here be tomfin
tomfin's googlepage page
Merry New Year!
(01.2008)
Avenue Q:
(01.2008)
This Week I Been Mostly Playing....
(11.2007)
Helluva thunderstorm out there recently - I have managed to capture a lightning strike on video with my digital camera, at last - pretty impressive, as it only does about 12 frames a second in video mode. Call it a lucky strike, eh?
(06.2007)
Been away enjoying the sunshine (and rain) in the North of Scotland for a few weeks, so if you haven't been able to find me, I've been relaxing near the shores of Loch Ness. Poppy the Dog officially endorses holidays up north.
(05.2007)
NEW GIANTS ALBUM!
"The Else" available on (hnnnggh) iTunes now, CD out in July.
(05.2007)
Whoa - Lothian Buses fixed their website recently, and sensibly so - rendering my pointless whinging below completely invalid. Timetables in speedy plain HTML, and downloadable PDFs for offline reference. Frankly, I'm amazed at the changes. Good job there, Lothian Buses. I take it all back, except the 'www' prefix comment, which is still broken... :)
(04.2007)
It's time to switch.
Windows is now my "other" operating system. That, or contemplate a future "upgrade" to Windows Vistarrrarr and bring my machine to its knees. I'll take Beryl, Beagle, Stellarium, Celestia, OpenOffice, Firefox, Pidgin Messenger, and VLC, please. Wine has made a clean sweep of various swiss army-knife utilities I often use, amazingly even running AIDA32 to some degree. Total cost is zero plus a weekend to install, and my desktop has never looked so good. Funky wobbly jelly windows that catch fire and burn away when you close them, Mac-like Exposé effects when switching applications as well as real-time minature displays of windows when Alt-Tabbing through them (yes, even for movies, just as Vistarrarr is lauding it as a unique must-have feature) make for an extra pleasant eye-candy experience. The coup de grâce has got to be seeing your application windows doing their stuff back-to-front on the opposite side of the transparent desktop cube. You can see some nice videos of the effects here and here - be thankful, I spent more than twenty minutes finding a couple that didn't have tragic generic Hip-Hop or Death Metal soundtracks, preserving your precious ears for actual music.
Directory Opus will be sorely missed, though. There's nothing quite like it anywhere else, and when questioning Linux Propellerheads about alternatives, they tend to mumble things about Thunar (woefully inadequate by comparison and laughable as an alternative to the mighty DOpus) or gleefully explain that everything can be done with the command prompt anyway, so really there's no need for a file manager. I'm no slouch in the computing world, neither am I intimidated by a command prompt - but seriously?
Reguardless, I'm loving the picture thumbnails of all my PDFs, images and videos in the standard Ubuntu file manager, and the ability to preview MP3s by hovering the mouse over them is a great experience. No doubt I'll be providing Ubuntu installs in my friendly neighbourhood PC repairman guise - hurrah!
Oh, and I nearly forgot the magnify/zoom feature in Beryl. Hold a key, scroll the mouse wheel, and bu-doing! You just have to see the effect to believe it. Small print is no longer a chore to read.
No, really.
(04.2007)
We've moved house (2nd move), so if you know who I am and you're still in my good books, you'll know where we live now. Very nice it is, too - we only occasionally annoy our very own Mr Heckles downstairs with boots on the wooden floors. It's not our fault, Mr Heckles, it's the floor. Take pity on me guv'nor, I've only got one leg.... go on, spare us a rug...
(01.2007)
I think I'd like to nominate Lothian Buses as idiot-webdesign decision of the year.
They recently switched their timetables from sleek, fast-loading and easily readable HTML to....PDF files. Now, instead of about 15-20 seconds from browser opening to finding the needed bus time, there's an interminable delay while Adobe Acrobat loads, occasional time-outs while Acrobat fails to load the PDF from their servers (leading to browser lockups), and general chugginess all round.
And they insist on prefixing their web address with the now near-redundant 'www'. Idiots.
(01.2007)
We're in the middle of moving house. Twice.
This is a very painful thing to do in the same year, nevertheless we shall attempt both moves in under a month, having just completed the first.
Moving house must have its very own circle of hell devoted to it.
It's not too bad since we recently got this little ball of fur who's great fun to have about, though our energy for walking the dog was fairly wiped out from moving all our stuff down two floors and up three (not to mention the loading, unloading and driving of the van).
Anyway, this is Poppy... over there... asleep on a cushion. She's a King Charles Cavalier Spaniel, which Americans call an English Toy Spaniel, possibly to avoid any need to discover what a Cavalier might actually be, or who this King Charles fellow thinks he is, and is just six months old.
Definitely the ultimate lap dog, and seems to be bright as a new penny. When not asleep. On a cushion.
(11.2006)
Pictures from Belladrum music festival are up. Well, some are...
Pete Gillies has a webpage up showing off his decorative craftsmanship - I recommend you head over there for some excellent glasswork and choice items, and buy some tasty presents for friends.
(2007 Update: Pete's moved to Canada, so you'll have to pay UPS worldwide shipping or live north of Detroit to benefit greatly from his excellent art. You should still check out his site though)
(10.2006)
It was with some astonishment I found Google's pagebuilder, previously believed to be a forthcoming event, can be accessed from Google Labs. It works, rather nicely too, so I doffed my hat in tribute, and began creating this monstrosity of a page.
(07.2006)
I think I'll throw in a link:
Of course, this is entirely in keeping with the general manhandling of the show by them upstairs at Fox. It's been bustled about the schedules throughout its lifetime, arbitrarily shortened from 22 episodes to eighteen in the second season, and to just thirteen episodes in the last.
It certainly all seems like a bit of a double standard since AD is still being hawked right up there next to 24 on Fox's Emmy pages for 2004 and 2005, and rightly so as it's a tremendous series. If only it were recognised as such more... consistently.
There's still the-op.com fansite, the entry at WikiPedia and - huzzah - an up to date blog.
Look out for the Arrested Development DVDs in all good video stores, and some of the bad ones.
(07.2006)