Weblog

Found some cool timewasters atrobotduck.com nb, not the same place I directed you to before for the shockwavce space invaders, that was robot-frog.com.

Brainfart recommend the Yard Invaders, and so do I.
There i s a semi annoying nag screen asking you to donate, but as we all know, this is the end of free stuff on the web....
posted by mart    11:20 AM       ~

Oooh.. this is a handy site if you;'re visiting somewhere and are looking for a church to go to at the weekend... And yes, Highfields is listed!

Talking of whch looks like they've finished doing the site for the church, and it does look loads better... I wonder who designed it...
posted by mart    6:24 PM       ~

Oooh , well after the blog frenzy of last week, it's taken a while to find something worth writing about this week....

Anywho someone in irc alerte me to the True Meaning of Life a kind of spoof agony aunt/uncle page. He warns me it's quite addictive and I have a feeling he could be right....
posted by mart    9:45 AM       ~

Thought I might do smattering.org's "Friday Five". They give you 5 questions evry friday... answer them in your blog...

So here we go:
1. What cologne or perfume do you wear?
XS by paco rabanne, but only rarely.

2. What cologne or perfume do you like best on the opposite sex?
Hmmm I quite like Tommy Girl... and CK Eternity for Women... I've never been a fan of "unisex" perfumes, like CK One... it's like they're too much of nothing...

3. What one smell can you not stomach?
Bananas. Ugh ugh ugh. They make me retch. I hate the smell of old banana skins too...

4. What smell do you like that others might consider weird?
Pipe smoke. Not cigars or cigarettes though...

5. How do you plan to spend your weekend?
Down the gym, at church (we're on cleaning rota this weekend) and in bed! Not in that order.


posted by mart    2:26 PM       ~

Went to see Lost Prophets last night...

Was a bit worried before we went as I'd seen em twice in the last 8 months, and was thinking they'd just be doing the songs from the album, again. Fortunately they did 3 new ones, all of which were very cool...

There were 2 support bands - Jarcrew (who apparently have a website, but it's not at the url I've got...) and Douglas. Jarcrew were (in Jeff's words) a skiffle-heavy metal band... All red shirts and black ties or (for the guitarists) black shirt and white ties... They were quite quirky, with a vocalist who had a style reminiscent of The Fall... Very animated drummer, lots of shouting, nice riffs, and big noises... they're playing at the Clwb Ifor Bach in March... so I think I might pop along to see that....

The second support - Douglas - were, as their name suggests, very very bland. They were also too loud. (Did I say that? Am I getting old?). With heavy heavy guitars, songs at over 200bpm, and a vocalist warbling indistinctively at half time, it all made for a truly boring experience. Jeff and I went into the foyer at this point and saw Rich from Community Music Wales and we had a nice chat with him...

Then back for the Lost Prophets, who, it has to be said, were better than ever! It's so nice to have an entire band that are very animated, rather than having that single "moody" bass/rhythm guitarist who thinks standing still means he has good stage-presence... They're new Transformers themed stuff looks cool as well... Anyone else remember that Galvatron had a deadly carrot

All in all, a very cool gig, and I have to say that the Coal Exchange is rapidly turning into my fav Cardiff venue... The sound engineers always seem to do a good job, even for the support band, and the atmosphere is nice, and not too smoky... Last night was full of 13 yr olds, but then, all the moshers these days seem to be young.... bizarre...


posted by mart    11:46 AM       ~

had our official email about ntl: charging for what used to be our free web access...

It's depressing as I don't want to move, and £5 a month certainly isn't much... so I guess we'll stick with it, but *sigh*...
posted by mart    11:32 AM       ~

I've changed the design slightly on the rest of the site.... I decided that it really WAS time to change the colour of normal text, but couldn't find a complimentary colour for links. Using the colour that I use here on the blog just didn't look "right", so I've put dotted lines underneath ;links, which still expand when you mouseover them...
posted by mart    2:51 PM       ~

I've been enjoying minor 9th, a weblog from a music student. Today's link to a a trashed hall of residence kitchen made me smile...

ok, so that was the second html mistake in less than 24 hours.
posted by mart    9:11 AM       ~

yeah yeah I didn't close the italic tag correctly earlier. sue me.
posted by mart    10:19 PM       ~

Can I just say, there are 3 reasons why I really dislike the current No Doubt single:

