Scott’s Flickr pics
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Scott’s blog
Musings on a world I am no longer sure about
DO NOT BOUNCE
Been a quiet lil few days really. Got little bits of FC done as and when I can — you can now embed video from practically any site into the forums, you can do bulletted and dotted lists, you can view a “quick preview” which almost works...I’ve created the two new themes - they’re refinements of the existing default theme and are optimised for FF3 or Safari and look way nicer. Now all I have to do is polish up the other ones as well.
Spent the weekend in Luton at my brother’s hotel. Set the aircon to 20°c and proceeded to love aircon a bit. I’ve had literally a few hours sleep every night since it got hot and it’s slightly irritating.
We were all at my brother’s hotel on account of it being my grandfather’s 80th birthday. Got him a Tefal one-touch kettle thing which he liked.
Food was great in the evening but let down by a crap breakfast. Liam took a great pic of me that might just be my profile pic at the moment.
Cycled up a Down. I think subconsciously I’ve been wanting to say that for a while. Took pictures at the top and arrived home knackered but happy. Cesar Salad for dinner at Café Verde.
Bought aircon at about 6am Monday morning. FAR too hot. Bleh.
Brighton Pride this weekend, tho Liam’ll be moving and so won’t be accompanying me. Unsure yet as to whether or not I’ll go and stay over or just pootle along for the day. Whichever way I’ll be taking my camera I think 
Viewed 475 times.
One of my favourite book passages
...because I found it and want to put it somewhere:
< Viewed 559 times. Eventful few days. More bits of the new site finished, including the two default themes, both of which star TJs curious small building collection. It’s sorta cityish.
Went to Trailer Trash on Friday with James for his birthday. Started off at the Foundry — Andy and Raj looked bemused by it but hey. Moved on to the George and Dragon in Shoreditch where I was short changed by an irritating queen of a barman who took my tenner, wandered to the till, put it in, chatted to his “mate” for a bit then wandered over and accused me of giving him a fiver for two pints. a) if I’d have given you five, you cocksnot, why did you look at it and walk off and put it in the till and b) why would I give you five when you tell me it’s £6.40? Annoying.
Trailer trash was great, but slightly alcoholic. Ended up giving up trying to get James to go to the Swan with me and so headed home, realised quite how drunk I was and avoided the Swan entirely.
Up at noonish on Saturday for the final installment of Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog — made me sad but also made me happy that it hadn’t ended in the lame way I thought it was going to. Considering all things I think that this is an outstanding bit of work, and Neil Patrick Harris is a really rather good singer. Can’t wait for the DVD...
Bought some new herbs and stuff at the weekend, halfarsedly potted them. Might do a better job this weekend if I get a chance.
Spent Sunday cycling with Liam. We went down (or up) the Lea valley and ended up in Enfield, which was fun. Got introduced to his ex neighbours as his “partner” which was slightly surreal but cool.
Monday was Owen and Jen’s wedding. Slightly surreal feeling of “are they going to tell us all off?” during the ceremony and then lots of Pizza followed by far too much alcohol and a good time was had by all. Champagne at 10:55pm was a bad idea when the bar was closing at 11 though...so had a very unproductive day full of hangover yesterday and then today I’m back at work.
Mind you, yesterday I also got to munch a Quorn “Pork” pie, so all is not lost to the world. It was almost nice too. MmmmmPIE...
Viewed 464 times. ...in my dream I got a payslip. And it was in dollars. Canadian dollars. And they paid me wrong. And then I realised I’d been given the wrong payslip, that of a different “Scott” and I chased them, trying to find out where mine was. Sometimes my mind is curious...
