davidrickard.net

Random stuff, randomly updated.

Archive for January, 2006

New, Sparkly, Pretty

Tuesday, January 31st, 2006

I’ve been batting around various new templates and ideas for my site for some time. The older style was getting boring, so I’d been playing with new things. I stumbled across the theme Green Marinée, by Ian Main. He’d entered the theme to a competition, which is where I found it. Although very nice, I wasn’t keen on the green, so I decided to re-colour it a shade of blue. After doing all this I noticed some oddities with the bullets, so I tried fixing those. Whilst looking at the Readme file I noticed mention that he was going to be doing some different colour versions. I took myself along to his site and found that there was a blue version (the aptly named ‘Blue Marinée’). I downloaded it and had a look on my test install of WordPress and found it worked very nicely, and fixed a few bugs with the original. I’d already re-coloured the images, so I dropped those in (the blue shade is darker in my version) and I went and changed some other elements to be green. I know the old saying is “blue and green should never be seen, without a colour inbetween”, but for some reason they work. Windows XP has been doing it since 2001 quite happily, so why shouldn’t I?

So here you see the slightly modded style, in all it’s glory, complete with Google ads and random tagline. I daresy I’ll get around to fixing a few other things when I feel like it, or I next change the theme.

Posted in Intarweb | Comments Off

Life On Mars

Saturday, January 28th, 2006

Life On Mars

Ordinarily, I’m no fan of TV dramas, tending to aim for the comedies more. Now and then, there’s something that crops up that catches my attention, and I find myself watching intently. Life On Mars is a new BBC drama about a Manchester policeman, only with a twist. The lead character Sam Tyler (played by John Simm) is your average Detective Inspector. His ex-girlfriend and colleague is snatched by a muderer he’s trying to track down. Hearing that she’s been taken, he takes an emotional drive, which leads to him being run down after getting out of his car. Next thing we know, he’s lying in the middle of a disused factory, soon to be the site of the new bypass he was just run over on. The year is now 1973, and Sam finds himself confused, and lost. Is he in a coma and dreaming? Has he somehow travelled back in time? Or is it something else? He doesn’t know, but finds his way to the same police station he left earlier, albeit thirty years previous. Sam finds himself fighting against his superior, Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister), and somewhat old-fashioned policing methods. His only support comes from WPC Annie Cartright (Liz White), and he’s left trying to work out what exactly is going on.

This series is truly great, on levels of drama, comedy, and the mystery surrounding the overal storyline. It’s not immediately obvious if Sam actually is in a coma or not; after his accident we’re taken back to 1973 with him, and don’t go back into 2006 at all. Various things happen which could suggest he’s hearing the outside world, such as doctors talking about a patient being in a coma, but Sam will sometimes turn and find a radio playing a radio play which happens to be about the same thing.

It’s an intrigueing storyline, something which keeps you enthralled, whilst Same and Gene find themselves warring over how best to apprehend various criminals. I wonder what direction the show will go in later on, whether we will find out the reason for his time jump. I certainly hope so! I know I’m going to be glued to the rest of this series for sure though.

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A Stupid Name

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

I have a tendancy to add album art to my iTunes library. I don’t know why entirely, I suppose I’ll get a photo-capable iPod one day when this one conks out/is past repair/is too small, so it’ll be nice to have stuff already set nicely. Plus it’s sometimes useful to just see the artwork in iTunes when things are playing.

Not everything in my list has art, so I tend to do it when I notice albums without. I noticed that the single ‘Nothing’ by the band ‘A’ had totally the wrong art. A little utility I’d used in the past would sometimes confuse band names and titles, and end up putting the wrong art on songs. I get most of the art from Amazon.co.uk, as they have reasonably-sized images, and they work quite well.

So off I went, and realised the trouble I’d had in the past trying to find the band ‘A’ online. Being a letter and word, ‘A’ tends to turn up a lot, as this search shows. Searching for the band, the title of the single, or variations on that either turned up hundreds of usless results, or in the case of searching for ‘A’, just kicked me to the advanced search page. I tried another angle, by searching for one of their other albums, then following one of the ‘Also by this artist’ links, but that didn’t work either. It simply returned the same result as searching for ‘A’.

As I was doing this, it occurred to me how much of a stupid name it was. Twenty years ago, it would have worked quite nicely, as it would put the band in the first place in the record-shops, but in this day of people looking up bands online, it really doesn’t work so well. Even iTunes returns no results, whilst on the band’s website, they claim you can buy the songs on iTunes – quite how, if you can’t find them, I don’t know. This also made me think about how other up and coming bands would want to try and have something easy to find. A band is effectively a business, so if you want to get your stuff out there, and easily found, you’ve got to have a name that puts you high in the listings. Names like Foo Fighters, Barenake Ladies, Fleetwood Mac all work, as they are only one thing. You’re unlikely to end up finding a company called Fleetwood Mac making computers, for example.
Nice idea for a name, but it just doesn’t work.

