Licensing

Apparently the UK’s TV license is to rise in price by £5.50 per year. In a way I don’t mind – as was pointed out a while back, the BBC website is funded by the license fee too, and I use that a lot every day. But at the same time it does annoy me in that there’s still so much shite on BBC that we all pay for, and that we’re not supposed to have a choice in.

Traumatic Childhood

According to an (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) report, nursery rhymes expose children to more violent incidents than an evening watching TV.

I was more pleased to see the photo of Humpty Dumpty (Suffered serious injuries in a great fall) from Playschool as part of the article.

Fanmail Part 2.

In the email just now…

recently read your blog whilst researching for a performance project at uni. Your comments made me laugh and i was wondering if i could borrow them and adapt them to our performance…?

Please email me back and let me know

I’m not going to say anything about being at Uni and still not using capitalisation…

Beauty

On an utterly different subject, why is it that the massive majority of people going to beauty college (or whatever it’s now called, but they’re the ones doing courses in make-up, hair-dressing, etc.) are quite spectacularly unattractive?

And are they the ones who graduate on to working on make-up counters in department stores?

Frustration 2

Following on from yesterday’s post regarding upgrades etc., I’ve also just upgraded my Opera browser to the latest version. My earlier version of Opera was registered, and the new version hasn’t even upgraded or imported the details, bookmarks, etc. – instead I’ve had to reinput all my setting and preferences which is, to be blunt, an utter pain in the arse.

Maybe I’ve missed the “upgrade” version instead of the clean install, but either way, it’s a pain.

UPDATED : Oh, and also it looks like my version of Opera is lacking a “Stop” button. The previous one had a reload/stop button, which was handy. No idea why it’s changed on this version…

Wankbiscuits

Back on October 19th I sent off a nice big SAE to get my photos back from whence they’d been submitted. Because it was the first time I’d ever submitted photos to other people for consideration, I also asked for some feedback (if they felt able to give it) on the submission, so that I could change/alter what I did next time.

Bear in mind that this is all part of the “encouraging photographers in the North-West” malarkey, and also part of a North-West photography collective that “aims to make life easier for photographers and photography in the region and beyond, by providing information, opportunities, events, training and professional development.“.

Today I finally received my prints back, after nearly a month. The covering letter reads

I enclose your pictures. [We] cannot comment on any submission. Sincerely.

Wow, that’s done a fucking grand job of encouraging me, particularly the way the information has improved my professional development.

Thanks a bundle.

Frustrations

In the last couple of days, I’ve upgraded/changed a couple of things. Obviously the TV has changed, but what I’d forgotten was that I’d need to reprogram the TiVo remote control to do Samsung commands instead of Sony so it can continue to alter the volume/channel, and turn the TV off using just the one remote instead of two. However, the issued Samsung control codes don’t work. So I’ll have to use the two remotes instead of just the one.

I’ve also just upgraded my Firefox install now that the full 1.0 release is available. After the install it killed all the extensions I’d previously loaded – and there’s a couple that no longer seem to exist. The Session Saver has disappeared again, as has “Double-Click to close a tab“.

I know that neither of these events is the end of the world, nor are they even close. I do find it interesting though just how much use I made of these little tweaks. The TiVo control in particular is frustrating – when something is useable in that way it becomes second nature, and when the feature is no longer available, it jars every time. The “double-click to close” is another one that I hadn’t realised how much I used it ’til it’s no longer there.

UPDATED : Yay, thanks to Gordon I now have the “double-click to close” function back. Now, about sorting out Tivo….