2005 Archives

Yay, my underwear from Figleaves turned up today, I have new bras…

Yay, my underwear from Figleaves turned up today, I have new bras which fit. Now my breasts look enormous, which is a bit scary…

Let me see, let me see!

(awaits slap)

Sundeep/Katie Burning

As you all know, Bryn’s nemesis and everybody’s favourite pseudolesbian are having a birthday burning and unchristmas party on the beach tonight. More details here, here, and here (can you tell they’ve been planning this awhile?).

Anyway; in order to make sure that people know, I’ll post this message here: I’ll bring all the barbeques you can eat, and people (by which I inevitably mean ‘me’) can cook things on them. If I can get the help of one or more people with cars, I can also arrange for a large quantity of burnable wood to be deposited on the beach, too, which is always a good thing.

Hope to see you there.

GMail Accounts

People have asked me for GMail invites again, but one of these people’s @aber.ac.uk e-mail address doesn’t seem to be working, says GMail, so here are some “ready to pick up”:

Invite 1 (used)
Invite 2 (used)
Invite 3 (used)
Invite 4 (used)
Invite 5
Invite 6
Invite 7
Invite 8
Invite 9
Invite 10

Get ’em while they’re hot. If one doesn’t work, try another. If they all don’t work, leave a comment (and pull your finger out next time).

SmartData’s Almost-Free Pens

I’ve just seen haggling taken to a new level. A marketing company called us up and offered us 100 executive-type pens, branded with our company information, with no commitment to buy. They delivered them, and they’re… okay… but they really don’t fit the company image. The total value of the pens is £290, and we’re not paying that much for a design that doesn’t suit us. But the marketing company knows that they can’t re-print the pens, and they want to make some money on them (or, at least, lose as little as possible… and it would cost them money to have their courier pick them up). And so, over several phone calls, co-worker Gareth haggled with them, as follows:

Them: £290?
Gareth: free.
Them: £150?
Gareth: free.
Them: £100?
Gareth: free.
Them: £75?
Gareth: free.
Them: Really, we can’t possibly give them to you for less than £75.
Gareth: Okay then, you’ll have to send a courier to pick them up. (I’d suggested that he also say that our office hours are 9am to 9:30am on Monday mornings only, unless it’s raining in which case it’s 4:30pm to 5pm) Wow… how much is that going to cost you, out here to the West coast of Wales?
Them: Look, go ask your director – £75?
Gareth: (background noise) free.
Gareth begins to get bored.
Gareth: Okay then, £40.
Them: £50.
Gareth: £45, and you can throw in a catalogue and we’ll read it.
Them: Done.

You’ve got to love any haggling where you start at ‘free’ and stay there for as long as possible. They’re not bad pens, but we’ll be using them here rather than giving them to people…

Hollywood Pizza And BT Online Billing

If only BT.com online billing provided an XML feed… we could integrate our Hollywood Pizza order call times and lengths into the Troma Night web site.

Probably not a good thing, actually.

Confusion

Don’t you hate it when you can’t draw the line in your memory between your dreams and waking life: I’m very hazy on last night, and can’t remember whether a conversation took place or if I just dreamt it.

I’m more certain, however, on a nightmare I had last night: Claire and I bought a villa in Cyprus and went to live there. But as we were moving in, we ended up arguing about the way that we would like to decorate the place, which turned nasty, and I ended up sleeping on the couch. I think it says a lot about you when nightmares of being chased by things are replaced with nightmares of domestic arguments. Ah well.

Watched the remainder of Blackadder last night with Claire, Ruth and JTA . And played some more Settlers Of Catan, in which JTA barely pipped me to the post… again! That’s the fourth time he’s just-barely-beaten-me, out of four games we’ve ever played together.

Productive Weekend… Perhaps

This post has been censored at the request of S******. See: all censored posts, all posts censored by request of S******.

