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So, long time no blog?

Mmm, yep, it has been a while since I posted anything on my blog. Almost a month in fact! Well, what’s my excuse? I guess just work and being generally busy, plus skateboarding a lot more too.

Good news is that my sore back is getting better, it’s taking time but I’m able to skate and ride my bike without much pain, I’ve still to go surfing (no waves!) and see how that goes though as laying horizontal on my board is one of the sorest positions for me. Hopefully it will be all good though.

Other news:

Our car is running well, Annie is busy playing a bunch of ceilidhs, three this weekend actually, Fri, Sat & Sunday nights!

Birthday boy:

Sunday is a special day, it’s the day I become 34 years old! If I had gotten my driving licence at the age of 17 I could now have been driving half my life! However, this birthday makes it 21 years since I got my first skateboard! Wow, 21 years of consistent skateboarding! Definitely my preferred method of 4-wheeled transport!

Must sleep:

Ok, well it’s late on Saturday night and I think I’m going to go to bed now and catch up on sleep!

Geek info:

One final point of interest for those interested in the technical aspects of this blog and what I do. This blog entry was posted using a cool little plain text markup tool called PHPMarkdown, this in turn is a PHP port of John Gruber’s original Markdown program. Check it out if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

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My friends went to Malaysia and all they bought me was this ‘Rechargeable Mosquito-hitting Swatter’

My friends Colin and Jackie went on a holiday to Malaysia recently, now they are pretty good at getting unusual and funny gifts, I’ve got several funny things in the house that they’ve given me and Annie.

Well, keeping the tradition alive they brought back quite a spectacular but rather scary piece of technology. Behold, I present the…

“Rechargeable Mosquito-hitting Swatter”:

Click the image to see the big picture
[Click image to view larger]

How can you describe this thing? Well, cross a tennis racket with a tazer and this is what you get! Basically it’s for killing mosquitos, but it’s a pretty scary piece of equipment. It plugs into a wall and it powers up rechargeable batteries so that you can zap mosquitos by swatting and pressing the ‘zap’ button as you hit them!

Picture of the plug and 'on/off' button
Picture of the plug and ‘on/off’ switch

I have to admit I’m pretty scared to use it! I switched it on tonight and pressed the button and it zapped a piece of dust or something and it was pretty scary! It needs to be charged for at least 8 hours so it must get a fair amount of juice into it!

‘Very powerful’ package design

The other amazing aspect of it is the packaging, the description / instructions for use are hilarious due to the limited command of the english language that the makers of the device have, here it is in it’s full glory:

Main Character:

  1. Rechargeable Type: It furnishes 2 pcs. of 1.2V high quality rechargeable batteies which can by recharged in recycle for 600 times. it is quite practical and economic.
  2. Twice-speed discharge: It adopts an innovative twice-speed discharge circuit which can output 2500V in a moment. So, it has the best result for killing mosquito.
  3. Electric Shockproof Net: It can kill mosquito which is sucking blood on human bodies but it is harmless to human. when touching the net on flat surface, without any feeling of electric shock so it is safe for use.
  4. Leakproof Net: It consists on a special 3-layer net which can easily catch insect and never leak out.

Directions:

  1. When charging please use AC 100-240V, 50HZ power source.
  2. before using,please charge the batteries for 8-15 hours. They can be recharged in recycle for 600 times.
  3. When hitting insect, you can easily kill them just by pressing it’s switch.
  4. When the indicator twinkle,it indicate that the batteries run out. Then,the swatter should be recharged for 8-15 hours.

Warning:

  1. For more safety,do not press the switch or touch the ourface of net when swatter is in charge.
  2. Please do not finger the medium layer net.
  3. Please shake swatter for cleaning off insect carcasses which remain in net. Be sure don’t wash it with water,so as to avoid short circuit.
  4. The swatter may become without high-voltage or in low-voltage conditions when it absorbe damp in wet weather,the effect will be declined. Then,it can be dried by blowing with electric blower or shining with sunshine. The effect will be recovered soon.
  5. Children must instruce under adult when use it.

