Go now

Where to donate to the Tsunami appeal.

Dub

Echo, reverb, bass, drums.

You get less than that for involuntary manslaughter

When I started with my current job, I was in my twenties. Now I am in my forties. Shouldn't it be time to retire soon??

S'rung

A history of safes and safe-cracking - looks like an cracking read. I'm sure I've come across Hunkin before somewhere in TRW, for some reason I think cartoons in the Observer when I was a kid: his style is familiar, the name as well. Details elude me..

Update: found it. He had a strip in the Observer called The Rudiments Of Wisdom which ran from 1971 to 1985. See also here.

Another update: an interesting paper (2.5MB PDF) on 'Safecracking for the computer scientist' here.

Him name is Hopkin Green Frog

Who took Terry's frog? Genius. Check back for new entries!

ps he'll find his frog!

pps No he won't..

Mucky

Think I've fucked up the layout enough for one night, maybe I'll know what I'm doing by tomorrow..

An "aha" moment with Thunderbird

I've been using Mozilla Thunderbird for email and newsgroups since it was called Minotaur (of course) and I've watched helplessly as my Mail folders grew in size ever since. Now I finally find the "Compact folders" function.. hidden away in plain sight in the "File" menu.. And I had to use Google to find that out. Oh well, my Inbox file went from 250MB to comparatively nothing, and I won't need to worry about all the emails I moved or deleted last year reappearing en masse anymore, which happened a couple of times.

Anyway, Thunderbird is being rushed to 1.0 (not literally, I hope) - it's an email client along the same kind of lines as Firefox the browser: built with usability and security in mind. For example, images in emails which aren't from people you know are not displayed by default - which avoids having to actually see the obscene filth that passes for email these days. Tbird makes it difficult to fool you by pretending that links in emails appear to point to one place while taking you another, it has a "Simple HTML" display mode which is somewhere between plain text and untrammeled HTML - (I can't get used to using HTML email after forcing Outl**k into plain text for so long) which is useful when you are viewing messages which may contain unpleasant or malicious content.

It has a built in spellchecker, RSS reader and the ability to create Virtual Folders (a bit like "Search Folders", apparently, I haven't found the need yet). Mouse gestures work so you can increase text size, move to the next message etc just with gestures. Of course, the usual CTRL+ and CTRL- shortcuts change the text size too, like in Firefox (CTRL-zero resets the text size to the default, by the way)

What else? Message filters that work and are completely configurable, built-in adaptive spam filters, extensions and themes and everything else good about Firefox is here too. Thunderbird defaults to protecting users' privacy and security, and does a good job doing what an email program has to do.

I've got a candidate build for 1.0 to try - which reminds me, you can back up Thunderbird and Firefox (& Mozilla & Netscape) profiles with Mozilla Backup, on Windows anyway.

If you're fed up or frustrated with Outl**k or Outl**k Express, why not give Thunderbird a try when 1.0 comes out? It will import your settings and contacts and mail, if you want it to, although it won't import any attachments. [Edit: this isn't true of the release versions]

Mac Reedy's

Ask Tog - HCI and Macs. I enjoyed using the various Kintoshes at chez Turnbull, Safari seemed a bit sloooow but I liked the display of the page-load progress in the location bar. Took my mind off how long it took to render pages.. but I managed to download Firefox and run it off the desktop. Then I moved it into an application folder using Finder and started it with the dock. Way! I can use a Mac now! I even know to remember to look up the top for the menus, and look in "recent apps" or use Finder. Though I'm not sure how to find Finder..

There's never a better time

I have an Amazon wishlist - not sure how it would work for presents, wouldn't I realise the item had been bought?

Mere words fail to express my disgust etc etc

The recent hoo-hah over Prince Charles' comments about knowing one's place remind me why I am such a strong supporter of the Euro - I don't want that man's face anywhere near my trouser pockets, whether as a coin in the front or a note in the back.

I mean really, a man that requires his manservants to masturbate him when he feels the need for release as the spiritual and moral leader of this nation. Well, we've had bad kings before. Maybe the Queen could live for ever in a cryogenic tank and we can just forget the whole sorry mess.