Not quite so productive a weekend as I might have hoped, but still – plenty got done. Geek Night on Friday is best described by Ruth. Saturday saw me interviewed by some Theatre, Film & TV students who are doing a documentary on Nice ‘n’ Naughty, having seen my blog entry reviewing the shop. And then, joined by Ruth, JTA, Bryn, Claire, Liz and Paul, I found myself in front of the camera again, this time in a full afternoon’s rehearsal of many of the “group” scenes for The Great Free Publicity Campaign, a film we’re hoping to start shooting before the month is out.

Troma Night was particularly good – the so-called themed “Bogart Night”. We watched The Maltese Falcon (I’d seen it as a child, once, but been too young to actually appreciate it), Casablanca (still fab), and the MST3K cover of Overdrawn At The Memory Bank. The latter stars… and I use the term loosely… Raul Julia, who later went on to become Gomez in The Addams Family before once again losing his credibility by appearing in Street Fighter (the movie – not Street Figher: The Movie, the game: I kid you not). In the film, Raul plays a guy in a future in which people take short vacations by transplanting their personalities into wild animals: while inhabiting a baboon called Daisy, his real body goes missing and his personality has to be moved to the mainframe computer for safekeeping, which he breaks into. What’s that got to do with Humphrey Bogart, you ask? Well, it repeatedly references Casablanca, including footage taken from it… or, as Crow T. Robot put it, “Never show a good movie in the middle of your crappy movie.”

Paul’s got some odd plan for next week’s Troma Night, involving formally inviting people [!]. Not sure what that’s all about.

And on Sunday evening JTA, Ruth, Claire and I – joined by Jimmy, who’s back in town, and briefly by Sundeep, who was busily pirating music – watched most of the third series of Blackadder, before JTA started falling asleep and had to retire.

Apart from that: got a little work done on the research for a report I need to write, but not enough to really call it “progress”. Got a little work done on some code I needed to write to allow a project I’m working on to be multilingual, but not to any great depth. Hmm… doesn’t sound like such a productive weekend, anymore…

Edit: Oh; and there’s now a little bit of publicly-available information about TheFilm.

Edit2 – 19 September 2017: certain details were removed at Sundeep’s request.

DVI-VGA Adapter

Troma Night tonight could really do with a DVI-VGA adapter, like the one pictured to the right. I have two of them, somewhere. If you were part of the tidy-up squad and you remember seeing it, or if you have one that you can lend to me for the evening, it would be much appreciated.

Spring: Fun While It Lasted

Umm… it seems to be snowing…

Frustration

Tried to post from my mobile, but it lost the post. Tried to post a summary from my mobile, but that died too. So here’s the short, short version:

Just witnessed frustrating argument. Not least because I felt ‘banned’ from it. That may be for the best, because if I’d have participated I think Claire would have felt persecuted… all participants were getting rather defensive before I left, which wasn’t helping any of them.

Despite a couple of (probably accidental) attempts to backstab, Andy earned himself a respect point tonight.

Lots of points that shouldn’t have been overlooked, but were, but I’m not typing them again.

Fuck it.

Curry With Alec And Suz

Alec and Suz are visiting Aberystwyth at the moment, in a hunt for a place to live next year and possibly over the summer too. Suz has a final year to go in her degree (having spent this academic year, and the next few months, traipsing around Europe as part of her course), and Alec is hoping to be accepted onto a UWA PGCE course, giving him an excuse to come back after his year-or-so of absence. In the long run, almost everybody comes back to AberWorld, it seems.

So, Alec and Suz joined Claire, Andy, Sian, JTA, Ruth and I in curry at Cafe All Spice and drinks at The Cambrian (where we were also joined by Katie and a friend of Suz’s, Jo). Finally, we retired to the flat to watch 40s public information films, including:

Molly Grows Up – “It’s okay to swim, so long as you don’t do it on the first few days of your period, and if you wash your hair you must dry it promptly to avoid catching a chill. But strenous activities like horse riding and square dancing are to be avoided.”
Easy Does It – “In this sped-up film, it’s easy to see that the little woman walks over four miles every day… from sink to refrigerator to dining table…”
Perversion For Profit – “Psychologists believe that exposure to this kind of pornography…” [demonstrates] “…by even normal men… can turn them into homosexuals.”

