Entries in Category: Life
Things that happen in my life.
A new site for 2010
Hello 2010, how are you?
Here is my girlfriend Becca's new site to showcase her jewellery designs. At the moment just a holding page. I present:
My favourite podcasts (at the moment)
I've been finding recently that I seem to spend a lot more time watching and listening to podcasts than I used to and I thought I'd list them here to see if anyone else has similar podcast taste or if anyone has any podcast recommendations.
Apple Quick Tips: Weekly, short tips on how to use Mac OS X. These are often things I already know, but sometimes the odd gem of a tip comes up.
Best of Chris Moyles Enhanced: Since I don't commute to work any more, I seem to not catch much of this show when it's on in the morning, so I catch up on it with the podcast.
CNET TV's Loaded: A (generally) less than 5 minute look at the latest news stories in Tech. Presented by Natali Del Conte.
The Collings and Herrin Podcasts: Weekly musings from Richard Herring (ex of Herring and Lee) and Andrew Collins (ex of Collins and Maconie). Often quite crude, always very funny.
Diggnation: A hilarious look at the weeks top stories from digg.com. Presented by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht.
GeekBrief.TV: Shiny, happy Tech news.
Hak5: Info and tutorials on all sorts of geeky topics.
Layers TV: Short tutorials, competitions and news about all applications in Adobe Creative Suite.
The Perfect Ten with Phill Jupitus and Phil Wilding: The first podcast I've heard with rules: * 10 Subjects, drawn at random from a fine-looking hat * Only 30 minutes for the lot * No returning to subjects - EVER! It ruins the time/space continuum. Another very funny podcast.
Photoshop User TV: Tutorials, news and competitions focused mostly on Photoshop (and sometimes Lightroom).
Pixel Perfect: Presented by the Photoshop wizard that is Burt Monroy. He shows you how to create all sorts of things from scratch in Photoshop.
Robert Llewellyn's Car Pool: The actor behind Kryten in Red Dwarf and presenter of Scrap heap Challenge. Drives people around in his car and has a chat with them. Fantastically simple concept which makes for a great podcast.
Scam School: Bar scams and tricks. Another great podcast from Revision 3.
SModcast: Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier (with occasional guests) chat about anything and everything.
Systm: Patrick Norton, David Caulkins and Roger Chang talk you through all sorts of geeky projects. From building a robot, to making a Media PC.
Another lolcat
Just a quick note to mention that I got both of these lolcat images off of random websites whilst searching for 'happy cat' or 'sad cat', so I don't own the copyright. If you do and you don't want me to use them, let me know.
iPhone impatience...
I think O2 heard me:
Date: 9 July 2008 21:01:45 BST
Subject: Order Confirmation
W00t! My order is confirmed, so ought to be here by Friday!
Slight redesign
I've just taken the opportunity of being quite awake at 11pm (for some reason) to give the site a quick ...
I want one of these
New Camera Piccies
Before Christmas Becca and I purchased a new camera and today we went for a wander around Wensum Park and ...
Things to do
Migrate VDS to new VDS - Before 31/10/2007 Fix various things after the migration - after 31/10/2007 Update my blog ...
Using Nokia E70 with iSync
On my first Googling, I found the hacky way of doing this. Which is hacky, but works. I was just ...
Tips for people moving home...
In case anyone didn't know, Becca and I recently moved house. Well, I say moved house, we moved from a ...
mChicago Wii boxing
House house house house
House house house house house house house house house house house house house house house house house house house house ...
iGTD and Quicksilver
In a vague attempt to make myself more organised and productive, I've started using a funky piece of software called ...
Common courtesy
Is it just me or if you have a letter posted to someone's address without warning(/asking) them and they email ...
Selling CDs
CDs for sale Inspired by Jez I've sorted out a bunch of CDs to sell. Here's the list: Singles = ...
Standard new site post
So yeh, new site can't be arsed to write about it in depthly, just trying to draw attention to it. ...
Look what I got!
My order from View Askew finally arrived containing Noodles' birthday present, a t-shirt for Becca and these: Yay!
Houses and stuff
Although we weren't actively looking for a house Becca happened to find a reasonable sounding house for sale on the ...
Anyone ever take part in this....
Did anyone take part in Ewan Spence's 'Win my stuff'? If so, did you ever receive anything?
Photoshop messings...
I thought Brett resembled the Hopback Brewery man so I knocked up this from a photo from last night: It's ...
*Chuckle*
This is amusing... http://www.neatorama.com/images/2006-03/lego-let-it-be.jpg
TNT
A few years ago, if you'd told me my package was being delivered by TNT, I would have been impressed. ...
