dr_rik

I’ve been a bit (ha ha) lax at posting pics recently, but this one seems to have been quite popular on Flickr so I guess it’s worth a mention.

(Click through for flickr page)
It’s Clifton Suspension Bridge, as seen from Cumberland Basin. The exact spot, if you’re interested, is here
HDR blended from 3 exposures.

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

Still the best party film ever..

Man, I need a party…

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As a nipper I was well into magic, and a friend of mine is a professional magician too so it’s fair to say I have a pretty good understanding of the techniques involved in manipulating cards etc. but watching this routine, which utilises just about every shuffle and pass in the book blew me away.
Be sure to watch and listen carefully to the song too and you’ll realise just how good he is..

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

Stick with it, the really interesting stuff happens later on..

If nothing else, check the last 30 seconds…

:^)

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Ha ha, this new student status thing is ace.

The Amazon fairy just came and delivered my lovely shiny new Adobe Creative Suite CS4, all singing and dancing every app under the sun mega edition. List price is something like £1,450. Educational price, £247. Ker-ching - Don’t mind if I do!

Nice to know Adobe have a pretty flexible student policy. Basically if you’re on any kind of course, full or part-time at either secondary school or anywhere that is accredited to grant degrees then that counts.

I did check beforehand with their customer support, and that little exchange is almost worthy of a post all to itself. Suffice to say it was the most long-winded exchange imaginable to get a simple ‘yes’ answer but on this occasion I’ll forgive them the outer mongolian call centre in the interests of saving myself £1200.

I’ts much the same as M$ with the home/student edition of Office. I guess they are just taking the sensible option and figure they’d rather build brand loyalty and get £some money out of you rather than £none knowing full well most people would just copy it anyway.

Certainly give me a warm fuzzy glow to know I’m 100% legit with my SW on here too

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

Had the potential for a tech nightmare a couple of weeks back. I needed to print some labels vaguely urgently and had run out of my usual Avery jobs so I bought a pack of own-brand laser printer labels from Staples in Gloucester. Hmm, bad mistake as the very first sheet I put through the printer some of the labels came off their backing sheet inside my printer and left a right nasty sticky mess.

ARSE!

So, cue me and a succession of phone calls and emails to Staples, who helpfully put me in touch with their label suppliers. It has to be said they were all very good about it and just asked that I got an independant report to confirm that the printer was at fault.

The good folks at Konica sent an engineer who did indeed confirm that the printer had been damaged beyond economic repair and so the label manufacturers agreed to cough up for a replacement.

As my old one was no longer available I went for the latest equivalent, which just happens to be a much better spec and so I’m now the very happy owner of a spangly new 25 pages-per-minute, automatic duplexing, colour laser.

Ace

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

http://www.modernwarfare2.com/

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

Oh so true…

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

Man, some people have *way* too much time on their hands.

Little Big planet level/video to accompany the song ‘Toys’ by Frost*, who just happen to be one of my fave bands of the moment.

I love the crazy internet people!

Me & Shob are off to see Frost* with Dream Theater in Southampton in June. Can’t wait - I’ve not been looking forward to a gig this much in *years*. Might have to see if I can snag some tickets for the Leeds show too.
www.frostmusic.net innit.

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

In Wales for a couple of teaching jobs today.
There was a bit of faff around the bookings and so I ended up with two schools on the same day thing is they are only six miles apart, but three hours to kill in between visits. Can’t say I was really looking forward to that until I got down here and realized that the first school is one of the best i ever come to in Wales (I can never remember which is which with all the odd Welsh place names - thank f**k for sat nav!). Double bonus as on the way in I remembered that 5 mins down the road is a retail park which has geek heaven in the form of a huge Borders with both Starbucks and Game in-store.

Strangely enough I’m not worried about the wait now

Bliss.

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

Rumours that Apple are gearing up for a touchscreen netbook for this this summer…

More on MacRumors.com

Aww go on Steve (or Tim), you know you want to…

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been getting some random spam just about daily from some crappy “speed date” app on Facebook. It seemed to be legit as it was from the facebookapps domain.

Now obviously I was 100% sure I’d not added any crap like that so I did some digging. It turns out that a seemingly innocent Starbucks app from months ago TOTALLY CHANGED IDENTITY into the dating thing. i.e. it was basically a scam to get people to sign up and Facebook did fuck all about it..

A little more digging and it turns out that this SpeedDate lot have been systematically acquiring legitimate Facebook apps and changing them over to their dating one, banking on the fact that most people wouldn’t notice.

Cheeky cnuts!

See:

http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/02/starbucks-misses-huge-branding-opportunity-as-speeddate-steps-in/

http://www.coreblox.com/blog/?tag=starbucks

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

Ha ha, top bit of blaggage.

Since I enrolled on my OU course, I’m technically a student. Well enough of a student to get a 3 year NUS card anyway. Got to milk those discounts, I’m really looking forward to seeing the look on the spotty little oiks in McDonald’s as I request my free fries with a Big Mac because I’m a poor student! The real bonus of course is stuff like software. Full Adobe CS4 Suite for £280 anyone?

