Macbook or iMac?

On my weekly sabatical to Birmingham yesterday I dragged my colleague to the Apple store at the Bullring to check out the new Macbook.  I did look for them at my local John Lewis at the weekend but they were no-where to be found.

I was impressed by them too.  Small, light, neat, smart, fast, clever and great at oral sex too!

But after looking at the 20 inch iMacs and also after reading that my matey WhiteBoyBob has just bought one (and not managed to break it), I am wondering if one of those might be a better purchase.  I have also been reading some benchmarks on gaming with the 20 inch iMac using XP and Boot Camp.  They do seem impressive too.  I think I will have to install XP via Boot Camp as the kids use some games on XP still and the wife will probably get all confused over OSX and will not be able to work her Home Accounts Spreadsheet properly without ringing me all the time.

I do use my laptop at home a little.  Not lots though – just a little.  Sometimes after a hard days internet surfing work I don’t want to be huddled over another PC in the corner of the room.  Sitting on the sofa, slowly cooking my legs with the laptop on wifi is quite nice really.  I have done more of my “Blogger Template Overhaul” series using the laptop than anything else.  My desktop PC setup at home is not perfect for spending lots of time at the screen.  Stuck in the corner next to the dinner table, it is quite restrictive to use and the desk it sits on gets piled with paper, toys, mobile phones and recently, my Xbox360, controllers and headset as I now play that via my LCD monitor.

But the 20 inch iMacs are nice and they are faster and have a bigger hard disk too!  I do quite a bit of photoshop stuff so maybe that would be a better purchase?  But the laptops are nice and “free” and I can take it on holiday and stuff too.  Oh… crap…. more decisions.

Geeklimit

I have just been accepted as a new team member over at Geeklimit.com.

Therefore, my "technical posts" will go there – and the rest of my mindless drivel will go here!

Joke of the day

Bruce walks into his bedroom with a sheep under his arm and says…

“Darling, this is the pig I have sex with when you have a headache.”

His girlfriend who is lying in bed replies: “I think you’ll find that’s a sheep, you idiot.”

Bruce says: “I think you’ll find I wasn’t talking to you.

Thanks to the esteemed Captain Beefheart for this!
The first laugh i’ve had all day!

Fantabulosa

I was watching a program the other night called Balderdash and Piffle, relating to the origin of words and phrases, their meanings and their definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary. The BBC has been attempting to enlist the help of the public to, for example, get the earliest meanings for terms such as "Pear Shaped" and "Pass The Parcel". The program was rather dull and even the minxy feline presenter was not attractive enough to keep my attention.

Apart from one section…

"That charpering omi is a dish! Troll over and vada his basket for me!"

Polari is the name used to describe British gay slang from the 50's and 60's when the subject or practice of being homosexual was rather frowned upon. In an effort to keep the movement underground, a secret language was developed and used by the gay community so you could converse in public about the size of "that bloke at the bar's todger" without getting arrested, beaten up or both.

Polari, or pallare, is also used to refer to the internal slang languages used by other groups such as sailors, gypsies, circus folk and vagrants. So possibly "can you spare 10p for a cuppa tea guv" could have some other sinister hidden message the public have not yet grasped.

Kenneth Williams, a popular gay actor and comedian in the 60's (now deceased) has been partially blamed for destroying the now seldom used language by using it frequently as part of a comedy radio show, Round The Horne. The show was listened to by millions of the British public and such mass exposure to the terms ensured that no-one was safe using them any longer. Also, the eventual acceptance of the homosexual communities ensured that Polari was no longer needed – as that bloke at the bar now knew his enemy and could beat you up even if you weren't talking about his todger anyway!

A list of common words, meanings and a brief history of Polari can be found here.

And just for the record. I am not an omi-palone, a meese or a riah shusher! I was just intrigued by this stuff I had never heard of before!

Technorati Tags: polari, pallare, language, slang, gay, homosexual, kenneth williams, round the horne, OED, BBC

Twenty Oh Six

Holy cow!

