Merry Christmas!
December 22nd, 2007
Have a good one everyone, God bless, and I’ll see you all in the new year.
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Archive for 2007
Problems
December 3rd, 2007
I know, I know, I know! The updates have been getting less again - but I do have an excuse - Work has been mega busy, look out for some exciting stuff coming from them sometime soon….
But the lack of updates aren’t the only problem with this site, one is the un-robustness of the design in our old friend Internet Explorer.
I’m really inclined to say ’screw IE’, but then again it’s still a main-stay of web surfers the world over, it shouldn’t be - but that’s an argument for another time. Recently, my good friend Mr.Cotton told me that one of his classes had to review a website for an assignment, so being the good egg that he is they we’re pointed in the direction of roobottom. Now, I like to think this was because Paul knows good design when he sees it, but its more likely that he just wanted to take the p**s out of my name.
Knowing what our country’s fine educational institutions are like at providing the latest equipment for their fine young minds, I doubt if they’ve got much choice than to use IE, but you never know some cleaver boffin may have sneaked in a copy of Firefox in his Transformers lunch box. So now I’m torn between really wanting to serve the readers who have little choice in their web software, and sticking it (in some small way) to the man. The man being, erm.. Well, I’m sure you know what I mean.
Incidentally, Paul getting his class to review me did raise another issue that I will be sorting out - Comments. He said he didn’t think most of the guys in his class even knew you could comment. Whoops! Is this true? Do it need to make it easier to and more obvious that you can comment?
Anyway, all this blogging has made me hungry, and lunchtime is nearly over. TTFN.
The Boosh Are Back
November 13th, 2007
That’s right, the moment you’ve been waiting for is just around the corner. Thurs 15th sees the boys return in series 3 of the Boosh on BBC 3. If you’re a UK dweller, you can see it now on the BBC 3 website - That is if you can put up with the turd that is Realplayer… Why oh why did the BBC choose such a cack media type?
Oh well, You Tube has it too (no, I’m not going to link to it - where would be the fun in that?). And yeah, they’re back in true form. Maybe not quite as quality as the genius that was Old Greg with a funky ball of tits from outer space, but good things will come.
Episode one, Eels, sees the return of the Stitcher and his Chelsea boots - and some obvious increases in production budget. Genius genius genius all the way. They’re back! Get in!
An Inappropriate Gift
November 6th, 2007
Recently my good friend’s Paul and Esta popped their first sprog (well, Esta did most of the work I’m told) - And in traditional fashion I brought them a gift to celebrate. It’s called ‘Smoking Baby’ and I’m sure if you want you can get one from somewhere on the net, but I got mine in Brighton.
As you may imagine, I was chuffed to bits to meet little Amelie - she’s gorgeous and despite myself I think I actually said “Awwww”. I quickly had to talk about football to regain some equilibrium (not that I like football - it was just the first manly thing that came to mind). But seriously, she is amazing - even if she is making Katie broodier than ever.
I was not so pleased to be asked to take back my gift though! I mean, come on, what self-respecting parent wouldn’t want Baby smokes-a-lot around to teach their kid at an early age that smoking is not only sociably acceptable, but also makes you look cool. I’m surprised this little guy hasn’t got a pair of ‘knarly’ shades or ‘far out’ tattered jeans - Just look how cool he looks puffing away on that big tab.
Well done proud parents - I bet you can’t wait to see what I get her for Christmas!
Who is Newton Faulkner?
October 22nd, 2007
One word - Genius!
And all from a 22 year old singer / songwriter who hails from London. If you’re not familiar with the name then you’ll probably know his song ‘Dream catch me’ which has been getting quite a lot of radio play. Personally, I’d not heard him until Dan was going on about him last night. Like many new bands and artists someone tells you about - you tend to go “yeah, cool” then forget all about them.
But then he showed me this.
LOOK at that body slapping! HOW does he do this, and sing and play the melody too?! How do you get your brain to process that much all at once? Man… this guy is good.
So today I got his album ‘Hand Built by Robots’. Again.. Wow.
Check him out. See him live. Hook him up with your mother… Or even better get his album, which is available on iTunes and (i’m sure) in all good record stores. And yes, it includes that amazing version of Teardrop.
Creating Panoramas on Mac
October 17th, 2007
Whist in Italy I took the opportunity to capture several images of the same thing - the bay at Salo, the Tower at Sirmione and the Arena in Verona.
Now by themselves, they look pretty rubbish, but stick them in a crazy-go-nutts program called Calico and out the other end you get beautiful panoramic shots.
I’m so impressed with this software. I didn’t use a tripod for these shots, I simply ensured there was plenty of overlap and then exported them full-res from iPhoto. Once in Calico I simply loaded the photos in, and clicked Align.
You can of course rotate each photo or change their order, but Calico takes care of the rest. Alignment, colour balance, the lot! Crop off the black edges and you can’t tell the photos were ever separate.
Pretty sweet! Sorry for those of you with a PC - perhaps someone could suggest something similar for other platforms?
Lake Garda - Italy
October 16th, 2007
The weather was warm, the food was amazing and the wine was cheep. After 7 nights in Italy drifting around Lake Garda, being awed (and a little romantic) in Verona and getting (very) lost in Venice the reality of being back to work has hit like a tonne of bricks.
