La la life

I haven’t written all that much here recently. I suppose this means I have a life, or I’ve been tring to work. Perhaps both, even. Time for bed.

A talk by Professor Lord Lord Master Martin Rees

The last lecture in a series at St. Cats college was on this evening, so Dorothy took Paul and I along. He talked on science in the 21st century. Interesting, but nothing amazing. Lots of pictures and stuff we’d all heard before, especially given most of the audience seemed to be professors I was really suprised how low the level of the talk had been pitched. Serious popular-science level for most of it. Time I went to bed soon, but it was pretty cool to go to a talk by a guy who’s called Lord twice. Hoorah!

Reverse thievery

Strange happenings at Emmanuel College, captured.

Vitamin C

It’s now available online, for all your video watching pleasure.

Wooo woooooooo, Ali G on Google Video makes for good procrastination.

A week in to Google Analytics

So a week in I don’t think I’ll drop StatCounter.com completely, but Google Analytics looks interesting. Give me something to look at next holiday I suppose….

To work, I return.

Windows Live Messenger

I’ve got 10 invites to give out to the Windows Messenger Live Beta Program if anyone wants to sign up. It’s pretty nice, but a compatible version of Patchou’s Messenger Plus! hasn’t been released yet and the nicknames didn’t seem to work too well, so I was put off. Anyhow, the program itself seemed stable and have some nice new features. Get in touch if you want to be invited.

Rome!

The parents abandoned Ben and I for quite a bit of this week and went off to Rome. An anxious dad relaxed when he got out and sans having mum’s camera nicked at St.Peter's Basilica which entailed a trip to the Police station, they’ve come back full of anecdotes and happy which is quite cool. Ben got a t-shiart with ‘ITALIA’ written across the front, and I got a tie. Sign of who’s the boring son? Hmm. Anyhow, gifts in their glory:

We survived many meals; Lamb and assorted veg followed by pancakes with chocolate sauce, two pizzas Ben got at the end of his shift for 30p with salad followed by orange sorbet and spaghetti bolognese followed by fruit smoothie, which I kind of made a mess with. Woops. Mushed up fruit is reeeeeeeeallly annoying to try and clean up. So I learnt my lesson the hard way, but Ben’s still alive!

Si returned this evening which was pretty cool so I wandered over for dinner and had a chat. Having seen him most days for most of the past 3 or 4 years pre-September it’s been a bit wierd, but we’ll both be knocking about Cambridge next year which will be good.

I’m wondering about summer: China/Luxembourg/Travel, the college work I need to get on with and the money I need to earn. I’ve just seen Last.fm do interns but don’t know if I’d qualify. Maybe something in that area? UROP sounds attractive as well, but returning to CTAD/Waitrose was more my aim last summer. Ho hum.

Google Analytics

The interest yesterday in managing to upload HTML files only was me adding tracking code to all the pages on this site for Google Analytics.

I’ve been happy with the StatCounter.com reports for monitoring traffic, but the 100 log-size limit means tracking anything over much more than a day is pretty impossible. I’ve been meaning to implement Google Analytics for a while. I would give out a URL but I don’t think there’s an easy way to make the reports public. If you’re interested and have a Google account drop me an e-mail and I can add you to a user list.

I might write something more about this in a while, 46 visitors don’t really reveal all that much.

SmartFTP transfer filters

One of the geekiest but also most useful things I’ve found in quite a while in Google’s cache.

christopher_m asks at 03-30-2005 03:24 PM:

how can I only upload *.html and *.php files which are stored in several folders and subfolders?

eyebex answers at 03-31-2005 01:45 AM:

i guess you could try to use tools -> settings -> transfer -> filters, although it is meant to exclude files / folders. you "just" would have to "invert" the regular expression. i'm no regex expert, but something like "\.[^hp][^th][^mp]" should do it (this will also allow "*.htm" files; don't forget to deselect "Apply to folders").

Normal CSS service will be resumed shortly.

In the dictionary...

Gareth -- [noun]: An alien 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

Nabbed from Madam Horner.

Talking to Rachel last night I noticed I’d taken more than 20 A-level maths module exams. Eep. I’m a freak. Time I returned to work.

