B2 d t+ k s++ u- f i o x e l- c--
Blogger Code is similar to Geek Code, only it's far more up-to-date. It's about blogging for starters.
Despite running this site since 1995, I only started using a blogging tool last year, so my first answer is based on that.
(via blumenvasen.org)
I hope Keisha wins Best Actress, but Charlize probably will.
I will be highly amused if Johnny wins best actor, although I suspect Bill Murray will steal it.
Belleville Rendez-Vous should obviously win the animation category. Why Brother Bear was nominated is beyond me.
The Return of the King is overrated, but that's not a big surprise. It should win Best Visual Effects, but little else.
Whale Rider and Big Fish should be in for Best Picture.
You may have noticed my bias towards Whale Rider. That's because I think it was easily the best film of 2003.
Venue: Odeon, Guildford
Cruise's character Aldren is hired to train the Japanese conscript army to fight against the rebel Samurai: technology making obsolete the old ways.
I was expecting something like Shogun. What I got was an attempted Dances with Wolves set in late 19th Century Japan. Visually the film was impressive. The sword fights and battle sequences were well choreographed and filmed. The actors all performed admirably, but were sadly let down by poor character development. Toll's photography was wonderful and, frankly, saved the film.
Reflection on the plight of aboriginals seemed to be a little forced. Why did the writers feel it necessary to make so many references to the Native Americans? Perhaps they thought it would be easier for the US market to sympathise with Katsumoto's rebels?
This is an unimaginative, but well photographed, action film. A predictable story demonstrating a superficial understanding of the culture and history. If only I'd realised that John Logan was the writer before I forked out cash.
After a pin-prick on the side of my finger and some questions I was finally okayed to give some blood.
I proceeded to have an encouraging conversation with the guy with the needle.
Thankfully it all went okay and it was no more painful than a pinch. Didn't feel anything, apart from my fingers getting a little numb.
I had my iPod and people asked me what I was listening to. Well I had a little Ben Harper on to start, and then some Kenickie. I should have lied, as I then had to explain who they were.
Very relaxing though. One nurse suggested they should hand out iPods on entry. What a good idea - just have to stop people running off with them... collapsing on the floor and being dragged back to the bed.
Sing Yia Yeu Ui! (Teochew) Gong Xi Fa Cai!
Have a Happy and Prosperous New Year!
(image courtesy of onemoremonkey)
Two lovely flash animations and a song to brighten up your day.
Enjoy!
Kelly's post has prompted another Desert Island question.
You will be given:
The mobile boat library will return in a year when you can swap some books.
Please post or trackback your answer. If you are having a tough time deciding, maybe The Big Read will help you compile your list.
You may have noticed the site gnomes at work. They have implemented MTSimpleComments across the site, which means that Trackbacks and Comments appear seamlessly.
The only bit which didn't quite work was the recent trackback/comments. I wanted something like recently_commented_on for MTEntries but for both trackbacks and comments.
After fiddling for a bit, I have figured out a way to do this.
> Backup files. Use at your own risk #### Prerequisites First off you have to hack simplecomments.pm:The following is code you can put into a template.
<MTCollateCollect>
<MTSimpleComments lastn="30">
<MTSimpleCommentEntry>
<MTCollateRecord>
<MTCollateSetField name="entry_date"><$MTEntryDate$></MTCollateSetField>
<MTCollateSetField name="id"><$MTEntryID$></MTCollateSetField>
<MTCollateSetField name="title"><$MTEntryTitle$></MTCollateSetField>
<MTCollateSetField name="url"><$MTEntryPermalink$></MTCollateSetField>
<MTCollateSetField name="count"><$MTSimpleCommentCount$></MTCollateSetField>
<MTSimpleCommentIfTrackback>
<MTCollateSetField name="type">Ping</MTCollateSetField>
<MTCollateSetField name="date"><$MTPingDate format="%Y%m%d%H%M"$></MTCollateSetField>
</MTSimpleCommentIfTrackback>
<MTSimpleCommentIfComment>
<MTCollateSetField name="type">Comment</MTCollateSetField>
<MTCollateSetField name="date"><$MTCommentDate format="%Y%m%d%H%M"$></MTCollateSetField>
</MTSimpleCommentIfComment>
</MTCollateRecord>
</MTSimpleCommentEntry>
</MTSimpleComments>
</MTCollateCollect>
<div class="side">
<ul>
<MTCollateList sort="date:- id:d" limit="5">
<li><a title="<$MTCollateField name="count"$> Comments & Trackbacks" href="<$MTCollateField name="url" regex="stripFile"$>#comments"><$MTCollateField name="title"$></a></li>
</MTCollateList>
</ul>
</div>
The Daily Telegraph Adventure Travel & Sports Show
This was a pretty big exhibition, taking up 3 floors. We managed to cover about 2.5 yesterday. Now I have to read through several bags of material about adventures in Antarctica, Nepal, Tibet, Africa, etc.