Blogger dead

Is not blogger.com limping along unable to cope with the load? It takes a long time to login, you never know if the admin pages are going to load (especially the 'edit' page which I use a lot, and the 'Create Post' page which no-one else ever seems to use!) - publishing is a bit of a lottery: and they never delete any of the crappy blogs with one single crap entry from years ago (which blogs happen to have names that I wanted to use :-).

I'm trying to post our nineball results (I want to get them on as soon as I can!) and it's just not playing. Let's see if I can post this. Ah. I am unable to post there that I won 15-6. Shame.

As a complication - and an extra risk factor - Robin gave me a cute tiny USB lasermouse Kathy had got him - it's promotional for "Bondronat" - which eats the batteries and I'm on battery now. I've set the warning to go at 90% and shutdown at 85% - see if I can get at least a few seconds warning before it dies.. it never was a very good battery (it's a lot newer than the laptop, at least to me - the first battery died altogether after a year or so charging continuously, it's still in my 'dead battery box': I just can't bring myself to throw batteries in the rubbish, the chemicals in them should never reach the water table. Oh well. It just di

No surrender to the RIAA

When youngsters find out the benefits of copyright for themselves, they'll be less likely to disrespect the property rights of others

Respect Copyrights

When I was a kid I certainly never produced anything worth copyrighting. Unfortunately it's a Flash-based site so it doesn't shizzolate (there's a weird redirect issue as well) - I'm not sure when I last saw "disrespect" actually spelt out..

Too little, too late, too expensive!

Microsft have reacted to Firefox with the Windows Marketplace - your one-stop shop for Internet Explorer Add-ons. (As long as you are using IE on Windows) For only $30 you can buy a popup blocker, a few more bucks for a Download Manager, and splurge the rest of your money on a skin which might give you tabbed browsing.
Result? A browser which has at least some of the features of Firefox, for only slightly less money than an upgrade to Windows XPSP2.
How stable and secure your browser will be is another matter.
On the main Windows Marketplace Page, one of the entries in the 'Most popular categories' section is 'Adware removal tools': once computer sellers and ISPs realise they can ship a branded Firefox installation (at minimal cost) and save hugely on support costs (because of the absence of spyware/adware problems) they will follow Netscape and hopefully laugh all the way to the bank. What goes around comes around.. there used to be a guide to branding Netscape, but it probably went south with devedge - there's a tutorial for deployment (in a corporate environment, say) here.

Rude words are words too

Wordcount - look yourself up for your WordRank (tm)

Sweet Zombie Jesus!

Great Futurama quotes at the wikiquote. Because of the wonders of wikis, if your favourite one isn't there you can just add it.

Every cloud...

Just like a birthday present for Firefox, there's a brand new Internet Explorer worm doing the rounds: it appears to have gone from proof of concept to critical risk over the course of the weekend. Don't click on links in strange emails - or get Firefox and click on what you want..

Who ever presses the 'home' button anyway?

I notice that Microsoft in their infinite wisdom removed support for "about:mozilla" from Internet Explorer in XP Service Pack 2. Type it in the address bar and instead of a pleasing blue page (which previous versions would render) IE displays its standard 'Action Cancelled' page. Unless you set about:mozilla to be your home page, in which case when IE starts it shows simply the word "Mozilla". Or you could use other text - if you set your home page to be "about:You should use Firefox instead - it's much safer" (you obviously have to do this directly in the tools\internet options dialog) then that's what you see when IE starts up, without the about:. Juvenile I know, but I'm stretching for reasons to ever use IE these days. When I use it very occasionally to test this or that it seems so clunky.

Firefox 1.0 is out today: pause to download and install it: run it and make it your default browser - your computer will thank you.

Tomorrow I am going to rasterbate

The Rasterbator - it's just a question of deciding what picture to use..

