Archive for April, 2007
Shortbread
For the second day in a row, I ate ice-cream in a cone bought from a man behind a counter. Yesterday it was Rukenglen Park and today it was North Berwick.
Rukenglen was very nice, there was the very large pond, but I particularly liked the waterfall. It was quite a surprising discovery, since to start with it seemed like largely open parkland, to come across such a large body of water tumbling over a hill and into a river below that ran through a gully. I’m sure there are lots of other surprises of nature like this around here, something which I must make more of an effort to discover.
North Berwick was what it always was, damn cold, but otherwise with a rustic charm. It would have been a nicer experience had I been dressed for it. The main shopping street was a cross between traditional Scottish seaside town and modern commercialism, with a Boots sitting next to a shop selling shortbread. There did seem to be an inordinate amount of charity shops, which I found to be confusing. Either it’s a very giving town or people just have a lot of junk they want to get rid of.
Burgled
The scaffolding has now been removed from my house. Which let’s me see some good progress. Couldn’t get around the front again, so just another shot from the back, but while we were there you could hear them working inside through the open windows.
At least I hope it was somebody working. I’d hate to think the place was being burgled already.
Coda
So, Coda then. The new integrated web development environment for the Mac from Panic. It’s a text editor, FTP client, CSS editor, terminal and a set of teaching books all within one application. Which in theory sounds great, and the UI is full of excellent touches, but the problem with the kitchen sink approach is that nothing really gets the spit and polish it really deserves.
The text editor has promise (it has tabs!) but lacks something as simple as proper auto-indenting (which means, as I’ve said before, that a new line after an opening brace indents the next line and a closing brace on a line on it’s own automatically has it’s indent decreased). This alone makes it difficult for me to use. The books seem pointless, they’re online and I can’t add my own. The terminal is like the normal Mac terminal, pretty basic. The CSS editor is confusing and doesn’t seem to display according to the preferences I set. The FTP part does pretty much what you’d expect, but still forces me to treat everything like a project.
If the text editor did the basics, or it didn’t quite lock me into the site/project method of working, then this would be more than a neat idea with a clean interface. But as it stands, it’s no more usable than Editplus via Parallels. Maybe after another 6 months of updates and upgrades.
Deleted
I downloaded the demo of Coda (more about that tomorrow) and loaded up one of the sites from my local hard disk into it. It wasn’t quite setup the way I wanted, so I moved things around on my hard disk to put files into a better place for Coda to deal with. In Coda however, the view didn’t seem to update. Or something. It’s a bit fuzzy. Anyway, I decided to delete some of the files from the folder thinking that then maybe Coda would pick up the change, so I did Command+A to select all and moved them to the Trash. Which made no difference at all. So then I decided to empty the trash, in case it was actually somehow connected to the node of the file rather than it’s path. It was then I realised that rather than just delete the contents of a folder within my websites directory, I’d actually deleted the websites directory itself. And then emptied the Trash.
20,000 files. Gone. In an instant.
Backups? That would have been nice.
Standstill
The CCG show home opened today, so I got my first look inside a newly built home by my builder of choice. It’s not exactly the same as mine, the show home is a 3 bedroom semi while mine is a 2 bedroom terrace, but they both share a lot in common and it was generally nice to see the quality of finish that they were putting into it. It was all very nice, and there were certainly no causes for alarm, but whoever did the interior decoration should perhaps check the prescription lenses in their glasses are up to date, because it lacked a certainly quality I like to call taste.
The estate continues to come on in leaps and bounds, the first row of houses are indeed almost at the stage where people are going to be moving into them. Mine may still be a good two and a half months away, but at least it can’t be said that the project is at a standstill.
Swindled
So apparently the Channel 4 documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle was a load of old horse shit. Apparently. From scientists with a previous history of being a bit rebel to ones that were also previously funded by oil companies. It’s all a bit of a shambles to be honest.
The problem with this is how are we meant to know who to believe any more. Al Gore makes a convincing argument. So did this documentary. And there’s also no doubting that this planet has had previous periods of cooling and warming, we would otherwise not have had an ice-age nor come out of it. So why can’t this time just be another natural occurrence. I think we’re honestly past the point where anybody would take any properly researched counter-argument seriously anyway.
Crippled
I knocked my laptop from the arm of the couch and it landed on the floor with a thud. I didn’t notice at first, but in time I saw that the left hand side (it’s a MacBook Pro) around the card slot was all bent. A little bit of knife action and I’ve managed to bend the metal back into some sort of reasonable shape again, but it’s not the same. I shall for ever more have to deal with the shame of having a little, crippled laptop.
Blocks
There are now 305 movies on WOPR (my media centre, for those not paying attention). There are a fair number of them which I haven’t actually seen, so tonight me and Andrea decided to just start at the top and watch them all, in order. We started with 16 Blocks, the Bruce Willis cop thriller from a year or so ago.
It wasn’t too bad, although seeing Willis playing an older, tired cop you can’t help but compare the role to his John McClane character and think that this could be an alternative universe Die Hard 4. I don’t think it would be quite the sequel Die Hard fans would be looking for, but it would certainly have been an interesting creative decision.
