In other news...HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!
My rather gorgeous girlfriend is experiencing what many might describe as a 'birthday' today.
Happy Birthday You.
xxxxxx
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 9:43:43 AM
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You Dumb Idiots
Don't normally talk politics here, but I can't believe some of the crap that's being said by the Tories this morning, after the dumping (and indeed 'back-stabbing') of their leader last night.
Crispin Blunt (rhyming slang, surely?) has just been on News 24 saying, i'm paraphrasing here, something along the lines of 'this is it now, last nights' events mean we can win the next election, it's all sorted now, the mood of all the journalists has changed overnight to "oh shit, you CAN do it now"'. Yeah right. It's been highly entertaining to watch the Tories self destruct in public like this. Almost worth the TV licence fee on it's own....
But you'll get anywhere in the next election will you? Your leader was/is the only problem is it? Nothing to do with your policies or outdated and scary thoughts on how to run a modern country?
Oh, WHAT PLANET ARE YOU PEOPLE ON?????
Un-fucking-believable.
Who 'leads' you (a relative term when talking about the Tories, I'd of thought) isn't actually relevant. Everybody knows this, even you know this.
*Sigh*
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 9:32:25 AM
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An Ex-Tears For Fears Emulator 1 and a road trip....
Myself and Mr Blatant Optimism went on a mini road trip last night to go and pick up a free synth from a nice man in Watford.
Now, as someone that seems to hoard old crappy technology I would have probably been interested in getting hold of this Emulator 1 anyway, but seeing as it just happens that this very unit used to belong to Tears For Fears back in the early 80s I think it's safe to say I was extremely bloody keen to get my hands on it. Bit of a fan, you see.
And now I do have my hands on the very same machine. It's currently in many pieces on my living room floor though, as it needs some TLC (which I expected it would to be honest). It is over 20 years old now, and has a serial number of 211, out of the 500 or so they made of this model. Built in 1982. It's incredibly heavy. It has a whole 8 voices (i.e. you can press 8 keys at once), a whopping 128K (yes, that's K) of sample memory (woo!). You can have 2 samples in memory, both being a maximum of 2 seconds long. How ghetto is that then?!
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 11:28:07 AM
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BBC News 24, bad chromakey, and looping backgrounds
A week or so ago (I forget when exactly , I mean it's not a real diary event!) BBC News 24 (which I have on the TV most of the time as background noise and images) suddenly went all wierd. All of a sudden the presenters had that distinctive blue fuzzy cutout look, and they'd gone all 2D [I know television is a 2D medium but I think you DO know what I mean]. There were other signs that they were trying something new i.e. lots of pulsing single-scanline artifacts on the desk in front of the presenters etc etc. It would seem that the presenters are now sitting in front of a blue screen and they are chromokeyed (i.e. cutout) and placed on top of a background that isn't actually behind them.
"Strange"; I thought (any emails to me along the lines of "get a life" will be ignored. Thank You)
I had noticed in the past that the activity behind the presenters can be rather, ummm, interesting. None more so than a month or so ago when you could see someone leading a guided tour of the news room followed by what looked like 20 people. There wasn't quite anyone going "Hello Mum!" through the glass looking onto the news studio, but you could imagine that could happen easily enough.
Anyhoo, I noticed today that the backgound (which is basically a bunch of computer screens with occasional people sitting down at a computer keyboard doing stuff) is ON A LOOP.
Imagine you are watching the two main presenters. And there is a guest pundit/commentator sitting on the right (screen right) end of the desk. Now, the key is when they cut to that person talking [in a one-shot, i.e JUST that person filling the screen] - of course we want watch the background. You will see a background, over the pundits' right shoulder, containing many video monitors on the wall (all out of focus so you can't see exactly what they're showing) - some 6 seconds after this cut to the 'one shot' I mentioned, a man in a white shirt walks past in the background. Really! And just after he does a couple of those fuzzy video monitors that have been showing a mainly red image suddenly turn very white. Every time!
The loop seems to restart every time they cut back to the single person, in other words it might go like:
Shot of presenter and pundit, presenter askes question.
Cut to one shot of pundit, 6 seconds later man in white shirt walks past.
The pundit talks for an amount of time.
Cut back to shot of poth presenter and pundit (or perhaps just presenter)
Cut BACK to one shot of pundit - 6 seconds later man in white shirt walks in background.
MAD.
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 1:30:24 PM
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Good Grief. Spam anyone?
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 3:58:17 PM
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Still A Classic
"You're not very tall, are you?"
"Well, I try to be..."
Those lines still make me laugh out loud, even though I've seen The Big Sleep far too many times....
Good comedy is timeless, and that's such a good thing!
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 7:10:10 PM
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Quite an achievement really!