CSS Naked day

I haven’t registered, but thought I’d take part in CSS Naked day. It makes it clear that (at least bits) of the site really need re-writing. But hey. Enjoy.

Spam

I get quite a bit of spam, though the past two years of using Gmail have been practically spam free because of the great filtering. I was impressively slow at converting to Thunderbird, but I’ve just been very impressed.

My computer isn’t particularly happy, I need to buy a new hard drive some time soon but have been putting it off for ages. Something else I don’t do is empty my Spam folder. Gmail automatically empties itself every 30 days, so sits at a little over 600 most of the time.

For reasons that I can’t remember I turned this off a while ago in Thunderbird and have amassed around 30,000 spam e-mails. What impressed me was how quickly Thunderbird was able to operate with so many messages, how fast it deleted them and how responsive the program remained during deletion. Shame I’ve been converted to Gmail already….

Work

smells.

Boat race and birthday

Pfft. Facebook’s not working. I put some photos up, as did Billy and Rachel, but I can’t link to them now. Oh well.

So yesterday, as I start writing this at least, was my 19th birthday and the boat race happened to coincide so Maria being the fantabulous person she is organised for a bunch of us to meet up and watch the race.

Ray made a stylish late entrance on Cong’s bike, we headed over to London avoiding fun engineering works congregating in Waterloo a little after 12, having discovered on the train that international texting to Bernard in Hong Kong costs a little more than 12p. For lunch on to The Yeast, a noodle bar near Putney Bridge for lunch, wandering down the south bank of the Thames, wandering back to Putney Bridge then set off along the north bank.

Walking seemed like a good way to pass the time, and pass the time it did. We managed to get about a third of the way down the coure, I'm informed. As the boats went past us it looked like Cambridge had a slight lead in both the reserve and actual race.

The reserve race seemed to end in Cambridge's favour, but not the main race. After the boats went past us we went to a local pub that seemed to be at least 80% Oxford fans. Ali managed to get her little finger stuck in a bottle *much* to Ray’s amusement.

The pub was too busy to get into so after an impromptu (I like that word) happy birthday we wandered round London and ended up at The Nags Head at Covent Garden, then to The Dublin Castle to see waveform and ALSO. I think Maria knew a few of the people in waveform, the motivation for going but I ended up being more impressed by ALSO. There’s a waveform promo on my desk waiting for Fairport to come out of my drive so I can have a listen though.

Might be worth interjecting words to note that I haven’t become a manic Fairport fan, I’ve just made friends with a couple of guys who have misunderstood Fairport’s target audience by 40 years or so. Having taken me along to a gigconcert in February Paul got me Fairport Live Convention. Awesome. I’ll have more of a listen, perhaps back in college. I’m sure Dmitry’ll my metal-playing neighbour will love it. Mmm.

Anyway, post-gig we headed back to Maria’s via Subway sat around chatting and watched Mean Girls, which turned out to be a chick flick. Billy in protest fell asleep and then left when he woke up.

Ray left early this morning, the rest of us wandered in to London and I ended up walking with Ali from Waterloo to Victoria having lost Iain, Billy and Rosie by this point. I then rang Ben, had a bit of a chat, his having-friends-over plan wasn’t welcomed by the parents particularly, he seems alright about it though. I went to Harrods and other posh shops and wandered about seeing price tags with large numbers, but got what I was after, then meandered back home. Parents are away until late Thursday and I totally need to work like crazy over the next week. Eep.

Facebook’s working again, so my photos, albums one, two and three.

Photos

I’ve been thinking about how to put photos online for a while. I’m not convinced a single brilliant solution exists. Hopefully I’ll post some more thoughts in a while, Facebook.com seems reasonably good has few adverts and no total upload limit but allows comments only from registered users, doesn’t allow download of full size photos, limits albums to 60 photos and navigating lots of photos is clumsy using their albums. I want something that allows me to specify a date for photos, and navigate via a kind of calendar interface. Flickr.com seems to allow this, but lacks the ability to tag people in photos, and it’s rather disjoint to put photos up there. Plus it costs, and I’ve no idea how much I’ll really use it.

Maybe I’ll bite the bullet soon. Oh, and I still need to get a camera with which to take photos... ho hum.