Two Years On
Posted: Thu 25 August, 2005 Filed under: General, Music, Thoughts Leave a comment »Blimey, looking back through the archives, it’s now two years to the day since I saw Massive Attack last. It doesn’t seem anywhere near that long – time flies when you’re having fun. Reading through the archive for August 2003, it also means it’s just over two years since the house was broken into, and two years next month when I moved in to the next house, which turned out to be my last one in Manchester.
It also means that it’s now a year since I heard from a long-term friend who I fell out with. I didn’t write much about it at the time, but may do later in the week.
Slashing and Summary
Posted: Mon 22 August, 2005 Filed under: General Leave a comment »Well, today is truly not a summer’s day. It’s chucking it down – not quite a thunderstorm, but equally not far off. Still, at least I can just sit in the office and watch other people get wet. Much more fun.
The weekend was actually fairly busy in the end – failure to find the other two car dealerships resulted in us ending up just going for the car we were 98% certain to be getting anyway. Well, I say failure to find, but it actually amounts to “could see on the other side of the dual carriageway, and when we tried turning round there was no feasible way to do so without travelling round another four miles of Reading’s inescapable one-way system, so we thought ‘fuck this’ and went home”
So on Thursday we become the owners of a slate-grey Focus 1.6. It’ll do all we want, and should be a lot more fun.
Other than that, I finally got out and had a proper drivbe on my own. A lot of people had warned me that it was weird doing the first bit of proper driving without an instructor burbling “slow down, turn right, change gear, blah blah blah“, but to be honest I didn’t have any real issue with it at all. Still, it was fun.
I’m sure I’ll burble on more about these things later, but for now for some reason I’m just not in the mood…
Mr Big
Posted: Sun 21 August, 2005 Filed under: General 1 Comment »Caution: Criminal Mastermind at work.
Funniest thing all day.
Cashing In
Posted: Wed 17 August, 2005 Filed under: General 1 Comment »I see that the government is already trying to help party contributors advertisers and corporate entities by introducing the ‘2012 Act’ or (more properly) the Olympics Bill, which (among other things) would “make it illegal to combine words like “games”, “medals”, “gold”, “2012”, “sponsor” or “summer” in any form of advertising”.
Technically, this would also mean that you could get fined for using the sentence “We do not sponsor any of the medals in the 2012 Summer Olympic Games”.
Again, I wittled on about this last year for the 2004 Athens Games, where they had a very specific and detailed policy for ‘all’ hyperlinks relating to the games. But this legislation is whole orders of magnitude worse. With luck, it’ll get changed and amended in the meantime.
“Food”
Posted: Mon 15 August, 2005 Filed under: General, Thoughts, Weirdness 2 Comments »The weekend in Manchester was actually really good, despite the weather taking on a rather soggy turn on Saturday.
One place we went that I hadn’t previously visited was the food hall in Selfridges, which was definitely worthwhile. (and resulted in the purchase of some fantastic cheeses. I could’ve spent far more than I did, but decided to be good, for once) However, there was one small section that was just manky – which was the part run by Edible.
Edible specialise in foodstuffs that most people would go “yuck” at. Giant Ants, Snake Vodka, Thai Green Crocodile Curry, that kind of thing. Fair enough, I don’t mind the ants per se, and several other things – but really, coffee beens that’ve been passed through an animal already? I’ll pass, cheers. (pardon the pun) As for Hornet Honey, again, I just don’t see the attraction.
Maybe I’m getting boring in my old age, but while there’s a certain gross-out factor in Edible’s stuff, I really don’t like the attitude that goes with it.
Content Management
Posted: Sun 14 August, 2005 Filed under: General Leave a comment »In my spare time, as well as working on a couple of websites and so on (Yes, Si, I know, yours is one of them – no excuses other than just generally being crap, though) I’m slowly working on the concept and initial code for a photographic content management system so I can do a photoblog as well as the stuff within WordPress. It probably won’t site on d4d™, because I do want to keep them seperate (and I’ve a buttload of webspace just sitting around doing sod-all) but the ideas are slowly coming together for how it’ll all work.
However, I think I really do need to get out more, rather than working on geeky stuff like this all the time. Ah well, maybe one day…
Purchasing
Posted: Sun 7 August, 2005 Filed under: General, News, Thoughts 4 Comments »You know, we really shouldn’t go out sometimes. Yesterday’s plan was “a couple of plants for the new office” and “possibly a new bed for the Hound”. Oh dear, a plant-shop and a pet-shop. Cue lots of other things.
We ended up with :
New Hound bed, food bowl, collar, two toys, and a 30kg bag of food. Oh, and dog-shit bags. Lovely.
The office has a trio of passion-flowers in one pot, two spider plants (although they were an in-house transfer) a begonia, a polka-dot plant, and a leafy thing whose leaves turn all flame-coloured round the edges. There’s also a “rude plant”, (where the stamen just looks rude – photo to follow at some point) another polka-dot plant, a couple of leafy things with no name as yet, a money plant, and a gardenia that’s gone a little bit mental.
However, I’ve come to the conclusion (yet again) that I really shouldn’t be let out with a wallet sometimes.