Ben, a 7-year old: What do you call Darth Vader kissing Luke Skywalker?
Me: I have no idea.
Ben: Luke Darth Vader
Me: What?
Ben: in complete hysterics
Me: What?!
Ben’s Dad: Don’t ask. It only gets more random from here.
Me: What?!!
I blame Roo. Having had a look at some of his Perplex City cards last week, today I went and got some of my own from Season 2.
Here are today’s stats:
This is an addiction. I am an addict. I need more cards.
[ update: for a list of my available swaps, check out the list. ]
In the mildly alarming, if not surprising, news that inflation has jumped to %3.1 last month, I find a small glimmer of humour. A requirement of “the system” is that the Bank of England’s governor sends the government an open letter when this type of thing happens[1]. In this instance, because he was brought up well by his parents, Gordon Brown[2] wrote a nice letter back[3].
I can imagine the scene. Gordon has dictated the letter to a civil servant who has duly typed it up for him. It has then been presented back to Gordon to sign, who, being the busy man he is, signs it with whatever he has in his hand.
Given the look of his signature, I really do wonder what he was doing at the time… perhaps trying very hard to keep the colouring in-between the lines?
[1]Specifically, it was the fact that the inflation rate was 1% above or below the target rate of 2%. ^
[2]Gordon got to respond in his role as Chancellor, not PM-in-waiting. ^
[3]The letters are link to from the BBC News article. ^
Seen in a bookshop in Norwich; I always like a cup of Surrealism with my Soup.
Why do pier’s tend to burn down? True they are often made of wood, but they are also usually surrounded by sea.
Southend’s pier maybe the longest pleasure pier in the world, at a leg aching 1.33 miles, but I wonder what’s a pier thats not for pleasure? A business pier?
When arriving at the sea-side, do you get stopped and asked if you are there for business or pleasure and then get directed to the appropriate pier?
This may seem a random post, but at least it proves the hook-up from flickr to this blog works.
Has Roo started a meme? Only time and the internet Gods will tell.
My name transliterated to Arabic is نيكهولاس Ùˆ’ليار.
Thanks go to Rob’s transliteration tool.
update: weirdness abounds. The trackback to Rob’s blog has worked fine, however the trackback on Roo’s post has broken the URL. All three blogs are running Wordpress, and Roo’s is hosted on the same machine as this one. Odd.
Its over a month since the wedding and I have yet to put up the ‘official’ photos of the event to the flickr pool, although there are over 200 photos available to see. Actually, some have their privacy settings turned on, so there may be less than that visible to the general public. Regardless, there are plenty of great photos that really help to relive the event.
The ‘official’ photographs were taken by my Dad who did a great job of sticking around to the very end. Jo and I have been poring over a couple CDs worth of images he has since sent us to try to put together the official Wedding Album. In particular, we wanted to find the image of us that we could send with christmas cards to all the aunties and uncles who didn’t come to the wedding.
For quite a few of the photos, I have had to spend some time in the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program; the linux equivalent of Adobe’s Photoshop) touching up the images to make them just right. This has including doing minor things like removing red-eye to quite major jobs like swapping around heads from different photos to get everyone looking the same way with ‘nice’ smiles and no grimaces. I am particular happy with the results of our main portrait.
Below is a side-by-side comparison of the before and after images. Play spot the differences - there are 8 to be found. (With apologies to Meg and David for having removed them so callously - oops, thats give away two of the differences.)
Having googled around this subject, I was surprised to see how little information was out there that could help me. This post is intended to increase the Google Juice.
I bought a Canon Selphy CP510 printer earlier in the year to replace my Canon Stylus Photo 950. The ‘950 was proving too expensive to run given how little photo printing I was doing and the large amount of text printing Jo was doing. (The Selphy only replaces the photo printing side of the 950; I also bought a HP Scanjet F320 which acts as a better general printer).
The Selphy is a great little portable photo printer that does almost all I want. Being able to directly attach either of our cameras is really handy. However I came across an annoying issue with it; it refuses to print an image that has been edited on the computer and put back on the camera. It simply says ‘cannot print’ with no further explanation. Google doesn’t help much here, aside from a few reports that agree with my experience. Unfortunately I couldn’t get to the bottom of the issue so I had to get the Selphy directly attached to my laptop.
The LinuxPrinting.org page for this printer details the state of support; currently described as ‘mostly’. The laptop is running Ubuntu Dapper which makes a lot of this easier.
The last time I tried printing to the Selphy, I added a printer to the system, selecting the Canon CP100 driver; there wasn’t a CP510 driver listed as was suggested there should be. When I tried printing from EOG it failed, wasting a shot of the Selphy cartridge. Not wanting to waste more, I left it at that.
This time, I read around a bit more, and got the impression that gimp-print/gutenprint was the way to go. That meant installing some extra packages that I didn’t have - an apt-cache search on gutenprint reveals a number of them.
I then fired up the GIMP and loaded one of my recent photos. Under the print dialog I added a new printer called ‘Selphy’ and under the ‘Setup Printer’ dialog I selected the Print Queue of the original CP100 printer I added previously.
For the driver, I expected there to be a CP510 driver in the list having installed the new packages, but there simply wasn’t. I selected the Canon CP220 driver this time, and was happy to discover that I was able to successfully print directly to the Selphy.
One last note; before printing, make sure you click ‘Save Settings’ - otherwise it will print and then forget all the settings you’ve made.
Apple clearly weren’t the first to think white headphones would look good.
Neil’s Hotmail Haiku reminded me to log into Hotmail to keep my id alive. I’m close to abandoning Hotmail altogether - I don’t use the email address for anything other than as a spam hole and enough of my contacts are on gtalk these days.
Once logged in, I was given the opportunity to use Windows Live Mail. Out of interest, I clicked through the registration process to see what its like. Having got to the end, it told me I would be able to access it within the next two weeks. Oh well, I thought. I then went back to hotmail, only to find I could access it already.
Well, not quite - here’s the message I got when I logged in:
Unsurprisingly, you need IE6.0 at least to make full use of Windows Live Mail - with a nice link to the IE homepage. Oh, apparently the full version also works with Firefox 1.5 - no link to the firefox page though.
I say apparently, because, you’ve guessed it, I am using Firefox 1.5.
I’m that bit closer to abandoning Hotmail altogether.