Wow, so there it is, one of the scariest electronic items I’ve seen for a while!

~Rick

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I just bought a car!

Anyone who knows me may now be thinking, “But you don’t have a driving licence!?!?”.

This is true of course, it’s funny how this can seem like such a strange thing to some people (particularly people from somewhere like, um, Canada for instance!) mainly because people are very used to *needing* to have a car in order to get about. But for me it’s never been essential, living close to the centre of town I can easily walk, cycle or skateboard wherever I need to go. I’ve just never had a real need to drive, I’ve always thought it would be useful but just never been bothered enough to get around to taking lessons.

Of course, it’s actually Annie who will be driving the car anyway! I will just get chauffeured everywhere now! Although, now that we have a car I will no doubt want to get driving so it will motivate me finally to get my licence!

One funny thing about not having a licence is when I tell someone that I don’t have a licence I tend to have to explain that it’s not that I’ve lost my licence but that I’ve never had one!

What about the car?

Ok, here’s some details about the car, I’ve broken the information down into two formats, one for men and one for women, click the links below to jump straight to each.

Info for men | Info for women

Information for men:

  • Vauxhall Astra Envoy
  • 1.6 petrol
  • 5 door hatch
  • Automatic (Annie’s only allowed to drive auto here)
  • 2003 Model
  • One previous owner
  • Full service history
  • 13,000 miles

Information for women:

  • It’s green

Heh heh…

It looks like this: (car pictured is not ours but similar)

Vauxhall Astra Envoy 1.6

~Rick

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Viruses, OSX and chiropracters…

Ok, quick update, got my Nokia N80, it’s pretty cool. Although my old number hasn’t ported across to it yet so I’m not using it day to day yet. Very cool surfing with Wi-fi!

Mac OS X: Viruses and Security

There’s a really interesting article on the Symantec website, entitled ‘Mac OS X: Viruses and Security’, it’s a good read to clarify the true situation regarding Mac OSX and viruses.

Check out the article ‘Mac OS X: Viruses and Security’ via this link.

Backpain

For the last week and a half I’ve been having loads of hassle with my back, not so much pain in my back as the pain is actually in my arm but the source of the problem is in my upper back. I’ve been to the chiropracter once this week already but I’m going back again today so hopefully that will bring relief! Ibuprofen has made no real difference so I’ve not been taking anything for the pain.

I post this for your sympathy! ;)

~Rick

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Cool gadget, cool site

On the new gadget front I am just about to get a Nokia N80 phone as my contract is up with T-Mobile, after being with T-Mobile for over 7 years I’m about to jump ship over to Orange instead, they had a really good deal on offer coupled with having the Nokia N80 so that sold it to me.

What’s cool about the N80? Well, it’s got (amongst other things!):

Pictue of Nokia N80 phone

  • Integrated 3 megapixel camera (2048 x 1536 pixels)
  • High-quality video capture in MP4 and 3GP formats with up to 5x digital zoom, Video capture resolutions: 352 x 288; 176 x 144 pixels
  • Image and video uploading to the Web
  • S60 3rd Edition software on Symbian OS
  • Integrated digital music player with stereo audio. Supported file formats: MP3, AAC, m4a, eAAC+ and wma
  • Stereo FM radio
  • Multimedia player (RealPlayer) with 3GPP & MPEG4 AVC video streaming support
  • Internet browser (Based on Safari’s WebKit core)
  • Integrated Wireless LAN (802.11g) and UPnP (Universal Plug and Play)
  • Bluetooth wireless technology
  • Infrared
  • Pop-Port? interface with USB 2.0 Full Speed with mass storage class

So, it’s pretty cool! : )

I came across a cool site called ‘We Feel Fine‘ which is an interesting idea, it’s more of an artwork than an application, on the site they say:

At the core of We Feel Fine is a data collection engine that automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.