As I type this I seem to have managed to screw up the various bits of CSS and table junk on here to make this page render differently in all four
of the main Macintosh web browsers (i.e. IE, Safari, Mozilla and Netscape).
Surely there is some sort of prize available for this amazing feat? No? Oh......
One thing I have learnt over the last few years of making various interwebnet pages is that often the problem is what you could call the difference in 'error correction' that certain browsers apply i.e. some (funnily enough IE, for all its' faults) are better at guessing what you actually meant to do and showing that version of the page than some of the others - Safari seems the most picky to me in this respect. I'm thinking of things like closing HTML tags properly, always making sure DIVs open and close in the right order, closing table elements in a logical sequence [seems to be the biggest variable here] - basic errors like those. All the more-talked-about stuff like different rendering engines, CSS bugs, box model hacks etc etc....well let's get the easy stuff sorted out first, shall we?
Anyway onwards and upwards!
[and I am far too scared to even switch on the PC and look at this page on the various web browsers installed on there at the moment - Oh my, what a lot of issues that could raise! Apologies to anyone reading this on a PC if it looks all over the place....]
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 9:26:16 PM
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Excuse me...
...while I muck about like a man-in-the-dark-with-no-torch with this particular webpage 'o' mine. Lots of things I've been meaning to do for ages but have only just found the time to do i.e. the list of recent posts list in the bottom right hand corner (you might not be able to see it yet, hence the mucking around I have to do...)
Radio Userland is a very good weblogging/content management tool, but the documentation for it (what there is) sucks the big one, so it's taking me a while to find out the stuff I need to.
Will be all working properly again soon! (In the meantime, amuse yourself with silly pictures of cauliflowers why don't you?)
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 9:30:58 PM
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Probably the coolest Flash game ever?
It's Lego meets Atic Atac meets Jetset Willy (play it online [Java]) meets Super Mario World.
Go and have a play of The Lego Treasure Hunt (arrow keys, and enter to do stuff) [is Flash]
We've just got a new Lego shop here in Brighton. They now do Lego bricks in the funkiest colours. And they have a wall at the back of the shop where you can buy a cupful of individual bricks/bits/trees/fences etc etc (yes, really - it's like going to the cinema and going to the self-service soft drinks machine)
Yay for never growing up!
[via herself, which was via meish.org]
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 6:49:25 PM
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We thought we had dreamt it......but no!
OK, my weirdest blog post ever.
A few weekends back me and the lady were attempting to buy food at the local supermarket on a Sunday afternoon whilst not in a particularly good state of health i.e. we'd had a very heavy social weekend and we could hardly see or remember our own names. We went to buy cauliflower (as you do). Seemed like a simple enough idea at the time, but then we saw this thing where the cauliflowers are supposed to be and almost jumped out of our collective (rather pasty and it has to be admitted rather clammy) skins...
"That's not a cauliflower!"; we said [ok, that's a lie as we could hardly speak at all, but we both thought it at least]; "that's a mad creature from Mars!"
We go home. In shock. And until this afternoon we had made a pact never to speak of it again, presuming it was simply an hallucination and something we should erase from our memories forever.
They had the same freaky deaky vegetables there at the supermarket today. And we weren't totally out of our trees this time, so we bought one. It is real. It is a cauliflower. Simply a speciality "Romanes" cauliflower.
It looks like this:
[you do realise that if you click on this little thumbnail to download the larger version, you will be requesting a 200K-odd picture of a cauliflower? you DO realise that right?]
OK, so maybe everyone knows about these, but I'm 33 and had never seen one before in my life.
Nature can be freaky, but oh so beautiful at the same time. Just look at how amazing it is! (it does taste just like the normal white version, by the way)
UPDATE: we searched for ages and ages to find any other reference to these mad cauliflowers on the internet - yes, we were still not 100% sure we weren't imagining it all - we try handfuls of Google searches, but the one that finally worked for me was to enter "i bought an odd cauliflower" - and this page turned up. It's real! It's NOT just us!
(go look at the picture links at the bottom of the page - we didn't paint our one though, we just ate it!)
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 4:16:10 PM
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Please Please Please Please Please
Let this be true!
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 6:53:33 AM
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Electric 6 - For the Googlers
So many people seem to end up here after doing Google searches (is there really any other search engine worth using anymore?) for "Electric 6" I thought I'd better say:
Our (Fatboy Slim) remix of "Dance Commander" (well, the dub version at least, I guess they didn't want to use the vocal version we did on the CD release) is being released on the 13th of October (see the full details here on NME).
(via, and prompted by, the girlfriend)
[is "Googlers" the right phrase for it? I have no idea...]
Posted By Simon Thornton @ 10:45:09 PM
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