Übercreepy

via GreenFairy comes one of the creepiest things I’ve seen in a long time.

EggShell babies.

The Egg Babies are individually hand sculpted in polymer clay. The babies range in size from 2 to 5 inches.
The eggshell underscores the fragility of the life of a baby in the womb.

Yick, Yick, and thricely Yick.


Mezzanine

I’ve come in to work early this morning – partly just because it was convenient to do so, and fitted in with the plans of Herself, but also because I’ll be leaving early and well, don’t want to take the piss too much.

One thing that’s really nice about being in early in the morning is that you can work to music without having to have it on headphones. And for the first hour this morning I’ve been able to play the incredibly bass-heavy and fantastic “Mezzanine” album by Massive Attack the way it should be played – with a bass that can rattle the windows. Yeah, sure, you can play it through headphones, or quietly, but frankly it’s just not the same as when that bass line – particularly on the first track, Angel – is kicking deep down in your chest.

The only other tracks I can think of that test out a bass sub-woofer as well (other than cacky drum’n’bass stuff) are “Writing on the Wall” on “Elusive” by Pressure Drop, and “Down by the River” on “To Bring You My Love” by P J Harvey.

It’s certainly been a good way to start the morning.


Eventually

Well, that’s one success that was well and truly deferred.

Test One was back in ’98, down in Dorchester in Dorset. I failed horrifically, having stalled the car on a hairpin hill curve while on the way back from Weymouth to Dorchester. And rolled back bigtime. Not an auspsicious start.

Test Two came three months later, and put me off driving for a very long time, by the forty-five minutes I’d spent with every other road user trying to kill me. It was market-day, and (among other things) I was nearly side-onned by an idiot coming out of a side-road, rear-ended by a speeding coach, and narrowly avoided a slow-moving (OK, Stationary) skip on a blind corner.

Test Three was in 2003 in Manchester. Another failure for “failing to do proper observations”. I still argue the toss on that one, but well, it’s all in the past now. Bizarrely it again involved a skip, but this time on a junction so I couldn’t see round the fucker. I pulled out to see round it, and then went. The examiner said I should’ve stopped at the line. The response “Could you see round that fucking great skip? Because I bloody couldn’t.” didn’t go down well.

Test Four was in April this year and failed due to fucking up my clutch control at a junction. Unimpressed, but fair to fail me on it.

Test Five was taken in June, and failed for exactly the same reason as Test Four, bizarrely. Not the same junction, but exactly the same fault.

Test Six was today. And yes, at fucking last, I’ve passed. Halle-sodding-lujah!


Twat

There’s always at least one cunt in any party, isn’t there? You know the sort, sneering at everyone else, deciding they’re all a waste of space, and generally being a snide fuckmonkey cunt.

In my case, yesterday it was Ken and his comment.

suggest you rename site
SELF-OBSESSION FOR DUMMIES

Well, I’d suggest that either a) Ken sticks his head back up his arse, and farts, or b) that if he’s going to fucking sneer at other people, perhaps the marmoset-cocked wonder should learn some proper English (like wot I knows) and consider use of words like “I” and “your”, which make the comment at least look literate, if still somewhat fuckwitted.

Cunt.


The Report

Well, it turns out that in three years d4d™ has had 6,376,116 hits, and shown 2,214,576 pages. Not bad going at all. The full report is is here. There are a few days where there appears to have been no logfile created or moved, so the figure is probably slightly on the low side, but hell, I’m more than happy with averaging 2.1 million hits a year, or 738,192 pages.

In some ways it’s really hard to believe that d4d™’s been that busy, particularly when I think about it just really being a personal site. d4d™ started off as a little thing to see if I could keep a project going – I’d had the idea, but at the time (and still, to a greater or lesser degree) I was great at having the ideas, and far less good at carrying them through. d4d™ was a thing to prove to myself that I could keep on with a project past the initial stages.

Sometimes I’m still not sure if I can – I keep feeling that d4d™ is really still in those “initial” stages, even after three years. I don’t know what the future holds – and when I look at the differences the last year has had, I don’t want to know what even the next 12 months hold in stall, because I’ll just go with it, and have a good time.

In truth I never really believed that d4d™ would take off – perhaps that’s what made it easier to continue. Three years on, and I’m still enjoying writing it, and keeping up with new ideas. (although I know I haven’t innovated that much this year yet. There’s stuff in the wings though, although whether it’ll be ’05 or ’06 before it happens, Gawd only knows at the moment) So whatever else goes on, I’m pretty sure d4d™ will still be here to celebrate its fourth and fifth birthdays too.

And a big thanks to all those who do read, comment, pass on the word, whatever. Thanks is too small a word, but for now it’ll have to do.


Time

Bloody Hell, this log analysis takes some time. I started it running four hours ago, and it’s still plodding through…

Considering I’m using a PC with twin 3.4Ghz Pentium 4 processors and 1Gb of DDR RAM, that’s one shit of a lot of computation.

UPDATED : It finally took from 9.15 to 2.30 -5 and a quarter hours. That’s a lot of work.


3

Yes, d4d™ has now been being written for three solid years. I’m having problems believing that myself, but it’s true. Over 1,000 days, and coming up to the three thousand posts mark, which is pretty good in anyone’s book.

Of course, there are plenty of blogs that’ve been round far longer than d4d, and thousands are better-written, better-designed, whatever. But still, I’m pleased with how it’s gone over the last three years.

D4D™ didn’t have a party this time like it did last year, but there’s that kind of acknowledgement of growing up. I’m currently running a log-analysis to see just how busy d4d™ has been over that three years, and I’ll post the results once the PC has wheezed it’s way through the 110Mb of zipped-up logfiles, including all the DNS lookup and so on. I think it’ll probably be a fairly big figure though.

Anyway, onwards and upwards to the next year, three years, five years, whatever.