Henson.com podcast
Since no one wanted to come with me to see this, I was rather pleased to see that they've done ...
Weird Day
Had a phone call at 8:30 this morning to tell me not to bother going into work as we had ...
Reynard City Web site is no more
Will finally came to the decision that if I was to have nothing to do with the business, I was to have nothing to do with the web site either so alas, I am sad to announce that the Reynard City website that I designed is no more. It is apparently to come back in another guise sometime soon, so I look forward to seeing that.
I imagine this will be the final post in my Reynard City blog category - except when I get round to finishing off the Launch party story.
How to organise a party - Part 2
Some parts in this post are written by Becca
Days had turned into weeks and weeks had turned into months before we thought further about the launch party. We had originally planned for the party to be in April - when we thought Issue 1 would be finished. This was subsequently put back to June to coincide with school and university holidays and then again to July to coincide with what Po Na Na could offer us. A date of 20th July was mentioned and sounded pretty reasonable to us and them.
Since our first meeting we had received some mock-up flyers from one of our friends at Po Na Na (described as 'an adobe wizard'). There were a few designs, none of which I felt were in-keeping with the comic - but I was happy to let them go as I was unfamiliar with what was involved with promoting club nights. Maybe clubgoers are attracted to blocky designs with lurid colour schemes and staid, gaudy effects, I don't know. At our first meeting, contact details were discussed and I suggested I set up an e-mail address (which I did the moment I got home) that went to Will, Becca and myself to make it easier for the Po Na Na people to contact us all at once, and to have an easy e-mail address to remember. This address was neither used for the flyers nor any other e-mail contact we had with the pair.
Meanwhile, we had begun to try and organise our guest list and who we wanted on it. Will suggested Waterstones might be able to come along and sell copies of his book (autographed, naturally) and Becca remembered that Lush made a product called 'Flying Fox' which would tie in perfectly with the comic book's main characters. Will set about chasing up Lush and seeing if they were interested and Becca began planning what decorations we might be able to have.
We came to a point where we wanted a second meeting to try and clarify and pin down some costs for things; ideas we'd thrown around in the previous meeting and between ourselves since the meeting, so we arranged to meet up with the guys again at the Pitcher and Piano in our regular (well, it seemed like it was becoming that way) seats. Will's bus was slightly late and we were running a little late for the meeting. I kind of assumed that as they were late for the last meeting by over an hour, they would probably be at least a couple of minutes late for this meeting too. Tardy is as tardy does, you know? Turns out they were there bang on time. Our apologies for being about 5 minutes late were met with this retort:
"We'll forgive you since we were a bit late last week!"
Excuse me, I thought, 5 minutes late is hardly the same as over an hour late, is it?
So anyway after the same rigmarole of last time (i.e. they ate and we waited!) we got down to business. Becca, ever the organised soul I had a list of questions as the only contact we had had from Po Na Na was what Will had sent us!
On going through our list, it seemed not a lot had changed. They were still offering us the same, but then she dropped a bombshell.... they couldn't confirm the date. Hang on, we thought, she was definite about the 20th July last time. We'd already advertised to a lot of people that our party was going to be on 20th July.
"It should be fine, we've just taken on a new promo guy and he has to approve stuff now"
Hold on, we thought, this was fine the other week, what has changed? We went on to mention the idea of having a band playing and we were told we needed to let them know what equipment the bands had and what they might need, as "we don't have much band equipment". This seemed massively different to what we were told before but we took it on the chin.
The final thing we discussed was prices for drinks and suchlike. The pair from Po Na Na had said they could get us some big cut outs of the characters to stand around the club, which we were very interested in. We also discussed the idea of having free drinks and cocktails. Our female friend from Po Na Na said she'd email us the costs by the following Monday - which she never did, until chased a few times by Will, and when she did, she failed to use the party@reynardcity.co.uk email address!
We left the meeting feeling pretty happy about the plans, but we weren't to know of the final bombshell that would be laid upon us before we would finally give up on our ideal launch party venue.
It's the end of the road
Today spells an end to my business interest in Polycomical (Reynard City)... My email to Will: Will, I've been hesitating ...
How to organise a launch party - Part 1
Ok, so from the title this might sound like a teach yourself series, but it is more of a cautionary tale of what not to do. This is not to say that our launch party didn't turn out well - it did, but just not as we'd first expected...
