Sign the “Thank you, Poland!” letter

Merry Christmas everyone! I got back into Edinburgh tonight after a very nice time at home with my parents and sister. It mainly involved eating lots of very nice food and drinking lots of very nice champagne/wine/beer. Got a good haul of presents and seemed to come back with more stuff than I went with! We also managed to fit in some super-early sales shopping in Middlebrough. I got a really nice winter coat half price in Burtons and some new dressy shoes that I’ve been needing for a while in M&S.

I’ve got three days at work now as part of the “skeleton crew” just incase anything really hits the fan. Then its new year!

Had some enjoyable drinks after work last night in the Merlin. Good few people went and everyone was in a good mood. I’m off to finish packing and then catch the train home now (far too early!). Have a good Christmas everyone!

James from work/uni is getting married (at last) to Catriona. Of course, being a geek and fellow web nut he had to setup a wedding website complete with wordpress powered blog. Oh yeah and he stole my stylesheet: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” 🙂

I still have a heap of gmail invites and three brand new o2 sim cards. If anyone want anything, just leave me a comment. Merry Xmas!

Half-life 2 seems to have swept the board at Edge magazines awards this year. Winning ‘Best Game’, ‘Most Innovative’ and ‘Best Visual Design’. Strange, as I always think of Edge as very console biassed. From Guardian Gamesblog.

Chris Justus has dissected the Google Suggest Javascript code that I blogged about earlier. It’s very cool stuff, it uses an embedded http-xml component to communicate with google’s servers as you type. The results are then displayed dynamically with some clever javascript key handlers to help navigation. I first read about Google Suggest over on the Google Blog, where it started as one guys personal project. At google they’re allowed to spend 20% of their time at work on any project they choose. That is so cool.

Dumped a load of (kinda) recent images onto UrbanArt. Also made the front page a bit more responsive and useable. Check it out.

An Interesting chat with SCEE’s Executive Vice President of Development Phil Harrison about the origins and growth of the Playstation:
Guardian Unlimited Gamesblog

I finally finished reading this fantastic book the other night: The Second World War by John Keegan. It’s taken me quite a while, mainly as I stopped reading for a bit whilst I was “flat limbo”. It was a fantastic, if very long read. I’ve always been interested in war in general and so especially in WW2. But, I hadn’t really read a book that covered the whole thing. Keegan very clevery manages to break down the different styles of warfare and the different regions that the conflict took place in. He covers the massive tank battles at Kursk, the ‘island hopping’ marines in the Pacific and much, much more. I’d recommend it to anyone wanting to read a history of the war.

I’ve finally cobbled together some kind of ‘About’ section, you can get to it over on the right there. In it you’ll also find the “design archive” (pretentious enough?) of past cyber-junky layouts. My amazon wishlist if also now linked from the sidebar, as is a paypal link and a brand new section of Projects. At the moment urbanart is the only one but I hope to get a few more up soon, including:

• A demo of my ‘Collaborative Online Document Management Framework’ dissertation project
• More amazon xml api searching fun
• My latest toy, an online task list manager
• Fun with php image generation
• and much, much more…

Very Cool

Last Saturday Kerry and I went to see the Beastie Boys live at the SECC in Glasgow. First time I’d seen them and the first time I’d been the SECC. The gig was amazing, we had a good spot quite near the front and managed to avoid the drunken beer-throwing and crushing that went on in the middle. They started with a huge screen showing what was happening back-stage. Some roadies were wheeling a big case up to the stage, smiling and slapping and pointing at it. They brought it up the stage, opened it and Mixmaster Mike jumped out and lept up to the DJ booth. He then did some amazing turntablist trickery for a bit including the “5-4-3-2-1” countdown from Thunderbirds (genius) and then the Beasties came jumping on to the stage in matching adidas tracksuits. It was a great show starting with them doing their “3 MCs and 1 DJ” style stuff. Then they went off the stage leaving Mike in the DJ booth. Then the booth disappeared backwards and a huge stage/float thing was wheeled around from the back with a whole band on it, plus the Beasties all in really bad suits. They then did a few of their more instrumental tracks before the stage did some more trickey and reverted back to DJ booth/dancing space. Amazing night in all, even though it took us 3 hours to get home.

Review here from the Independent.

And another from the Guardian.

And a last one from the Times.

Anyone looking for a cheap old skool car in amazingly pristine condition? My flatmate Ben is selling his Vauxhall Chevette.

It was the the Playstations 10th birthday yesterday. 10 years, wow. I can still remember the first time I saw one in use, it was pretty damn impressive for the time. It had loads of fast moving 3d stuff, amazing cd sound and the actual console looked good. Speaking of which, I like the new Playstation3 logo a lot:

Sony’s graphic design is always very nice.

• bittorrent changing lanes
• father ted bittorrent christmassy
• kerazy bittorrent
• shag tag edinburgh
• p0wned

Netscape? Whoah, everyone thought you were dead! But damn! The new you is u-g-l-y: http://gemal.dk/misc/nsb05.png

“The new Netscape is based on Firefox, but with a twist – it includes support for switching to Microsoft’s IE engine.”

Oh dear god…

Last Friday I went to my first Thanksgiving dinner kindly hosted by Jed (aka Neil) at his and Ian’s place. There were a few initial delays but we had plenty of wine to keep us occupied and when we got to the food it was delicous. He’d cooked a huge turkey (that had apprently taken an age to defrost) and to go with it we had sweet potatoes, stir-fried sprouts with almonds (very nice), stuffing, gravy and a carroty type salad which was curiously nice. We polished all that off with strawberry cheesecake and chocolate roulade, and some belt slackening…

A couple of gallery updates to feast your eyes on. The first is from Jed’s birthday party about a month ago which was rather hilariously fancy dress. See if you can work out who everyone was supposed to be (sorry about the lack of focus).

Jed’s Birthday Gallery

The second is from when my parents were up visiting about three weeks ago. We took them along to the Falkirk wheel which is pretty impressive and looks good in photos (see then new header image).

Falkirk Wheel Gallery