We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. This is an approach that was inspired by techniques used in Listening Post, a wonderful project by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen.

Once a sentence containing “I feel” or “I am feeling” is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.

Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified “feelings”. This list of valid feelings was constructed by hand, but basically consists of adjectives and some adverbs.

It’s pretty cool, go check it out, www.wefeelfine.org/

~Rick

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Five films I want to see

I was just checking out some movie trailers over on Quicktime.com and I’ve got 5 that I really want to see. They’re not comedies, summer blockbusters or anything like that. Just films with dealing with some serious issues like ‘Global Warming’, ‘The dominance of Oil’ and ‘War’ (Why yes, America does feature in these movies!). So, here’s my list:

An Inconvenient Truth

Image of Poster of 'An Inconvient Truth'Eloquently weaves the science of global warming with Al Gore?s personal history and lifelong commitment to reversing the effects of global climate change. A longtime advocate for the environment, Gore presents a wide array of facts and information in a thoughtful and compelling way. The film is not a story of despair but rather a rallying cry.

View trailer for ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ on Quicktime.com…


Who Killed The Electric Car?

Image of poster from 'Who killed the electric car'It was among the fastest, most efficient production cars ever built. It ran on electricity, produced no emissions and catapulted American technology to the forefront of the automotive industry. The lucky few who drove it never wanted to give it up. So why did General Motors crush its fleet of EV1 electric vehicles in the Arizona desert?

View trailer for ‘Who Killed the Electric Car’ on Quicktime.com…


America: Freedom To Fascism

Image of poster from 'America: Freedom To FascismDetermined to find the law that requires American citizens to pay income tax, producer Aaron Russo (?The Rose,? ?Trading Places?) set out on a journey to find the evidence. Neither left, nor right-wing this startling examination of government exposes the systematic erosion of civil liberties in America since 1913.

View trailer for ‘America: Freedom To Fascism’ on Quicktime.com…


Road To Guantanamo

Image of poster from 'Road To Guantanamo'The terrifying first-hand account of three British citizens who were held for two years without charges in the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Known as the ?Tipton Three,? in reference to their home town in Britain, the three were eventually returned to Britain and released, still having had no formal charges ever made against them at any time during their ordeal.

View trailer for ‘Road To Guantanamo’ on Quicktime.com…


The War Tapes

Image of poster from 'The War Tapes'Straight from the front lines in Iraq, THE WAR TAPES is the first war movie filmed by soldiers themselves. This is Operation Iraqi Freedom as filmed by Sergeant Steve Pink, Sergeant Zack Bazzi and Specialist Mike Moriarty. Steve is a wisecracking carpenter who aspires to be a writer. Zack is a Lebanese-American university student who loves to travel.

View trailer for ‘The War Tapes’ on Quicktime.com…


So, there you go, 5 films to make you think, not sure when they’re on general release in the UK but you can check out the trailers above.

That doesn’t mean to say I won’t be going to see ‘Cars‘ though!

~Rick

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Go Skateboarding Day

I already added a short post about this over on DundeeConcrete.com but I thought I’d add it to my own blog as well.

Today is “Go Skateboarding Day”, check out the website at www.goskateboardingday.org. On the site it says:

On June 21 skateboarders around the globe will celebrate the pure exhilaration, creativity, and spirit of one of the most influential activities in the world by blowing off all other obligations to go skateboarding!

Skateboarders everywhere will hold fundraisers, contests, protests, demo?s, they?ll skate across cities, gather in skateparks, stream into their local skate shop and some will even revel in the solitary act of skateboarding alone, all bringing together the skateboarding community in the grind heard around the world.

This has been running for a couple of years now and there’s events happening all around the world. Except here, because we forgot! Ah well. People will be skating anyway I guess, but if you haven’t skated before or haven’t for a long time then maybe it’s time to go ‘burn some calories’ (or use some other excuse as to why skateboarding is a worthwhile activity other than just being awesome fun!).