About 8 months ago, Becca and Myself (myself being Dave) met up with Will in Henry's to discuss general Reynard City business, when Becca struck upon the fantastic idea of having a launch party for the first issue of the comic. Will, immediately taken by the idea went to purchase a bottle of Cava to celebrate, and the talk of what we could do at the party carried on into the night.
Things carried on as normal for a few weeks, with no one really thinking much of the party. Will then met through a friend of a friend (of a friend of a friend..) someone who worked at Po Na Na in Norwich, who told Will they could get us the venue for free.
Initially, Will organised a meeting with the people from Po Na Na to look around the club and discuss what they could do for us. The words he passed onto us from the meeting were as follows:
"If you pay £50, you'll have an OK night. If you pay £100 you'll have a good night. If you pay £150 you'll have a great night."
I was initially sceptical. What arbitrary and small figures to throw around when talking about booking a 300 capacity venue. I though I mentioned this to Will, who assured me it was all above board and he suggested he organise a meeting with all of us and the guys from Po Na Na to discuss the details and what they could do for us for the 3 seemingly random figures of money.
The date and time were set for a Saturday morning. Will, Becca and myself made our way down to the Pitcher and Piano - where we had organised to meet the guys - got ourselves comfortable and had a drink. Lucky that we'd got ourselves comfortable as we were in for a long wait. An hour and 2 phone calls later, our erstwhile contacts at Po Na Na finally turned up.
They turned out to be a charming pair, who after having some dinner (ie. keeping us waiting for another hour), put all our fears to rest and seemed very interested and into the idea of a comic book launch party.
"We can get you a guest list of 100, free flyers. We'll get some big cut outs of the characters made, we can do your 'Foxtail' (a cocktail concocted by Becca) at the bar. We can design your flyers, print out pages of the comic and posters to put up around the club. You can have a band playing - we have all of the equipment for that..."
The list went on and on and we were convinced. We'd pay £150 at the most and get the launch party of our dreams. We left the bar in high spirits, planning all the things we could do at our party, but things weren't to turn out quite as we had expected...
This looks so cool..
http://www.oscars.org/events/labyrinth/index.html A screening of Labyrinth followed by a panel with Brian Henson and others from Jim Henson's creature shop. Anyone ...
Wine Post Number 1
Just sitting at the table looking at the crap on it, amongst which is an empty wine bottle from the ...
Home Automation
Home Automation Home automation is one of those things that I have always been interested in, but have always seemed ...
Finally.. we're famous (in Norwich)
Our article finally turned up in the Evening News. The web version is missing the vastly amusing picture of Will ...
<Cartman> I'm gonna be on television in the newspaper </Cartman>
So yeh. Will went to last tuesday on Tuesday and did a talk about Reynard City. As a result we ...
Wow.
I spotted this earlier on, via Jono Bacon's blog. The console itself looks very very cool, and I was astounded ...
Ouch.
I've got a cold. It seems like I've not had a cold for years and on further research (ie. reading ...
Random thought of the day
What was the best thing before sliced bread was the best thing?
I wonder...
Why do apple pies come in green trays but bilberry pies come in yellow ones?
myspace
Can someone please explain the point of myspace to me? I'm not even going to credit it with a link, as it doesn't deserve it. OK, so it's so a social networking site, but what actual purpose does it have? I really can't see the point of putting another set of your contact details online for some kind spammer to harvest just to show that a bunch of random people are linked to you, isn't the internet a small place?
People seem to use myspace as a way to keep in touch with people, surely there are better ways than by going to stupidly slow website and entering it in a form? Well, yes, in fact there is. It's called email. Use it people.
So, who's with me, let's boycott myspace!
This rant was brought to you by: Family Guy: Stewie's Guide to World Domination and the letter V. STOP MOCKING ME!
Where'd my post go?
I made a post the other day (on my birthday, I think) that seems to have gone missing :| Anyway, ...
The worst web developer in the world
These actually happened, but may have been paraphrased for comedy effect (and because I've forgetten quite how they were said): ...
Sleep
I've noticed that I can't seem to sleep before midnight nowadays which brings me to this conclustion: if ( $time ...
So that was Christmas....
Yes, I know I've been a bit slow with Christmas posts, but it I've not really had a chance to sit down and type for the past week or so, as I've been busy visiting various relatives and such. Here's a quick breakdown of what I can remember:
Friday 23rd: Finished work early, came home had some lunch, watched TiVo'd American Chopper for a bit, Becca came home.
Saturday 24th - Christmas Eve: Went to visit Becca's friends who had their kids/step-kids visiting and give them their Christmas prezzies. Played with Scaletrix for a bit, eat cakes that the kids had make and came home.
