Ah the way we live :sigh: Seasons Greetings!!!

Copyright of the above cartoon is not me!!!

I would gladly credit the author of this comic or seek permission, but sadly I have no way of tracing the source. Whoever you are, thank you for amusing me on this day. I apologize if I've offended you by publicizing your work in advance.

RSS Feed List Added

I've been meaning to do this for AGES. I finally got round to doing it. My RSS feed list now appears in the Rated and Recommended section of my blog (bottom left on this one).

This basically means that if you're brave you can import my feeds.xml and gain 100 or so feeds related to technology, gaming, cartoons, news and business.

At the same time I've also been looking for the perfect RSS reader. I can't say I've found it, but RSS Reader comes pretty close. The main things I like are:

• Pop-up headlines from the taskbar, with an auto-close
• Good aggregation; meaning I can read 100 feeds as one feed embedded correctly

I hope this saves you as much time surfing as me.

Should We Be Allowed Gadgets?

I was reading about Tyco's Sony Syndrome woes this morning on Penny Arcade and began to realize the tragedy that my own gadget world has to offer.

Tyco was musing over his inability to operate a one-buttoned Pod Coffee-maker; sadly he's not alone. I thought I'd chronicle mine:

Offense #1:
Omitted cup from the machine.
Created a coffee river into the cats bowl on the floor. Fortunately I didn't end up with 3 drugged-out cats moon-walking on the curtains.

Offense #2:
Didn't put water chamber back on machine properly.
Created a water river into the cats bowl on the floor. Cats inspected their ruined food with some fear that this was a serving suggestion.

Offense #3:
Failed to put water in the machine.
Created HG Wells' Time Machine. Seriously ugly pump noises and fur-ball spluttering. Machine allowed to rest for a day to recover.

Offense #4:
Failed to put coffee in machine.
Created a nice cup of British tea, all water no tea.

As you can see I don't really fare any better than Tyco. The real question is, should we be allowed our gadgets, be wheeled to the retirement home, or do we inherently screw things up in our sleep-dazed state?

If I'd level gadget hell I'd also have to chronicle:

• Blowing up a computer's power-supply by moving the computer 5 miles
• Blowing up a PS2 due to my ham fisted soldering techniques
• Nearly blowing up a house by drilling through a water-pipe and then 2 minutes later a mains power-cable.

Hmmm - I think I'll stop there. It's best these gadget disasters are left untold.

[MW]

Digital World Up and Running

Okay - the digital photography blog is now up and running to: http://digital-world.blogspot.com.

We've done some major behind the scene changes to the blog structure. There's a lot of reuse between the 3 blogs, therefore a collection of shared javascript includes needed to be created.

Banners, email bot etc are now all handled correctly.

Next stage is to rip out the final sections of Marshmellow World and create a Pfff gateway page with all relevant information.

I hope it's useful and logical to you all. Remember, if the link drilling drives you crazy everything can be accessed via RSS.

Things are Changing

I'm changing things around. I've made an off-the-cuff decision.

There's too much I want to post, and it doesn't make a lot of sense without an element of structure.

I'm therefore going to create 3 blogs off the www.pfff.co.uk route:

1. Main ranting blog
2. Digital photography and experimental blog
3. Gaming blog (http://echos-of-the-machine.blogspot.com)

I've wanted to create a gaming blog for some time. Not to pre-empt things in the gaming world, but basically to allow the non-Japanese world access to content as I come across it. Anything that can encourage Japanese companies to distribute worldwide is a good thing.

I think each blog will have its own specific style too. Plus, let's face it, it's pretty fun to setup all this stuff in the first place. Marshmellow world is a pot-pouri of .css and test scripts therefore some order to the chaos is well overdue.

Yet again: Watch this space.

A Night Shot - but is it right?

Well below is what I was trying to photograph, but I'm not feeling what I saw. Although the background is well lit, it doesn't feel quite right.

Like every other damp old British autumn night it was raining, so I was limited in what I could take without soaking the camera.

I'll try again tomorrow. But I think I'll preset to sodium WB and reduce the shutter speed manually. I want the Christmas lights to show colour rather than their bland over exposed blurred self you see below.



