Friday, May 20, 2005
Two of our friends were getting married on Friday and we had the pleasure of guarding the groom on Thursday night as David had the unenviable task of being the best man. Being as well-trained as we are we managed to avoid getting the groom into any trouble whatsoever. In some strange way in would have been cool to have resorted to various macho stereotypes and left him for dead chained to a lamppost somewhere.
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by Antz at 12:16 AM | Permalink |  | |
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
One of the very few goods things that came out of the fire at David's flat was that his insurance company has handed him a large pile of cash. Now, of course, normally this money would go towards trying to piece back together your personal belongings however in David's case he is in the lucky position of being able to splash some of the cash on whatever he likes as he doesn't need to replace some of the stuff that went up in flames.
So for the last couple of weeks he's been test-driving various four-wheeled beasts with the intention of using his insurance money to find a replacement for his Renault 5 (which is pretty much coming to the end of its life).
After a lot of test-drives and several restless nights he finally settled on a Peugeot 206cc cabriolet. Luckily for him our local dealer actually had the version he wanted in stock so this morning he visited and bought his new car on his debit card! I should of course point out that it's not a trick he can normally do. Just make sure you don't say the words "Mid-life crisis".
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by Antz at 9:10 PM | Permalink | | |
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Things on the new website I'm developing for work are going pretty well, although some days I find I'm stuck trying to sort out the smallest thing for hours. A case in point was today when I spend a couple of hours trying to alter some code so that I could get prices on the site to look just how I wanted. I guess it's one of the problems with using an off-the-shelf product as the basis for the site's shopping cart system. The other problem is that my knowledge of php isn't that great; of course it's getting better every day.
The site is pretty much ready for some hard-core testing. It's been in development for the grand total of three whole weeks and all the essential elements are up and running. Being a designer I have to stop myself getting all wrapped up in the smallest of details and in the end have to take a step back, slap myself round a bit and then move on to something more fundamental; like a whole section that I?ve been putting off.
Hopefully the site will be going live in June and then we can see whether the Great British public are ready for what we have for them.
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by Antz at 9:58 PM | Permalink | | |
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
For several months now I've been having problems with my Mac's firewire ports. Originally I noticed that David's iPod wouldn't update and put it down to a dodgy firewire cable but having got my hands on a replacement found that it still didn't work. I read loads of forums and had pretty much decided that it was probably a fault with the iPod and pretty much forgot about it.
That was until last week when I bought a Lacie CD burner on eBay. It's a pretty cool little external thing that uses the power of Firewire to communicate. Trouble is that once i'd plugged it in it failed to communicate. Power lights worked but nothing else.
More trips to forums suggested that it was to do with an Apple Update some months ago that could have affected the drive before I got it; others suggested resetting the mac while other said I needed to sneak inside the mac and press some magic little button that you're obviously never meant to know about, never mind actually dare press it. I got pretty wrapped up in the whole thing for a few days and didn't get anyway at all. I gave up.
The other day i suddenly realised that if it wasn't the drive or the cable then it had to be the Firewire ports themselves. So I surfed over to the 'Bay to find myself an affordable Firewire card to stick into one off the vacant slots round the back of the Mac. 24 hours later the card arrived, 2 minutes later it was installed and 30 seconds after that I was burning CDs as if there was no tomorrow.
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by Antz at 12:07 AM | Permalink | | |
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
I've been an avid fan of the 'real-time' TV drama 24 since series one; every Sunday night sitting down and fearlessly guarding the TV in case David should try to change away from my hourly dose of Agent Jack Bauer and the rest of the CTU team. That was until this season.
This season, because of the magical technology that is Sky Plus, I don't have to upset David by watching the show while he's at home. The Sky box quietly records each and every episode so that I can watch the adrenalin-pumping drama in my own time. Trouble is I've been getting seriously behind in my viewing, which means having to look away whenever a 24 trailer comes on the TV.
So tonight I settled down for a mammoth six episode 24-fest. Five hours of glorious all-American terrorist filled drama. I can now safely bump into trailers for the coming week's 24 without breaking into a cold sweat.
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by Antz at 11:37 PM | Permalink | | |
Sunday, May 08, 2005
One of the really cool things about my rash decision to move to a new job is that I'm actually doing what I spent so many years at college learning to do; designing things.
At my last place I pretty much spent the last two years being some sort of glorified administrator. A great job if you happen to get off on administrating, however I have enough problems remembering to send my family birthday presents at the approprate times of the year, never mind dealing with all the admin for a £1 a year business. Plus, of course, I never had any intention of doing anything at all related to admin when I grew up.
So anyway I'm now back to doing what I'm good at. At the minute I'm up to my elbows in redesigning a website. My Mac is full of visuals and dummy site designs which will all gradually come together in a blaze of website design in the next few weeks. Then it's down to getting the redesigned site up and running so that people can hand over their hard earned cash in exchange for our cool products. When it happens you'll be one of the first to know.
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by Antz at 8:37 PM | Permalink | | |
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