Posted in Music | Comments Off

Rickards by Region

Monday, January 23rd, 2006

Map of the UK

You may be wondering what the purpose of this seemingly randomly coloured map is. Well, it’s from a website which allows you to show the distribution of your family name from the 1998 and 1881 censuses. There’s no data for ‘Rickard’ in the 1881 census, presumeably because Rickard is a fairly recent veriation on the name Richard. I’m guessing it probably started outside of the UK, and came back over time. As you can see from the graphic (Yellow is low, through to Purple being high numbers), we’re mostly in the Southern parts of the UK. I was a little surprised to see so many in Northern Wales. Still, it’s fairly interesting.

Posted in General, Intarweb | Comments Off

Whale of a time

Saturday, January 21st, 2006

I’m sitting here flicking between Sky News and BBC News 24 watching footage of the stranded whale found in the River Thames. It’s been interesting to watch. I really do hope they can save it, as it’d be a real shame, both for the whale, and for all the people who have come together so quickly to mount this rescue operation.

I always find it interesting to compare news, so I’ve been flicking back and forth between Sky and the BBC. The BBC somehow managed to lose all their cameras, presumeably whilst moving them to a better vantage point, so were playing old footage for ages. Sky were following with a helicopter, but in true News Corp fashion, managed to rush news items out, such as one of their reporters finding a baby whale, but this was reported before any sort of confirmation. Later reports pointed to it being a dead dolphin.

Be interesting to see how this pans out.

Posted in General, TV | Comments Off

When The Lights Go Out

Tuesday, January 17th, 2006

Last night I was laying in bed (just like Brian Wilson did, ohhh) happily watching Red Dwarf. I was about half-way through an episode, when all of a sudden, the light went off, then all the other kit did, followed by the TV. I sat there for a moment, then heard other people in the house shout in disgust. I got up and went and looked out the window, and it seemed most of our area had gone out, although we could see lights out towards the main road from Oxford all lit up. It’s not unusual for that to happen. In some parts of the town, thanks to the way they were wired, you’ll see every third house, and every other street light off. In our case, it was the whole estate.

About five minutes had passed, and I was pretty much resigned to the fact it might not come back on instantly, so I decided to get ready for bed instead. I was wandering around with a little head-light thing I got for Christmas (clips onto the ear like a Bluetooth dongle – very natty!), and I made sure to switch everything off. Whilst doing so, I was managing to automatically switch ON lights in rooms I entered – amazing how accustomed to doing such things we are!

I lay down in bed, closed my eyes, then heard a clunk as everything wound back up again as the power came back on. I opened my eyes and looked at my lamp, which I had neglected to turn back off, and decided that seeing as how it’d woken me up anyway, I’d watch TV again.

When the power goes off, it makes you realise quite how reliant on it we are, for so much. We can only hope that new power supplies are built in the UK, as soon as possible.

Posted in General | Comments Off

Sysinternals – Yay!

Monday, January 16th, 2006

My Thunderbird mail box has always been a bit slow, due to the fact that the file fragments like hell. Windows Defrag is useless, and the O&O Defrag I tried wasn’t much better. Today at work, by chance, I stumbled across a utility called ‘Contig’ on the ever-useful Sysinternals website. All I can say is it is fantastic! It’s defragmented my inbox, and it all whizzes along. The nice thing about Contig is that it will work in individual files, or the directory, which Defrag and O&O didn’t do. So I’m super-impressed! Sysinternals truly is the wonder of little utilities!
Go check it out here.

Posted in Computers | Comments Off

Prose and Poetry

Friday, January 13th, 2006

Here’s a great quote I saw today in the Phrase Finder weekly email.

“There was a young fellah named Rollocks
Who worked for Ferrier Pollocks.
As he walked on the Strand
With his girl by the hand
The tide came up to his knees.

Now that’s prose. If the tide had been in, it would have been poetry.”

The quote is attributed to Brendan Behan, but apparently has never been confirmed. Still, it made me laugh all the same.

Posted in General | Comments Off

A song…

Friday, January 13th, 2006

I saw this one today on a forum, and it made me laugh

Posted in General, Intarweb | Comments Off

Futurama coming back?

Wednesday, January 4th, 2006

We can but hope. Digital Spy have a little article about it. This tends to pop up every six months or so, so it’s something of a regular cycle these days. Still, it’ll be nice if it does come back. Family Guy went through the same rumour process though. I wouldn’t mind betting Fox pretty much flipped a coin on whether to bring back Futurama or Family Guy – both were equally as popular on DVD and in syndication. I assume Family Guy has been doing well since coming back, so Fox will probably look to bring back Futurama eventually.

I’m a little miffed with how BBC Two have handled showing Family Guy and American Dad though. They started off back-to-back on Friday nights, just after 10pm. Just before Christmas they started to show them every night, and shove them about within the 10pm-11pm timeslot, then they suddenly disappeared. I didn’t even know they had moved. Obviously, BBC Two were moving them around the schedules to give the other programmes a chance, as they were far too successful.

I just know that in a few months, the BBC will come out with some half-hearted excuse about how hardly anybody was watching them, and drop them both altogether. Hardly surprising considering how it’s hard to find them.

Posted in TV | Comments Off

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