Problem is, this will also darken the scene. We'll see. I'm also going to make up a few time-lapsed ones so you can see all the animation :-). I might even go for an odd angle to jazz things a little - at the moment it looks like a holiday guide picture and that's not what I want at all.

Nighttime Mission

I have a mission.

Tonight I'm out for some night photography. A D70, 1GB CF (I shoot raw) and a tripod. One man whose sole attempt is to ...

Take pictures of all these flipping Christmas tree lights.

Good gawd, it's like a National Lampoon's Christmas vacation out there. My theory is that North America has saturated its traditional markets and suppliers are now plugging their wares in the UK of A instead.

If your house doesn't have a Reindeer with a moving head you're just toast.

Anyhoo, I've spotted the most aesthetic of these (a pub) and it's gonna get capture tonight. I'm unsure on the shooting effect I will use, but watch this space. I'm sure it'll amuse.

I'ma feelin': challenged but excited

I'ma listenin' to: PMR - MTV

What Year Is It?

Yes - we still have 1949 style goverment driving documents in the UK. Can you believe it? This is an International Driver Permit. The UK equivalent of a Berlitz translation dictionary or a chinese instruction manual for our driving license. It hasn't been changed for well over half a century and must be issued by a goverment authorised service; I'm so not kidding - check the dates on the picture.

I don't know if other countries have such gems, but I felt the need to share. Without a picture you'd never have believed me.

Milk Wars 2004

I was reading about the horrors of corporate life the other day. Some poor person spent their entire day pasting receipts to pieces of paper for their boss.

I began thinking.

Our debacle of the week centralised on our sister site and its mob of about 70 people. The building management had decided to change from milk cartons to those little individually wrapped milk things (the basis of a poor man cappuccino) in order to save money. People were apparently using milk in an “inappropriate fashion”.

I dread to think what can be done with milk in an inappropriate fashion, but it was a big mistake. Wow – my inbox filled up faster than a Slimfast conventions buffet line that offered free food. It was an ugly day for packaged milk.

The crux of the backlash centralised on the morning cereal brigade. They clearly didn’t want to open 200 packets for one bowl of cereal, and they didn’t want to buy milk themselves either. This in itself might sound like whining, until you hear where they got their cereal from; yup, that’s right, the building managements own cereal vending machine.

Oh boy, big mistake, buying cows, devising milk machines, all sorts of madness ensued. A time and motion assessment was even done to consider how much lost time was spent opening milk packets compared to using a milk carton. In a corporate world, we can all be very sorry individuals.

Five days of bickering later the management backed down. Well, maybe it was a temporary reprieve, but I hear the traditional cereal ticker-tape parade is scheduled for next week.

We're Live! Pfff

Okay - went live last night. DNS propogation took a little while. Hopefully it's covered the world by now.

You can book mark me using this link.

Also don't forget, the slightly more sane RSS feed (reader required).

Why Pfff?

Pfff is a sound. It's that spray-can noise of anything from insect repellant to spray-snow. It's a retort, it's a reply, it's a response, it's now my home URL.

www.pfff.co.uk routes back to here.

I chose it as it's easy to remember (well at least for British people) and it was a free registration with my ISP. It'll be coming online in the next few hours.

More on this later, but for now: Use it. Bookmark it. It's way more simple to remember than my other forwarding bits and bobs.

Professional Cosplay?

Gen's two promo-girls at the Square-Enix FFXI playoff in Paris this week. I would make some comment, but contary to the stereotype these gals were top-notch professionals and really helped out.



Considering the normal intelligence of a promo-girl (roam the calls of E3 and you'd know what I mean), they're well worth a mention.

Day or Night; now we know

Just a small change or two. The timezone clock here has changed. I removed the java dependencies a few days ago as they were annoying when you changed browsers.

Now I've added day-light or night-time symbols. I find this useful considering the world never sleeps ... or is it me?

Morning Sunrise

Today was a sub-zero foggy day. These were taken just across the road from where I work once the sun decided to rise.