Buff
It was Jennifer’s 25th birthday celebrations today, so me and Andrea went out to join the fun. We started out in a pub in Glasgow, which wasn’t too bad at all. Somehow we’d managed to score a table upstairs, away from the throng and the noise in the main bar area. The company (many of which I’d never met before) and conversation was sparkling.
We then moved to the Buff Club, which for me is when things went downhill. I just don’t like clubs, too loud, too hot, too cramped. I hadn’t been drinking (was driving) which I’m sure made a bit of a difference, but even when I have been, clubs still aren’t my bag. However much I think about doing it and however much other people try and persuade me, I just can’t get up and dance. I’m an OK dancer, I certainly have rhythm, and can sweep across the living room floor when the situation demands. But in the dark with a bunch of strangers, I just won’t do it. My time is therefore spent sitting at the table on my own, or shouting over the music to whomever stayed with me. Not the best.
But everybody appeared to have a good time, and Jennifer certainly seemed to enjoy herself, so the night can only be considered as a success.
Phoning
Day One. I phone up my solicitor and tell them why I’m phoning, which is because I need to confirm with them the details of the contract. The receptionist takes my details, says she’ll get the file and that somebody will phone me back. Nobody does.
Day Two. I phone up again, this time the phone is answered by somebody else. She sounds surprised that somebody is talking to her, as if this is the first time she’s answered a phone. I explain how I phoned the day before and nobody called me back, she says somebody will. Guess what, they don’t.
Day Three. I phone again. I’m pretty annoyed by this point. I explain for the third time why I’m calling, and that nobody phones me back. This time I get put through to the solicitor, but I have to wait on hold for a few minutes first. He clearly has the contract in front of him and he points out a couple of minor points relating to it, nothing I hadn’t already realised by just using a little common sense. The conversation lasts two minutes, at most, at the end of which I’m told they’ll send a letter back to the other solicitor to confirm.
Again, what am I paying for?
Savings
I paid some money into my bank account today so that I could write a cheque for the house builder later in this week. The girl behind the counter suggested that if I was paying that kind of money into my account I’d be far better paying it into a high interest savings account, especially if it was going to be there for any length of time. Sadly this wasn’t going to be the case, it would be gone again within days. But isn’t interest such a con anyway, unless you have incredibly large amounts of money lying around in your account?
Plugged
Batman Begins is such a fabulous comic book movie, so wonderfully paced, acted and directed. It’s the high standard that all such movies should be held to, and there’s an excellent ending which really sets you up for the next one (which I’m really looking forward to).
As part of my DVD rental subscription I’ve been choosing all the films they had available in HD and this was one of them, anything to put my HD-DVD drive to good use. But although the film was excellent as always, I was disappointed with the HD experience. In fact, out of this and V for Vendetta which are the two films I’ve seen in HD so far, neither of them really blew me away. There were certainly moments in V where the colour and definition were spectacular, but on the whole I’ve felt a little underwhelmed.
Maybe it’s the player, maybe it’s just the films I’ve seen so far, maybe I don’t have the TV setup properly. Whatever it seemed so much simpler when DVD was released and you just plugged it in and knew right away it was better than VHS.
Bobcat
If your only experience of Bob (Bobcat) Goldthwait is his character in the Police Academy movies, or perhaps in Scrooged, you probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he did wrote and directed a film involving sexual acts with animals - Sleeping Dogs (or Sleeping Dogs Lie, or Stay, depending on where you are).
From the premise, I expected a bit of a racy comedy, but it’s sadly quite tame. It also seems to run out of steam about half way through, and the story goes off in all sorts of different directions without much point. Events seem to just occur in order to extend the length of the film, rather than because they add something to the story arc.
Disappointing. **/5.
Blades
It’s that time of year again, time for another Will Ferrell career comedy, where something goes horribly wrong or a new rival appears on the seen and some adversity has to be overcome before the final victorious showdown. This time it was Blades Of Glory, but what will it be next time? Find out here.
Missives
I received the missives for my new house today, more well known simply as the contracts. It’s not a big contract, about four pages long, and nothing in there strikes me as particularly strange or unusual. Reading it however does beg the question of what exactly I’m paying my solicitor to do. Ultimately all he’s going to do is send back a confirmation to the other solicitor who is then going to ask for a deposit and give final confirmation. So he’s maybe going to send a couple of letters, open a couple himself and then ultimately charge me almost £700 for the privilege.
It seems that somewhere along the line I made a mistake with my career choice.
Effect
The Links Effect is one of many web projects that I’ve produced over the years. Users could submit links which then appeared on the site for all to see, the idea being that you had a never ending stream of sites to visit. Many other sites have since come along and made variations of this idea very successful, but for me, it never gained any traction.
I’ve relaunched the site today as a tumble log, powered by the wonderful new service Tumblr. A tumble log is a simple blog made up of links, quotes, photos, videos and basic posts, and you’ll probably find that it’s going to updated far more than here just because of how simple it is to do so. Whenever I find something cool (or Graham adds something to his del.icio.us feed) then it’ll appear on there. Visit every day for something new.