Thinking Machine 4: Play the Game

Will I beat the turbulence chess engine or will I be distracted by the pretty lights.. damn, not fair!

strtran("Hunting", "H", "C")

Saw on the back of a little car driven by a fat man:

Hunting is natural! Even foxes do it!

Maybe: but they don't dress up in colourful furs, ride on genetically mutated badgers and drive packs of sharp-toothed vicious voles in pursuit of chickens.[Edit - this is obviously inspired by (i.e. plagiarising) Bill Bailey, though I didn't realise it at the time]

Hunting may be natural, but when one species is set onto another species for the entertainment of a third (who are riding on a fourth) then we have come a long way from nature. If we allow hunters to set their dogs onto foxes, why not allow them to set their dogs against a bear when they get home? Or make the dogs fight each other?

This is why the cruelty of foxhunting is irrelevant. If you really must hunt foxes with dogs, then don't make a fucking party out of it - make it a shit job done by smelly guys in dirty jackets.

Want a bigger extension?

Come and see Huge URL - here's a sample

Fossil

my new watch

Worksafe

NICE TITS - Pictures of Tits.

No balls no babies

An ordered list to help you order your life. A bit more exhortative than my usual muck and drivel but there you go, I liked the title.

So that's what a masters in marketing qualifies you for

Giz a job French new-media stylee. Good accordian music too..

Going to dress you up in my love

In another entry to the occasional series of animal clothing, I present for your amusement and edification - dressing up cats. Warning - this page contains Comic Sans in it's most evil form.

Life goes on for the rest of us

Surprised to discover that "the experiences of dancing and programming to have a great deal in common". Perl programmers have big heads, if you ask me..

Ar Jim Lad

I liked this email telling Dreamworks' lawyers that "it is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and
that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons." That should work..

XPSP2 not secure after all, shock horror..

Scroll this web-page in Internet Explorer and then look in your startup folder. Oh dear. Fixed by the latest IE security rollup.

Crufty crufty

This article discusses how UI decisions can persist when their original rationale is gone.. I found it while wondering whether to buy UI Bloopers (I decided not to partially on the strength of the Amazon review - "For the most part, the book's value can be captured by reading the seven page table of contents carefully". Hmm, £21 for that?). I also noticed that the User Interface Hall(s) of Fame/Shame have gone, they used to be at iarchitect.com. Boo.

Skin pantones

According to this article from the Sydney Morning Herald The Simpsons' skin tone is RGB 255, 217, 15 while Marge's hair is RGB 23, 145, 255. Isn't that useful!

Oh dear, they will be cross

You're not supposed to link to the Athens 2004 web site without written permission, according to their Hyperlink Policy... oops..

Don't read this while lying on the sofa..

Woman Dies After Six Years On Couch - "After years of staying put, her skin had literally become one with the sofa". Yuk.

Groomy

Here's a picture of Gaut on his wedding day - sorry there aren't more pics but I took my old camera and it turns out it's rubbish after all (I had to get a new one to realise that!)

Sidewalk Flats

Thanks to Shirley for these pictures - view the whole collection here

Kirked

Updated: this really is William Shatner covering Common People - hear more Shatner & Co here where I also found out this is a teaser for a forthcoming album.. oh brave new world that has such things in it.. Clive Banks's site is a great resource for TV SciFi fans.

Update: Shatner features in the Re-Code video.

Updated again: Klingon Google

Catlife

Daisy the cat was born on 1st May 1987 and was put to sleep on 21st September 2006. For nineteen years her story was my life, my life was her story. Let's stick to her.

Records are incomplete from the time of her birth.. I was living in Tooting at the time (Ansell Road, next to where the garage was, a few dooors from the "second hand shop" that specialized in nasty hifi) and I drove down to Brighton to collect Daisy and her brother Tom from Satan - they were the only progeny of Tabitha, who was herself a "gymslip mother" being less than a year old. That's cats for you. I do remember my motivation for getting them: I felt I was rootless and that the responsibility of having cats would provide some stability. My mum and dad had moved from Epsom to Glasgow among other contributors.

