yesterday was my last day working at waterstones. I will miss the retail shenanigans. Mainly the other people at work and the nice customers. Working in a bookshop is a pretty good job for the retail sector but the pay and prospects are pretty non-existent. It was just my summer job anyway, the stuff I’m doing at scotweb I actually, like, enjoy doing. So, I’m getting paid for doing stuff I enjoy, which is the whole point I think.

In other earth shattering news I’ve had a haircut. My parents are up tomorrow for pre-graduation stuff and then the big day on Wednesday. Good news is that Kerry got a ticket in the extra ticket lottery thing. She jumped around for a bit giggling when she found out .

Coudal Partners were always very slick and their latest redesign is particularly tasty:
Coudal Partners