I’ve done Top Ten lists before, but thought I would bring back the idea in a shorter form - half, in fact. This is not for every Friday, but if I feel like I might have a list to share, this would be the place to do it.
I haven’t been to the cinema for years. I know the last time I approached one with the intent of going in, it was around the time of a Harry Potter movie, and the cinema said they reserved the right to use night vision goggles and essentially spy on you. I was appalled at the idea, decided to spend my evening elsewhere, and never returned.
11 weeks ago, a zoo in Vienna, Austria welcomed a little baby panda.
Now they’re trying to decide on a name for the youngster, and are asking for people to vote. His brother is called Fu Long, and the choices they’ve come up with are Fu Hu, Ao Kang and Wei Xing. Does anyone else think Fu Hu sounds like boo hoo? Sadly that name is winning at the moment.
A while back, I talked of time spent at my first official job - messing about with stationery. It was a mundane job, and one which I was quite good at, which meant as long as the work was done, slacking off was a bit more acceptable in the eyes of the bosses.
Back then, I casually mentioned that we used to doodle things on post-it notes. There was a particular chap who I had a bit of a connection with, mostly because everyone else thought I was a bit odd but he had the same sense of humour as me. We used to write post-it notes to each other about nothing in particular, and then it would always end up in doodling. We used to have doodle competitions to see who was better and he always won.
Over on Sidepodcast, we quite regularly live blog the practice, qualifying and race sessions, in something we have called the Factbyte Factbox. Essentially, I gather all the information I can from the screen, from Twitter and from other sources, and keep everyone updated, in what I hope is both an amusing and useful style.
Now that the off-season has begun, we are looking for more ways to use the Factbyte Factbox. Firstly, because I am officially addicted to doing it. Secondly, because we need to keep on testing bits and pieces behind the scenes. Finally, because it is useful to see how easy and/or difficult it is to adapt the FBFB to other formats.
I was just messing around with some filters for this one, and really loved the dotty effect. Then browsing through fonts found this one which just seemed to fit really well. Also, the turquoise/green colour sets the effect off. It was simple to make, but I think it’s quite effective.
Made with: Pixelmator Font: Desdemona Quartz Composer
One side done!
I should have posted this a while ago, because it’s dangerous having a Rubik’s Cube just sitting about on the desk.
First, I managed to get the white side complete but the edge pieces didn’t match the ones they were supposed to. After a bit more fiddling about, I got the white side done correctly. I don’t quite know how I did it, and I don’t remember using particular logic, but perhaps I did!
Oh dear. I bet I’m not the only person to use that pun. Terrible.
When Microsoft first announced the Kinect, did anyone else think it would never see the light of day? It seemed far too magical, a technology far greater than what we currently had, a step beyond what anyone would want in their homes. Think: Microsoft Surface.
But here it is, launched in the States, and ready to break out across Europe today. I haven’t even been keeping a close watch on the hype surrounding but I already know that I want one.
At least that’s the way it seems.
An experiment to move I Heart Franck off Wordpress led me to Posterous, which is really good, but not for blogging. It’s great for uploading a picture or some kind of media and sharing it, which is what it is ultimately designed for.
As you know, dissatisfied with Wordpress I made the transition to Squarespace, and have found it mostly good, but there is a significant spam commenting problem. Every day I am having to check that spam comments have not found their way on to the site, and at least 70% of the time, there is something published that I would rather not be there.
So, last time I was here, we discussed the Thursday test, in which Peugeot dominated.
The weather turned against the drivers during Friday practice, and the first session saw Bourdais’ car on top again, with Franck and Sarrazin finishing slightly further down.
1 Team Peugeot Total – Peugeot 908 HDi FAP – 1:28.751 7 Audi Sport Team Joest – Audi R15 TDI – 1:29.389 8 Audi Sport Team Joest – Audi R15 TDI – 1:30.041 2 Team Peugeot Total – Peugeot 908 HDi FAP – 1:31.093 (FRANCK!) In the second session, the weather was worse, and you can see from the times that it was a slow lap.