So I collected them in my fancy car of the time but on the way home to Tooting, while the two tiny kittens were in a basket on the back seat, an illegally overloaded Volvo overshot the end of a side street and buried itself in the side of my beautiful Alfa. Which was then revealed to be made of "not-really-steel", a metal composed of paint on the outside and rust on the inside. He didn't have any insurance. Three years later (I think it was to the day, more or less) I got a third of what I paid for the car. It's still the most expensive car I ever owned.

Anyway, Tom and Daisy were happy in Tooting. I lived with two nurses and a painter and they indulged her (Daisy used to bring shrews and voles as presents for one of the nurses) and the was a garage next door, they could spend a lot of their time under cars. Especially when I wanted to get them in. But I wasn't very happy in Tooting, and we moved to Brighton.

We lived in a house in St Martin's Place off Lewes Road: not our finest hour. I was working as a roadie at the time and was away a lot, and Tom and Daisy had a stomach disorder which manifested itself in small piles of runny cat poo everywhere. We were living with two lesbians and an Aspergers sufferer, and they ignored the excrement so on my return I had lots of crap to deal with. Eventually I fixed their stomachs by feeding them nothing but chicken mince for a month: I think I can still remember the smell of it cooking.. yes, dis-gus-ting.

Me and Aspergers were supposed to take over the tenancy of the house with a hippy idiot and an asylum seeker but that fell through (surprised?) so I was a bit scuppered. As it was, I ended up moving to Hull and renting a flat off Pearson Park with a crazy woman I met on the road. We stayed in Hull for a year or so I think. I used to cook for hippie buskers (as Borlotti's, after the beans) - they would perform during the day and come round to ours and pay for a veggie dinner. I remember Tom got hit by a car, but it just broke one of his teeth and made him woozy for a day or so. The first of the 'extra' cats, though, came from Hull - Joe-who-had-the-most-beautiful-eyes and who deserves his story to be told.

I got him from the hippies - some loser had taken him on at about six weeks or so and then failed the responsibility test, locking poor Joe in a cupboard without food or water. The hippies found out and knew I had cats of course so I got another. Joe emerged blinking with huge knots in his fur (hugely amusing the hippies - a kitty with dreads) and the most beautiful eyes - blue and green and deep. But going without food had made him greedy, and he from that day always ate all the other cats' food as well as his own. Poor Joe - he was about 3 or so he developed a tongue infection and got a bit ill, then he got hit by a car and thrown in a skip (my mum didn't tell me that for a few years). He's buried in my mum's back garden. He had the most beautiful eyes ever, amazing green hurricanes of colour.

We moved further up north to Edinburgh, which was very cold and dreich, as they say up there. More cats - at one point I had five. One of them was Joey, a runt kitten I found in the wheel arch of a VW camper van in a street on the south side in Edinburgh where I used to go to buy vegetables.

Then I moved back to Brighton via a stay in Glasgow, but the cats stayed there with my mum as outside cats living in her outhouse and very rarely coming in: finally the tyranny of the litter tray was over, and the world was their toilet. I stayed with Jon & Carry in Brighton when their youngest child was born, then collected Daisy and Tom and we were together in Brighton again. We moved in with Aspergers in a bizarre house - very dark and gothic in a kind of stone-cladding way. Dirty, but big - lots of space for the cats, and they needed it.

Tom and Daisy had never been what in a human you would call 'close' - when they were really little they used to huddle together for a bit of protection but as adults they fought like, um, cat and cat. Lots of lurking and leaping, pouncing and prancing, scratching and biting, ambushing and hijacking - catfighting. But, they had stuck together up to this point.

Cue the return of our landlady from Thailand and her boyfriend from a Japanese prison. They got a kitten, who got fleas, the whole house got fleas. Daisy developed a strategy which involved touching the floor at as few points as possible: Tom fucked off. He'd shown a lax attitude to ownership previously, adopting an entire block of students in Glasgow, but this time he was offski not tomski, never to return. This would be around 1993.

