Still recovering from gum work. So eating a lot of Weetabix and Soup. I am so looking forward to a bacon butty or a big plate of chicken and chips when my mouth heals. Lightly toasted bread, buttered hot, very crispy streaky bacon, thinly sliced tomatoes, a big mug of piping hot tea…
Bliss city 🙂
There is an ongoing programme to redevelop the docks area of Belfast. A plan has just been submitted to redevelop the Titanic Area where the infamous Titanic was built. I’ve always wanted a house by the sea. But I also like city living. Getting an apartment in the Titanic area with a view over Belfast Lough and Belfast City might be nice. I’ll have to keep and eye on this new development.
I recently (2005 to 2006) had some orthodontic work done to straighten my upper Social Six teeth. The social six are the visible incisors and canines in the upper jaw. I got the straightening done via lingual orthodontics where the braces are placed on the back of the teeth and can’t be seen. This worked perfectly and the teeth are now okay. I did have to get my normal dentist to remove some discoloured enamel and do some reconstruction. That was all done.
In the last year I’ve noticed some gum line recession on my upper teeth. This can happen after orthodontics. My dentist remarked about it at my last check-up and referred me to a periodontist. He recommended a gingival gum graft. In this small sections of tissue are removed from the roof of the mouth and palette and are sewn into the gingival tissue to reconstruct the gum tissue. I had it done this morning. It took about 2 hours. Ouch! It’s as gruesome as it sounds. They cut your gums and then harvest tissue from your palette and sew it into the gums. A tad sore 🙂 Much swelling and some blood! On antibiotics and pain killers.
it’ll be worth it as it’ll mean the teeth are protected from root infection. No pain no gain as they say. I was meant to be going to London on Wednesday for a work related session at BETT in relation to the new job I’m starting in a few weeks. I’ll have to see how I feel tomorrow but I can’t see that I’ll be okay to go. Not a pretty sight when somebody smiles at you and the teeth are all bloody.
BTW: If you are in Ireland and want contact details for an excellent orthodontist who treats adults with lingual (invisible) braces drop me an email or post a comment.
Each year The Edge asks prominent thinkers a simple question. This years question was What are you Optimistic about? Why? The responses are up.
I’ll have to have a think and decide what I’m optimistic about. I’ll post it in the comments.
Update: I’ve posted my optimistic predictions for 2007 in the comments.
There is an excellent version of John Lennon’s Imagine performed by Queen and Paul Rodgers at their Hyde Park gig. Why is this entry filed in the Music and the Atheism categories? Roger Taylor’s reaction to the no religion too… line. Apparently in the USA that line is often changed to read as one religion or even taken out altogether.
Roger has form on dislike of religion. His song called The Key (which could be one of my Desert Island Discs) contains the lyric:
Well you can search the whole wide planet
Down to viruses and germs
A sensible religion
Is just a contradiction in terms
…to be able to do this:
God that’s good. I love the look to camera at the end 🙂 Here is the original song from Queen II.
I’m at the very early stages of learning chords and stuff on piano. IF I ever get to the stage where I can play Nevermore like this guy I’ll be as happy as a big happy thing!
Queen made a lot of videos. I still like the one for Somebody to Love the most I think. It’s simply the 4 of them in a studio, inter-cut with concert footage. So the most important thing, i.e. the music itself, doesn’t have to compete with over ambitious visuals or story. You can watch a 30 second clip at the iTMS or buy the video in its 5 minute splendour there as well.
Click picture for larger view
Yeah!. New artist. New Music. Mika is going to be huge. Dodgy Holiday is very good. The performance of the song Grace Kelly on Later with Jools Holland is very good as well. Available as a QuickTime file at the Mika MySpace Music site.
He has a very broad vocal range. The control is better than most and he uses it really well. Inevitably there is comparison to Freddie Mercury and Marc Bolan et al. Sounds a bit like Scissor Sisters and The Darkness from a vocal perspective (but better). He doesn’t need the comparisons to other vocalists. He can stand alone as a very good singer and musician. Looking forward to the album.
[Thanks to Brian May’s Soapbox for the pointer]
I wrote previously that I was testing MacJounal as a replacement for ecto as a blog tool and SOHO Notes as a personal journal app. Whilst MacJounal has some nice touches, and does have a nice Mac interface, I’ve reverted to ecto and SOHO Notes for the two tasks respectively. I really missed being able to drag a picture into a blog entry window in ecto and have a thumbnail automatically created that linked to a full size version when uploaded to my Soapbox. I also like the ability to specify a target when creating links. On the SOHO Notes front I like the way it automatically enters the current date as the title of a note when you create one in the in built Journal folder. Hardly Earth shattering I know but the small touches are nice.
