is rubbish.
archive for 2003
Arrrrrrr, the xmas madness is coming to an end. I would have blogged yesterday but I could not move from the sofa due to the vast amounts of turkey, pork, ham, wine etc… It was all very tasty though, big up thanks to the cooks. I got some very nice presents: shiny headphone-ninja headphones, two towers dvd, lots of chocolate, many pairs of socks, a box of lush goodies, and so on.
We were tempted to brave the crowds today and try and shop, but we went for an extremely “brisk” walk on the beach. The wind was absolutely screaming in off the sea and we ended up getting a small exfoliation session and a mouthfull of sand by the end of it. It all helped to blow (exterminate) the cobwebs though.
Tomorrow we are getting up “early” to browse the sales, Dad wants us out the door at 9 am. ho ho ho, should be interesting.
The Guardian have announced their best of british blog awards. I was skimming the article and noticed that my vague aquaintance george was commended in the photography section! holy crap! Congrats to George!
He is far too good with that camera 
Christmas has arrived.
Brad has finally finished/started his desktop wallpaper gaming site: desktopgaming.com.
Also, Ian has has a re-design and a shuffle about. Very basic at the moment.
Kerry finally made me get some new shoes. After going around a few places including they very swish (but expensive) office I settled on some Duff’s at Schuh and amazingly they had them in a 12! I did spot some very nice campers, which I’d never seen before. I really liked them but £95(!) was a little out of my price bracket. Anyhoo, these will do very nicely:
Well, term has ended for christmas. Got all my work handed in at the last minute (of course). I’m looking forward to a good xmas at home with food, presents and good company. Tonight I’m out celebrating with the lads but tomorrow I shall xmas shop.
Been avoiding proper uni works lots lately so I’ve been working on the GameSoc website. I’m now officially the webmaster, we had a proper AGM and everything. Its really fun getting stuck into a nice project, even if some of the code is 3rd-hand and completely unreadable. I’ve fixed a few niggling bugs and added some nifty new features which will not interest you in the slightest if you aren’t a member.
What does it spell? slack!
Yes, well, I’ve, erm, been busy….yeah, busy. Its the last week of term before xmas at uni and its deadline central. Last week we did out presentation for the SLIP module, which was bit ropey but ok. I also presented my inital project progress and ideas to our group on Friday, I was really nervous but it went well!
Now I’ve got an essay to write, a project report and a wireframe teapot to finish, all for Friday.
ho-hum
This is really rather good, much better than I was expecting. If you’re not a fan of home star runner you probably won’t “get it”.
Watched the new cut of the Two Towers the other night with Kerry. Better than I remembered, and the new bits give you some nice Boromir back story and stay more faithful to the book in places. The Ents trashing Isengard is still a fantastic scene and reminds you of the power of nature of industry (nice oneTolkien). On the whole, very enjoyable, I’ll be asking for the DVD for christmas .
Yes, I suck. Managed to miss Cut Chemist by completely forgetting about it until we were already out, slightly inebriated and it was too late. gah!
Well, university is finally hotting up. Technical report due in on Friday, fancy anti-aliased line drawing practical a week after that and I’ve got to start my major project (dissertation) and get stuck into the practical module I’m doing.
ho-hum
On Friday morning me and Neil went to queue for the free mtv awards tickets. There were supposed to be 3000 distributed amongst all the HMV stores in Scotland (there are 15 branches I think). Afterwards we heard that there were actually only 2000 and 800 went to one branch! Anyhoo, when we got there at about 8:15 am we were greeted by this:
ruh-roh
Needless to say, we didn’t get any tickets.
Went to the fantastic Monster Mash on Forest Road in Edinburgh the other night. Very friendly, good food and great value for money. Highly recommended.
Cut Chemist is playing at Honeycomb in Edinburgh!!
Cut Chemist does most of Jurassic 5’s turntable wizardry and producers lots of their stuff. He also teamed up with DJ Shadow to do the infamous Product Placement mix cd and the genius that is BrainFreeze. In other words, rather good on the ones and twos.
