Smörgåsbord of Updates
Posted on 2009-03-06 [direct link] Tags: Cake ImageMagick Mia Rafting Sweden Tennis Wii.

A few random, and seemingly unconnected, updates. I should probably have made this into a bunch of separate posts...

• Last week I threw a quick site online for a new venture brother Pwetey D'Ramdaq is involved in - Loebeat. The site is a bit of a place holder for now, here are some polygons to make up for any sense of anti-climax. El Ramadaqo's various ventures and persona are so complicated and interlinked that I had to have it all explained to me ad-nausea before it sank in, but the meat of the issue is that Loebeat is going to be churning out some neato tunes very soon. Follow the progress on Meejah, which already has some great behind-the-scenes video.


• I've taken to playing Wii Tennis with a semi-serious attempt to understand the game's control system. My intention was to get my "skill rating" to plot off the top of the graph, which I'd read happens are a score of around 2000. It actually goes off the graph at more like 1900 (which I've passed). Getting a 1900+ rating was surprisingly easy, especially considering that I tend to only play for quick 10 to 20 minute bursts a few times a week. Apparently things get a lot harder once you hit 2000.


• I really liked the cocktail glass that I've used for the preview image for this post... but is it wrong that I like the photo it came from?


• The lack of Mia photos is probably distressing my core readership, so here she is doing her best faux-fur wearing hair-flicking child-model impression.


• Rebecca has discovered a new stickiest-substance-know-to-man, we'll be sending a sample to NASA in the morning. It mainly consists of melted marshmallows, sugar and egg whites.... and it works particularly well on cup cakes. Yummy.


• The version of ImageMagick proposed to ship with Ubuntu 9.04 has broken SVG support, a pain if you're a fan of polygons. It renders stroke lines (and many other things) in a non-compliant way, for example something which should look like This ends up as This. Installing ImageMagick 6.4.9-8 (from source) fixes it.


• And finally, but certainly most importantly, we have booked the anchor feature of our Summer Adventure (I'm capitalising "Summer Adventure" in the hope that it'll become a de-facto annual event), and we're off to Sweden. Many more details to follow eventually, but the teaser campaign starts here... I can confirm that we'll be building a log raft and spending four days sailing it (while wild camping) 50km down a Swedish river. The photo below is from another brave soul's trip along the same river...

Picture Credit - http://flickr.com/photos/8088927@N06/2787148048/

[2009-03-06 at 20:08 (updated 3 times)] [views: 4852] [direct link]