Monthly Archives: December 2005

Minor points

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If you’d not noticed – or maybe I’ve forgotten if I’ve mentioned it before, Gatekeeper has gone. But SK2.1 is now being employed and as I have not had a false positive for months I’m leaving it fully unattended to slaughter whatever comes it’s way.

The search function here has been completely removed. Can’t see why someone would use it, Google knows all, and why not. And before you go trying /?s= type stuff, it doesn’t work :)

Typo blog now up and running. It’s in T3. If you like sliding comments or you haven’t seen the smooth goodness that they are, go comment away on the initial post there. Initial impressions are very good, but a little longer is required. I will blog there, but much less than I do here. I got the favicons going though !

My arm still stings.

I’ve said it before but editing files directly on the server is brilliant. Saves loads of time.

And there was something else I was going to write but I’ve forgotten what.

That stung !

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An hour of drawing to get the whole composition correct, then 2.5 hours of outlining – from the back of my shoulder/armpit down to the bones in my wrist. I can now – from experience – inform you that having a tattoo around one’s elbow stings a bit but one that goes into your armpit stings more. Ouchy. Considering that I didn’t know .. it looks fantastic. Neil wiped a lot of the ink off as he finished the session, I sat up, looked in the mirror and just grinned. Going back in a week for lots of photos – though I’ll take some once the initial redness has gone down – and Neil is now very keen to see things worked on, so he’s pondering another 2 hours then as well. Not a bad exchange for doing a website ;)

Upgrade in Dutch

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Michael has translated the guide I wrote for Dutch WordPress users. Excellent stuff :)

Weird thing this morning – shaving my arm. I’m standing in the shower shaving my arm from shoulder to hand. I’m not the most hirsute guy where my arms are concerned (which explained a couple of bits I missed) but just the act of doing it was really strange. Still – all in a (damn) good cause.

Inky

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1pm tomorrow Neil starts colouring in my right arm :) I’m feeling really good that I don’t know what the actual design will be. A few times when I’ve been at their studio someone has come in, said “I want a tattoo there” while pointing at their arm / chest / waist “so what have you got ?” and that has always struck me as weird. Why go get a fairly random piece of ink pushed into your skin “just because you want” or “because my mates have” ? So, you are thinking, that’s what YOU want to do isn’t it ? But it isn’t. When speaking of tattoos, the words “This shit is permanent!” springs to mind. So why get a random pattern ? What I actually think they do is get this random pattern then later they attach meaning to it so they don’t look like the shallow incompetents that they really are. Anyway, Neil drew the first tattoo I had and got that perfect, did my arms how I wanted and now, after a lot of talking about the images and emotions I want portraying, about the ink (no black!) and shading and how both arms – when complete – will contrast yet match, I’m going to stretch out my right arm, criticise his choice of music and let him start the buzzing :)

Stale Reading

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I need new feeds and new sites to go look at / read / etc. Because I’m online so damn much I never build up a backlog of online activity. Emails are generally forgotten (sorry!) but where feeds and sites are concerned I’ve read it already. So I get bored. Where can I go ?

It’s snowing here – and it’s fantastic.

Why hasn’t The Great Escape been on the TV yet ? I want to see it again. (Joking ! It’s the Sound Of Music really).

I’m at Level 10 in KoL which makes me a “Ravioli Sorcerer”. Rah!

NDS ……. P has an NDS with MK. It’s connected to the WiFi, and playing online works. Anyone up for some gaming maybe ?

In case you’d not noticed …

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WP went 2.0 yesterday. The WP site also had a makeover (and we’ve got pink stickies which is neat). I’ve made some changes to the guides and tomorrow will get round to a raft of phpmyadmin screenshots which are needed. If you are quick – because I’ll turn it off soon – jump into the TestTrack blog. User TT is set as admin so you can see the full display of coding goodness :)

Remember..

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That what happens today is not real life. It’s a blog, not real life. Got that ? Good. Try and get me to believe otherwise or yell at me for saying that in response to you and I will get more than annoyed. Far far more. So remember – blogs are not real life and in the grand scheme of things, they don’t matter.

Clinically clean

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Several years ago I did a Food Hygiene course which all the nursing staff had to do. Not rocket science and some parts were actually interesting. I can distinctly remember that the next day at home I looked at the fridge and wondered what was lurking behind it – that day I cleaned the entire kitchen inside and out. It wasn’t that it was dirty, just that once I got going I kept going. It was also the case that a bit of clean makes everything else look less clean somehow. When I was a teenager I very stupidly cleaned around the boot lock of a Triumph Spitfire. A white Triumph Spitfire. Using a cutting cleaner. Oh how foolish was that. That small circle of pearl whiteness, framed against the now dull grimy white meant that the rest of that day was planned out for me. Since that day I haven’t used cutting cleaners. Anyway .. cleaning. I’m not a fan of the D & V Diet School – there are much more comfortable ways to lose weight if that is your particular fetish. And today (well.. yesterday really as it’s gone 1am now) there was turkey and various other raw foods around. Not good. Several gallons of very hot water, several cleaning cloths, a lot of time and some proprietary cleaning fluids later and I have a kitchen that I think could be called Clinically Clean. This is testimony not only to my charlady skills and dishpan hands, but also to the low levels of hygiene that are apparent in hospitals across the land (“Free MRSA with every appointment !”). In fact, in the kitchen there is barely any evidence that it is the christmas season. The only telltale clues are around 70 mince pies (courtesy of P), 3 huge tins of chocolates, various ‘nibbly bits’ and bottles of alcohol. But it’s all clean. (And no I’m not a cleanfreak (J does tidy, I do clean) but sometimes it’s good to blitz through is it not ?)
Oh yes – the picture. Those leaves rock / sway when it’s in the light. It’s great !!

Not quite perfect

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I am told that the first Christmas dinner I cooked was extremely good. Being my harshest critic about cooking there were a couple of elements I would change – I shall practice hard for the next time.

Queen’s speech – it was on in the background when I heard her say this “As if these disasters were not bad enough, ” and I fully expected to hear her say “my son Charles went and married that horse-faced unfaithful Camilla”. Now that would have made for a good Qs.

Am I the only one seeing what is a significant increase in manual spam ? Especially the sort that just seems to be quite harmless. Today alone I’ve had to delete around 16 across 3 different domains.

Oh yes – I’ve had a phenomenally bad headache all day. Nice.