Jul. 26th, 2004 12:15 am
Rock Me, Amadeus!
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vin_petrolWeekend Update.
Friday evening was Screaming Banshee Aircrew at Fibbers. Trash does like SBA, so she came along too [although she wore lots of colour - "black is not a uniform, you know" :-)] Pleasantly surprised to see![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
minusbat and godgirl, as well as all The Usual Suspects, plus miss_dark's sister Nicky (who has the same birthday as me). The toilets flooded to a scary degree, and godgirl graciously lent Trash her boots (with big platforms) for 'wading through the liquid' purposes (eek!). Which led to an interesting moment: Trash in New Rocks. There's something I never thought I would see. Picture here.
SBA were great.ant_girl wore stripy tights :-) mister_ed wandered around in a suitably scary fashion - dancing with Trash at one point, she gleefully told me afterwards ;-) I took some pictures for the first few songs, which I'll put online eventually, but I currently Have Issues with fotopic which I've emailed them about.
[Nerd stuff about fotopic: there's something about their resize algorithm I don't get. I crop and size my pictures to look 'reasonable' (IMHO) on a 'typical' 1024x768 monitor. This works fine for landscape images, but there's something about the way they resize portrait images that makes them oddly a lot smaller. If you're interested, take a look at http://vinpetrol.fotopic.net/c235514.html and click on a clear landscape image. See - nice and big. Then click on a tall, thin portrait image (like me,gothgrr or steer. Look, oddly smaller images. Why? I've emailed fotopic and they're getting back to me on Monday, so I'll upload some SBA pictures then].
Spent some time talking to people, including the lead singer from Manuskript. He's an...
WARNING - THE NEXT BIT IS ABOUT THE 'F' WORD - SKIP BEYOND THE RED TEXT FOR NORMAL TALK
Arsenal supporter. He was actually there when Arsenal thrashed Boro 6-1 at The Riverside. This was the best performance by any team I have ever seen. It was also the best performance by Arsenal he had ever seen, so we were clearly both privileged to be there. Kanu back heeled one of the goals... He thought Boro had made a good signing in Ray Parlour, so that was nice.
Manuskript were pretty good, although I had to retreat to the back of Fibbers after a few songs 'cos I was getting very hot. I chilled out there chatting for a while then returned back to watch more Manuskript after I had recovered.
I noticed the sky was nice and clear on the way home, but I was knackered after the gig and just went to bed.
Saturday Trash and I were supposed to be going out walking, but she had been bitten severely by red ants the previous day, and was getting all sorts of nasty irritation round her ankles and wrists. I think this put her off walking, so we went out shopping at Clifton Moor instead! She bought a carpet cleaner (like the VAX I mentioned recently, although she had decided to go for a Bissell instead). We also had a good look at widescreen televisions, with a view to getting one soon. Returning home Trash wanted to play with her new toy, so I left her assembling her carpet cleaner and went for a spod.
Sunday morning I vaguely woke up when my phone vibrated at about 0900. I get lots of text messages on my phone, seeing as I monitor lots of systems at Orange, so I never get excited about text messages. However, this one looked odd: "[AuroraWatch] Red alert issued 08:01 UT 25 Jul 2004". Wah! I jumped out of bed. I have *never* had one of these before, and I've been on the mailing list for months. I went to check the web site and there was indeed a geomagnetic storm raging above us in York. Sadly, during daylight hours :-(
About midday I wandered over tosteer's for GP watching. gothgrr appeared with something akin to a Black Forest gateaux in kit form. I was the kitchen bitch, and helped with food preparation in there: basically, sausages and mash. I spent quite a lot of the race helping with the final assembly of the cake, of which there are pictures on steer's LJ here.
Schumacher won (again), but it was nice to see lots of fun racing between Button's Honda and Alonso's Renault. Poor Kimi's car broke again in a most spectacular fashion.
Since then I've been chilling out, reading the papers, and keeping a close eye on the geomagnetic activity and cloud cover overhead. Oh, and I was reminded to watch Top Gear byladyserpentine, which led to that rather silly poll.
Hmmm "Possible ongoing storm". I think I may have to venture forth and see what I can see.
