Yet Another Blog

Gareth Gates, who won {insert generic pop TV competition here} (I can’t remember), has come top of the 2002 Record of the Year competition.

Shurely shome mishtake? I believe this is a song originally sung by the Righteous Brothers. Gates’ rendition is strikingly similar to the original – surely they should be awarded the prize and he just get a congratulations for being able to sing – his record company simply seem to go through buying rights to others’ songs, and just adding a new voice to them?

Grrrr. A few of us were chatting last night about all this Pop Idol/Star rubbish – the conclusion being a lot of these people are clearly able to sing, it just comes down to how good they look on stage. Hmmm, sounds familiar?

Just checking that a suit I want to wear was okay (no dire white paint marks, etc) and discovered in the process that I’ve actually lost a bit of weight around the waist, and can now fit comfortably into those trousers again without fear of the button popping out.

Hooray!!!

Tonight was also the marking of a realisation that I am pretty dire at colour coding – black jacket, black trousers, black shoes, white shirt and black tie. I look like a bloody penguin (wanted navy blue tie… or burnt sienna but I had the option of black silk, black “wierd fabric” or gray silk – went for second).

Are Melanie Sykes and Des O’Connor taking over ITV1? I’ve switched on the TV every now and again, or seen the TV at uni at lunchtime in the café and there’s always some chat show with those two. It’s on at lunchtime, then it’s on again in the evening but it feels like they’re always on….scary.

Update: Just found this.

I don’t usually use Google‘s Pagerank as definitive guidance as to popularity to site, but there’s something very satisfying about Blogwise having 7/10. Svenlat and this site are both 5/10 which is also good (see why I don’t think it’s definitive 😉 )

Found via B3ta, this Battleships game is first class (I only say that because I beat the computer twice – it has a fairly predictable search pattern)

So, Avril Lavigne is doing a concert in Madrid tomorrow, but according to her website it’s an “over 18 show” – surely that means she can’t go? 🙂

Finally figured out a cheap shot solution to getting screengrabs of all 750-odd blogs on Blogwise. It involves MS Word (I don’t have VB), a load of SendKeys commands, Paint Shop Pro, and a build of Mozilla 1.2 running fullscreen. Very very tacky, but only because it was 4am and I couldn’t figure out a nicer way.

I’m sure Alexa use something similar (but a bit tidier) like Mozilla in Linux and some clever script to grab their pictures but I don’t have Linux with a GUI installed anywhere (don’t get me wrong, I like Linux a lot – I have it on three of my five computers, I just can’t stand the GUI).

This probably means a lot more to Americans, but recently Apple have been making a load of switch to Macs because Microsoft smells of wee* adverts on their website, on TV, etc. Well, here‘s a lovely commercial – although it’s for a slightly more sinister organisation (no, it’s not a return to Microsoft ad).

* caption may not reflect Apple’s actual campaign, although I bet it’s what they’re thinking.

I keep seeing pictures of this wierd little brown furry thing and finally discovered what it was.

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It’s called Domo Kun, a little character created in Japan (…wierd character….made in Japan….naaaah…). I’m downloading some clips from domo-kun.de, and it’s all very dodgy. Very surreal. Have a look at a few if you’re bored and have broadband.

Update: Just found a Japanese translation of what ‘Domo’ is (this is a direct quote!):

“DOMO is a strange creature born from an egg. One day he fell into Usajii’s house,the old rabbit likes TV. After that he began to love watching TV. He is gentle and strong. When he is in a bad mood,he breaks wind.”

Also I think this program also features an alcoholic bat called Shinobu. How about that.

A useful reference for font sizing inconsistencies shows that there are still a few bugs with the ways browsers render fonts as set by different properties (pixel, em, keyword, etc.). I use all three in different places on different sites I run, and am still not happy with the best one to use. At the moment I’m sticking with pixels because keywords are horribly inconsistent across browsers and ems have some wierd bugs in IE. I am also vaguely interested by those scripts popping up that let you resize a page by clicking +/- buttons – I may install one of those.

Also of note, the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture has just been launched (well, a few weeks ago) with some interesting and influencial heading the team. I may consider becoming a member when their website grows a bit. Although the president, who doubles as Interaction! Designer! at! Yahoo! Inc! has a very daunting homepage.