A few months later the rest of us left after receiving death threats from the formerly incarcerated boyfriend. Well, he never threatened the cat in writing, but he did me! A couple of rentals later and I bought a garden flat on Springfield Road: there was a garage opposite again, Daisy used to pop across and beg for bits of sandwiches from the mechanics. I was lucky enough to meet Becky, and she moved in with me. She isn't crazy, I have been lucky this time.

We got another cat, Millie, in 1999 and we got married in 2001. We moved into our present house in with the two cats and started to plan a family - and we thought what a lovely name Daisy would be for a little girl, if we were lucky enough to be blessed with child. It seemed impractical to have a cat and a child with the same name, though, leading to exchanges like:

Where's Daisy? On top of the door (the cat would climb onto the top of a door whenever a dog came round, or some child-related threshold was passed). Or up the pear tree. On the changing table, in the cot (that last applies to all three of them, Millie most of all) - you get the picture, it would be confusing. Here's a picture of her in the old car seat.

Anyway, the decision was kind of taken out of our hands. When I was impregnating Becky on holiday, Daisy was movin' out. We got back to one cat where previously there was two. It turned out she had gone to live across the street in a basement flat, eventually along with another white cat. They put in a cat flap, and we got used to seeing her occasionally in the street.

Nine months later, as is the plan, we had a daughter and called her Daisy. Nine months later, to our surprise, Daisy the cat came home again. She'd popped in a few times during the interveening eighteen months, maybe stayed over once or twice, but this was a surprise.

She was sixteen or seventeen years old, by this point. Not bad for an old cat with hardly any teeth (she lost them to gingivitis a few years ago, Henry the vet whipped them out - she only has a few left, but she does fine with them).

When she first cam back, she took to sleeping on the first stair immediately underneath the stair guard, so everytime you went past there was no room at all. She'd never been much of what you would call a 'house cat' - in summertime she would hardly ever come in - but she wasn't going outside. The downstairs toilet was her toilet too, but after we kept that shut she would aim for the litter tray (with her eyes closed, I think, judging by her inaccuracy).

We weren't sure at this point which (if any) of her senses were still functional: was she blind and deaf or just extremely good at ignoring humans? Is there a light still on behind the pretty eyes? Some said she had come home to die (I said that if she carried on sleeping on that stair she would ake someone with her) and that she was senile. Either or both may be true, but she's holding her own. Daisy is crawling now, (told you it was confusing) and thinks it's hugely funny to sit on any cat or dog she can.

After a couple of weeks, she raised herself off the stairs and went and slept on the post thing outside our house for a fortnight (during the two weeks of sunshine we were allocated this year). This was better than the stairs, but there were a couple of incidents which me and Becky found quite distressing, not showing humans in a good light at all.

As soon as our mini-summer ended, she moved back inside, where she still
is now. She sleeps on the top floor mostly, unfazed by bashings she sometimes get from DaisyBaby. This is a picture of her looking down on me.



Edit:
1 Nov 2006. Cat has a dislocated hip. Henry the vet thinks I really need to consider having her put to sleep.
2 Nov 2006. After an xray, it's determined she has dislocated her hip in an unusual way - one that causes little damage to the hip gristle and joint, can be put back without anaesthetic, and doesn't need to be strapped afterwards. She has to be confined [in the office] for a week when she comes home tomorrow. She had just moved out as well, sulking back to No 23 after she was put on a course of antibiotics (Beck kept finding soggy pills in the hall).

www is deprecated

Daisy's site is now a Class B no-www site. Makes sense to me..

Ello ello ello

Updated again: What's going on 'ere, then? Interesting again in the light of increasing speculation about a Google branded browser.

Installing Bugzilla on Microsoft Windows

Installing Bugzilla on Microsoft Windows - no need to manually patch the source and compile. Updated: I've updated to 2.18RC2.

Weird and not entirely work-safe

Thank Travis Kroh for this link and especially this one too.
A question - would you describe this cat as 'lucky'?

Note Chris Hemple's open proxy can be found here..

Must... divulge... personal... details...

