Paying homage

So, Annie’s in Toronto. I told her she had to go visit some place special for me.

Annie outside the Toronto Yorkdale Apple Store

Can you spot her?

She phoned me up from her sister’s cell phone to tell me she was there! She wins the title “iWife 06”!!!

~Rick

Cheesyvision Song Contest

Well, it’s that time of year again when people across the UK (and in europe I guess) say “Oh no, not flippin Eurovision!”.

As bad and cheesy as it is *every* year, it certainly makes for hilarious viewing due to the painfully cheesy bands / singers / music!

I saw a definite theme / formula whilst watching it, you need:

  • One Female singer (preferably attractive, with long hair)
  • At least 3 backing dancers / singers
  • One wind machine
  • One unwanted Shakira song, merged with local dance format (such as cossack dancing)

or if you can’t find anything to fit that format just get a bunch of extras from an episode of Buffy and enter them instead!

As I write this Lordi from Finland look set to win, when asked how the band felt about being in Eurovision they said:

?We are meat eaters in a vegetarian café.?

~Rick

iPod R.I.P.

Yes, despite my best efforts to cure it, my 40gb iPod is dead! : (

I tried restoring it, reformatting it, etc etc yadayadayada… but nothing worked. It’s now going off to take a visit to UKiPodRepairs.com to see if they can do anything else with it. I reckon the hard drive is toast which is at least £150 to fix, I’d sooner buy a new iPod I reckon. Ah well.

iPod RIP

 

~Rick

 

Lost Series 2 – Why so long for the DVDs?

I just checked on Amazon.com and also on Play.com and it looks like it’s going to be a while before Lost Series 2 will be available on DVD.

Amazon.co.uk has Series 2 Part 1 showing but it’s not available until July 17th apparently.

Image of Lost Series 2 Pt 1 on Amazon.co.uk

I kind of understand that because the series has only had about 4 episodes so far over here. This date is also backed up by Play.com so it’s probably right.

Image of Lost Series 2 on Play.com

In the US the series finale is this week so then why does Amazon.com show that the whole series isn’t available until October 3rd??!!!!

Image of Lost Series 2 on Amazon.com

Crazy, last series it was available right away in the US and Canada!

Oh well, looks like I’ll have to put up with watching them on TV. if I had a US based credit card I could buy them from iTunes, but alas I can’t by any shows on iTunes at the moment, I wonder when they will become available over in the UK?

~Rick

Surf’s up!

Well, with Winter? having gone finally, I went for my first trip to the beach with my surfboard. Despite the fact that Magicseaweed.com (MW no longer exists, try surf-reports.com instead) said it wasn’t going to be much happening I headed over to St Andrews with my mate Colin. I was just happy to get into the water and float about, it really wasn’t as cold as I thought it would have been, although I was wearing a wetsuit.

Picture of me on St Andrews beach with my rockin board!
Yep, there’s not much in the way of waves there!

It was fun anyway, now Colin is looking to get a board too so we’ll hopefully do some surf trips this Summer.

One of the r-a-d things about surfing in the UK? No sharks, box jellyfish, coral reefs, (did I say sharks?), or other nastiness! ok, it might be cold but I’d rather have that I think! This reminds me of something I wrote whilst in Australia one time:

Mmm, that’s funny too, all the hoohaa about ‘blogging’, well, I blogged that trip in Australia back in 1998, wow, I’m like SO old school at this kind of thing! You can check out the whole of My Australian Tour Diary to find out more, it’s basically about a month and a half’s worth of entries, and in true blogging style I got bored and it kind of stops at the end! Well, that and it was hard to get round to writing entries. Ah the joys of blogging!

~Rick

The reputation of the Scottish people…

At work today we were looking for the exact (Pantone) colour specification for the Scottish Flag, a quick Google search and it flagged up the entry for the Flag of Scotland in Wikipedia, there are some interesting facts about the flag:

  • It is the oldest National Flag still in modern use.
  • The cross should have a width of 1/5 of the height of the flag.
  • Known as The Saltire or the Saint Andrew’s Cross.
  • Pantone 300 is the officially recommended colour.

What really me laugh was that it says the colour of blue used has changed at times from anywhere in between sky blue to dark navy blue, apparently this was “a selection apparently motivated by which colour of blue dye was cheapest at the time” !!!

The Scots do have a reputation for being thrifty so that confirms it!

~Rick

The importance of cross-platform testing

Well, in my new mission to post on this blog regularly I have gone and created a nice new blog widget for the purpose of quick and easy posting to the site. It’s working pretty well but I still can’t figure out how to save preferences in widgets, it just doesn’t seem to work. Perseverance needed!

With all the hoohaa about Apple’s Bootcamp software that allows you to run windows going on I thought it best to test and see what happens to sites when viewed using Bootcamp.

I chose my friend Alyn’s Blog as a test subject, here’s the results:

So, you can see that sites do look quite remarkably different when using Bootcamp.

Back online again!

Hi, I’m finally back online again after my hiatus without a computer at home. I actually got my new MacBook Pro a week or so ago but I’ve just been a bit preoccupied until now to post a blog entry.

I just dug out my little Blog posting Dashboard Widget that I’d made ages ago (before I even had Tiger! so I couldn’t check it worked without sending it to my friend Alyn!). Now that I’ve got that working again, albeit in a very basic form, I’m going to try and get posting blog entries a bit more frequently. I’m also going to do a revamp of the look of Suburbia too.

~Rick

Yep, it’s been a while…

Well, with having no computer at home I have been awfully quiet with the blog posts, I guess this is kind of expected…

Only 14 days until delivery of my new MacBook Pro though as of today!

So what’s been happening? Working on a few things, skateboarding… I also got snowboarding last weekend too along without about 4,999 other people it seemed, it was good to get riding though.

Last night I had my first surfing dream, as you’ll know if you’ve read my previous blog posts I bought a surfboard recently which is currently sitting in my dining room looking nice until the weather gets warmer! But it was great to have a dream about catching some waves, it’s gotten me excited about going surfing!

That’s all for now, I’ll try and post some more soon along with pics of Natalie etc.

~Rick

Can’t surf the web, but can surf the waves!!!

Good news on the laptop front, my damaged powerbook was going to cost over £2000 to fix so I’m getting it replaced by the insurance company! So I’m ordering a nice shiny MacBook Pro any day now. So that’s cool, but I’ll still have to wait 3 or 4 weeks before I’ll get it so Annie and I are still without a computer to use at home.

Even though I can’t surf the web I can now surf the waves, yep, I finally got a surfboard! I’ve wanted one for ages and my friend Aaron was moving back to New Zealand and didn’t want to pay to ship it back over.

Surf's up!

It’s a 6’6″ custom Mark Richards board and it’s a bit thicker than a regular board so it should be pretty good for the surf around here. I’m looking forward to taking it out on the water even just for a paddle about, I know it’s pretty cold over here for surfing compared to say Australia, but there’s a big plus side too – NO SHARKS!!! ;)

Fun picture of Natalie time!

Here’s a picture of Natalie chilling in one of her favourite environments, a ball pool!

Natalie chilling in her domain
This was taken (with my phone so quality is low!) at the Marmalade Pot restaurant in Dundee whilst dining with Uncle Alistair, Aunty Maureen, Granny and Daddy (Mommy was in Ireland so she wasn’t there).

~Rick