Just stumbled upon an ZDnet blog page detailling the new Swedish train which runs on fuel made up of organic waste from cows.

Not just being environmentally friendly and quiet, the train also runs at a respectable 130kph and according to travellers on the maiden voyage, ran on time.

I'm not sure what Rev Awdry would have to say about this – but i don't expect a DVD version of "Thomas and the shitty smelling train" will be landing on my sons lap at christmas time.

Technorati Tags: thomas the tank engine, biogas, train, cow, environment

Smoke and Mirrors

As a reformed smoker of over 5 years standing I now feel qualified to speak on this matter with some authority.  The UK government has started legislation for a partial smoking ban in UK pubs.

I am not PRO a total ban on smoking in public places – as I will not be able to get my “by proxy” fix of the sweet smell of Old Virginia rolling tobacco wafting over my pint of Guinness whilst I chat.

Smoking is nice.  I loved it and I probably would still love it now.

Call me selfish… but I don’t care!

Technorati Tags : smoking, ban, smoking, uk, patricia, hewitt, guinness, pub

The Holy Grail

I’m good me!

Over at my photoblog – Photao – I have managed to get the new template half finished and implement what Photoblog type users of Blogger have been searching for since the dawn of Photoblogs. A template that has a large single photo displayed – but also has thumbnails of previous images to be used as navigation to previous images. This is easy to do if you want to edit your template every time and manually insert the image source code – but as Blogger sometimes has horrendous publishing issues – this is not acceptible. To accomplish this I began by changing the text in the title field of each posting to the same http:// address as the image source.

 

I then set blogger to only show one posting at a time.

Within my template code, i removed the list of recent items completely (and the entire sidebar) as this only shows as many postings as you have told blogger to display on the screen (ie One). To create the section that shows the thumbnail images, I headed over to Feeddigest and set up an RSS feed of the Photao blog for free. Make sure you have the RSS feed turned on though! I then modified the feeds HTML template within FeedDigest to include an IMG SRC tag around the title field text – which then creates a link to the image itself rather than just displaying the text:

Feeddigest then allows you to copy some code into your blog which displays the feed. In this case it is just a feed of the last 15 postings made into images from the same blog! The free version of FeedDigest is restricted to the last 15 items. Here is the code I am using at the moment to get the feed into the footer area of the Photao blog:

 

This means that when I post a new image, I can make a standard posting through the Blogger interface, add in the image and text (if required) and as long as I put the URL of the image into the title field, the RSS feed will be updated correctly and (most importantly) automatically. And as I store all my images at the excellent Flickr, I can use the URL of the smaller size versions of the image which are created for you in the title field which makes loading times quicker. The only problem (a very minor one) is that you will also have to remove the posts title field from your Blogger template. So if you want to give your images smart and fancy names, you will have to enter it as standard text above or below the image.

The template is far from finished though – so watch out for more whizz-bang design changes soon! EDIT: Just found out that I got mentioned over on the FeedDigest website too!

Technorati Tags: photoblog, feeddigest, blogger, RSS, template, photao

Monsters what?

Mrs Taoski and I watched Monsters Ball at the weekend. However, I may have missed some vital plot bits (as I was ironing at the time) – but what the hell was it all about?

Here’s a few plot points for the mentally impaired:

• White policeman executes man on death row.
• White policemans son kills himself.
• Convicts fat son gets killed in a hit and run.
• Three deaths before 1 hour is up.
• White policeman gets jiggy with convicts wife.
• Convicts wife buys White policeman a white cowboy hat.
• White policeman ditches frail racist father at a home to die.
• Convicts wife moves in with White Policeman.
• Convicts wife finds out White Policeman fried her hubbys brain.
• They eat Chocolate Ice Cream.
• The end.

And she won an oscar for that? At least she had the decency to show her breasticles!
Great direction, great photography, good atmosphere……Crap film.

Moral choice

If a gay jumped on your back, would you toss him off?