Wow, what a weekend. That was a whole heap o’ fun. If you haven’t been keeping track, last weekend was James’ stag trip to Prague in the Czech Republic. We flew out on Friday morning and arrived at about 3 in the afternoon to be greeted by gorgeous weather and an amazing city. Thanks to Adam’s navigations skillz we got a bus and a tram to the hotel but got off slightly too early and treked about 2 ks up a road in the blazing sun. The hotel was nice, basic but clean and friendly.
archive for August, 2005
So….tired. Will blog stuff about the weekend “soon”.
An interesting article by Jason Kottke on GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS? and the general future of applications and the internet.
Last night was the premiere of Serenity which Kerry and I had managed to procure tickets for. The queue when we got there (an hour early) was already at least a hundred people and it continued to grow into the biggest queue I think I’ve ever been in for a film. The film itself was bloody great and I think stands up on its own as a fine sci-fi action film with all the usual glorious Whedon dialogue. Noticeably the entire geek populace of Edinburgh was in attendance, which included most of the regulars from the Hoose. This let to much clapping, not just at the start and the end, but at key moments which was a little strange at first.
I did read one review in Metro last week that said the special effects were “ropey”. I don’t know what crack that reviewer was smoking but I think the style of effects used in Firefly/Serenity is positively refreshing. They use lots of traditional camera effects such as objects being out of focus and rapid panning and zooming which all makes it look like a hand-held camera. Oh and I really liked the soundtrack, might have to buy it.
It looks to be released here in the UK on the 7th of October. I’ll be seeing it again and I’d recommend it to anyone else.
Wow, this is super-cool. The Beastie Boys have put up mp3s of A Capella versions of some of their tracks for personal remixing and such.
They’ve gone all typographic and print-like. I love it!
Wow, this week is a busy one. This morning Kerry and I went to view a flat on Lauriston Street that was really, really nice. We’ve asked for an application form and everything, heres hoping we’re the only ones going for it. Wednesday is Serenity premiere night (if I every get back in touch with Erin) and then on Friday we’re off to sunny Prague for James’ stag weekend!
We though it would be best to actually see something in the festival, seen as how we live in Edinburgh. After reading a cracking review in Metro I’ve booked tickets for “Basic Training by Kahlil Ashanti”. Looks like it will be fun.
We got annoyed at the slowness of the W3C HTML validator today, so I looked around for instructions on installing a local version. As usual the Apple Developer Connection has a very good article on installing and setting up a local validator. It’s much faster with it being local plus its, like, more extreme.
Protopage is a brilliantly useable application of AJAX and Javascript. A useful application for non techy folks who want to create an instantly editable “links page” to set as a home page.
We did some “extreme” programming at work the other day and manged to re-design clan.com in a single day(ish). This wasn’t technically extreme programming but hey, it makes our geeky jobs sound much more active and well, eXtreme. It was nice change for the team to focus on a single project for a whole day.
Toot, toot. De La Soul are playing at Scratch in September and we got tickets.
I had the afternoon off yesterday as it was Kerry and Is second anniversary. We went to see the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Dean Gallery. Bresson was a photographer who craved anonymity and would never stage photographs; instead he wanted what he famously called the “decisive moment”, when the click of the camera captures a moment of unexpected drama. He was brilliant at catching this decisive moment, illustrated perfectly in the photo to the left. He manages to get the shot when the guy has both feet off the ground above the puddle. The exhibition was good, it wasn’t just photos taken by Bresson. It had photos of him and other biographical photos and items to view. It was a little pricey at £5 but hey, it was a treat. Magnum have all the photos Bresson took whilst working for them online to browse (and buy). After the exhibition we dodged a torrential summer downpour and got expensive ready meals and fizzy blackberry wine from M&S for dinner. A great way to spend an afternoon off.
Update: Looks like Joe beat me to the Cartier exhibition 🙂
We’re having some serious issues with our web hosting over on Google Sightseeing (probably not working). Please bear with us while we work it out.
Holy mackerel batman! The W3C HTML Validator has had an update and a face-lift. It has finally come crawling out of the 90s.
SwankSigns is an ace site “dedicated to the art of mocking public works”. It’s basically a gallery of bizzare and funny signs from around the world, some of which I think (hope) have had a wee bit of photoshop tweaking.
This is a nice article over on particle tree about code commenting strategies. We should do more of this at work.