Franck was out and about today, as he and teammate Stephane Sarrazin took to the track at Zhuhai for two test sessions. These are pre-practice sessions for the weekend, which seems a bit odd, but any testing time is good.
The first session had Peugeot on top, but it was the other one, with Bourdais and Pagenaud. Franck’s car was third, with a pesky Audi splitting the two of them. In the second session, they improved and finished first, with Bourdais’ car in second place - a 1-2 finish for Peugeot. If the race could go like that too, I’d be happy.
The conclusion of a two-part story that I started watching ages ago. For once I was grateful for the “Previously on…” montage.
There are some excellent Doctor moments in here, starting with his unique ability to escape pretty much anything. I particularly enjoyed him being backed up against a lift and then using it to escape, but that’s because little things please me. He’s also smart enough to know that he can’t convince the people in charge that the Prime Minister is an alien. I imagine he has had this conversation many times before, and no one ever believes him. The only other option is to run!
Not much to report this week, as Thursday appears to be behaving itself so far. However, via ZooBorns, I learnt that the one and only baby panda cub born in the US in 2010 has made it’s appearance at Zoo Atlanta.
Not sure referencing the size of a cell phone is particularly helpful when they vary so much!
I don’t really like the scrawny panda cubs, they normally get cuter when they’re a bit older. It’s only a few weeks until we have another fluffy bundle to ogle though. Long live the baby panda!
Before today, I had brought my iPad to work with me three times, ready to read some books over lunch. I’ve been reading the Kindle App on my phone which is great, but it suddenly occurred to me that to other people, it probably looked as though I was staring at my phone for an hour every day.
I was torn between being the type of person who stares at their phone for an hour, or the type of person who brings in their gadgety gadgets to show off.
What a month! Goodness me. The weeks and weeks of setup we have been listening to are finally starting to pay off. Where do I start?
Kathy and Jamie I had kinda thought, and hoped, that with Kenton out of the picture, we would hear a bit less of Kathy. Wrong! Jamie has turned into a horror teenager, I won’t argue that, although there are quite some depths he has to sink to yet… if this was Eastenders, anyway.
This past weekend, I went for a little trip to Longleat with my very good friend. I was driving through the safari park, which means it’s a little bit tricky to take pictures and steer at the same time, but I did get a couple of good shots.
I did enjoy the house, despite my normal dislike of anywhere you are not allowed to take pictures. There is so much artwork on the walls, big curtains, enormous rugs, and lots to look at. Great fun.
That’s easy for you to say.
I recently added a new item to my Life List in the form of No. 63 - Solve a Rubik’s Cube.
When I was quite a lot younger, I had a Rubik’s Cube and I couldn’t do it at all. My mum found The Book for solving it, and even with the answer in front of me, I still couldn’t do it.
So now, with winter drawing in, I thought it would be fun to get started on what is likely to be a very long term list item. The cube can sit on my desk, and I can just pick it up when I have a few minutes. I’m not confident I will ever manage to figure this out, even if I do give in and buy the book at some point in the future.
With a new month, comes a new batch of headers, and with a new site, we have a new start. Instead of the Smarter Than Your Average banner of old, I’ve changed to the new site name, and that gives a bit more space. For this header, the first inspiration came from the colours - I wanted to mix a deep red/purple with a nice cream. Et voilà!
It has been a couple of years since I sat some exams, and I have been very happy spending my time in more creative pursuits. I have got out of the house a bit more, examined the world of podcast and community creation to a greater extent, and spent a lot of time with my family and friends.
Now, though, I am getting the craving to learn again. I am always learning, obviously, given what a clean slate I have to begin with, and what a poor memory I have for retaining information. When I watch films, I learn. When we talk in the comments, I learn. When I read books, I learn. We all do.
