Month: May 2001

realised today or guess

I realised today (or I guess more accurately yesterday now) that blogvoices was not running at the moment. We’ve been thinking for a while about creating bulletin boards for other areas of the site, so people can post back about their travels in the countries we’ve been to, or can agree or disagree about our gadget reviews. So, tonight we’ve been adding that functionality. At the moment it only runs from the blog and gadget pages. Soon we hope to get it running off more parts of the site. We’ve used some XML based Perl freeware software – XML Board. So, now all the comments are stored on our server, and we’re no longer forced to deal with any delays/unreliabilities of getting to an externally hosted board. We’ve rescued the comments from blogvoices and imported them as a starting point.

Take a look at our blog discussions or the gadget discussions boards.

Shed building

From After
in just 4 or 5 hours. Fantastic or what! Rich’s Dad had bought a shed, and we offered to help him build it. It all went pretty smoothly, no injuries, no parts missing (although we did head off to the DIY store for a few extra bits and pieces). The rest of the pictures can be viewed in here

Big Brother 2

Well, Big Brother started again in the UK on Friday, and I’m kind of hooked again. Not sufficiently hooked so that I watch it on E4 for 20 hours a day or whatever, but enough to check the site out from time to time. I only got interested in the first Big Brother at the time when Nasty Nick got kicked out, and I think I was a bit spoilt as that was way more interesting than the current programmes are. However, it is early days yet. It is very obvious (well to me anyway) that Channel 4 are definitely trying to spice things up a bit with this series, building a “den”, putting in a “table dancer” etc and I guess only time will tell whether anything happens or not.

Jungle Book Groove Party – dancemat challenge

The boys play Dancemat Challenge

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Earlier this year, we bought a copy of Jungle Book Groove Party for the Playstation. This is a fantastic game, you have to dance around on the dance mat in time with the music following the arrows on the screen. Some friends came around for dinner a few months ago, and immediately went out and bought the game themselves.

Yesterday, we had the “Dance Mat Challenge”. The game comes with a few 2 player options, and so we tried them out at their house. One of the options is the head to head match, no big surprises here, both players get to choose a character and then they dance against each other. There was one surprise though, at the point where in the normal game you get a rest, here you get a “Dance Sprint” where you make as many contacts with the mat as you can to score more points. The other game we played was the team game, which was really hard. If one player missed a contact, then the arrow moves over to the other players stack. This was really funny to watch, as the more contacts were missed, the more the boys laughed, and the more they missed.

An excellent game and pretty good exercise too

Glamour magazine

Cover of the magazine

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A new magazine was launched in the UK a couple of
months ago. No big deal, new magazines are launched all the time. What’s different about it is it’s size. Instead of the usual size it’s about A5 – only slightly wider than a book. This is a fantastic idea in my opinion. It makes them even more transportable on tubes, trains, planes etc. I read the April edition (I think) and I have to admit that it was “just another women’s magazine” but, if I was looking for something to read on my way to work or similar it would probably be one of my first choices.

Leyton Orient 2 – 0 Hull City

So, we lost 2-1 on aggregate. I wish I could say we were hard done too but, in all honesty I can’t. We played poorly in the first half – we seemed to be playing far too defensively. We looked a lot better in the second half and created a couple of good chances. Orient were the better team but I think they are going to be hard pushed to beat Blackpool in the final at Cardiff.

The atmosphere wasn’t as good as I’d hoped – we were on the terraces and had no roof to help magnify our sound. Shame. I have little voice left so I know I did my bit. The Orient only seemed to have one song “Orient, Orient” – a bit like the Skol lager song. At least we had some variety to offer – including singing “One song, you’ve only got one song”.

It’s dissapointing to lose out but when I think back to how close we were to losing the club completely I don’t feel quite so bad. Next season let’s do it properly and get automatic promotion.

And so, instead of heading for Cardiff on the 26th, it looks like we’ll be on shed building duty – helping Rich’s Dad. Somehow this doesn’t have quite the same appeal.

Leyton Orient v Hull City

Tonight, Hull are playing the 2nd leg of the Play off semi finals at Brisbane Road, London. Hull won the first leg 1-0 so we go into this match with a slight, very slight, advantage. It is the first time Hull have been in the Play Offs and I’m feeling nervous. I’m just waiting to start the journey and it’s a weird feeling. 3000 Hull supporters are expected, and I’m sure we’re going to make some noise and support out team the best we can. We’ve had such a strange season that we’re all really proud of what the team has achieved whatever the result.

Theoretically a live broadcast from the Radio Humberside commentary should be available here. C’mon you Tigers!

Extreme in Ealing

Cathy shoots”
Dude”
Cathy tumbles”

Saturday, Ealing, London: a day out in the park on what must be close
to the hottest day of the year so far.

The excuse: a free extreme day organized by the
local government, where we could try out various extreme sports. It turned out to be dominated by kids, but hey… we invited the New Scientist web team over,
we had fun and discovered that Cathy rules
at shooting because she was taught to shoot at school in France.

The end of the day was spent drinking, chatting, and playing football in
another park, followed by great tapas at La Siesta. Mmmm… great tapas,
and enough veggie options to keep Ash happy.

As you’d expect, there are eyemodule photos.

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[oh, BTW, this blog is late because we’ve come to rely on
JPEG Wizard to trim the fat from our images, and the
site was down for a day or two]