Archive for November 2009

Rachel’s birthday

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos on 9 November 2009 with Comments Off

It was on this day, a whole 30 years ago, that my big sis­ter was born. When I was little I always had a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that Rachel being born at 4.11pm was just part of the world’s biggest suck-up trick (my Dad’s birth­day being the 4th, and my Mum’s the 11th. Oh, what a handy coin­cid­ence for someone look­ing to seal their fate as Favour­ite Daugh­ter!), but then I also also, vari­ously, believed that Rachel was adop­ted, I was adop­ted, and Um Bongo had poison in it. One Christ­mas, my only present request was for a burst bal­loon, so you can make your own mind up about the way my mind worked as a child.

I’d claim Rachel got all the good genes, but she is both older and shorter than me, so HAH! When we die, we should prob­ably be bur­ied next to each other and have sep­ar­ate grave­stones with, “which gravestone’s tallest?” engraved on them, although that would be mostly point­less because Rachel’s will be stand­ing on tippy­toes and our skel­et­ons would do noth­ing but fight. She got all of the attract­ive, healthy and soci­able genes, but was also lumbered with a hard time when we were grow­ing up because I got the men­tal arith­metic gene. And look where that one got me, eh, every teacher I’ve ever had? If I went back in time my advice to little me would be to go for attract­ive, healthy and soci­able too: it turns out that nobody ever really needs their seven times table (you can even get a degree without doing any maths past the age of 13) and soon they will invent this thing called Word which will cor­rect all of your spelling anyway.

Happy birth­day, Rachel.

Balgreen from the 22

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos on 6 November 2009 with Comments Off

I’d write more, but I have to go and burn my bra on Twit­ter or some­thing instead.

Fripper’s on a roll

In Hamster, NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos on 5 November 2009 with Comments Off

Last night all of Italy decided to spam the server, res­ult­ing in a quite stressed Al and a very dis­ap­poin­ted Frip­per who had to make do with my com­pany as he ran around. And me? I am BORING. I never do any­thing inter­est­ing like build things or take things apart on the floor. We made do by play­ing “Sarah tries to take a photo of the ham­ster in his ball while the ham­ster tries to run into the cam­era” but it turns out to be not as inter­est­ing a game as you’d ima­gine and he was off after a few blurry shots.

This is who my spam is from

In NaBloPoMo, Odd, Photos and Videos on 5 November 2009 with 2 comments

Two things about email:

1. Types of emails I don’t like:

1. Lib­rary Elf emails which I inev­it­ably don’t read until after my books are overdue.
2. Those Face­book emails you get because someone you don’t know has replied to someone you don’t know on a dis­cus­sion about some­thing you can’t remem­ber com­ment­ing on six months ago.
3. Invoice emails/emails gen­er­ally inform­ing me about money being removed from my account and put into someone else’s.
4. The emails from Abbey where they use Comic Sans. Hello. You are a bank. This is, for once, not a phish­ing email. At least try and make it look like you didn’t get a bunch of Indone­sian schoolkids to write it.

2. A list of names taken from my Spam folder in a fruit­less search for Nanowrimo char­ac­ter names:

Louve­nia Cardera
Mar­garito Cai
Laur­een Back­bone
Char­main Berdy
Mar­cone Omar
Hufstedler Wayne
Adena Sweat­mon
Sweet­land Bulah
Hanna Had­daway
Alpha Votoda
Blanch Sto­et­zel
Ver­n­ita Treichler
Voc­cia Simonne
Ilu­min­ada Hes­ford
Jim­mie Amorosi
Des­per Debera
Mer­cedes Dress­man
Flans­burg Jone
Maizes Bobby
Romeo Van­v­ranken
Aus­tin Sweezy
Kurt Letcher
Evan Bustillo
Kaili­poni Clyde
Steep Kur­tis
Dina Shopp
Shona Gal­leno
Cor­alie Zippe
Bong Zakar
Assunta Wedge­worth
Char­lotte Pof­fen­roth
Eyre Edgar
Gar­land Mamros

Morningside by night

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos, Projects on 3 November 2009 with 2 comments

Can we cla­rify: post­ing a photo before giv­ing up and just going to bed counts as fully-fledged blog­ging, yes?

Cleaning windows

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos, Websites on 2 November 2009 with 2 comments

I’ll admit it: I really don’t mind Win­dows. In fact, I quite like it. I could hap­pily use Linux if it could run Pho­toshop with any pro­fi­ciency, and I’m sure I’d love a Mac if I could just find a rel­at­ive I could sell in order to buy one, but des­pite all of the hoo-hah, and once all user account warn­ings have been dis­abled within an inch of their lives, the Win­dows of 2009 is really not that bad. This is quite a use­ful thing, given that for the second time in two weeks I’m watch­ing Win­dows 7 install onto a machine at a speed that would make a snail quake in its boots. You know, if a snail could wear boots. Or install Win­dows 7.

The first install was planned, a full install on a brand new Vista laptop, and went smoothly apart from that small issue with the graph­ics driver and the web­cam only show­ing upside down images. You want to chat with someone who appears to be hanging from the ceil­ing? I’m your girl. The second install was not so planned, but ended up being an upgrade-ish from Vista to Win­dows 7 on my desktop’s shiny new hard drive, a hard drive that talks to my com­puter and works and everything. I say upgrade-ish, because you can’t upgrade from Vista Home We’re Awe­some Edi­tion to Win­dows 7 We’re Suit-wearing Pro­fes­sion­als Edi­tion, and so it makes up a story about how it’s doing a clean install. This is a blatant lie, incid­ent­ally, but a happy lie from Microsoft for once.

All of this is a long-winded way of say­ing, I love Nin­ite. The first thing I nor­mally do after a rein­stall is open Inter­net Explorer and use that to down­load Fire­fox. Once Fire­fox is sor­ted, I then start the three-day-long pro­cess of work­ing out what it is I actu­ally use, remem­ber­ing only when I go to use a pro­gram that I still need to down­load and install it. Nin­ite takes out the guess­work. Open IE, head to IE, tick boxes for almost everything I use on a daily basis — includ­ing Fire­fox, Thun­der­bird, Note­pad++, Spo­tify, Adobe Reader, AVG, VLC and Win­SCP — and I can down­load a cus­tom installer that gets it all done at once. This means that the only soft­ware I need to manu­ally install are the big­gies — Pho­toshop, Illus­trator, Light­room, and any drivers that need to be argued with (assum­ing that those drivers are avail­able before mid-November, that is. Just sayin’, Hewlett-Packard.) So kudos, Nin­ite — you have made the past two weeks infin­itely easier.

(Note: all credit for the pump­kin above must go to our next door neigh­bours. Sadly, I can­not take any credit for those artist­ic­ally swirly eyes or the way our stair­well sud­denly smells a lot like rot­ting veg. You don’t know how temp­ted I am to take the lid off and put the ham­ster inside, just hav­ing him knock on our door to get in again once he’s had his fill.)