Thanks to brad for pointing out that A List Apart is back up with v3 of their site. A cracking bunch of new articles aswell, the css image tabs are pretty amazing. Check it out.
| I was working at the Martin Bell event last night for work. Very nice guy and an excellent speaker (well, he is a politician). We had someone from Forth 2 doing the talking up on stage with him, it was all nice and informal. It was a pretty good turnout, probably just shy of a hundred people. Plus, Queen’s Hall is not huge so it looked ‘full enough’. He stayed to sign all of our stock aswell, about 120 books, which was very nice of him. The question and answer session was nice and active aswell with forays into scottish politics, the Kelley affair, the scottish parliament etc. All in all, a good night. We even sold some books! |
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Updated the Urban Edinburgh gallery with some new photos.
Recently the spammers have worked out that they can target blog comment systems to spread their rubbish. This is incredibly annoying not to mention tedious when I have to remove all the links to porn sites and penis enlargement pills. Anyhoo, the very nice Jay Allen has released a plugin for moveable type to block all these bitches. Aha! smacked-down!
CyberSpace
justin’s links.net – I can spend hours browsing this website.
Just got this depressingly-funny new book in at work.
Guess what? Billingham is in it! (thats where I’m from). Rated as the 35th worst town in Britain it mentions the Stalinesque architecture of the town centre and the high death rate from heroin addiction. Ahhh, no place like home.
update:
Heres the original article from idler.co.uk. A slightly different one actually appears in the book.
And, a Billingham resident stands up for the town (why oh why?).
Rare interview with the mysterious Neal Stephenson: TCS: Tech Central Station
Started back at university yesterday, finally into fourth year! woo-hoo! Yesterday and today were all introduction lectures where we get a chance to choose which modules to take. At the moment it looks like I’ll be doing:
Term 1
- Computer Networking
- Computer Graphics
- System Level Integration Project
Term 2
- Computer Security
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Visualisation
…and amongst all that I’ve got to do my dissertation/project !
Recently, I have mostly been painting Kerry’s new room. A fine shade of white, known as ‘pure white’. When I’d finished doing the ceiling it looked like I’d been sprayed with icing sugar, everywhere.
The official webpage of the North Korean ‘government’ is the ultimate in communist-chic. Its just bizzre seeing stuff like this on the web. It all looks like Russian posters from the 60s, smiling workers and the omni-prescient ‘leader’.
The e-library is of particular comedy/worrying value.
Oh and they seem to love image maps.
| My main man Rick has been a busy beaver. Taking lots of very nice shots in and around home. Check it out: |  |
The other night at work a giant squirrel and a giant Zippy (from Rainbow) came into the shop…..
Well, I’ve finished my full-time stretch of work at waterstones, going back to doing Sundays only. It will be quite strange and I’ll have to make myself not go in every time I walk past the place. Its not a bad job really, much better than most retail jobs. Our job title is actually book seller, we get a generous discount and on the whole its a very laid back and friendly place to work.
Things are still going super-well with Kerry, which is nice, more than nice even . She recently got me a Beastie Boys tee for just one pound from a charity shop (bargain!) and some of this:
which is just as nice.
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We went to see the fantastic Spirited Away on friday night with Kerry, Ian and Alex at the Cameo. They were showing the dub and the subbed versions at different times and of course we went for the sub-titled version. So much better when you can hear the original tone and inclinations.
Well, Awesome, beautiful, breathtaking, original and completely dreamy are just some of the words that spring to mind. Go see it, now. Unfortunately its only on limited release but Edinburgh has a splendiforous selection of indepedent cinemas. |
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Did some updating of a-mackenzie.co.uk the other day and tweaked the main interface this morning. Quite happy with the result aswell.
Cobbles
Hold it!
Tagged
and a bit of fun
Went to my first wedding repeption on Friday, had a fun trip out to Stirling on the train. Ruth and Archie were the happy couple, Ruth being one of Kerry’s school friends. Here we are just before going out:
awwwwwww
wait…that shirt looks familiar
Germany At War – a fascinating book full of colour photos from the German side of WWII. Very strange to look at, as most photos from the Allied side of the war were still b&w at this time. The Germans on the other hand had slightly more advanced photography and access to colour stock. hrm, I could buy so many books if I had more money…