Sunday 25th - Christmas Day: Opened stocking presents at about 8ish, came through to living room and opened main presents. Got dressed, phoned parents, got picked up at 10 and went to sisters. Parents arrived a couple of hour later and we opened all our prezzies. Had tasty dinner (cooked by my sis), sat down and played DVD games. Got thrashed at Telly Addicts, thrashed others at Music-y quiz. Watched a bit of tv, had a spot of tea, came home. Played with Christmas prezzies a bit before retiring to bed.
Monday 26th - Boxing Day: Got up, had breakfast, assembled cardboard robot present (very cool). Got ready to goto Uncles. Drove to Tesco to buy bogroll/petrol. Supermarket was closed. Drove to Uncles. Sat down, had a chat with Uncle, people arrived, had a bite to eat, chatted with Aunty, left Uncles, drove around a bit to find an open shop to buy bogroll, came home.
Tuesday 27th: Got up to find lotsa snow. Decided to try and wait for it to die down before going anywhere. Waited till about 1:30, snow started even worse as we left. Got to Huntingdon, sorted our stuff out, opened and gave presents to Becca's family. Spent evening with family, retired to bed.
Wednesday 28th: Went to Peterborogh on train to meet up with Carl and to do a bit of shopping. Becca's sister came along, argued with Becca. We went to a few shops, had a bit of lunch, came home. Becca and I cooked dinner, Mexican, watched a bit of TV, went to bed.
Thursday 29th: Got up, had nice buffet type lunch, got all packed up and came home. Had a bit of a tidy up, watched tv, went to bed.
Friday 30th: For Christmas, Becca's sister bought her parents tickets to see Pinnochio On Ice at the Norfolk Showground and a stay at a B&B in Norwich. Due to the horrid weather, they decided to get the train and I volunteered to be Taxi driver. We went shopping for food, bought a new DVD storage thingy, came home, unpacked everything and went to the station to pick up Becca's parents from the train station. Picked them up, drove to the B&B (eventually), let them get settled in, made our way out for dinner. I tried to take a shortcut from Dereham road, to get to Little Melton and went quite (stupidly) wrong and ended up in Ringland (oops). Eventually got to Little Melton and sat down for dinner. Becca and I ordered a set 3 course meal without realising the time and we had to leave after the main course to drop Becca's parents off at the Showground. The nice people at the pub, kept our pudding for us and allowed us to come back having dropped them off and finish our meal. The meal was very tasty and we decided to stick around at the pub and have a couple of drinks whilst waiting to go and pick up Becca's parents from the show. We had a couple of cokes and played a few games on the machine in the pub before making our way back to the showground. It being still quite snowy, the snowground was fairly difficult to drive on: my car almost got stuck when I tried to park, so I swiftly moved to somewhere else to park. Someone else then tried to park in the same space and got even more stuck (ie. completely). We sat in the car, laughing as they tried to get it unstuck in some completely random ways. Eventually 4 burly parking attendants came out and pushed them out. Amusement over, Becca's parents came back and we whisked them back to their B&B. Upon returning home, we put our DVD holder together before collapsing into bed.
Saturday 31st: I overslept a bit and had to rush to get ready to go and pick up Becca's parents from the B&B. After they had checked out, we went to Tesco to have a look around and try and get a birthday present for my dad. We did that, returned to the flat had a couple of cups of tea before Sarah came over. We then went to the Rose pub and had lunch. I had a very tasty Ranch Burger and a couple of glasses of coke. We returned home, got Becca's parents stuff together and dropped them off at the station. Came home, Becca had a bath, Will came over with a friend in tow and a bottle of champagne. We polished off that bottle and a bottle of Cava we had between the 4 of us and Will became quite drunk before he and his friend ran off to catch the last bus back to Beccles. Becca and I had a couple more drinks, some cheese and biscuits and watched 5 Children and it and then a few episodes of Peep show Series 1 from the DVD I got for christmas. Both feeling quite tired, we retired to bed to watch The Hootenanny. Becca saw the New Year in before falling to sleep. I continued watching the Hootenanny when Noodles gave Becca the Video call he promised to do on Christmas day, but couldn't due to lack of signal. Sleep.....
January 1st 2006: Happy New Year! Had a bit of a lie in, got up, fiddled with laptop, couldn't work out why I couldn't get ssh into my router. End up turning it off. Get ready to goto Parents house. Dad's birthday is tomorrow, but due to Mum working tomorrow she's cooking a big meal for him today and we're all going over. Get to Dereham, sister has bought PS2 and Buzz: the music quiz. We had a quick play of it before lunch, had a huge lunch with Mum's speciality (Meringue) for pudding, yum. After lunch, we all sat down to play the game. 3 hours later, Dad remembered he wanted me to look at his PC and install the virus checker I got him for christmas. I installed it and got it up and running and fixed a random attachment opening problem for him. We then came home cooked a ham joint for our lunchboxes for next week watched a bit of TV and then here I am now.
