Category: Favourites

OK, I promise this is the last I’ll say about the NBA All-Star weekend…

And this goes out to all you people who said Vince Carter wouldn’t be the same as he was in 2000…

Throw it down big man, throw it down!

Completely inspired by Michael Heilemann’s 25 Most Influential Games, I thought I’d give it a shot too, and trying to remember 25 great games past and present was surprisingly more difficult than you might think.

I tried to keep the balance of Atari ST, MegaDrive, Super Nintendo, PC, PlayStations 1 & 2 and Xbox games just about right, it’s not too top heavy in one particular system and I wish I could play some of the games above right now…

So, can you name them all?

Michael Heilemann gets old skool with his 25 Most Influential Games montage on Binary Bonsai and Flickr.

There are quite a few there I recognise immediately like Doom, Half-Life, Another World, Monkey Island and some I know, but the name is on the tip of my tongue… There are a few omissions in there, but that’s just my personal opinion, maybe I should put my own 25 together, make it like a meme kind of deal…

More and more often I’m getting asked “what’s that funny lil favicon your site has?” And now with more and more people seeing it in Firefox as well as other places (Flickr, blogs with Gravatar supported comments, MSN conversations etc) it’s time to introduce the world to Blossom in full-ish size and reveal the secret history Blossom and I actually have…

Yes, it’s Blossom of the Powerpuff Girls and it all started about 3 years ago as a little laugh that spiraled way out of control… Truth is I’m a fan of the Powerpuff Girls cartoon series (and movie), and I found a great image of Blossom on the old PPGWorld.com site and originally used it as my desktop wallpaper…

When I joined o8 – Meaningless + Shallow, I needed a little 32×32 icon for my profile and posts that would set me apart from the rest… And the above picture suited that right down to the ground, except it needed to be suitably cropped, so a 96×96 version was born.

Here is an example of how it looked (circa January/February 2003)… And basically it stuck ever since, I found a site that turns images into favicons and thus it became the favicon of Scam City version 5.1 (as it was known back in those days) and now it lives on as my globally recognised avatar… Though some question my mental stability for keeping it, I think it’s more recognised than me myself… It appears in such a different variety of places and if you see it you’ll instantly know it’s something to do with me. I still get a kick out of seeing it in people’s Bloglines public feed or in people’s contacts list in Flickr and now Haloscan supports Gravatar, so it appears there as well…

It’s me, I’m the crazy guy with Blossom as his gravatar!

Nothing like a late night Halo 2 session on Xbox Live to bring a smile to ones face, this time I was in a party with Joshua Davis (aka PrayStation) and for once, there was a surprise outcome…

Yep, PrayStation = Pwned!

All in good fun of course…

Before… Bye bye winter beard!

After… Hello white trash trucker handlebar moustache…

For the last few nights we’ve been watching season one of HBO’s Carnivale via netflix… And damn, it’s a weird, weird show, like Twin Peaks weird…

It follows a traveling carnival as it wends its way across the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, focusing on Ben Hawkins, a mysterious 18-year-old fugitive with hidden talents who is taken in by the carnival, and Brother Justin, a charismatic, shadowy evangelist who “speaks to god…”

And in 6 episodes (half of season one), that’s all we got… We have no clue as to what’s going on, who’s good or who’s bad and the answers to any other questions you might have… Very Twin Peaks weird…

The worst part is it’s so compelling! We have to keep on watching in the hopes that something, ANYTHING will happen. Season two has not long started on HBO, so we’ll have a long wait til those come out on dvd, since we don’t have HBO.

So, today Erika finds a box of crayons and decides to do a little drawing, and I just had to ask her to scan it…

My very own Erika Walker-Arnold original…

It’s been about 15 months since I last done something like this, and seeing as it’s been a year since I first moved here, I thought it would be fun to try it again, except I ran out of steam halfway through… It gets a bit boring, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

(more…)

What happens if I don’t shave for close to two months?

Maybe it’s time I cleaned myself up… Phil and Erika now refer to me as “Grizzly Adams,” which, co-incidentally, was the same thing my mother would say if I didn’t shave for a week, let alone 2 months… Sigh…

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful.

Indeed what a mouthful, but what becomes of it when it becomes unusable? For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been floating around the support forums looking for answers to questions I have as well as trying to help others with things I may have already fixed, but it’s slowly becoming apparent to me that the problem is WordPress its self…

Now regardless of what the problem was, I’ve always been able to come up with a quick fix, sort of like a band-aid, to sort it out until I can seek “professional” help in the support forums, but now I have a problem that, as much as they think they are helping, is just down to fucked up coding by the developers. But wait, yes, I’m using 1.5 beta, and “beta releases shouldn’t be used by the general public,” OK, fine, so why do the general public have access to these nightly releases? If Joe Schmoe is running WP 1.2.2 and finds out that someone or other is running WP 1.5, of course he’s gonna want to upgrade, cause WP 1.5 comes with all these much better bells and whistles. Therein lies the problem, the average user (and I don’t mean to be condesending in this, simply because 18 months ago, I was the same) probably doesn’t have the knowledge needed to fix things when they fuck up, and they will fuck up…

The “company policy” when it comes to this is “back up your data via phpMyAdmin, change settings in phpMyAdmin, yadda yadda yadda” which for advanced users is all fine and dandy, but me, and I consider myself an advanced user, I absolutely HATE going into phpMyAdmin, it’s far, far to easy to screw around with something and end up with everything in your database flushed down the proverbial toilet.

