Descent Into New York
Gregor Smith Just another attempt at a WordPress weblog
Olympique
Like others, I’ve spent probably too long recently watching the Olympics, which is strange as before I was quite ambivalent about them. I didn’t watch a single second of the Athens Olympics, for too long the summer games had made a dramatic shift from the greatest spectacle on earth to the biggest fraud in history, at least in my mind. But as news trickled out about the positively mind blowing opening ceremony, I thought I’d give this one a go.
And the opening ceremony was mind blowing, especially in HD… From there it rolled right into Michael Phelps obliterating any fool (except one) who dared challenge him. In fact, even though the Olympics is all about the track and field events, I’ve always been more of a fan of the lesser events that get some time to shine in the opening week, like archery, diving, weightlifting, gymnastics, handball, shooting, beach volleyball, cycling. There’s something strangely appealing about 48kg women hoisting 122kg in a clean and jerk, you watch it for the potential for anything to happen (read: nasty injuries) but it’s more amazement at the ease they do such things. Another event that if you’d never seen before, you’d just sit down and watch it for hours was synchronised diving, yes, really… Especially when they bust out the super slow high speed camera replays.
Anyways, that opening weekend we literally vegetated on the sofa for 48 hours straight, it was kinda awesome.
I think it’s been a pretty good Olympics, I haven’t heard much in the way of failed doping tests, and everyone will be talking about Michael Phelps 8 golds (7 world records) and Usain Bolt shattering the 100m and 200m records on his way to two easy golds for a long time. I’m pretty happy that Britain are 3rd in the medal table with (currently) 16 gold, should make the 2012 games in London that much more appealing for some people. Next up is Vancouver in 2010, and I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve registered my interest in tickets for that event, they go on sale in October…
Trippin’
It’s the final countdown to our much delayed, much anticipated and much feared trip to Scotland. Originally we were due to be over there for my birthday, but due to me losing a job and moving house, we delayed it till now. And I’m not looking forward to it for my own reasons.
Firstly I should be thankful that frivolous spending on our Delta AmEx cards has allowed us to fly using our SkyMiles, and after our last flights to Edinburgh from Atlanta, we decided it had to be done right, so we’re doing it right by flying 1st class for 4 out of the 5 flights we’ll be taking to and from.
But the downside of using SkyMiles is you don’t get the flights you really want, and Charlotte’s airport flies nowhere that helps us, so we’re going this route….
A 10,250 mile round trip that goes from Charlotte, NC to Houston, TX then to Paris, France before ending in Edinburgh, Scotland. This is a 24 hour trip starting lunch time Saturday, we leave Charlotte at 12:30pm and land in Edinburgh on Sunday as 4:30pm. You know that’s going to be fun. At least the way back is a bit more civilised, Edinburgh to Newark, NJ then finally to Charlotte.
As I said, thank goodness it’s mostly first class, the only leg that’s not is Charlotte to Houston. But seeing as I have a fear of take-offs, Saturday/Sunday will be a bad day for me.
Oh, and we’ll be in Edinburgh for the final week of the Festival, how on Earth did I agree to that?
Olympic Ceremony Star Mimed
A pretty girl who won national fame after singing at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games was only miming. Wearing a red dress and pigtails, Lin Miaoke charmed a worldwide audience with a rendition of “Ode to the Motherland”. But the singer was Yang Peiyi, who was not allowed to appear because she is not as “flawless” as nine-year-old Lin. This is the second “fake” story about the opening ceremony after viewers around the world saw a display in which 29 firework “footprints” travelled across Beijing from south to north, but a senior official from the Beijing organising committee confirmed on Tuesday that footage of the display had been produced before the big night.
A New Kind of Twitter Spam
Before Twitter Spam was relatively harmless, someone (or some automated bot) would follow you in the hopes you’d reciprocate thereby exposing you to their hidden tinyurl links that could be anything. And seeing as I’ve been twittering for nearly 2 years now, I’ve had to block my fair share of these people, but tonight I discovered something rather disturbing that changes the landscape of Twitter Spam.
While going through Twitterrific I found a strange name in my friend updates, someone or something called @manatee (oh the huge manatee joke aside) and upon quick inspection he/she/they/it had 814 followers and only 24 friends, usually spam is the other way around, a refresh later revealed 1,270 followers… And each refresh kept on rising…
1,270… 1,684… 2,074… 2,490… 2,676… 3,138… 3,335… 4,895… And so on…
This was just in the space of 30 or so minutes… It’s pretty sad that Twitter has succumbed to this kind of spamming technique.
Phoenix From The Flames
Probably unbeknowst to most people, I burned down my village yesterday as I’m not in the mood to renew that domain, so today I rebuilt it on a mostly unused (and much cheaper come renewal time) domain and promptly retired the “Scam City” brand I’ve used for the past 9 years. I’ve also retired the Blossom avatar I’ve used for the past 6 years, my how time flies…
Hopefully the redirects I have in place will move most people along during the transition process, I’m especially curious as to whither the redirects will also push RSS readers over (once once they have moved will they stay moved?), so this is a test of sorts. There will be stuff missing, I’m still working on moving over things like my dump folder, videos, music, music player, older versions and so on… It’s not a priority…
Other than that, not a lot is going on, we have 2 sick cats after Josie brought an upper respiratory infection into the house and infected Sally (we think) and we’re leaving for the UK in just over 2 weeks, so I’m hoping anything will be cleared up by then so we can leave them here alone with some peace of mind.
Skip Caray 1939 - 2008
Broadcaster Skip Caray, who was in his 33rd season of calling Atlanta Braves games, died in his sleep Sunday at his Atlanta home. Caray, the son of former Hall of Fame play-by-play announcer Harry Caray, had several ailments in the last year but had recovered enough to continue calling Braves home games at Turner Field, as recent as 3 days ago. Sad, sad day for baseball…
Reboot
9 years ago I decided to drop out of college and do things my way, at the time it seemed like a good idea but being the shady, secretive person I was I didn’t tell anyone for 6 months… It was a combination of boredom and not wanting to be taught or something like that, but shortly thereafter I began to teach myself the ins and outs of HTML and began my long journey down the web path.
And I learned the old fashioned way, finding pages I liked and hacking away at their source code. Yes, I was one of “those” people…
Not having a college education can sometimes be a hinderance, luckily 9/10 employers here won’t even bother to check into my UK education history and I can usually “blag” my way around most questions. But the lack of that education and my method of only learning what I needed to know just to get by is hurting me now. I basically list myself as a “jack of all trades, master of none” and know enough to be dangerous, and right now most employers are looking for experienced professionals who are skilled in a great many programming languages, some I don’t even know like Ruby On Rails or Python.
So now I’m going to undergo a personal reboot of sorts. A definate change of direction is needed…
The Multiverse
A wonderfully descriptive account of how 282 TV shows are linked together in a common universe. Everything from I Love Lucy to Heroes, from Gilligan’s Island to The Wire, the entire Law & Order series and even the new X-Files movie… It all takes place inside the mind of Tommy Westphall, an autistic child in 80’s drama series St. Elsewhere.
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