Good grief. What a blunder. I was playing a 12 minute game of chess against a human opponent on playchess.com and got to the following position –
I was playing white and it was my move. I had about 3 minutes on my clock and my opponent had about 1.5 minutes. So no time pressure. So what did I play?
49. b7??
Really stupid move or what? Can you see why? Black can checkmate in a single move with 49 … Ng2#. Here is the position at the end:
I couldn’t believe it 🙁 I should have played 49. Rxf4 Kxf4 50. Kxe2 and then advanced the pawn on the b-file to Queen it. More study required I think to spot obvious mating positions. Here is the full game if anyone is interested:
[Event “Rated game, 12m + 0s”]
[Site “Beginners”]
[Date “2006.12.05”]
[White “Canicula”]
[Black “Coriolis”]
[Result “0-1”]
[WhiteElo “1251”]
[BlackElo “1283”]
[ECO “C42”]
[Annotator “Robinson,Ian”]
1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 d6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. d3 Be7 5. Be2 O-O 6. Be3 Nc6 7. O-O Be6 8. Ng5
d5 9. f3 d4 10. Nxe6 fxe6 11. Bg5 dxc3 12. bxc3 b5 13. d4 b4 14. c4 exd4 15. e5
Nd7 16. Bxe7 Qxe7 17. f4 Rf7 18. Bh5 g6 19. Bf3 Rxf4 20. Qd2 Raf8 21. Bxc6 Nxe5
22. Rxf4 Nxc4 23. Rxf8+ Qxf8 24. Qf2 Ne5 25. Qxf8+ Kxf8 26. Be4 c5 27. Re1 Kf7
28. h4 c4 29. h5 b3 30. axb3 cxb3 31. cxb3 d3 32. Kf2 Ng4+ 33. Kf3 gxh5 34.
Bxh7 Kf6 35. Ra1 Ke5 36. Bxd3 Kd4 37. Bc4 e5 38. Rxa7 e4+ 39. Ke2 Ne3 40. Bf7
Nxg2 41. Bxh5 Nf4+ 42. Kd2 e3+ 43. Ke1 Nxh5 44. Rd7+ Ke4 45. b4 Nf4 46. b5 e2
47. b6 Kf3 48. Rf7 Ke3 49. b7 Ng2# 0-1
BTW the chess boards above are taken from the excellent Sigma Chess.
UPDATE: It’s not all doom and gloom. I won my most recent game –
[Event “Rated game, 8m + 0s”]
[Site “Beginners”]
[Date “2006.12.05”]
[White “Canicula”]
[Black “G¸nni”]
[Result “1-0”]
[WhiteElo “1169”]
[BlackElo “1378”]
[ECO “B06”]
[Annotator “Robinson,Ian”]
1. e4 g6 2. Nf3 Bg7 3. Nc3 Nc6 4. Bd3 d6 5. O-O Bxc3 6. bxc3 e5 7. Bb2 Bg4 8.
Bc4 Qd7 9. d4 exd4 10. cxd4 Bxf3 11. Qxf3 Nxd4 12. Bxd4 O-O-O 13. Bxh8 Ne7 14.
Qxf7 Rxh8 15. Qe6 b6 16. Qxd7+ Kxd7 17. Rae1 Rf8 18. f3 Rf4 19. g3 Rf6 20. f4
c6 21. g4 b5 22. Bd3 a6 23. g5 Rf7 24. f5 gxf5 25. exf5 Nd5 26. g6 hxg6 27.
fxg6 Rg7 28. Rf7+ Rxf7 29. gxf7 1-0
With apologies to Douglas Adams for nicking the line uttered when Arthur Dent uses his bottle of Retsina to gain access to the flying perpetual party in HHGTTG. But I discovered a new pleasure tonight. Thatchers Coxs Single Varietal cider. It’s really tangy and crisp. Delicious chilled and over heaps of ice. Even better, they sell it in a Tesco store I pass on the way home from work. I bought one a few days ago to taste it. I’ll be getting more 🙂
You may have noticed that I’ve changed the theme in use by WordPress for the Soapbox. The new one is based on Man~ja. I want to change the colours of the entry headers to blue and the colours of the links in posts to a different colour as well. I’d also like to change the Posted by… text to a different colour as well. However no matter what changes I make to the style.css file the colours won’t change. I’ll sort it out later! I like the new theme. I think it is cleaner than the previous one. A few more tweaks and I’ll be happy.
