Archive for March, 2005

postConstantine - Movies & TV - 27th March
constantine poster

Kerry and I went to the cinema last night for the first time in ages. Constantine was the only thing on that we both wanted to see and to be honest: we weren’t expecting much. I was expecting something on the sillyness level of Van Hellsing but Constantine was actually quite good! It was very much in the same vein as HellBoy (though not as good), lots of religious/occult overtones, a decent main character but with less nazis. It was quite quite noir-ish in places, with Keanu chain smoking throughout the film and his dusty offices above a bowling alley seemingly always at night. They also covered a lot of ground in the film using quite a few characters that felt as though they had a lot of back story behind them. I wanted to know more about all of these characters. I’m tempted to go read some of the Hellraiser comics that it is based on now. Peter Stormare was excellent as ‘Lou’ and Tilda Swinton as Gabriel (yes, the angel) was disturbingly deranged.

We also saw a trailer for Sin City which looks excellent and has Jessica Alba (remember her) looking extremely hot with blond hair. A bit of IMDB later and I find that she is also in the Fantastic Four as The Invisible Woman. The studios do like their comic book adaptations at the moment.

postEdinburgh Architecture - Design, Edinburgh - 27th March
 

I found this interesting site on current Edinburgh architecture and future planning for new buildings. The image above is of the new “Connery” filmhouse which is re-locating to Festival Square. It will certainly be very different once that is built.

postBunny Massacre - Me - 27th March
oh no! look at the poor thing!
 
postCC: Scotland - Me - 26th March

Lately I’ve been wondering if I need to put some kind of CC license on my photos and words on the site. Thankfully I see that they are working on Scottish version of the license. It’s only a draft at the moment but its good to see one being actively worked on.

postNetdisaster - Links - 26th March

This is aces.

postJapanese WW II sub found off Oahu - News - 26th March

This is pretty amazing.

postNew Look GameSoc - Design, Gaming, Me, Technology - 23rd March

A while ago in my role as “webmonkey” for GameSoc I thought that we were due a re-design. The site design had been unchanged for atleast a year and was starting to look rather dated. It was based around a horrendous table layout with a huge banner graphic. Really old-skool stuff. So, I’ve updated the colour scheme and stripped out some of the table layouts. A lot of the table stuff is still there but I really don’t fancy digging around in 30+ files changing <td>s and <tr></tr>s to <div>s and <span>s. The original site back-end code was written before CSS layouts were vogue. I think I’ll phase out the tables gradually.

I’ve also managed to crowbar in some nifty PNG image trickery. The shadows on the sides of the page content are actually pngs with variable transparency. This means the background image can change and the shadow will still ‘make sense’. Neato stuff, except that is totally breaks in IE (surprise). One hack later and IE is atleast displaying the image properly. But now you can’t click on any of the page! Slight flaw there microsoft… Another google later and I find this life-saving page. Apparently your image has to be really small in one of it’s dimensions. That’s one nasty bug.

Anyway, I like the new look and I’ll continue squashing those nasty tables. What do you think?

postBanksy Hits The Galleries - Design - 23rd March
 

Some snaps of paintings that (the genius that is) Banksy snuck into various New York art galleries. Great stuff :)

via: www.core77.com
postFooter Fixing - Me, Meta - 21st March

I finally fixed up the footer over the weekend to display properly in IE & Safari. It had been bugging me for a while but displayed perfectly in everything else. Giving the right footer div a width property seemed to fix it. For some reason IE & Safari were collapsing it down to the width of the link images.

I also managed to fit in a ton of work on the GameSoc re-design. It’s all top secret at the moment but I’m sure I’ll be blabbing about it once it’s finished :)

postHalf Moon Bay - Design, Links, Me - 19th March

I was wandering around John Lewis last week and I noticed the really cool coasters:

 

A little bit periodic-table-like. They were rather expensive though so I thought I’d check online.
Unfortunately Half Moon Bay only do trade sales over the ‘net. While I was browsing their online catalogue I did notice this really funky NYC door mat:

 

…and this “lollertastic” pack of chewing gum which Kerry actually got me last christmas! (So thats where she got them from…)