1) The incessant repetition of the line Hey baby, hey baby, hey!
2) The incessant repetition of the bassline.
3) The way that camomile is rhymed with sex appeal.

ugh.
Don't buy this rubbish people.
posted by mart    8:58 PM       ~

awwwww. Poor Liberty. they have to change their name.
posted by mart    5:03 PM       ~

ok, robot frog is one of my all-time favoutrite sites, it has very little... a few groovy icons, a couple of wallpapers, but it has one excellent game - a shockwave old-school space invaders, which you lose potins on for any bullets which don't hit anything. It's got great sfx, and a nice design, and oh just go play it for yourself.
posted by mart    11:05 AM       ~

OK people, I may not be a teacher now, but I've spent enough time in schools, on both sides of the desk, to know that these kind of mistakes happen all the time.

Exam boards are always sending out incorrect papers, or papaers missing a page. Sure, I feel sorry for the kids sat the "impossible" maths question (what's impossible anyway?), and they shouldn't have to sit it again (which the exam board have said they won't), but purrlease stop making such a big deal out of it.... it must be a slow news week....
posted by mart    10:51 AM       ~

It's link-madness today.

You know that thing about if you met a stranger, chances are that it would only take six steps of acquaintances to link the two of you together? Well the Sociology dept of Columbia university is launching the Smallworld project to attempt to prove this...
posted by mart    4:26 PM       ~

Here's one for Percy.
posted by mart    4:16 PM       ~

common threads: another photo-blog
posted by mart    4:11 PM       ~

Wallace and Gromit appear to be returning. In lieu of their next feature length film, they will be appearing in 12 short flms, availbale in the first instance, online. It appears you'll have to download sections of each films from different sites before being able to view a single short... Interesting, but not sure it'll catch on. Think I'll wait for the feature-length myself.
posted by mart    11:55 AM       ~

Somebody bought us a very cool sideways-walking wind-up monkey at Christmas. She told me yesterday that it came from Hawkin's Bazaar which is full of loads of other tacky stuff. grrreat!
posted by mart    3:52 PM       ~

this LOTR-ish blog has some quite amusing diaries of members of the fellowship.

via the denizens of #angband.
posted by mart    3:53 PM       ~

Wow... look... space age travel thingies, here in Cardiff!
posted by mart    2:45 PM       ~

oooh... become your own trading card!

via evhead.

Also heres an anti-Hermione site.
posted by mart    1:51 PM       ~

Oh no. The whole world is going mad.

Seen someone from afar you find attractive? Well these crazy people will find out lots about that person, and then arrange a "coincidental" meeting for you with him/her...

Further proof, if it were needed that the web, and the wrold is a very scary place.

and check out their rates too... that's almost even more scary!
posted by mart    12:58 PM       ~

The Register has a story about the launch of the new .me.uk domain name.

moppy.me.uk doesn't work - it would have to be moppy.us.uk, which is just plain confusing as it looks half american.... I've always thought having your own name as your domain name is a bit of a crazy idea anyway....
posted by mart    9:46 AM       ~

Now people may think a sitcom about Ozzy Osbourne to be a rather absurd idea, but actually, his family are quite interesting. There's Ozzie with this horrendously thick Brummie accent, and yet he and his kids live in a *huge* mansion, and the kids are like the poshest you could imagine... it's all "oh yes, this is daddy's such and such giotar, and this is the snake he keeps to practice biting the head off...." etc...

via angryblog.
posted by mart    4:35 PM       ~

Well, there we go, Adam Ant, probably my first pop idol (I wnated to wear funky face paint) has been submitted to a psychiatric hospital following his gun-wavin episode in London at the weekend. Here's an Official statement.
posted by mart    2:11 PM       ~

the ! is now a ~ (wrt to permalinks.)
posted by mart    1:15 PM       ~

What would your AD&D Stats be in real life?

Mine were terrible:

Str: 16
Int: 15
Wis: 11
Dex: 6
Con: 11
Chr: 10

A strong mage I guess....
posted by mart    8:23 AM       ~

Surprised I haven't seen more Lord Of The Ring's Tests.

I am, apparently most like Legolas. I always thought of myself more like Strider, but that's probably wishful thinking. I think Mum said she thought I'd make a good Boromir which is a bit disheartening, but I've often played main charcters who die before the end of the first half (eg Riff in West Side Story). Anyhow, Elves are cool, even if in the film they do (in Poppy's words) "all look like they're from some Timotei advert".