A quick look at Etsy this week.
Sliding Invitation Cards It looks like the panda is actually crushing the text, but in fact, it slides around a bit. I’m not quite sure why, but it’s fun, and I particularly like a purple panda.
Etsy Link: simplypearlee
Silly Fuzzy Pandas Aww, these are so cute. The wool is definitely fuzzy, so I wonder if it might be a bit itchy and therefore not huggable, but even so cute little square shaped pandas.
I spotted this a while ago, but keep on coming back to it - the Adipose Stress Toy.
The Adipose made their debut at the same time as Donna Noble, and although technically they are quite gross (born from the fat and yuck of humans), they are also enormously cute.
Far from having to squish and squeeze the stress away, simply looking at the Adipose’s toothy grin makes me feel happy.
That’s wicked in a bad sense.
A while back, we had some issues with our Sidepodcast wiki. It was hosted on Wetpaint, and… well, it basically didn’t work for a lot of people. There were intrusive ads that could be removed for a reasonable (!) $20 a month, and there were a lot of virus warnings floating around as well.
It was time to move, and Wikia seemed like the best bet. A very popular wiki-host, with a look and feel that was very much like what you would expect from a wiki. There were some limitations, but equally plenty of benefits, and I decided to take the plunge, and put in a lot of hours moving everything across.
Franck’s next assignment takes place at the beginning of November, when the LMP1 class of cars turn up at the Zhuhai International Circuit. The 7th November will see Franck partnered with Stephane Sarrazin, whilst a second Peugeot car will be fielded by Bourdais and Pagenaud.
That’s still a couple of weeks away, of course, so while we’re waiting, here’s a photo gallery (on Facebook) of Franck at Petit Le Mans.
Yum.
A note from my dad:
Congratulations to Christine for completing the 5k run. Only a few months ago she couldn’t even run to the end of her garden. She was showing me the picture of her crossing the finishing line and I thought that at last she has managed to grasp the idea of a race. I was remembering a certain playschool sports day in 1987 or 1988. I have attached a couple of pictures I took. In the first picture Christine is lined up with her classmates waiting for the starting whistle. In the second, as you can see, they have all gone and she is stood there on the starting line all on her own. The expression on her face said “Where have they gone?”
I’ve become a little bit obsessed with a new game on the iPod/iPad, and it’s called Train Conductor. The premise is quite simple - trains appear on the tracks and you have to direct them to the correct destination. Sounds like a million other Flight Control/Traffic Control style games.
There are lots of extras, though. There are two kinds of levels - the daytime shift has you steering trains to avoid each other, whilst the nighttime shift has ghost trains that can pass through each other, but require other attention. The developers made a video to better show off the game.
The votes have been pouring in, thanks to everyone, and we have our winning header design.
The winning design is the rather whimsical Gretna Green signpost. Excellent stuff! That will be the header for the next few weeks, whilst I gather inspiration for the next batch of designs.
The first two-part Doctor Who episode of the New Who era, and we are back to London to find out that Rose has been missing. I was slightly confused by the entire introduction to this story. Whilst it was quite revealing to see the impact of Rose’s departure on her family and the friends she has left behind, isn’t the TARDIS a time machine? Once they realised they’d returned a year later, couldn’t they hop back in and hit reverse for 12 months? Problem solved.
I recently stumbled across the site Kickstarter.
It’s an interesting way to raise money for a creative endeavour you want to do, for instance, make a film. You set a time limit and a goal, and encourage people to donate to the cause. If you reach your goal, excellent, you can go on and make your film. If you don’t reach the target, though, no one pays anything, all donations are cancelled, and you’ll have to go back to the drawing board.
We have reached the end of another batch of headers, and as is the custom, we’re going to have a vote. All you need to do is pick out which is your favourite of the ten headers featured over the last few weeks. I’ll keep the vote up for a few days, and then the winning design will be up there for the rest of October.