EDIT: wandered out somewhere dark West of York at about 0030. Nothing so see :-(
Friday evening was Screaming Banshee Aircrew at Fibbers. Trash does like SBA, so she came along too [although she wore lots of colour - "black is not a uniform, you know" :-)] Pleasantly surprised to see
minusbat and godgirl, as well as all The Usual Suspects, plus miss_dark's sister Nicky (who has the same birthday as me). The toilets flooded to a scary degree, and godgirl graciously lent Trash her boots (with big platforms) for 'wading through the liquid' purposes (eek!). Which led to an interesting moment: Trash in New Rocks. There's something I never thought I would see. Picture here.SBA were great.
ant_girl wore stripy tights :-) mister_ed wandered around in a suitably scary fashion - dancing with Trash at one point, she gleefully told me afterwards ;-) I took some pictures for the first few songs, which I'll put online eventually, but I currently Have Issues with fotopic which I've emailed them about.[Nerd stuff about fotopic: there's something about their resize algorithm I don't get. I crop and size my pictures to look 'reasonable' (IMHO) on a 'typical' 1024x768 monitor. This works fine for landscape images, but there's something about the way they resize portrait images that makes them oddly a lot smaller. If you're interested, take a look at http://vinpetrol.fotopic.net/c235514.html and click on a clear landscape image. See - nice and big. Then click on a tall, thin portrait image (like me,
gothgrr or steer. Look, oddly smaller images. Why? I've emailed fotopic and they're getting back to me on Monday, so I'll upload some SBA pictures then].Spent some time talking to people, including the lead singer from Manuskript. He's an...
WARNING - THE NEXT BIT IS ABOUT THE 'F' WORD - SKIP BEYOND THE RED TEXT FOR NORMAL TALK
Arsenal supporter. He was actually there when Arsenal thrashed Boro 6-1 at The Riverside. This was the best performance by any team I have ever seen. It was also the best performance by Arsenal he had ever seen, so we were clearly both privileged to be there. Kanu back heeled one of the goals... He thought Boro had made a good signing in Ray Parlour, so that was nice.
Manuskript were pretty good, although I had to retreat to the back of Fibbers after a few songs 'cos I was getting very hot. I chilled out there chatting for a while then returned back to watch more Manuskript after I had recovered.
I noticed the sky was nice and clear on the way home, but I was knackered after the gig and just went to bed.
Saturday Trash and I were supposed to be going out walking, but she had been bitten severely by red ants the previous day, and was getting all sorts of nasty irritation round her ankles and wrists. I think this put her off walking, so we went out shopping at Clifton Moor instead! She bought a carpet cleaner (like the VAX I mentioned recently, although she had decided to go for a Bissell instead). We also had a good look at widescreen televisions, with a view to getting one soon. Returning home Trash wanted to play with her new toy, so I left her assembling her carpet cleaner and went for a spod.
Sunday morning I vaguely woke up when my phone vibrated at about 0900. I get lots of text messages on my phone, seeing as I monitor lots of systems at Orange, so I never get excited about text messages. However, this one looked odd: "[AuroraWatch] Red alert issued 08:01 UT 25 Jul 2004". Wah! I jumped out of bed. I have *never* had one of these before, and I've been on the mailing list for months. I went to check the web site and there was indeed a geomagnetic storm raging above us in York. Sadly, during daylight hours :-(
About midday I wandered over to
steer's for GP watching. gothgrr appeared with something akin to a Black Forest gateaux in kit form. I was the kitchen bitch, and helped with food preparation in there: basically, sausages and mash. I spent quite a lot of the race helping with the final assembly of the cake, of which there are pictures on steer's LJ here.Schumacher won (again), but it was nice to see lots of fun racing between Button's Honda and Alonso's Renault. Poor Kimi's car broke again in a most spectacular fashion.
Since then I've been chilling out, reading the papers, and keeping a close eye on the geomagnetic activity and cloud cover overhead. Oh, and I was reminded to watch Top Gear by
ladyserpentine, which led to that rather silly poll.Hmmm "Possible ongoing storm". I think I may have to venture forth and see what I can see.
EDIT: wandered out somewhere dark West of York at about 0030. Nothing so see :-(
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<Vin plays with that> Ah yes, that helps. I don't actually mind their resizing - it works OK for landscape images. I just wish I knew how it worked. That's an engineering thing - I'm sure you understand! :-) If they won't tell me I shall just have to do some "test collections" and reverse engineer the algorithm.
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It really maddens me to see successful research programs which have provably improved transport conditions dismissed as a failure because he has a photo of a buslane without a bus in it. Grrr... shooting is too good for him.
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