But I prefer to think of the amazing time we had.
As we landed at the tiny Besica airport we realized that the turbulence we had just endured was in fact heavy rain that drenched us as we ran from the plane to the cover of the arrivals lounge. From there we found ourselves sitting in the hire car, rain pounding on the windscreen, trying to get used to the uneasy feeling of sitting in the passenger side with a steering wheel in front of me.
By the time we reached our hotel we’d driven on three motorways and had a tiny disagreement with a barrier. Thankfully the wing-mirror was unharmed and the rain had stopped to reveal blue sky. Things got even better when we got into our room - it was clean, big and had a balcony from which you could see the lake (sort of) through the trees.
We spent the week exploring Lake Garda’s small towns and excellent restaurants, and venturing out to Verona and eventually Venice after planning to go on Wednesday and finally getting there on Friday - Due to a couple of days missing the train. Whoops!
My favorite place by far was Sirmione which was at the end of an tiny outcrop of land that juts into the south end of the lake. We spent an evening at the naturally heated spa followed by dinner at L’Archimboldo run by a really friendly guy who’s English was better than ours. If you’re going to Lake Garda Sirmione is a must.
Venice was amazing. Stepping out of the station, you’re immediately greeted with throngs of people walking up and down the banks of the Grand Canal. Wow!
We took a water taxi up to St. Marks Square and stopped for lunch and some shelter from the hot hot sun before we ventured into St Mark’s Basilica and mooched around the Square, avoiding the millions of pigeons that randomly landed on anyone they fancied, whether they had food or not.
We then set off around the labyrinth-like city on foot, exploring the seemingly unending passageways and tiny bridges. Needless to say we got horribly lost, and only just made our train back to the hotel. But I loved Venice, a day was just not enough.
In usual style, I took nearly 700 photos - and you can see some of them over at flickr. Oh well.. Back to reality I suppose.
iPod Touch Me
October 5th, 2007
Well, no great supprises but it turns out that there was an iPod touch in the box.
So far I love it!
In the box you get: The iPod (ohhh momma), Headphones, USB cable, A silky cleaning cloth, one of those dock adapter things (so you can use the Touch with Apple Speakers, etc) and a crappy little plastic stand. No stickers (didn’t they used to give you them with everything?) and a useless quick start guide in every language on God’s green Earth.
But onto the main event, the Touch itself. The interface is amazing! Even the keyboard (which pops up whenever you need to type anything) is easy to use, despite the keys looking too small for my chubby fingers to press. It really is well done, and well thought out!
The pinch-zoom is awesome, as is the double-tap - both really intuitive. No wonder they don’t provide a big manual, when it’s this well thought out it’s easy to use. You just kind of instinctively know what to do. Even the built in sound effects give you that warm glow of a well delivered feedback.
I LOVE Coverflow on this - I only wish iTunes could find more of my album art. The accelerometer (the device that flips the display or puts the ipod into Coverflow mode when you tip-up the device) makes yet another thing that could have been a User Interface nightmare a snap to use.
The only few gripes I have with it, so far, are…
- No Mail - What? Why? Come on Apple, why no mail app, surly this would be a natural thing to add in seeing how we have a web browser. Maybe they’ll release this soon
- No Bluetooth - This would be really useful to transfer photos, etc with my mobile and other devices.
- The bug in Videos - Sometimes (randomly) videos will pixelate to such an extent as to make them unwatchable. This is sorted with a restart, but it’s still annoying.
- No Quicktime in Safari - Again, What? Why? Maybe something to do with the zooming. Come on Apple, I’m sure your boffins can sort this.
- No games - Only a matter of time though I think
So in summing up - yes, it was a bit of a splurge (the first big spend I’ve made in a very long time) - but I’m very impressed. I’m sure they’ll be a new post soon about the dangers of the Mobile iTunes store! So look out for that one.
I’m on holiday for a week now, so roobottom will be back after a short break.
What’s in the Box?
October 3rd, 2007
I got a delivery of something cool. What’s in the box? I’ll reveal all next post.
Explore Wordpress Archives in a new Way
October 1st, 2007
One of the biggest parts of the recent upgrades was a revolutionary new way to explore the Roobottom archives.
Instead of the standard Wordpress list of archive months, the Archives display a full list of posts in a kind of pseudo calendar view. In this way, it’s easy to browse back through the years and take in the wonder and beauty of roobottom through the ages.
But now, even more goodness. I’ve integrated my Flickr photos in with the archives, so that each time you visit you’ll see a random picture for each month (if there are pictures for that month). You can even link directly to the full Flickr archive.
Oh, and I’ve updated the comment system to give you a little more feedback. It hopefully will put an end to the confusion over comments being held in moderation.
So what next? I’ve made upgrades galore, but it’s stuff that I wanted and I thought was cool. But what do you want? Do you even care? Here’s a few ideas I had to kick off.
- An easier (but still spam-proof) way to comment
- Monthly Video Blogs (my face and voice coming at ya)
- More fun with the Archives.
- Writing a WP plugin to make the Archives available to all