Actually, I can't wait for The Two Towers. I wanna see some Ents! Maybe I'm more like an Ent...
posted by mart    8:52 AM       ~

Gah. Just when I think I've cracked a joke about Bush (see below), His mother says the same thing.
posted by mart    8:40 AM       ~

added permalinks. (The little exclamation marks after date). They link to individual posts. eternally. Also changed the colour of the "current" link in the RH column to be the same as the rest fo them, but think I preferred it dark anyway.
posted by mart    3:35 PM       ~

Don't Americans crunch their pretzels before they chew?
posted by mart    1:28 PM       ~

All the news about Drink and drugs in the royal circle only continues to confirm my own feelings about the royals... that they're essentially subject to the same obsessions, desires etc as the rest of us, but are supposed to have a greater responsibility to deny those feelings...

I guess that's how it should be, and public opinion doesn't seem to be too anti-harry atm, but it always bothers e how the press make such a big deal out of this kind of thing.

I mean, that time I got horrendously drunk on Sangria in Majorca was never mentioned to my parents, let alone the press...
posted by mart    1:07 PM       ~

waferbaby have taken down fsu. Oh well, most of the entries were rubbish, like he said.

We might be joining a gym - how scary is that?
posted by mart    10:42 AM       ~

been writing the help files for using lua scripting in PernAngband, and have uploaded some examples to help to my tiny angband page.

I have also discovered The Slippery Truffle.
posted by mart    12:58 AM       ~

finally succumbed and added the Site Meter code to the site. Means I lose a text counter in the format I prefer, but adds all the usual funky stat-tracking capabilities...

hmm that last entry had a two groovy's in one sentence. Unfortunate.
posted by mart    6:35 PM       ~

the ultra-groovy waferbaby (weblog, funny pictures and groovy interactiveness) has a new feature - fsu. Basically it gives you an empty form with two boxes, one labelled 'head', one labelled 'body'. Add some html or css to the boxes and press the 'add' button, and voila, your page goes online to the masses... and of course the best bit is viewing all the other stuff people have done :)
posted by mart    1:31 PM       ~

Hmmm. I needed to do a test post for Percy.
posted by mart    10:52 AM       ~

OK, two blogs I like atm - ugly green chair and goobita.
posted by mart    2:56 PM       ~

On a more disturbing note, 41 has gone missing :(

We came back from the weekend and he hasn't come back. He ate saturday morning's food, and then I guess he either went looking for us and some kind souls have taken pity on him cos he miaowed at them lots and looked cute, or he's had some terrible accident. Poppy and I have asked neighbours and done a fairly extenmsive leaflet drop thing, but there's no news yet.

How anybody can think that a cat as fat as he is is unhomed though is rather beyond me though, I mean no stray is gonna be as solid as he is. The photos up at the moment don't really do him justice in terms of the size thing. We took some more quite recently but hey, the film's not developed yet.
posted by mart    2:11 PM       ~

Forgot to mention that whilst on our mammoth tour to the whole of the hatfield/fahy family over Xmas, we also visited 2 different Ikeas. Both Poppy and I discovered what it is to have a true "Ikea headache". They come on quicker than "Tesco headaches" and just make you want to sit down somewhere else with a cup of coffee.

We managed to put one off for a while when we went to the Bristol Ikea, by having a drink in their own shop, but of course that only kind of delays the inevevitable. Still we bought lots of nice new things for the house, like bookshelves, and kitchen storage things. Still looking for something to fit under the stairs though.
posted by mart    2:06 PM       ~

We've been trying to find some units to fit snugly under our stairs. We'd love the staircase units from tansu but they're £5k each....

Oh, and they're the wrong way round too...
posted by mart    11:16 PM       ~

P.O.D. (Payable On Death) are getting serious amounts of airplay on Radio1 with their current single, "Alive". It's good to see that a Christian rock band can be successful in the secular world.

I've seen them catch flack for not being on strictly Christian billings (eg supporting Korn etc) but how else is a band supposed to reach non-christians? Plus I believe they've said that when they are in a position to top the bill themselves that they'll be interested in having Christian support bands.... maybe posted by mart    10:32 PM       ~

waferbaby has a link to this map showing bushfire locations in sydney.

And on a rather humblingly less interesting note, I uploaded my patch for Pern 5.1.0
posted by mart    11:44 PM       ~

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