Anyway, I was up in Birmingham yesterday for the Focus show thing at the NEC and got talking to one of the guys from the Royal Photographic Society. Really nice chap who was very encouraging about my aspirations to gain some more letters after my name in the form of a distinction in the RPS. Obviously to do this at some point I’d need to actually join the society. Normally it’s about £95 per year but at the show they were offering a 20% discount so I figured I may as well join as I’d need to eventually anyway. Looking on the app form it had a student rate available so I rather cheekily asked if the OU counted and pointed out that I did have an NUS card to prove it. Computer says YES! and they even said I could still have the 20% off so I only actually paid £32 . Tidy!

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

Sometimes people make you wonder don’t they…

Was supposed to be going up to the NEC today to the Focus-on-Imaging thing (photo/video trade show). Had arranged it last week to go up with a mate, and even popped round there last night to confirm too.

So, anyway, this morning I thought it a bit odd when I didn’t get a reply to my text or phone msg this morning. Not quite as odd though as when I phoned his other half only to be told that in fact he’d gone out somewhere else and not even bothered to call or text to let me know.

Nice that, eh?

Honestly, I’m getting more than a little tired of one-way friendships too.

Earlier in the week I went to visit another mate who made some remark like ‘where have you been stranger, we never see you these days?’ and yet this is one of those people who *never* call, mail, or visit. Since I’ve known them literally every bit of contact, every visit has been initiated by me.

Well, if you’d missed me so much why didn’t you call then?

Let’s not even get started on the sort of people who will actually say to your face ‘you guys are the best friends I’ve ever had in my life’ and yet in *years* I can’t recall a single occasion when they’ve ever got in touch first, even though there have been dozens of occasions when I’ve put myself out for them.

Quite honestly, I’m getting rather fed up with other peoples bullshit and getting treated like a mug. Going to have to do something about that.

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

Want!

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So, I’ve finally managed to retire my old Vectra. She was a good old girl and an ace car to drive, like being on rails round corners, but with 160k on the clock the maintenance was costing way too much compared to what the car was worth.

So, having looked around at various cars, I settled on getting one of the Mk3 TDCi Mondeos. Yes, it’s true what they say about turning 40, I am about to become MONDEO MAN!

Anyway, I fancied one of the top spec models with all the niceties that come with it, which in the Ford range has always been the Ghia. Or on the newer ones, the Ghia X, which gives you everything bar the kitchen sink. Trouble is, I was slightly put off by all the walnut trim which seemed a bit too reminiscent of my dad’s old Rover about 30 years back. Thankfully, good fortune smiled upon my budget which brought the newer special ‘Titanium’ edition within reach. Basically, the Titanium has the same level of refinement as the Ghia, except they replaced all the crappy Walnut with Brished Aluminium, added sports seats and 18″ wheels. i.e. Much more my cup of tea!

Trouble is, although the regular Mondeo is a complete Clitoris Car*, the Titanium X is pretty hard to come by, especially if you want one with sensible mileage and a full service history. We did look at one yesterday in Thornbury and I did enjoy driving it but it was pretty (very) high mileage and didn’t really feel quite right. Having made up my mind I was dead set on the Titanium X I was anticipating a bit of a headache to find one but again, good fortune was smiling on me and I found one in Southampton so we took a drive down today with fingers crossed that it wouldn’t be a crock of shite.

(Not my actual car, but a nice pic of the same model)

It wasn’t

So, a deal was struck, they are sorting a couple of minor things I wanted doing on it and I should be able to pick it up next weekend.

Vroom vroom!!

* Every C**t’s got one…

Listening to: Ten Thousand Fists from the album Ten Thousand Fists by Disturbed

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.. well, not quite, but it did make for an opportunity to use the pun

So, after the confuddlement of a couple of weeks back, things are somewhat more positive at the moment. It was all pretty gnarly last week but thankfully Kel has come to the conclusion that I’d always held that you can’t throw away seven years worth of relationship that easily and that it’s worth figuring this stuff out.

Yay Thanks babe…

So, I figured it would be nice to go out for a meal last night. We knew it would be busy but what the heck. We did expect that we’d have to wait but didn’t quite expect to be saying whuttuf??? quite so many times in one evening!

Whuttuf #1 was in the Italian restaurant. We both fancied pasta and we do like that place a lot so that was first point of call. Yay @ no problem fitting us in, but BOOO THAT SUCKS! to be told “We’re not actually running our usual menu tonight though Sir, just this ridiculously overpriced and very limited micro-selection for Valentine’s day. You wouldn’t mind putting up with something you didn’t actually fancy and paying double the normal price for it would you?” Err, actually, yes I would thanks, bye.

So, whuttuf #2. Thankfully, right nect door to Italian is Frankie & Bennies which is cool as we like their stuff anyway. No problem getting a table if we’re prepared to wait for about 40 mins which was fine as we’d expected that anyway. What I didn’t expect however was to get ignored at the bar for 15 mins while they served everyone else, including those that came in after us. The final straw was seeing a couple walk in, and then the barman go to serve them right away just seconds later. Suffice to say Kel got to see my assertive head at that point and normal service was quickly resumed!

(Minor) Whuttuf #3 came in the guise of the waitress bringing me completely the wrong meal, albeit something with a similar name. Thankfully that was rectified in just a couple of minutes and I got charged the lower price of the erroneous meal so it worked out in my favour

Anyhoo, top bit of scoff and a nice night out with me bird, so YAY!

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.