BugMeNot.com uses a database of fake logins so we don't have to register your personal details to read websites (e.g. NY Times). They have a very funny registration page which has to be filled out "if you are an employee, partner, affiliate or legal representative of any site which enforces compulsory user registration". Class.

More FIP

the Prince Albert in Trafalgar Street are doing a special FIP night for devotees of the French radio station we get here in Brighton.

404 Doodoo Error

404 Doodoo Error - it's not actually their 404 - this is.

Fun and educational

The HTMLephant

The opposite of useful

A site to thank Prime Minister Tony Blair for his support of the American actions in Iraq. If you want to. I didn't.

Arseblog

An Arsenal blog - no RSS though, cheapskates.

Optical illlusion?

I just don't see it but it seems to be true..

Blogthis with this

I use this javascript as my throbber URL - it invokes BlogThis for the current page. Useful if you blog links and remember it's there.. it has to be set using about:config or with this in your user.js file:

// Set throbber to "Blog This"
user_pref("browser.throbber.url", "javascript:Q='';
x=document;y=window;
if(x.selection){Q=x.selection.createRange().text;}
else if(y.getSelection){Q=y.getSelection();}
else if(x.getSelection){Q=x.getSelection();}
void(window.open
('http://new.blogger.com/blog_this.pyra?t='
+escape(Q)+'&u='+escape(location.href)+'&n='
+escape(document.title),
'bloggerForm','scrollbars=no,
width=475,height=300,top=175,left=75,
status=yes,resizable=yes'));");


hehe

Robin sent me this link via gmail - am I really like this?

Battle robots - Stuart VS Robin

Not only do I lose but he has an onboard iPod! - life is unfair..

Hmm

Young people, eh! (comment here rather than there please ha-ha as-if)

Geeks are the new gooks

Here's a kb article from when Windows XP was in beta (and VB still existed) How To Modify the Default Web Browser and E-mail Client Programmatically in Windows XP - handy if you use XP and want to have a different default browser per user.

A link in exchange for Robin

Turn your PC into a Mac

Source Destruction System

Visual SourceSafe: Microsoft's Source Destruction System As a developer (in a team of two) who could never be arsed to set up VSS this comes as a relief:

A single misbehaving computer can destroy the database

- a single misbehaving developer can fuck up a project but this..

If you're considering SourceSafe, consider something else. If you're using SourceSafe now, migrate away as soon as possible

Unequivocal, dude..

IE hell (2)

The files you need to run standalone IE onWindows have been repackaged here - any readers of a list apart might like the bookmarklet resize alistapart which puts that site into 'landscape' mode. It must bug web designers that an increasing percentage of their views will discard parts of the layout and resize or restyle any elements the way it suits the viewer.

Train times

I don't travel by train very often, so I've never had to use the Accessible UK Train Timetable - now I have I can report it is a clean, usable interface with a reasonably good response time. If you're one of these 'young' type of people it will text your journey details to you.

As if that wasn't enough, there's also the live departure boards

If the site is down there's an minimalist alternative

Stu

Premature Iraqi Nation

Visit Saddam's Cyber Palace soon to be Saddam's Cyber Prison I expect. Divert to the Sinn Fein Online Store if you have time - I like the "I still hate Thatcher" T-shirts.. Want something more substantial? you need Villain Supply!.
I'm going on a stag do on saturday but not to Staghdad fortunately. And, last but not least, a toy's holiday

Daily Zen

I'm very taken by today's quote on Daily Zen

In the green creek, spring water is clear
At Cold Mountain, the moon’s corona is white.
Silence your understanding and,
The spirit of itself is enlightened.
View all things as the Void and,
This world is even more still

Takes me back..

Sneaky

I suppose this point of this type of link is to avoid referrer logging ? http://www.google.com/url?q=http://stuartd.blogspot.com/

Updated: another is http://www.blogger.com/r?http://stuartd.blogspot.com.com

Second hand links

Tx to Robin for Pete & Dave's Dodo Emporium and woman gives birth to frog. I think..