The few stands which stood out in my mind were:
The travel photography talk was sadly disappointing. If you knew even a little about photography, then you would have learnt nothing new.
One speaker's photos were particularly uninspiring - luckily he zipped through them at 1 slide/second. Maybe he knew... Thankfully, more skilled photographers had their work on display at the Travel Photography Gallery.
I managed to catch the end of the Reindeer Trekking talk. Lena Conlan gave the captivating slide show presentation. Now I want to go reindeer kissing.
Movable Type 2.66 has been released.
Like others, I was not happy with the redirect they put in. I've implemented a quick patch to allow you to disable this particular feature in your mt.cfg. Another change was to remove the _blank target from the redirect and making it valid XHTML. > Backup files. Use at your own risk
Since I first released this patch, MT 2.661 has been released. If you intend to use redirects, then I recommend you upgrade to MT 2.661 and apply the new patches. If not, then don't upgrade to MT 2.661 and just apply the patch for MT 2.66.
I've set it to default to the old behaviour. If you want to enable/disable it then add the following line to your mt.cfg. 1 enables it, 0 disables it. Don't need to alter mt.cfg at all if you want the old behaviour.
YZPL: Like trophies mounted on a study wall, various Pikachus have been welded to this laptop.
I was particularly impressed by the stickers on the keyboard and making sure the floppy drive matched.
Do check out his PHKL (how do you think it's pronounced?) too. Now, where is my glue gun?
(via Boing Boing)
Planet SuSE New aggregation site for SuSE bloggers. It's good to see sites being syndicated this way. I think this could become a very useful resource for all Linux users.
I'm wondering if an RSS feed will become available, or does that get just a little mad? Where do you stop? Syndicate syndicated feeds until all blogs are one? Very
find.room.thing.hair.mysteryrobot.com
Namber works by assigning words to each 8 bit block of your IP address. I bet they're going to have fun with IPv6.
Although of debatable use for places with existing DNS entries, it could prove useful, well okay fun, for techies who have a whole load of machines to look after (usually with boring names like projectcode03).
Have you patched band.above.cool.air yet?
(via Easy Bake Oven by way of Blue Ridge blog)
This was inspired by Desert Island Discs and Alicia's desire for new music. I think the choices can be quite revealing as to how we change. My choices are not too far from what they would have been 5 years ago, but 10 years ago would have seen more metal.
You cannot take compilations (Soundtracks, Greatest Hits, etc.) You will be rescued in a year when you can revise your selection.
It's not hard to fill the iPod with music. It's hard to fill it with that much music you want to listen to.
Certain things will be departing my iPod in the not too distant future. Not because I've necessarily run out of space, but because I would rather they not appear when I shuffle my Pod. There was a reason why I haven't listened to some CDs in so long... I am currently ripping/encoding my new batch of bad-tune-replacement CDs from the Amazon Sale.
UPDATE: Recommend you use the newer patch.
As you may have realised, lots of images have spawned all over the site. This is thanks to the MTAmazon plugin.
I have made a few tweaks to the file to take care of the £ sign, added country selection code (defaults to UK), and made Asin the default method.