Anyways, back to the problem at hand, I can’t login to my WordPress install, the only reason I’m posting this is because when I upgraded to WP 1.5, Firefox kept the login cookie and lets me in, if anything, god forbid, should happen to that cookie, then I’m up shit creek without a paddle… And I’m not the only one… In fact this is described as a major bug in the system and it’s been around for a while, and with almost a month of nightly releases under WP1.5’s belt, it’s still not fixed, let me repeat that… IT’S STILL NOT FIXED! What kind of system that advertises it’s self as, and let me repeat:

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.

And it won’t even let you do the “simple” thing as logging in to the admin section… And the support forum is bursting with people to tell you how to fix it, except it’s not fixing it, and someone even said, I wish I could find the post now, that it “wasn’t such a big deal and the developers probably have more important things to worry about.” How off putting is that when you’re trying to fix this kind of error?

Which brings me back to my original point, the problem with WordPress is WordPress it’s self… Due to it’s open source nature, it will be impossible to have any kind of “official” technical support, so instead we have to rely on one another, but when you’re asking important questions and the responses are generally unhelpful, and sometimes insulting, what can you do?

EDIT (20/01/05 6:01pm): A particularly inflamatory statement has been removed, in the cold light of day it probably wasn’t the best thing to say and for those it offended I can only apologise profusely.

EDIT (17/02/05 11:58am): Toby Simmons has a great fix for login issue if you’re using Windows IIS

On one hand we have Queen Latifah, a rap artist and actress, and on the other we have HRH Queen Elizabeth II, the Queen regant and Head of State of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Head of the Commonwealth, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Commander-in-Chief of the UK Armed Forces and Lord of Mann, now you would think it’s hard to mix the two up, but not in Alabama…

Because according to whoever runs the ABC affiliate in Birmingham, AL., they are one and the same… I know the Queen was hard up, having opened up Buckingham Palace for visitors and such likes, but how bad must things be if she’s hosting The Grammys? She could at least host a real awards show…

So here we are, 2004 comes kicking and screaming to a conclusion, and in retrospect it’s been a fun up and down year, I’ll try to encapsulate it as much as possible by going over the positive and hiding the negative…

Favourites of 2004

Where to begin…

Favourite Movies of 2004

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2. Shrek 2
3. Team America: World Police
4. Garden State
5. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy

Bubbling Under: Spider-Man 2, Fahrenheit 9/11, Kill Bill Volume 2, Jersey Girl, The Incredibles

Favourite CD’s of 2004

1. Modest Mouse – Good News For People Who Love Bad News
2. Nellie McKay – Get Away From Me
3. Norah Jones – Feels Like Home
4. Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand
5. U2 – How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb

Bubbling Under: Team America Soundtrack, Beastie Boys – To The 5 Boroughs, Eminem – Encore, Linkin Park & Jay-Z – Collision Course, Snow Patrol – Final Straw

Favourite Blogs of 2004

(in no certain order)

• kottke.org
• dooce.com
• michaelhanscom.com
• pinksocks.co.uk
• r80o.com

Bubbling Under: photomatt.net, neilturner.me.uk, megnut.com, binarybonsai.com, airbagindustries.com

Favourite Blog Post ANYWHERE of 2004

Mark at R80o being busted singing in his car at an intersection. Gold Jerry, GOLD!

Favourite Place Visited in 2004

Since I only visited Portland, Oregon, I guess that wins by default…

Favourite Plane Flight of 2004

Plenty to choose from, but prolly my first flight from Glasgow to Newark in January was my favourite, mainly because Continental have great planes, great staff, great food and great legroom, plus I breezed through US Immigration like it was nothing at all. How things would change…

Favourite Event of 2004

Game 7 of the NLDS at Turner Field. A terrific game (even if the Braves lost) and a great atmosphere as the ballpark was packed to the rafters.

Ummm, I’m fast running out of favourite things now… So I guess I’ll leave it at that

Until now, my only major claim to fame was me managing to get my name included in the credits of Championship Manager 4 as well as my ever-so-slight brush with fame after FHM leeched that Yeti game off me earlier this year (but I’m over looking it as my name wasn’t published anywhere except here). Not any more… This is a follow up to my little post about it yesterday.

Firstly, if you look at the high res PDF of the advert, you’ll see my name lumped in there with the other Smiths around the world who contributed… Score! First I get my name into Championship Manger 4, now a major metropolitan publication.

Secondly, Asa Dotzler has a list of sites that referenced the release of said New York Times advert, and I’m there… Score! First I get my name into Championship Manger 4, then a major metropolitan publication and now the website of Mozilla’s “community quality advocate extraordinaire.”

Not bad for a few seconds work…

I’ve finally succumbed to the temptations of Xbox Live and Halo 2 and Burnout 3 in particular…

And damn, it’s insane stuff… There’s like this heirarchy of gamerdom that you can only learn the hard way… Namely kids yelling and cursing at you. If you’re good at a game, you’re branded a cheater and if you suck, which I do, then you’re ridiculed at every possible opportunity.

As I said, I’m shit at Halo 2… But I know my role in the team games, I’m the sacrificial lamb, running off and drawing fire so the good players can sneak around doing what they need to do, and thus far it’s working fairly well… I’m slowly moving up the ranking and becoming a better player as I progress.

I’m pretty decent at Burnout 3 already, but I don’t play often enough to sustain a decent ranking, I could be ranked 1,500 one day, then when I go back a few days later I’m down to 10,000… So that kinda sucks.

If you have Xbox Live and ever feel like a laugh, my gamertag is FLC and if you’re really bored, you can see my Halo 2 stats here (a little bit of XML parsing going on there, so they should be as live as live can be).