STFW (2)

Just Goo It - a practical usage: "The answer to your question can be found here."

TBC

B6 d+ t+ k- s u-- f i-- o+ x-- e- l? c?

It had to happen - the blogger code (decoder here)

IE hell

How to run as many versions of Internet Explorer as you need. Unfortunately, this can be non-zero..

One for me, later

The Maitrikara

Unforgettable

Saw the great Bill Bailey live last night: fantastic. His version of Kraftwerk performing The Hokey Cokey will live in my memory forever..

H2G2

STFW and you may find find the answer.

Foxy Foxy FireFox

FireFox 0.9 has been released and a nice man has offered to help anyone having trouble migrating from Internet Explorer.

Shouldn't be much call for it - the (few) bugs in 0.9 seem to relate to those of us who've been running nightly builds, although there seem to be some issues with themes.

Did you spot the new domain (getfirefox.com) by the way? Seemingly mozillafirefox.com and mozillabrowser.com are coming soon.

googlemail

There's been a bit of a viral meme gmail frenzy recently - I saw this Free Gmail Invite! get over a million hits since lunchtime (yes, a few thousand were from me) which may mean it's going to go public soon. Maybe this 'Invite' thing is to get those with web-power on their side at the launch - being a bit taken aback at some of the negative publicity they got on April 1st.

Well, I want one anyway. I want in early so I can get stu@gmail.com (though I know it will get a gazillion spams a day being dictionaryword@wellknownprovider.com) - don't wants to be stuartd32653565!

FIP

FIP is a French radio station we can get in Brighton. C'est tres eclectique! Ecoute ici (best open in a new window or disable browser resizing by scripts :-)

I like to listen to it when in the bath with Daisy (still haven't fixed my car aerial, so I'm shazamming all my old tapes and it's eating all my phone credit)

How to make a record that sounds good

Everything you ever wanted to know about vinyl, good for DJs (dance not wedding variety)

Gunlaug's Portal

Gunlaug's Dairy Farm and CSS Portal The winters are too long, I think. "I like style! It is something to be exploited." he says. He does, and he does..

Rudies can't fail

I was looking again at Zeldman's archive of rejected adverts - my all time favourite is this one but I have to give honourable mention to this one and the four which follow it - bear in mind that Zeldman put a disclaimer on these that they may cause offence.

Not to you lot, I expect!

Unreality TV

Where's (dead link warning) Kitten Hate when we really need it? Admittedly it was about something other than hating Kitten off Big Brother but it would have been a consolation. Ah well, at least she isn't from Brighton and at least she's gone.

Transfers

• Lores Ipsum Generator


• Take better pics with camera phones


• Quiet PC (1)


• Silent PC Review


• Quiet PC (2)

Bloody

Interested in becoming a vampire? This is for you.

DVD

Bought a DVD-RW drive, amazed to find I need software to burn DVDs! Here's a primer on dual layer DVD recording



I found a free DVD burner program which installed spyware (NavExcel). I also found an article on bitsetting which I don't understand at all yet.

Disappearing before your eyes

Gets smaller evey day..

Bridget Jones' Glastonbury

[Moved here April 2006]

Wednesday, 24.6.98
Lagers 10, Fags 20,sleep 5 hours, rain none, Visits from Robin & Charlotte 1. Attempted visits to Robin & Charlotte 0
Mud report: very little
Food consumed:
Burger & Chips 2, crisps

Set off from Brighton 1 pm ; left Shoreham 2 pm; arrived 5 pm got in 6 pm. Parked, carried in 4 tents & 4 lagers. Put tents up. Went back for more lager + sleeping bags. Blew up airbed (phew! Much panting) and went for more lager (parked about half mile away).
Sally & Dan & Jane & Andy arrived 2.30 am. Went for wander, sat by fire they went to get sleeping bags etc (???!!!!) we went to bed. 5am.