Viewed 467 times. <<[c[Town and Country Planning Act 1990 (as amended)
Town and Country Planning (General Development Procedure Order) 1995]c]
[f[Dear Sir/Madam,
Location: Site At Adjacent To 373, Commercial Road, London
Proposal: Demolition of a vacant single-storey nightclub building adjacent to the George Tavern (PH) and re-development of site by erection of a five-storey building to provite commercial use (Class B1 Use) at ground floor level and 11 flats consisting of 6x1 bedroom flats and 5x2 bedroom flats on the upper floors with cycles and domestic refuse provision. (The proposed 11 flats development scheme would comprise 100% affordable housing units).]f]
Further to your observations regarding the above planning application, I write to inform you that a decision was made to Refuse the application on 11/07/2008.
A copy of this decision will be available to view under the ‘Planning and Building’ section of the Tower Hamlets website, which is available at www.towerhamlets.gov.uk.
If you have any queries regarding the decision, please contact the case officer whose details are given above.
Yours sincerely...>>
I really wasn’t expecting that. Gives me some hope that we’re not being run by a bunch of automatons.
Viewed 485 times. So I bought a new N95 8GB. They’re shockingly cheap now that the N96 is here, £200 off eBay, no contracts or any of that malarkey. Interesting issue with how to get my phone book from my SE W910i to the N95 though...
IT seems that SonyEricsson (well, they’ve always done this) have a neat trick where you can send or export the entire phonebook as a vcf (vCard) file, but that Nokia have a very shit trick whereby they can’t deal with multiple entries in a single vcf file and so you spend a time carefully exporting your phonebook to discover you can only import the first entry.
So lateral thinking is required. This was my solution (not perfect, but free...)
My thinking was that I’d need to split the file into its constituent parts. There’s various phonebook managers that claim they can do this, but they’re almost all entirely rubbish and almost all charged for — so I looked into mail clients instead.
My theory was proven right. I figured that Thunderbird would likely either be able to do this, or would have a plugin that someone, somewhere had written to do this.
I installed Thunderbird and then added in the marvellous, but enigmatically named MoreFunctionsForAddressBook, and proceeded to watch as I opened the address book, right clicked on an empty bit and chose “Import vCard/vcf” from the menu and it effortlessly imported my vcf file and showed me all my contacts. I then ended up slightly in awe as I realised I’d not have to export them one by one and could simply ctrl+a to select all, right click and then click “Export” and pick a folder.
I discovered a vaguely neat trick on the N95 though, if I access it through mass storage mode and put the contacts in a folder called “Other/Contacts” I can mass import them into the phonebook, which is nice.
The display is wobblier than the SE W910i. It’s bigger but the graphics are choppier and seem slower. Overall I know I can do far more with this phone, but it’s a bit clunky. Plus it was meant to come with Spiderman 3 and didn’t, damn eBayers Viewed 349 times. 3gp:https://www.freakcity.net/test/12162355209590_0.3gp
new phone. Let’s see if I can still blog :-)
Viewed 404 times. Viewed 544 times. The title has nothing to do with this blog, I was just being overly dramatic. That’ll teach me to listen to The Cure at work...
Bought a boat on Thursday. Want to go float it somewhere fun soon, but I might sink. *scared*
Wrote an RSS feed for the freakcity news section. Half way through writing an RSS feed for the forums too (you can now read the latest forum thread titles without logging in, you just need to log in to read the forum threads themselves, the RSS feed will be similar in nature).
Writing a SearchMonkey for yahoo for freakcity - should be a laugh. Also on the freakcity front:
Rationalising all the different themes so they work a bit better and are a bit easier to maintain. Well, this is the plan at any rate. Soon you’ll be able to adjust the font size according to your tastes too in the preferences page. And I’ll be making some new themes and tidying up some of the crappier ones. If you have any requests, please let me know?
Ajaxifying the forums a little bit more, whilst keeping the existing system there for people without javascript.
The new SSL certificate has been installed and is working, so if you view freakcity from work and don’t want people snooping then you can access the site on www.freakcity.net
It’s bill payment time again. The total is $384 for hosting for the year, plus a $23 per month recurring balance that I currently pay for extra database space (coz everyone talks too much
boing
I had a dream last night...
A good thing came through my letterbox today
This is your captain speaking...