UPDATE: Looks like the colour changes I made to the CSS file are working today. I think the blue is a bit bright so I’ve changed it to be Dark Blue (#00008B). I think the style sheet must be getting cached somewhere between me and the Gradwell servers. So I’ll see tomorrow, after the cache has expired, how the new colours look.
I’m having another look at MacJournal to see if it’ll work as my personal diary tool and also as a blog editing tool. I’m writing this entry using v4.1d4, which is the latest available development build from Dan Schimpf. The editor is nice. Probably a bit better than ecto form a Macintosh GUI perspective.
I was able to download all 190 entries from my Soapbox okay after pointing it at the base URL. When I tried this in a previous version it only downloaded a subset of them. Not sure if that was as result of something I did wrong or the program itself.
In theory I should be able to use this one program to compose and store both personal entries and public entries for the Soapbox. Anyone want to take bets on how long it’ll be before a private entry gets posted here 🙂
Here is a screen grab of this entry being composed in MacJournal. If picture uploading is working then you’ll be able to see it. If not I’ll need to do some more tweaking!
Click on picture for larger view
Update: Obviously pictures are being scaled to fit the column width. Have to fix that. Three options:
• Find out if MacJournal can mimic the behaviour of ecto. The latter will include a thumbnail of the image in the post and will display the image in a new window when it’s double clicked. This would be my preference for a fix.
• Amend the CSS templates for the WordPress theme to stop images being scaled. If anyone knows how to do this post in the comments.
• Change the WordPress scheme to not use a single centred column. Might be time to go to a normal full window width theme anyway.
Update 2: The images are okay in the RSS feed from the site. Which is how everyone reads blogs anyway! Right?
Update 3: I’ve edited the picture to make it a thumbnail with a link to the larger version.
I’m moving to a new job!! If you look at the side bar it says that I’m employed as an IT Consultant by a UK based IT services company. I live in Belfast, UK, and work mainly in Northern Ireland. Well that’ll soon have to change to something like I’m employed as a Senior Solutions Architect by a UK based IT services company. I live in Belfast, UK, am based there but my work is focused on the education sector in England.
I’m moving sideways in the company I work for into the Managed Services Education section that delivers solutions for the Building Schools for the Future project. The new job will be helping to deliver environments and solutions to the education sector. It involves using technologies to create flexible learning environments, both physical and virtual, so that students can learn at their own pace, access lesson materials when not able to attend lessons (for whatever reason), adopt new technology to enhance learning (podcasts, digital media etc.).
I’m really looking forward to it. It’ll involve finding out how people learn. How the environment they are learning in influences this. How technology can help keep students interested and make them want to learn. Obviously the job will involve more than that, but I’ll learn that as I go along. I’ll transfer to the new role in January. Can’t wait.
And has every right to be. The march of the religious right in the USA has taken a few knocks. Read his thoughts, and celebrations, about it at SFGate.
Finished reading Michael Palin’s excellent Diaries 1969-1979 The Python Years yesterday. I loved it. It gives an inside view (abridged admittedly) of the birth of Python, the ups and downs and tensions within the group and the transition from the TV series to the films of the 1970’s. Palin’s thoughts on the Ripping Yarns TV series are very welcome as well. All in all a wonderful read. I note that on 12th July 1979 petrol hit £1 per gallon. It nearly hit that per litre a few months ago! I hope there will be another volume. I want to read about the making of the film Brazil, the making of the Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (I’m sure there where some tensions in that process), although the initial writing for the 4th Python film just makes an appearance towards the end of 1979 in this volume. Reading some of the entries I wondered how so many activities were crammed into some days. As a counterpoint to some of the hectic days we also read of Palin’s family life and more normal activities. I really enjoyed it.
David Gerrold wrote in his book World’s of Wonder that “…your first million words are for practice. They don’t count.” Meaning that to be a writer you have to write a lot of words. Like any activity you get better with practise. Want to play the guitar? Learn chords and practise. Want to be a good bowler in cricket? Get in the nets and bowl. Want to be a writer. Write lots of words, sentences, articles and stories. Practise, practise, practise. Good advice from Mr. Gerrold I reckon. I started a diary of sorts myself whilst reading Palin’s book. Mainly in response to Gerrold’s maxim on writing, rather than hoping the diary will be of any interest to anyone. No one will see it until i croak anyway! On a technical note I’m using the Journal feature of SOHO Notes as the place where I write and store my daily scribbling. I have a few articles and other ideas that I want to write and the more writing I do the better I’ll get at it!
The Tibetan Yak Fur guy, or Story Guy as he is properly known it seems, has another mission.