Author: Dave

Youtube stumbles

While doing some stumbling around Youtube I came across these somewhat unusual girls who go by the name of the Parselmouths, and who like to make videos of themselves singing songs about harry potter and potter related themes.

Here, for your amusement, are two of their offerings.

“What kind of name is Hermione”:

and, “And then I died”:

There…

Cheers big ears

For those geeks of you out there, here’s something that’s sure to appeal to you:

An online partially visual version of the old hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy game (which if you’ve ever played the old text only version (which I think may be available at Home of the Underdogs), you will know to be spectacularly, amusingly frustrating. In fact I don’t think the adjective frustrating really adequately does justice to how entertainingly infuriating it can be at points. Anyway)

Keeping a foot in the door

After seeming to blindly stumble into corporate quick sand, by choosing to continue investing in film based photography and ignore the rise of digital cameras, it looked for a while like Kodak might go the way of the dinosaurs, however some good corporate restructuring and product re-alignment seems to have held them steady, and now it looks like once again they are regaining their place at the top of the photographic food chain.

Today I was reading about a new filter technology which Kodak has invented with dramitally increases the light sensitivity of digital camera sensors (by a factor of 2 to 4, depending on shooting conditions). This will apparently have particular applications in mobile phone cameras.

Anyway, now I’m looking forwards to it’s arrival.

I love technology, by sometimes being a wannabe early adopter is a bit of a hassle.

Public service announcement

As several observant people have commented to me recently, my blog looks a little different at present. The reason is that I upgraded all my blog software components about a week ago, and haven’t gotten around to setting up all the little customisations I need in order for my site to look exactly as it did before. Have faith. Soon all will be back to the way it was, it might just take a week or two for me to find the time.

Divination

While the orb may not reveal its shadowy secrets to me, nor the tea-leaves provide me with predictive insights, I do now posess the power to predict the future.

This is because for our Beer and Pizza anniversary Simone got me a Magic eight ball, and my experience so far this year (we also have one in ED) the magic eight ball never lies to me.

Now if only I can figure out how to use it to predict the lotto numbers…

Inside my skull

Things appear to be getting to me a little.

I’ve been studying hard, and to put myself to sleep at night, reading my way through the harry potter books (reading fiction while lying down = dave asleep in 10-15 mins, which is a good system really).

Anyway, the last few days I’ve been having some odd dreams while I’ve been resetting my body clock after a week working overnights.

Firstly I woke up the other day from an afternoon sleep with a strange sense of foreboding, and a non-specific feeling of concern for Neville’s wellbeing. I explained this to Simone, who said “Neville who?… … Longbottom?”, and I said yes. She wasn’t sure which was more wierd, me dreaming that Neville needed help, or that she immediately knew who I was talking about.

Then yesterday morning I awoke after a dream where I was reading through my anatomy book, and found 4 pages that I had somehow missed, which in really tiny print listed the names, nerve supplies, actions and attachments of about 200 muscles in the arm, and I suddenly realised why I didn’t understand how the arm worked, and that there was no way I could possibly learn all those muscles. And then I woke up…. sweating…

No beer and no TV makes David something something.

Swinging from the chandaliers

In a nice illustration of our familial eccentricity, our standard routine when Simone and I are going out is to say to Jack, “Now you behave yourself while we’re gone. No loud parties and no swinging off the ceiling”.

It stems from a piece of silliness early last year where I suggested that while we were out Jack and my childhood stuffed toy “Teddy” were throwning some kick-ass parties together.

Now the other day I noticed that the leading edges of the ceiling fans were looking a little grubby, so I got a cloth and wiped them down, and guess what! The “grime” was in fact a uniform thin coating of Jack hair. Now a logical person would suggest that his hair is sufficiently light to loft up and get caught on the front of the fan, but I can’t help wondering whether it’s up there as a result of Jack ignoring our parental edicts, and swinging off the ceiling fans while we’ve been out.

The next question is of course whether he’s doing this in relation to a party or as practice for his try out for circus school…