Alec & Suz are crashing at the Flat these few days.

In other news, Andy K is pissed off and nobody knows why, Paul & co’s Birmingham Egg experiment is mentioned on Viking FM yesterday morning.

Google Wants Your DIY Porn Videos

Got home videos? Send them to Google! That’s the message that Google co-founder Larry Page is trying to put out.

In anticipation of launching a “video search” system, Google wants a stack of material on which they can test their “video spider” – a program which will hunt for keywords (spoken, or on-screen) in video material, so that it’s searchable in much the same way as web pages already are.

Fucking weird.

Black Holes “Almost Certainly Don’t Exist”

A brave physicist claims that black holes don’t exist at all, but what we are interpreting as the existence of black holes – where stars have collapsed into tiny, superdense masses with an event horizon within which matter/energy escape is almost impossible – are actually… dark energy! (yes, yet another dark-matter/dark-energy claim)

It’s a good one, though, and helps explain a lot of things. His theory is that these dark holes, as they’re undoubtedly going to be called by the mass media, attract matter over spacetime on the “outside” of the event horizon, but repel it from the inside, transforming electrons into positrons as they leave, thereby causing radiation (as we see from suspected black holes, but wouldn’t expect) as they collide with matter in the dimensions we’re used to.

In any case, it’s a brave little theory which is also probably wrong. But you can read it on nature.com anyway.

English Usage, And Colourblind Humour

I did the Commonly Confused Words Test (hey; shouldn’t that be the Frequently Confused Words Test): here’s my score –

English Genius
You scored 100% Beginner, 100% Intermediate, 100% Advanced, and 93% Expert!

You did so extremely well, even I can’t find a word to describe your excellence! You have the uncommon intelligence necessary to understand things that most people don’t. You have an extensive vocabulary, and you’re not afraid to use it properly! Way to go!

For the complete Answer Key, visit http://shortredhead78.blogspot.com/.

Which I’m at least slightly pleased with. Not least because I beat Claire (barely).

However, it does turn out that I was wrong about something, earlier – over the weekend, she and I had debated use of “I” and “me” (subject/object). Now, as you would expect, we both know how to correctly place them, but I claimed that it was also incorrect, when writing in the subjective sense, to fail to put the other objects in front of you (i.e. “…my friends and I” was better than “…I and my friends”). It turns out, according to AskOxford, that either are equally correct, merely that the former is considered more polite. So, a point to you, there, Claire.

On the other hand – if you get your point across, who gives a shit? Just the pedanticists, that’s who.

Matt, a co-worker, just looked over to my desk, where I was eating a jacket potato covered with bolognaise sauce. “Ooh! Is that spinach?” he asked, and it took me some while to work out why he’s said that… before I remembered that he’s profoundly deuteranope-colourblind (red/green). “Umm, no… it’s bolognaise,” I responded. But of course, to him – and to almost 10% of white male humans worldwide – the dark green of spinach and the dark red of a rich bolognaise have always been pretty much identical. Fascinating, isn’t it?

A Social Weekend; Script Improvements, Too

Things are making progress re: the film – JTA‘s made a few script changes that actually make a couple of the relationships in the story make sense, to which Paul said “These changes make the story work… I don’t like them…”

In other news, my parents have each agreed to lend us their respective video cameras, which gives us enough to film scenes sensibley. Couple this with Rach’s offer of a second tripod, and we’re laughing. I’ll be putting up the placeholder web site for the film… tonight, hopefully.

It’s been a fun, sunny weekend. Claire and I met up with Rach, Kathleen, etc. (finally got to meet Issac, Rach’s baby). Geek Night was fab, if quiet. Troma Night was okay, but it’s a great pity that we weren’t able to get Electric Dreams working (although Paul and I have since managed to download a fresh copy).

And last night, Claire and I were joined by Paul, Bryn, and Hayley for food, which was nice. So it’s been a jolly, social little time we’ve had. There’s always been somebody who wanted to touch bases with me, even if it’s just people sending hate mail about me auctioning the late Pope’s dead body on eBay in an auction that lasted just give hours before it was pulled. Heh.