Month: January 2002

So on a movies note, without thinking (not a problem for me) my top 5 movies of all time
     Batman
     Fight Club
     Magnolia
     Michael Collins
     The Shawshank Redemption

The history of video games.
BSIAMS reaches 2,300,000 hits in a month. Not bad eh.

Watching “Bloody Sunday” on ITV at the mo, so far quite interesting.

[Update] I don’t think I would say I enjoyed this, I am glad I watched it and I would watch it again. It’s quite hard hitting in places and I have no doubt there will be some press coverage about this over the next couple of days.

<rant> I hate churches. This person who can charitably be called misguided stands at the top of the room and spews shit at you. </rant>. Anyway other than that the service was ok, two friends spoke and they summed Matt up really well and had people laughing at fond memories so that was good. It was quite strange, but it worked really well. There were alot of people there and a good group together at the afterwards just talking. It was nice. There is not really much else to say

AOL in Negotiations to Buy Red Hat.

Ah the word is good. “And THE AUTHORITY isn’t dead.” Warren Ellis 🙂 🙂
He’s not writing it, which I can live with but it’s not dead 🙂 [Sidenote, Ellis uses AOL UK]

Word of the day: worthy
t adjective (worthier, worthiest) deserving effort, attention, or respect: generous donations to worthy causes.
n showing or characterized by good intent but lacking in humour or imagination: worthy but tedious advice.
n having or showing the qualities or abilities that merit recognition in a specified way: issues worthy of further consideration.
n good enough; suitable: no composer was considered worthy of the name until he had written an opera.

—ORIGIN Middle English: from WORTH + -Y1.

In what could turn out to be really really good news for “The Authority” which has been dangling in limbo for a while, Warren Ellis just announced an exclusive deal with DC Comics. This includes all of DC’s imprints and won’t affect any work currently ongoing work. This could be a really good move for DC.

and damnit people blog more often, most of the sites I read have not been updated in hours, some even days 🙁

On a much much lighter note, Angel season 3 episode 11 “Birthday” wonderful wondeful episode. Some excellent character development, great humour and Skip. I did find the last 30 seconds a letdown, it was not worth it for the sake of a laugh. Great showing from Charisma Carpenter in this ep…[ no unfortunatly not that 😉 ]

Tomorrow night is the end of redesign bash for AOL UK’s channels. I don’t know if the process is all done, I’m not really in the loop on that anymore, but nevertheless the party is on. We have a local club booked for a private party before it’s normal opening for everyone invited. However from 10pm it’s open to the general public and seen as my other half is coming to London for the weekend she will be joining me there. So I have just spent about 10 minutes giving her details on how to get there. It’s not all that bad, fairly simple and hey mobile phones are wonders. I am looking forward to the day off tomorrow, I have alot of stuff that I can get out of the way and then tomorrow night should be quite good 🙂 Lots of free drink, hopefully some food arranged and some of the good folk that I work with. Saturday it gets bad 🙁

I never did choose a word of the day yesterday, today I believe will be maturity. It’s a strange thing and I don’t know how you can go about quantifying it. When I first moved to London, it felt really strange, as there was quite a gap with everyone that I worked with and I younger than all. I wouldn’t say that I was hung-up about it, but every now and then it was obvious and not just to me. It’s kinda strange how it all worked out.
I have very few friends my own age; in fact I could count it on one hand and have change left over. There are some more people my age (ish) in work now which is nice and one of my closer friends is actually younger than me, which is somewhat unique. She has the dubious pleasure of the nickname “kiddo”, I’m not sure that she doesn’t hate it…but it is of course meant well and actually meant with affection On the other hand my boss has the same first name as me and as our desks are together it can be fun. I did suggest Old Dave and Young Dave (as there was Ol Mags and Young Mags in AOL Dublin) but that was kinda shot down. I tend to just ignore my name being called now. It’s mainly for Dave. But that’s just a couple of examples of a related topic.
Can maturity be determined by age? I would have to say no or at least somewhat, but mainly not. I think that experience plays a far bigger role than actual age, but I guess that can also be quantified by time.
I am often surprised either during conversations or meetings by people that I work with. I don’t know quite how to phrase this, but sometimes I can just suddenly take notice that the person talking knows 100% what they are talking about and is comfortable in that knowledge. It can carry across very well in his or her entire demeanour even when it’s not someone I would normally expect it from. But it can make me look at someone in a completely different light. I tend to leave conversations like that with a lot more respect for that person even if I don’t like them. It’s a nice skill to have, well I guess it’s not really a skill it’s a comfort level from knowledge mixed with self-confidence.

t noun [MASS NOUN] the state, fact, or period of being mature: their experience, maturity, and strong work ethic | the delicate style of his maturity.
n the time when an insurance policy, security, etc. matures.
—ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin maturitas, from maturus

I can’t write for shit. Meg can Go read her blog instead. I’m gonna sit here and be jealous.

An excellent article on downloading tv shows and movies from the net. It mainly refers to Morpheus, which I have never used but I have heard very good things about from a number of people and it does not mention IRC. (via MetaFilter).

Man eaten by his own pet lizards

I spent just under 6 hours last night working on this single page alone in various incarnations, Moveable Type is looking very likely as an option for a changeover very soon. I’m off work tomorrow but not going to Dublin as planned, so I might get it done then. This weekend was to have been the 30th birthday of a friend who passed away in the middle of last year and there is a large “birthday party” going on and a memorial on Sunday so the trip to Dublin is off. I should have been leaving tonight. But back to the subject…

I was working in UltraEdit for most of the night [Side note, I’ve been using this for about a year now and it rocks. It’s perfect for all your text needs] and it was mainly lines and lines and lines of HTML and so forth. It’s kinda strange when I finished I realised that a) I was really really tired and b) I was starving. Thinking about this it’s kinda strange, when I’m doing the same thing in work or any sort of “coding” there, I always notice what’s going on and stuff, but when I’m at home working on stuff of my own 6 hours can pass without noticeing anything or indeed without moving. Anyways I thought that was worth noting.

Meg has been talking about brand loyalty recently, basically that’s the reason I’ve not moved straight over to MT. I like Blogger…alot. Its very simple to set up, very simple to use, has to much extra stuff going for it (choice of comment system, bloggerbots etc), but it’s also a little limiting. I’ve been really happy with everything Blogger has done (well until last night) and I W3c’d the blog. Yet here I am now actively preparing to move to a new system. *sigh*

oh and yes damn you AOL!. Because of the caching systems used, Meta tags are ignored. So my robot meta tags and my smart tags meta tags and my script type meta tags are ignored by anyone connected using the AOL service. That would be a large percentage of the internet and ME damnit! (via Iain)

Userfriendly’s take on the X 10 pop-under ads.