That gives me a chance to sit back, take stock, scout around for inspiration and get designing.
Today I can cross another item off my Life List, as I only went and completed that pesky 5K race. It feels like I’ve done nothing but talk about running forever, but in actual fact, I only picked up the Couch 2 5K app in June.
Since then, I’ve built up my stamina, and my patience, and certainly improved a lot, but I can tell you one thing for certain: I was not built for speed.
I am ridiculously nervous. You might even call it “freaking out.”
It’s not so much the running, although it is a little bit the running. The last few attempts haven’t been as good as I might have hoped. They do say that a bad dress rehearsal signals a good opening night, though, so I’m pinning my optimism on that.
So, yes, it’s not so much the running, as the running in front of other people. The only mid-exercise interaction I have had with others is when people walking their dogs take a wide berth as they pass me by.
You’ve got to love it when randomly browsing the web, you come across a company who have named themselves after the exact thing you are trying to achieve. Step forward Underground Living Ltd.
It looks like they do one thing, but they try and do it well.
It’s more of an addendum to a house, rather than a complete underground living area, but the gallery and the animation on the site look lovely and clean and tidy.
Another tiny quote from Mr M:
We were the fastest on track again this year. We didn’t steal this. Same car, same team, same results - the only difference was the rain!
Last year’s race clearly affected him more than it appeared!
I’ve been getting more and more dissatisfied with Wordpress, and although I still maintain it is an excellent place to set up your first blog and start getting published, it’s limitations were beginning to get to me.
In point of fact, all I wanted to do was to change the font on my template. Typekit fonts are a bit ahead of their time, whilst the Custom CSS function was not really accessible on the template I was using.
Here it is, then, the final header of our second batch. We’ve reached our twentieth design, which honestly blows my mind a little bit. This one came from the background texture, which was a kind of wallpaper, I think. I wasn’t keen on it being wallpaper, so I tried the stripy filter to sort of bring it to life a bit. It could almost be a curtain, with ripples in, except they are a bit too regimented, and a bit too diagonal as well. Once again, I was playing around with the text, as that is somewhere I really need to concentrate my efforts.
Franck, along with Sarrazin and Lamy, won the 2010 Petit Le Mans yesterday. I didn’t watch it but all I’ve seen suggests it was a great race, interesting throughout, and it wasn’t until the final couple of hours that Peugeot seemed to have it in the bag. They took up two steps of the podium with Allan McNish for Audi in third.
A snippet from the Autosport report:
…the Audi R15 of Allan McNish/Dindo Capello/Tom Kristensen had a very real chance of winning, while the second 908 of Anthony Davidson/Marc Gene/Alex Wurz was waiting in the wings on the lead lap.But when Capello was briefly blinded when his balaclava slipped over his eyes, causing him to concede the lead to Montagny and then to pit out of sequence and thus drop off the lead lap, the cars fell perfectly into Peugeot’s hands.
Time for a change.
This site is moving from Wordpress to Squarespace, and that means you’ll need to update your feed subscriptions and suchlike.
Please visit: http://www.mrschristine.com for the new site. I’ll be waiting.
(This will remain for a while, until I point Smarter Than at the new place.)
A change is as good as a rest!
I got to have a peek at the brand new Kindle today, and although I was expecting to want to steal it from my brother - who is the proud owner of the device - it actually turned out that I wasn’t that keen on it. I love the device from a distance, I love people that have a Kindle, and I encourage people to get one if they want one, but here are five reasons I wasn’t keen.
Finally, Kenton and Kathi have split up! Who else is completely and utterly relieved? It started at that golf club dinner thing, when Kenton was doing his best, as per usual, and Kathi was being annoying, as per usual. She told him she didn’t need any help, then complained when he didn’t help her. Granted, he did punch her boss, and when he moved out, he immediately got drunk and arrested, but still, her claims that he was childish and unreliable still seemed unfair.
