Month: May 2005

Family are fun. I like mine being in another country, right now I like it a whole lot. I’ve been working on the photos and the inviting various family members to Flickr to make sure they can have a look at them.

This is all well and good and my dad is feeding me addresses and then all of a sudden boom.

An email address appears in a line with lots of others and my stomach didn’t quite turn but it thought about it.

I have no idea how to open up a conversation with my dad about it, he’s left as one of the few go-betweens and does mention his name every now and again. Depends on the company.

But if I were to invite that person I’d have to go through everything and ensure that everything I had marked as family went to either private or friends only. And so I said nothing and just didn’t send the invite. The cowards way out? Maybe.

It’s not a conversation for IM, when I put everything onto CD, my dad can do with it as he wishes but that does not mean I have to do any associating.

Fuck, now I’m in a mood.

When I was back in Dublin a few weeks ago, my dad asked me to have a look at a CD his brother had given him. On it were a whole lot of photos of his family some possibly from as early as the 1920’s.

They were done up in some strange format, I think that whichever company had done the work had locked them into some proprietary software and I couldn’t open them. I made a copy of the CD to take home so I could look at it again and perhaps look for the software from less reputable channels.

Well this afternoon I came across the CD and after a little looking around I found that not only would a nice photo app. that I’ve used for a good while now, IrfnView, open the photos, but it would batch convert them to usable images.

I have 147 surprisingly good quality images of what seem to go right back to my great-grandparents. I think there is a single one of my grandfather as a child with his family. It’s not in good shape at all but that’s my guess. It also seems to include my grandparents wedding day and covers at least 20 years of their kids growing up.

That’s very cool, my dad is going to spend tonight adding names and time frames as best he can. It seems to have kicked my mother into going off and getting some of her old family photos too. It would be very cool if I could get them all together.

I just watched the finale of Enterprise and I enjoyed it a hell of a lot. It was shit, it was actually complete and utter shit but it had Riker and Troi, Data and Picard and the Enterprise D alongside the music from TNG and it was like seeing an old friend again for the first time in a while.

So I enjoyed it, quite a bit.

Lost was ok, next week really needs to get the finale together, I’m loosing hope for this show quite fast 🙁

24 was the usual bags of fun. So OTT but so much fun.

And The Shield continues to be the best thing on TV. I’m looking forward to next week a whole lot.

Hibernation goes fine. This morning I watched A New Hope and lots of the bonus features. This evening I shall watch The Empire Strikes Back and the nerdiness shall continue!

I’ll probably watch Doctor Who because I’m somewhat bored but it’s really been poor so far. If this is actually rated as decent sci-fi then I weep for the genre.

To round off an exciting Saturday night, there will no doubt be some CoH.

How’s that for a fun filled weekend kids?

Well “meh” I think covers it. Nice the way it left lots of room for a sequel at the end.

Empire
New Hope
Sith
Jedi
Clone Wars
Phantom Menace

It was too long, but it didn’t drag half as much as the last two. There were quite a few good moments but also a little rushed and disjointed.

McGregor was excellent and brought so much to Obi-Wan. Very beleiveable that he would become Alec Guiness’ Obi-Wan.

Frankenstein sucked *really* fucking badly.

More tomorrow

(sorry Shug, I stole your joke!)

So I’m getting kinda excited now…

Tonight – > Out playing pool.
Tomorrow morning – > Going to Oxford to work with at a partners for the day.
Tomorrow Night – > Focus grouping for the evening.
Thursday -> Work as usual.
Thursday night – > Star Wars.

And funnily of all that, I’m possibly the least excited about is Star Wars.

And now some pool and beer.

One mainly for the gamers but it’s funny enough that everyone should get something out of it.

Save Target/Link As

I spent much of Saturday night confusing Doug and Neil. I’m not quite sure why but there were three or four times during the evening where I had them mixed up over recommendations for things.

The main one being; And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead. They are in fact excellent. Worlds Apart while being very repetitive is a solid album. Somewhat nu-metal but not enough to hold against it.

The rest of Saturday was good fun. The few of us who were not at Bristol did manage to make it to The Quays after what felt like a never-ending walk and then we drank and made merry. Lots of fun and (un)fortunatly none of the photos came out. Without the flash may have looked to be coming out reasonably well on the preview but in real life, not a one of them is usable 🙁

A decent pub, not as good music as the last time but there was one or two moments of table unity when we rocked out (read: nodded heads at the same time). Shameful behaviour from young Townsend who ran off early. An absolute disgrace! Anyway the twinges I had about missing Bristol were lessened lots by the good company so thanks all.

The rest of the weekend was either Heroing around (good fun on several characters) or having a Veronica Mars marathon. More on that one later.

I would like to be able to associate a song with two albums in iTunes. I have a few compilations and best of and things like that. I also have some of the albums which these tracks were on originally. In order to keep both albums intact, I have the same song on my iPod twice. For example. I have The Smiths, The Queen is Dead and The Best of by The Smiths. 9 Tracks feature on two of these albums so I have 9 duplicates. I’d love some sort of smart feature which could recognise this and eliminate the dupes.

Yes, I know that of course I can do this playlist but that requires quite a lot of effort from me to get organised and would break my album sorting. That’s why I said I want a smart feature to do this. I’m sure there are several ways I could do it but none simply and smartly. It also bugs me that I can’t use the nice “Show Duplicate Songs” feature recently brought into iTunes. It could do with a little tweak, like looking for more than just song name (track length within a few seconds would be good) but I’d still like to be able to use it on my iPod.

“The very existence of flamethrowers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, ‘You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.'”

Olden, but golden.