Mind you, I have it on blu-ray. So I don’t care *that* much.
In other freakcityish news, using display:table-cell appears to have fixed my image woes in the forums. JScript’s shoddy support of lookahead and lookbehind matches has annoyed me (they seem to sometimes work but sometimes not, which is an arse) so I’ve had to work around it for the regular expression matching on the site, which sucks a bit. The beta is still being worked on, though there’s still a lot behind the scenes and not a huge amount to show yet.
It’s a closed beta at the moment, if you join the beta testing group you can get access to beta.freakcity.net and have a play with the slightly redesigned forums. The key bits are (at the moment)
RSS feed for forum topics
Public groups show up in forums, as do your private groups, which are clearly marked “private” and unlike public groups only appear for their members.
If you’re not a member of a public group you’re taken to the group membership page when you click on a forum post.
The groups are a bit less horrible to use
The (x)HTML is a lot more semantic
The tooltips work in Safari too
The irritating fading bug that appeared in the messaging centre in IE is fixed, it now all works correctly.
Lots of CSS enhancements to take advantage of new features in Firefox 3 as well as a lot of work making everything look a little bit cleaner.
Quick preview pane for forum posts gives you an idea of how your formatted post will look.
Animated gif support in images (ish - still being worked on)
Long URLs now get truncated
It’s a bit faster
Known issue:
There’s only the daytime theme at the moment 
Video blog
Weirdness
RIP Charlie, whoever you were
www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/topstories/display.var.2376084.0.tributes_for_23yearold_set_on_fire.php
And if Adam really did that, well I guess now I know that one of my friends is capable of murder.
This is fucked up 
I’ve not seen Adam in a couple of years, guess weirdness has happened to him, can’t believe he’d do something like that though :S
Thirteen levels of hell
), I’m talking to them about compressing it all into one single payment and possibly changing or lowering the charges, but we’ll see. So the paypal button’s back on the site, feel free to donate if you use the site and feel it’s useful. We’ll probably be looking to raise about £250 in total.
Been thinking about video messaging too. We can video blog using mms, I’m going to see if I can adapt this to accept pictures as well, so you can picture blog. Then I’m going to look into some more text services. Things like a realtime quotebot via text might be fun, they’ll be free (Well, they’ll cost the price of a text message) and I want to have a play and see if I can do it.
There’s the chance of video messaging too if I can work out how to do it. It’ll be free to use and mostly done just to see if I can, but it could be fun
Last night I reinstalled linux on my laptop. Amazingly it works now. I also accidentally spent £250 on a lens. Oops.
Last night I also bought a draft N spec minipciE card for my laptop to make its wireless connection supermegafast.
I’m considering creating a 1000mb network at home, but linutop (the fileserver) is only 100mb. Not sure if it’s worth it.
Cycled over to Liam’s new place-to-be on Sunday, it’s pretty even if it is all uphill. It has a lovely kitchen and I’m pretty sure I can make all his new flatmates love me if I go cook in it for them all. Well, it worked for him...
Saturday I bought a new camera, the EOS40D — it’s very big heavy and shiny and I think it’s a bit lovely really. TJ is buying my old one off me and he may be interested in my old lens too in a couple of months time when he’s a bit less poor. Mind you, he’s poor because he wants to buy one of the new godforsaken shiny plastic crap looking iPhones. Meh.
Took the camera up to Broadway market and had lunch in some hideous chippy (damn fussy eaters) with MySound, Moogal and Sunin. “So these are proper chips then?” says Mike. Myself and Alan look at each other. “They were probably proper chips when they were made, yesterday” I replied. Bought some gorgeous balsamic vinegar syrup.
Wandered round the park and drooled at hot people playing footie. Took lots of test pics which litter my flickr account (if you’re reading this on facebook, click the link to my actual blog to see them).
Popped to Lidl (they do amazing steak at a reasonable price, no really) and bought some aforementioned steak and made foods for Liam when he arrived after work later that night. Doctor Who was re