I’ll be at the skatepark later if you need to find me, presuming it’s not raining!

~Rick

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Anniversary, Frenzy Festival and Get a Mac

Ok, Wedding Anniversary gifts, the theme was definitely about ‘pods’, Annie got me the book ‘JPod’ by Douglas Coupland and I got Annie an iPod Nano:

JPod and iPod picture

FrenzyFrenzyFrenzyFestivalFestivalFestival

The Frenzy Festival was excellent again this year. Sporran Again opened the event again, David Crowder band were awesome. I also got asked if I was one of the members of ‘Delirious?’ too! Last year some people wanted their photo taken with me, which I did obligingly!!!

Frenzy is an excellent event, check it out next year if you missed it this time round.

Get a Mac

There’s some more Get a Mac ads on Apple’s site now, check them out at http://www.apple.com/getamac/, they’re quite funny.

~Rick

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Fifth Anniversary (Is that like ‘cardboard’ or something?) (Wood!)

Wow, Annie and I will have been married for five years on June 9th! It’s a friday and I think Annie is playing at a ceilidh that night so I guess we’ll just celebrate the day after by going to Frenzy instead!

Annie and I have both got surprise gifts for one another, no idea what she’s got me though!

Don’t forget Sunday June 18th!

Ah, yes, Father’s day! Any offspring of mine (I know I only have one child!) reading this (or anyone else who feels like it!) feel free to buy me gifts!

UPDATE:

I found out that a 5 year wedding anniversary is classed as ‘wood’, according to Wikipedia.

Looking at the list of different ‘types’ of Anniversary, I thought it would be funny to think of things that would be impossible, very difficult (or maybe just gross) to get as gifts for people celebrating those particular years, so here’s my attempt:

1: Ice
2: Plutonium
3: Uranium
4: Carbon nanotube
5: Buckminsterfullerene
6: Samarium-cobalt magnet
7: Neptunium
8: Sulfuric acid
9: Bifidus digestivum ?
10: Acne
11: Nitrous oxide
12: Truffle
13: Liquid air
14: Pashmina
15: Pixie_dust
20: Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
25: Liger
30: Tigon
35: Giant squid ink
40: Thulium
45: Kryptonite
50: Amorphous ice
55: Polywater
60: Flatus
65: Melange
70: Ambrosia
75: Cochineal
80: Beluga caviar

~Rick

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BBC’s accidental interviewee is now on Wikipedia, plus ‘Return of the iPod’ and dumb joke…

I was just reading that Guy Goma, the person accidentally interviewed by the BBC in regards to the outcome of the Apple vs Apple court case, has his own page on Wikipedia.

He seems to have enjoyed quite a bit of fame since the interview and has appeared on TV several times since. Unfortunately the Wikipedia page also says that it has since been discovered that he has overstayed a tourist visa and may be deported due to being here illegally.

If it was on purpose that he stayed I bet he never thought he’d get found out by being put on national television!

Return of the iPod

So, I’d heard back about my broken iPod that I’d sent away. They said it had a faulty hard drive which was what I thought. I didn’t bother getting it fixed as I’d rather spend money on a brand new iPod instead.

It arrived back yesterday and I thought I’d just try to sync it up once more, the darned thing synced uo and managed to copy all the music over without freezing!!! I tried it loads of time the other day and it hung every time! I also managed to listen to two podcasts without any problems, so far it’s behaving itself, I think it’s a matter of time before it goes funny again but I’ll see how it goes.

Maybe it just wanted to go for a wee holiday? The fresh air in Brighton must have done the trick!

It was funny having no iPod for a few days, I’m so used to listening to it that it was hard not to go out and buy myself an iPod shuffle for £49 just so I could listen to podcasts! I resisted though :)

iJog, er, I mean iPod + Nike advert

macTV videocast has a cool ad for the new Nike / Apple show, check it out here.

Finally, what’s the difference between Apple and Nike? Answer: one of them makes software and hardware but the other one just makes softwear.

~Rick