iced coffee

As you may have noticed, I haven’t updated my Photo blog in quite a while. There are two main reasons for this.

1. Since starting to photograph gigs, bands and other local activities I just didn’t have the time to get a photograph ready to post every day.
2. My camera hasn’t been working for the last 3 months, therefore no new photographs.

It was, however, brought to my attention 2 days ago that one of my entries had received over 400 comments. All of this spam had been placed in my gmail spam folder. This was both a good and bad thing. Good in that Google nicely spotted all the spam correctly – bad ‘cos I didn’t know about it to delete from the blog. I changed the setting on Movable Type‘s Junk Score Threshold, though it really didn’t seem to do much good. The next day I had about almost 400 more; I had been getting about 20.83 spam comments an hour. Click here for a screen shot. Thats just ridiculous!

I have had to turn off comments on the site for now – hopefully I will figure out a way to fix the problem by the time I get round to posting again. Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Today the images of Richard Hammond‘s high speed crash have been released by the BBC.
He was making an attempt at the British land speed (currently 300.3mph) record in the Thule Vampire, a 30-foot Rolls-Royce jet-powered dragster made in Sweden capable of reaching 272 mph in six seconds en route to a theoretical top speed of 370. The crash took place at over 280 mph.

I find it interesting that the BBC put this in the Entertainment section of the News site.

Richard is returning to the show when the new series starts on 28th Jan, and apparently the crash is going to be shown in full.

From now on I am switching off my PC at 12 midnight every night during the week – no later! I was late for work this morning due to the fact that I was up until 2:30am. It’s freakin’ ridiculous and it ends now!

Although one reason for my sleeping is that our electricity ran out this morning. I don’t fully understand it, but it was beeping last night and when I checked it it was at -£1.00. I think at that time it was late enough for it to stay on all night. I do know that if its going to run out it will stay on until 9am the following morning and go into the minus figures. So I slept through it (or hit snooze a good few times), then it went off at 9am and I had no chance.

I went shopping today. This is not something i have done often enough since moving out in October ’06. My problem is that I am not a great cook, well not even that, more that I’m not so good at putting together meals – what goes with what. I don’t know what to buy. I was never a very adventurous eater when I was young. I’ve gotten much better at eating a variety of foods in the last few years, but making it myself isn’t something I have mastered yet. I really need to read some websites on healthy eating along with recipe sites. Let me know if you know of any good ones.

I bought a fair amount which should keep me going for a week or so. Though I feel I should really get out of the way of eating ready meals so often. I do have a small variety of other ingredients which i plan to experiment with during the week. I do find it quite worrying however, that I cannot even remember how to eat an apple. I bought three, and ate one. Well I forgot to take the little sticker off it. This was drawn to my attention when I saw half of it. The other half had been eaten. Better luck next time I guess.

There is of course the fact that food is expensive and awkward when its only for one person. You cant just buy one chicken breast. They come in packs of 2 or 4. Which really isn’t much good. I could probably go to the butchers. The same with mince. Well I have some sort of mini chicken things, rice, pasta, plenty of sauces and some vegetables – cant go wrong, right?

Its been a crazy weekend surfing the blogosphere.

I do enjoy the occasional few days when I end up spending far too much time online. Quite literally staying up all night, eventually going to sleep at 7 or 8am. It is very satisfying to learn so much so quickly. I don’t think there is anything right now that has me feeling super confused about the workings of wordpress. Okay, so I still know very very little about it all and php still scares me – but I certainly feel more confident in using it.

In other news…

What Happens Now is a great site, providing information on preparing and dealing with “life’s changes and challenges.” They deal with many issues and how to deal with their consequences. These range from accidents, fires, theft, theft, theft, travel. Other sections include life stages (birth, weddings, deaths), and natural disasters. Something like this should definitely be applied to the UK/Ireland.

Jake Gyllenhaal hosted the Saturday Night Live show on NBC at the weekend – and was extremely funny. Check out this clip

Ever imagined the cast of Futurama as anime characters? I’ve never been a fan of anime – but this is just awesome!

>Futurama: Super Happy Fun Show by *spacecoyote on deviantARTOr how about insane-looking Simpsons cast?

This turned out to be quite the success story for Deviantart user Spacecoyote who has been given a job working on a short anime Simpsons comic and may potentially work for 20th Century Fox on the relaunch of Futurama.

I’m often a little slow at picking up new technology and web design techniques. I’ve only just figured out what a widget is, and then it took much longer to work out how to impliment them on my blog. The last 3 days have been spent going through many sites offering wordpress plugins, widgets and tutorials. Then I discovered the that wordpress widget plugin doesnt work with the K2 theme, at least not without playing around with the code in the php files – something I have yet to discover how to do, and I’m not sure if I want to either; something is bound to go horribly wrong.

What I really want to be able to do is display my categories in the sidebar, and have more control over the order of the links. Both of these features seem impossible without much code rearranging.

It could well be time to get a new – widget compatable – theme. So there if you see something strange with the site, thats why.

1. Eat in the work canteen everyday, often twice a day.
2. Spent £1.75 on Clements coffee rather than £1.35 in The Apartment, with free refills
3. Give the bus driver a £10 note for £1.30 fare to work only to get all but £5 in return and the response, “you’ll have to come back to me for it when I get more change,” then forgetting about it. I should’ve just gotten outta bed on time and walked the 20mins to work.

For some reason I didn’t think Apple’s iPhone would actually be worth all the fuss of the last couple of days. But then I saw this, and now I want one too!
The Folks at Mozilla had a meeting about Firefox 3 – Here are some of the planned features

Somebody had a hell of a lot of time on their hands

Meet Summer, she’s a rocket scientist – no no, really!

The Jane Bradfords have hit the number one spot on the Qatar charts! The question is – how on earth did this happen?

The track ‘Hide from the Cold’ has been played on BBC Radio 1 by DJs Colin Murray and Huw Stephens and was found by local radio DJ at QBS in Qatar. The charts are determined by votes, rather than sales. The Band have managed to beat the likes of Muse, The Killers, Razorlight and The Lost Prophets to the number one spot.

Will this have a knock-on effect for other NI bands?

The Belfast Festival at Queens is under threat.

The Belfast Telegraph has launched a campaign to save the Belfast Festival, which will be closed for good if funding is not secured within three weeks. Due to a decline in public sector funding Queens chiefs say they are unable to cover the costs of the festival which last year brought around £6.5m to the local economy.

“The Telegraph’s Save Belfast Festival campaign is encouraging readers to show their support by signing a special online petition to the Culture, Arts and Leisure Minister, Maria Eagle.”

“The first festival was held in 1962 and it has since become an important cultural centrepiece for the city and the local tourist industry.”

Arts in Belfast are something that should be promoted as much as anything else. It is events like this that “show that we are a region that is culturally mature,” said the director of the Festival, Graeme Farrow.

Click the link below to email a petition

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