Right, sorry for the length of update, I reckon that's my blogging done for the year. I suppose I should try and keep it more up to date in future. Apologies for any omissions or errors as I've just sat here and typed it as it came out of my brain and not really edited it.
Now, off to watch Buzzcocks TiVo'd from last night.
Cooking and Stuff....
This is a bit of a Jez-style post. Meh! Here's my christmas cooking for the year: Sausage RollsMince PiesCheesey Things
Wales Pt. 3
..so where did Becca leave off? Ah yes the pub. We went to visit Sam and Chris' "local" pub which ...
Wales by Becca
Its TIVO TUESDAY! But enough about that... Dave is having a broken brain day so he wants me to write ...
Wales, pt. 1.5
I've just noticed I've only written up one day of our Wales trip. I shall rectify this soon, before the ...
Stuff
Damn, I'm tired. Went to bed late on Thursday having been to the pub for Brett's leaving evening at the ...
Wales
Becca and I spent Thursday -> Saturday in Wales visiting some friends of mine from IRC who I've known for about 6 years and never met.
Thursday Got up normal work type time, had shower, packed car, got petrol and got on our way. The journey there seems quite short, for some reason. We stopped about 100 miles along the way to get a cuppa tea and sausage roll and then carried on, making our way through the seven CDs of music Becca had prepared for the journey. We got onto the M6 and missed our turn off (just spotted it as we drove past, annoyingly) and drove for a few miles in the wrong direction resulting in us having to pay a toll, to come off of the motorway, for some reason. We finally got back onto the right bit of the M6 and made our way slowly to Shrewsbury and then to Welshpool where we met up with Sam and Beth in a small pub car park. We said our hello's before running into the pub and using their toilets. We then proceeded on towards Aberystwyth.
We travelled along very windy, hilly roads which were surrounded by beautiful hilly scenery. Very different compared to Norfolk where everything is completely flat. As we went through various small towns, I noticed that each town we drove through seemed to be backdropped by hills, again a huge departure from scenery of these parts.
We finally arrived in Aberystwyth and got out of the car to take a look around. The instant we got out of the car, it poured down with rain. Not fine rain, but really heavy, hard rain. We found our way to a WetherSpoons where we sat steaming and drying off and decided to have some dinner there. We had our dinner, got to know each other a bit, before wondering down to the beach and being shown the sites by Sam, such as: Pier Pressure, the night club on the pier and the ruins of Aberystwyth castle.
We then wondered back through the town to the cars and set off back towards Sam's house in Blaencelyn. This bit of the journey was quite short compared to the rest of it, although it was beginning to get dark. As we got closer to Sam's house in the dark, we realised it was lucky Sam had come to meet us, as we'd never have found Sam's house by ourselves, in the dark.
We got in, met Sam's parents, unpacked our stuff and sat down for a cuppa tea. We then decided to go to the pub for a couple of pints to meet up with Chris, so we did. The pub was The Ship in Llangrannog which was very close to the beach and a very nice pub. We met up with Chris, had a few pints and a chat, and then got a lift home with Sam's mum back to Sam's before heading off to bed.
Haircut
So, I eventually got my hair cut. Here are the before and after pics: Before | After Quite an improvement, ...
Bunch of savages in this town.....
I left my car window open last nite, by mistake and some savages (I can only assume kids) chose to ...
Blogs and things...
We've been talking about blogs at work today and I realised I hadn't updated this for ages, so I thought ...
Loooooong Weeeekeeeend
Saturday Went to craft show at Felbrigg Hall, where Becca bought some expensive hand-made paper and drooled over some pretty ...
General goings on
I've got into this terrible bad sleeping pattern and I'm not quite sure how to shift it. I felt a ...
New toy...
Yay :) Second new toy of the pay rise is a Nintendo DS which arrived this morning. I take back ...
Weekend...
Had a lovely weekend with Becca didn't really do much: went shopping, watched lots of dvds and had a really ...
and so...
Well, I got a payrise last week and decided to buy myself a spanky new laptop. After some deliberation (ok ...
Happy Birthday to me.....
In reply to his. Going to the Glass house on Monday evening to celebrate my upcoming birthday if anyone fancies ...
