Quite liking the 12x optical zoom on my new Canon Powershot S3…
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
New toy
Wednesday, July 18th, 200728 Weeks Later
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007Just back from a nearly-free preview screening of same. Hadn’t seen the first one, so didn’t really know what to expect.Not a lot, as it turned out; a mildy diverting (if utterly linear) gorefest with some big explosions and a lot of early-morning shooting around London to make it look deserted. And one of the most obvious “we’re going to make a third one” endings I’ve seen in a while.
Came back out to my car to find that somebody had stolen the magnetic ISPCC ribbon from the back, presumably to stick on their own. Only in Ireland…
Happy Birthday, Speccy
Monday, April 23rd, 2007
No, it’s not my own birthday today, but the 25th birthday of the groundbreaking ZX Spectrum.
I still remember the excitement as the bundled Horizons tape threw up a proper loading screen (rather than the psychedelic loading squiggles I’d grown used to on the ZX81), and later presented me with Thro’ the Wall, a full colour Breakout clone. Which was written entirely in BASIC of course, complete with neat squashy visual effect as the ball hit the paddle… turned out to be nothing more clever than swapping UDGs when the ball hit row 21, but half the fun in those days was finding out things like that so you could do it yourself. If only making computers do things were still that easy…
Way too many favourite games from the Spectrum era to list here (feel free to add your own), but suffice it to say I still play many of them via FUSE on my PowerBook! Thanks for the memories, Clive.
Holiday catchup
Wednesday, January 10th, 2007
So, first blog of 2007… bliadhna mhath ur, and all that.
It was a fairly quiet break for us this year, at least in terms of travelling and seeing family– we did neither, apart from a one-night spa break up the road at the Johnstownhouse Marriot in Enfield. (The food there really is gorgeous.)
We were out and about around town a bit though… went to see Jason Byrne on December 23rd, and we took in Casino Royale, Flushed Away, Happy Feet and Deja Vu at the cinema (mostly for free– thanks Curly!)
Work-wise, I’m trying out a Sun Ray 2 at home for the first time this week… the technology is certainly impressive, although it remains to be seen whether it’ll oust my laptop as my working-at-home tool of choice. It would probably be more useful if I had one on my desk at work as well, to get the full benefit of session mobility– maybe it’s time to retire my old Ultra 10….
"Cover up your eyes and drop your britches!"
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006Sorry Bastien, I’m just too disturbed by the thought of you in ManU pyjamas to say anything witty about it. (Something akin to a composite of these two springs to mind…)
Irn Bru Snowman
Monday, December 4th, 2006Irn Bru has had some classic print and TV ads to its name over the years, but this one has to be right up there…
PowerBook woes
Thursday, November 30th, 2006My 15″ Powerbook G4 died in various interesting ways yesterday.
It’s been making a scary buzzing noise for months, but yesterday the hard drive gave up the ghost. While doing some diagnostics in its death throes, I also noticed that I seem to be suffering from the logic board failure that causes half your memory to go AWOL. Not sure which of those was responsible for the buzzing noise (if either)– will find out when I replace the disk in the next day or two, I guess.
Of course, Apple being Apple, they’ll only admit that the logic board was faulty on a certain range of PB G4s, with serial numbers from W8503xxxxxx to W8518xxxxxx… and three guesses whose is a W8502. So no free repair for me.
I guess that leaves me three possibilities (four if you count “do nothing and hope it doesn’t get any worse”)… sell my 2×512Mb memory sticks and replace them with a 1xGb stick in the ‘good’ slot (and hope none of the more serious symptoms of the failure appear); purchase AppleCare now for €450, even though I’ll only get a year out of it now rather than three, and have it repaired under that; or pay the somewhat ludicrous €690+ that my local Apple authorised repair shop quoted me. Hrmm.
Edit: D’oh, just realised you can only buy AppleCare within a year of purchase, of course. Just have to cross my fingers for a while then, I think 
Shaun of the Slightly Dreadful
Thursday, November 2nd, 2006Got around to watching Shaun of the Dead this Hallowe’en… had the DVD kicking around since this time last year. Turned out to be a bit of an over-hyped duffer, really… but should have expected that, I’ve yet to see anything with Simon Pegg in it that’s particularly amusing. (He seems to be one of those people whose coolness reputation has been built more on appearing in cult TV shows than from actually being hugely funny.)
What I did in September
Monday, October 16th, 2006First I was going to try and post something arty (like a Luis-esque mosaic), then considered writing screeds about the whole escapade, but that would have taken forever. So, in summary:
First we did this:
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And then we went here:
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And we had a blast.
Phishing ingenuity
Thursday, October 12th, 2006Have seen it all now… got this phishing email today that actually includes a snail mail address to send your money to, just in case you’re too “clever” to click on the link.
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