Instant Search has been out and about for a while now, and I can’t see that it’s made my life any better, but I don’t particularly hate it either. I’ve been catching up with some TWiT podcasts, and Leo has talked extensively about why they would choose to implement something like this and what purpose it serves. It’s an interesting subject, because search is so very fundamental to the way I use the web. My brain is incapable of storing information and now with Google, I don’t have to.
I completed a couple more runs and they were at my usual level of about 45 minutes. I went about my normal routine, but on one outing, the My Tracks app got stuck halfway round. I know I completed the distance but it told me otherwise.
Far from being annoyed, it was an excellent way to break the cycle and I suddenly started thinking about what I was doing. After stressing out so much last time, it occurred to me (plus Steven said so) that I was being far too hard on myself. This was only ever meant to be a crazy hobby. I didn’t even start running to get fit, it was just something to get me out of the house, to be a bit of a challenge, and because, surprisingly, it was fun.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the new Tumblr account for Sesasme Street. I’m not exactly a huge Sesame Street fan, although of course I watched it as a kid. I was more interested in the fact that it was an official account, using YouTube and in-house videos to show snippets from the show. I looked around a bit more and found they also have a regularly updated podcast with the same kind of content. They’re on Facebook, they have many apps, they’re on Twitter. I love a company that is happy to put their stuff out there. There are so many routes to Sesame Street now, that the intro song makes no sense!
Back to a bit of simplicity, I found these brushes that seemed to me like twigs and sticks rather than brush strokes, so I went with a sort of tree theme. I was also testing out filters on the text to try and make things stand out a bit more.
Made with: Pixelmator Brushes: Brush Pen marks Filters: Motion Blur Font: STFangsong
Not a lot, but at least it is something:
I want to win at least one race with the 908 this year! But I’m going to have to hurry, because there are only two races left! I would especially like to win Petit Le Mans because the atmosphere is so special. It’s unique, and I like that!
He has seemingly disappeared completely. Still no word on his official site, he’s not in the news for any rumours, and he’s definitely not participating in Superleague - Girondins de Bordeaux went and found another driver instead. Silly people.
I miss him.
He will be back though! He is on the entry list for Petit Le Mans, which takes place next week - the race itself on the 2nd October.
You know, I do not remember this episode at all. I must have seen it, and yet nothing stands out in my brain. Although, that isn’t at all surprising. It’s not a particularly good episode, when it comes down to it. The first historical character new Doctor Who introduces, Charles Dickens no less, and it’s a bit of a let down.
After a conversation on Sidepodcast, I remembered that I still own the one and only autograph I ever got. My friend and I were taken to see Michael Rosen, and I think he must have been doing a talk, or reading some poetry aloud or something. I know that I liked whatever it was he was doing, and afterwards, my friend hurried forward to get an autograph. I was sort of close behind her, although far too embarrassed to ask for it myself.
I have just discovered this rather handy tool from the Good Run Guide - the RoutePlanner - where you can map out a track and find the correct distance. This is really useful when Google Maps only wants to give you directions and distances for the road routes or more obvious pedestrian areas.
I figured it was not just for runners but would actually come in handy for measuring any distance that you need, and if you create an account, you can save your work and revisit it whenever you want.
I stumbled across some brushes that show off city skylines, and I was intrigued. Admittedly, most of the hard work for this one was done for me, but I still think it’s a lot of fun. My only question is, which city is it??
Made with: Pixelmator Brushes: Famous City Skylines Font: TW Cen MT Filters: Sunbeam and cloud generator
After a rather long week, Mr C and I decided to retire from our desks early last night and take to our respective books for reading.
It was fun.
Mr C is currently enjoying Joe Saward’s latest book - The Man Who Caught Crippen. At the moment, it is only available in paperback, and it’s the first physical book we’ve ordered from Amazon in a long time (and it may well be the last). Meanwhile, I am suffering through the final book of the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, via my Kindle app.