Thurday, 25.6.98
Lagers 8, Fags 40, sleep 9 hours, rain on and off all day
Thoughts of going home 0, Visits from Robin & Charlotte 0. Attempted visits to Robin & Charlotte 1

Mud report: forming. Water building up alarmingly on top of ground

Food consumed: Burger & Chips 1, Breakfast 2, Chicken crap 1,

Woke up a 8am with screams from Stu that the tent had exploded, Beck got up put waterproofs on and set about bashing pegs about in the pouring rain, whilst Stu smoked a steadying fag in the comparative luxury of the tent.
Woke up again at 2pm: still raining. Went for breakfast in a diner come van with bolted tables, attitude staff and lots plastic - a real caff. Luxury.
Rob and Marina arrived 4 pm. Had bright idea of getting everyone to played football (all did except Janie – 4 a side) and managed somehow to get on telly (apparently.)

At night wandered down to the mad ('green') end of site with Rob and Marina for look at healing field, paranoid field, odd field etc - as we got to the heart of it (past the giant ship made of wood, right at the voodoo heads made of branches) it all got a bit weird so we split, afeared of luddites with clubs attacking us for having an electric torch. Trudged to the car for more lagers etc.
Went to bed sometime after 1am.


Friday 26.6.98
Lagers: far too many, Fags: far too many (quite a lot of wet ones), sleep 5 hours, rain all day (constant), thoughts of going home 0, Bands seen 0 Football matches watched 1
Visits from Robin and Charlotte: 2. Attempted visits to Robin and Charlotte: 0

Food: Egg roll 1, Tuna steak 1 (more probably including burger & chips)

Mud report: The bottom of our field resembles a Burmese marsh; elsewhere lots of churned waterlogged grass and slurry

Woken up at 10.30am by administrative error, Dance tent full in swing. Went for tea in the rain. Drank beer. Went to dance tent (strangely quiet...) where it turned out the sewage sucker they were going to use to drain the excess water was set to blow instead of suck and the whole thing was full of shit. Which we probably walked through. Appalling mud - 4" of slurry and worse.
Went back to car for more beer.
All assemble 6ish for footie. Sit in pissing rain for an hour waiting for football to start, then stand in pissing rain 2 hours watching it. Glory! but very very wet. Back to tent for soup & boiled red wine with Rob and Marina. Rob stopped shivering eventually.

Saturday
All things have become a function of mud.
Lagers: lots of muddy ones Fags: lots of muddy ones Sleep: 12 muddy hours Rain: on and off until 7 pm
Thoughts of going home 0, Bands seen 0 Football matches watched 0.5 Visits from Robin and Charlotte: 0. Attempted visits to Robin and Charlotte 0

Food: mud

Caught in murderous rainstorm on first-thing wood run - dry clothes soaked, fire almost extinguished, rob's drying sleeping bag soaked.
Built large fire to dry. Intermittent bright shiny thing in the sky - apparently called the stun, or something. Will it catch on?

Eventually saw beautiful rainbow stretching across whole site with 1 end on a farmhouse! Signal from Eavis that worst is over.

Sunday
Last day!!!
Mud report:
Much of the site under water; most fields either wet slurry or churned sticky mud. The only patches of grass now are where people have gone home. We sit on one.

Lagers: 2 (Stu) 5 (Beck) Fags: 40 (rizlas running dry on site (ha ha)) Sleep: some odd bits Rain: none !!!

Thoughts of going home - know any big numbers? Bands seen 1, Football matches watched 0

Visits from Robin and Charlotte: 0. Attempted visits to Robin and Charlotte 1 (they had gone home)
Abandoned tent, packed up, spent all day tring to light fire (succeeded too late)
Watched Pulp standing on some one else’s abandoned tent to avoid sinking into the mud. I will never forget it: they took the stage, and launched into Do You Remember The First Time? whose first line - "You say you've got to go home" - brought massive cheers.
Left Glastonbury at 1am (managed not to get stuck in mud by being first out of the field) arrived home at 5am went to bed for 12 solid hours.
Monday - Thursday
Ligering traces of mud still around.
Friday – present
Slight illness, nice photos of the rainbow, see you there next year!!!

XX Bridget