<MTAmazon country="us" ... >
$ cd {where your MTAmazon.pm is}
$ patch -p0 < MTAmazon.snowblink.patch
Do you ever go around an entire town only to end up in the first shop you went into?
The only problem with the iPod is the earbuds they come with. I don't like sticking things in my ear. After lots of research on Head-Fi, Headwize, and asking various friends, I decided to hunt down a pair of Sennheiser PX200s. I got distracted. My first mistake was asking if they stocked Grados. We can get them, but they're not very comfortable. Have you considered the Sennheiser HD600s?
He opened up this velvet lined box and removed the furry cans. Wow. Lovely sound. Felt very soft and comfy too. One slight drawback: £175.
So I announced that I'd be back after I'd checked out a few more shops. Well the rest of town proved fruitless, although I did have a bizarre conversation in Richer Sounds:
So I end up in the original shop 2 hours later, and bought their final pair of PX200s. If only I'd not been distracted by the soft velvet of the HD600s.
Quick review:
I seem to be getting googled for nemo sushi. Which is cool, but there are some people who are proceeding to link directly to the photo. This is called stealing bandwidth.
I didn't make the photo. It's been around the internet for a while. Please copy it off to your own server or link to the entry itself.
I am assuming that they are clueless, rather than rude. Therefore, instead of goatsing the image, I have 403ed non-snowblink referers.
...in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes. --- Benjamin Franklin
Well, I guess Ben was right. I've been putting off doing my tax assessment. Obviously I have to do it or they'll sting me for even more money (£60 per day it's late).
I'm hoping that they in fact owe me some money. Okay, time to find those bits of paper I filed somewhere...
Prompted by Fembat.net, I have upgraded to Movable Type 2.65.
There are not a large number of changes. Mostly security updates. Quite nice is the inclusion of an Atom feed.
MovableType 3.0 is on the cards and looks like it's got some interesting features (registration for comments, new API hooks, etc.).
I really didn't think about how difficult it would be to follow up my last entry.
Do I just carry on as normal? Do I contemplate
I know how difficult it is to gauge what and when you can email/phone someone who has lost someone. It is awkward. It feels like you're walking on eggshells.
When is it okay to send jokes again? When is it okay to chat about nothing in particular? When is it okay not to have to worry about words which may remind them of that person? When is it okay to talk about that person again?
I have decided to continue posting as normal. Some existential thoughts may crop up here and there...
I didn't sleep very well. At 6:20pm last night, my sister called me from France.
She told me Rob had died. He was 27. That post I was going to write. Those CDs I was going to buy. The dinner I was halfway cooking. All became instantly redundant.
I'd actually thought about him on New Year's Eve and how I hadn't spoken to him in ages. How I wanted to add him to the email list I send stuff out to. I was going to wait until my sister got back from holiday to get his email address...
I remember the last time I saw him was at my sister's birthday a couple of years ago (2001, I think). My sister had booked a room in a club, and there were lots of her friends there. I only knew her ex-boyfriend and her flatmate. Conversations were somewhat strained.
Rob arrived with his girlfriend and pretty soon came over to talk to me. His girlfriend wandered off and Rob sat down and we started talking. I was suddenly reminded of a conversation we'd had years earlier in my study, at school. He sat there for hours listening to me go on about comics, asking me questions about the plots and characters. He showed real interest, and made me feel good about knowing every little detail about the X-Men.
I can't remember exactly what we talked about that night in the club. I do remember that he sat there for most of the evening talking to me. I do remember him encouraging me to take off round the world. I believe a quality of a good person is that they can make others feel comfortable and good about themselves. Rob did this effortlessly.
He was one of those people who fitted into all the cliques. He got on with everyone. More accurately, he was liked by everyone. He'd smile and your day would be instantly better. If you have friends like this, cherish and nurture your friendship. If 2003 has taught me anything, it's that life is too short.
Feliz Año Nuevo!
After talking with K yesterday, I felt inspired - she always does that to me. So I now have a plan for 2004. What's the plan? Don't want to say just yet, as I still have to research the feasability of it.
I hope the family is feeling better K!
