Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

Winter 2010 Dinosaur Miniatures News

Posted on in Dinosaurs, Miniatures, TV.

He-Who-Kills from Khurasan Miniatures

It’s been a while since my last dinosaur miniatures roundup, so what’s new and exciting?

15mm is where it’s at. Khurasan Miniatures have continued to expand their Mystri Island range including the very nice T. rex “He-Who-Kills” pictured on the right. Also in 15mm, there are a few new additions to the M.Y.Miniatures Ice Age range. Splintered Light have blogged the greens for some raptors and sabre tooth tigers. Finally, Acheson Creations / Primaeval Designs will also be moving into this scale and have posted some photos of greens to their Facebook and Yahoo! Groups pages.

Speaking of Primaeval they now have a UK distributor in the form of Magister Militum. The prices are high as you would expect for imports but at least you don’t get stung by customs and post office charges on top of that. I picked up a few figures (Plateosaurus, Protoceratops, Feathered Utahraptor, Mastodon and both Megaloceros) from their stands at SELWG and Warfare. Now I just need to review them for Ragnarok and get my painting desk set up (ha ha, fat chance, my computer is still on the floor five months after we moved).

And in related news, the new season of Primeval airs on ITV on New Year’s Day. :-)

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What he said…

Posted on in Music, TV.

Top 5, First Letter, Music Meme, in the key of W

Posted on in Memes, Music.
  1. Reply to this post and I’ll assign you a letter.
  2. List (and upload, if you feel like it) five songs that start with that letter.
  3. Post them to your journal with these instructions.

[info]ggreig gave me the letter “W”, well he gave me “Z” first but with only eight Z-tracks in my iTunes that would have been somewhat limited so we mutually agreed to go with the second choice.

Argh! That was hard. I had a long list of about 25 and a short list of ten but getting it down to five took all evening.

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Casting suggestion

Posted on in Films, The World.

The home page of BBC News is currently reporting on BP CEO Tony Hayward getting a telling off from the US Congress. And they are illustrating it with this picture:

Tony Hayward

If Michael Sheen is looking for his next real life role then he need look no further, the similarity is much greater than with Brian Clough, David Frost or even Tony Blair.

A Weekend in London

Posted on in Music, My Life, The World, TV.

A Bank Holiday weekend in the UK, so the weather was extremely mixed.

On Friday a bunch of us from work went to the new-ish oriental buffet, Tuli on Tooley Street. It’s underneath the railway arches and has made great use of the space – it’s light and airy and feels modern. The food was decidedly average – exactly what you’d expect from an all-you-can-eat chinese buffet – and didn’t really seem to live up to the image that they were trying to present. Maybe the teppanyaki or sushi options would be more interesting if we ever went back as a smaller group and/or in the evening.

Saturday was the Crystal Palace Overground Festival and Lettice and I braved the drizzle to take a look. Spread out round all three sides of the triangle were stalls selling exactly what you’d expect from the good people of Crystal Palace – cupcakes, handmade greetings cards and antiques. There was also music and kids’ activities going on. With the events spread out both geographically and temporally, coupled with the poor weather, it all seemed a bit difficult to get into the spirit of things. Maybe if it’s sunny next year we’ll make the slightly longer trip up from Croydon.

And then round to [info]miss_newham‘s for the annual Eurovision party. Alcohol, scorecards, yelling at the telly, and some truly dreadful music. I seemed to be the only person who liked the Albanian entry; the winner of our voting was Greece, which matched the winner of the UK phone vote so we must have been in tune with the national psyche. Not sure why the UK bothers entering – everyone hates us and we always enter rubbish songs. Ben Dalby’s Doctor Can would have been a better entry and some sexy nurses would surely have garnered a few votes. ;-)

There’s a new art gallery in West Norwood – The Portico Gallery is very close to us and full of a wide variety of pieces in varied styles and media. I’m rubbish at writing about art (“and everything else,” yells the audience) so there’s not much more to say except that that’s where we were on Sunday afternoon.

And today? Nothing much at all. :-)

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Top 10 Films

Posted on in Films, Memes, My Life, Work.

As a follow-up to Desert Island Discs, the team at work have been doing our top ten films, and this week was my turn. The only condition was that one of the ten had to be set in London. Once again, I’ll be buggered if I’m writing all this lot up and not turning it into a blog post.
( My Top Ten Films... )

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Counting the Cost of War(games) – February ’10

Posted on in Magazines.

1 issue of Warpstone, @ £5.99

Total: £5.99

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JavaScript and me

Posted on in Books, My Life, Work, WWW.

I’ve been writing JavaScript for almost as long as the language has existed. My first “script” was a simple onMouseOver="window.status='Hello World'" affair back in the days of Netscape 2. I spent the dot.com years writing popup windows and hover images and scrolling boxes and other basic stuff. Then I took a break from doing much JavaScript – this almost exactly coincided with the years that some “proper” programmers took a a look at the language and applied a bit of rigour to it. So when I got back into JavaScript a few years ago I was way behind the curve.

I’ve managed to catch up a little and by using the jQuery library plus a few plugins I’ve done some quite cool things despite not having the sort of knowledge that real JavaScript pros have these days.

I’m a front end engineer, I’m not a “proper” programmer, I don’t come from a programming background and have had close to zero formal training. I only vaguely understand the principles behind object oriented programming and design patterns and so on and I think that I think that they are good things, but I have no real idea of how to apply them to my code.

Speaking of which, unminified it’s 70Kb, 1500 lines and growing. There’s a big refactoring job that needs doing there before it becomes impossible to maintain. But how to start?

Bookwise, I have Jon Resig’s Pro JavaScript Techniques and Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts and a few others. Are there any others that I should be looking at? What about training? Web sites? Blogs I should be following? Where do I go from here?

Very True Mood: (cranky) cranky
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Any other Tuesday…

Posted on in Music, My Life, TV, Work, WWW.

Today I …

  • Had my photo used in a (gay) mockup of a what our Valentine’s Day homepage could look like.
  • Had lots of fun combining Ajax, JSON, RSS, JSP and jQuery in various combinations.
  • Moved the breadcrumb trail from just inside the main content area to just before it … in many, many templates.
  • Wondered whether any of the ARIA landmark roles was suitable for a block that contained a breadcrumb trail, a print button and an RSS feed button. contentinfo or nothing seem to be the options.
  • Told my boss that I needed to refactor all the JavasScript (that I had written in the first place) on the whole site.
  • Wasn’t ill enough to go home to bed, maybe tomorrow. (Damn this really quite good immune system!)
  • Boggled at the photos of Ben Dalby in a straight jacket!
  • Spent most of Survivors thinking about the benefits of CGI vs something actually decent looking when it came to collapsing buildings.
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Counting the Cost of War(games) – December ’09

Posted on in Games, Magazines.

1 issue of Wagames Illustrated, @ £4.00

Total: £4.00

Total for the quarter: £11.99 + £39.92 + £4.00 = £55.91

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