Monthly Archive for June, 2005

I am the egg-man

Published on 21/06/2005 in everything. 6 Comments

split nose to navel!

Well, seems all it does is split a bit down the length as the frozen bits expand. A frozen egg, it is worth noting, is rock fucking solid!

I left it to defrost for a bit then cracked it. The white was back to normal, but it seems the yolk and that weird thingy stuck to it take longer to thaw, as they was still frozen. After another hour the yolk was no longer frozen, but about the consistency it goes when it’s hard-boiled. Why the fuck is that, anybody?

These days I’m mostly camped out in the kitchen, scanning the horizon for the delivery guy who will sure bring my new phone. I’m actually obsessing a bit over it, and have been reading up on what it can do (which I really should have done before I decided to get it, but hey).

It seems the handsfree kit is easily modified to accept any standard headphones. And, despite Windows’ problems, a K750i will happily mount its memory stick on your Mac over USB, allowing one to drag and drop files and even playlists onto it straight from iTunes (in theory). All it needs now is for the music player’s UI not to suck massive, sweaty donkey balls (though I fear it will) and I’m one memory-stick-purchase away from retiring my iPod.

Also, there’s a free Salling Clicker lite kind of thingy here that makes use of the phone’s odd-yet-welcome bluetooth HID profile. Neat!

of eggs

Published on 20/06/2005 in everything. 1 Comment

So today I asked myself, “what happens if you freeze an egg?”. I don’t know, do you? I already know what happens if you microwave an egg (thanks Anna), and would not recommend trying it, unless you have indentured servants who clean up after your wacky escapades (see how I resisted the pun there?).

So anyway, the subject is a large Tescos organic egg, and it’s sat in a bowel just in case. Those bowls are really cool actually, great for cupping in one hand and eating noodles out of. It’s best to have a buffet kind of thing going on though, since you can’t fit a lot of food in them.

Anyway, update on the egg tomorrow!

customer retention

Published on 17/06/2005 in everything. 1 Comment

OK, if you’re ever unhappy with your mobile phone contract, go ring them up and ask to cancel it! I was all set to ditch O2 and move to Orange and get a sexy new phone, so I rung up O2 and asked to end my contract. The people that deal with this are referred to as “the customer retention team” and they will tempt you to stay will all manner of succulent deals.

I’m still paying £15 a month for my O2 contract, but now I’m on the same talk plan as my good buddy Andy for which he pays £30 a month. Also, they are sending me a sexy new Sony Ericsson K750i for free! Pretty sweet deal huh?

Of course, I’ve been with O2 for nearly 2 years now on the same contract and after a year you’re no-longer ‘tied’ to it, you see. If you’re still in a mandatory-length contract then threatening to cancel probably wouldn’t hold much weight and make you look rather silly into the bargain.

strings and things and loo roll and glue

Published on 03/06/2005 in everything. 1 Comment

this puppet dude looks pretty bad-ass, I wouldn’t want to tangle with him! Geddit? Tangle!

Ugh, I have woken up after sleeping for three hours. I was sooooo refreshed after yesterday’s nap that I was totally unable to get to sleep until about 4AM this morning. Naps suck.

Whilst burning the midnight oil I chanced across a really cool-looking film (click “Voir la bande annonce” to view the trailer, it’s in French, you see). Basically, it’s a film done using marionettes, about marionettes. In this world you kill a man by cutting his strings, babies are first carved then life-giving strings are attached to their limbs, and the city gate is just a beam fixed in the air – nobody can pass under it because their strings can’t pass through the beam. The plot sounds vaguely entertaining also, though along with Sin City, this is a movie I’ll likely love for its style, not its substance (which is not to say Sin City is lacking in substance, just that it paled next to the style). Thanks to loismustdie for showing me this, I’ve already reserved the DVD through screenselect.

Oh, and finally, new link on the right there. Idol-a-day comes courtesy of Mr_Saeba, a surprisingly articulate American teen with a healthy regard for the female form, particularly if said form is Japanese and sparsely clad.

Idol a Day: it won’t keep the doctor away, but it’ll give him a solid hard-on. Well, unless your doctor’s a woman. Well, a straight woman anyway. Actually, even if aroused by the site, a woman can’t get hard, unless you’re counting nipples. Of course, most doctors are still men these days for some reason, so I’m pretty safe in my initial statement, statistically speaking. Nurses on the other hand….

And now I’m going to go think about lesbian nurses getting hard nipples from looking at Saeba’s site. Good day.

nap time~

Published on 03/06/2005 in everything. 0 Comments

Nothing is quite so refreshing as a 3-4 hour nap after dinner. Naps rock!

I had a random thought today: why don’t car stereo makers make head units with bluetooth in for the purpose of hands-free mobile phone usage? Bluetooth car kits cost a bomb if you want sexy features like a display, using your car’s own speakers and pausing the CD when a call comes in, and even then it’s hit and miss as to whether it’ll work with your particular brand of stereo.

In my car, for example, the idle bums who fitted my bluetooth kit couldn’t get to the back of the thing to wire it in, so I have a tiny shitty speaker stuffed inside the dash somewhere that sounds pretty damn muffled, and I have to pause any music that’s playing when somebody calls. No great hardship, I know, but it’s still annoying as hell when I’m out and about and people just keep calling me up.

Of course, if the bluetooth were a feature of the head unit then it’d be easy as hell to do all of the above, and probably pretty simple to have the name of a caller flash up on the built-in display. Of course, even better would be some bluetooth 2.0 + EDR lovin’ so the head unit could stream music from a bluetooth DAP (namely a bluetooth iPod, should one arise)!

It seems Pioneer have some vapourware that fits the bill, and Maplin carry a CD player with built-in bluetooth right now, though no tape and no line-in, which means no iPod :(

[ninja-edit] Seems the Pioneer thingy isn’t vapourware after-all, just fucking expensive and not quite out yet. I’ll put it on my birthday list :D

who’d have thunk it?

Published on 01/06/2005 in web design. 0 Comments

Well, apple’s system turned out to be a bit shitty, what did you expect from tables? Thankfully Shish pointed out that a fixed-width div with margins set to auto will happily do exactly what I want and much neater too. Thanks Shish!

Further progress involved me ditching the logo and making FAQ and contact pages. The real pain will be the hierarchal-menu-based products page (change to a “houses” page?), since it’ll need a lot of content writing for it. Also challenging, but fun, should be the interactive map of Derby showing our houses as well as student-landmarks like the main campus, bus stops and good chippies.

Actually, regarding the map, I was linked to a really cool article today by a guy named Sweeper who seems to really know the sheep from the goats, as Eddie Grant might say.

In related news, Bantam learned CSS! Well, he didn’t, but he got someone who did to de-table-ify his site, which is close enough. Now it needs is a little consideration for those who don’t browse the web with the browser taking up the whole screen.