PigPog

Has it really come to this? Blogging my own posts elsewhere?

Actually, this is an idea I’ve had for a PigPog post for a long time, but when French Toast Girl came up with such a great post at The Drawing Club, and said much of what I wanted to say, I figured I’d just add the rest as a post over there for now.

I’ll link to my own post here now, so I can find it easily when I finally get around to doing a similar article for PigPog.

Sam’s bought a new Sheaffer pen recently from Osborne’s Stationers – we’ll be reviewing it soon. Very nice.

Not really something I’d get much out of, I think, a portable games machine. If it was, though, I’d be very interested in one that runs Linux. Especially since the emulator scene opens up all sorts of options for getting older games for free.

Actually, the Nintendo DS and DS Lite look kind of interesting. They seem to be doing reasonably innovative things with their games, rather than just throwing more pixels at the alien monster, and more polygons into Lara’s nipples.

I’ve not seen anyone else marketing anything remotely like Animal Crossing or Nintendogs (er? did I dream that one, or does it exist? Cool – it exists.).

Assuming it’s true, this isn’t good. It could well turn out to be an intern or similar, not quite thinking through what they’re doing. I’d be surprised if Yahoo! were intentionally doing this sort of thing.

Come here from Google? Looking for the Hello Kitty Darth Vader pic? It’s Cowboy Caleb’s post you want.

Update2: Unexpected Cute is now here, so I’ve moved this post over to it. The place for all your unexpected cuteness – inappropriate Hello Kitty merchandising, kittens in toolboxes, and whatever else we fancy. Just set the site up now, and chucked a couple of posts into it. Will carry on with getting it and GuitarPr0n set up properly tomorrow, and bring some of the old stuff over here.

Update: Boing Boing picked this up too, and someone pointed out to them that it’s a Photoshop job, not real. Damn. There is, however, Darth Vera – a pink middle-aged female Darth Vader. Nearly as odd.

Cowboy Caleb finds the strangest things. A Hello Kitty Darth Vader.

I really must work out what I’m going to do with the old Hello Kitty Stuff blog. This stuff shouldn’t be polluting PigPog.

Tried to set up Drupal to do multiple sites in subdirectories today, but it didn’t go too well. There’s bugs in how it handles finding the site config files, and although it can be worked around, I didn’t have much luck, and modifying the Drupal install to get around the bugs makes for difficult upgrades later – I’d much rather stay with a default install. As far as I can tell, this is only a problem if you’re trying to host a default install of Drupal in the root of your server, then host other sites in subdirectories under them, so it’s a fairly unusual situation.

Anyway, I might try with separate installations of Drupal, or I might go for installing WordPress into one or more directories. At least that way I’d get to keep playing with WordPress as well as Drupal, which would be kind of interesting.

If you see someone being arrested in Philadelphia, don’t photograph it. This guy did, and got arrested for “impeding an investigation”. Not quite sure how snapping a pic with a mobile phone impeded the police, when they were in the street, and he was in the driveway of his own home. The ACLU aren’t too impressed.

Andrew says RSS is doomed. He’s probably right. It’s a great thing, and it’s much better than not having RSS, but it really is starting to seem a bit limiting these days. The stupidity of just shoving your site’s entire recent content in a slightly repackaged form every time someone wants to check if there’s anything new really doesn’t make much sense.

When Andrew Kantor gets a voice mail that makes no sense, he strikes back. Very funny.

I once got a phone call on my mobile, which went very oddly…

Me: Hello?
Them: Hi Martin. How’s it going?
Me: I’m not Martin. I think you’ve got the wrong number.
Them: Oh, have I?
Me: Yes.
Them: Oh. Right. So. How’s it going, Martin?
Me: I’m not Martin. You’ve got the wrong number.
Them: Heh heh. Yeah. So. Y’alright?
Me: Er? You’ve got the wrong number.
Them: Yeah, right. That’s just the sort of trick you’d play, Martin. Very funny.
Me: No, really, I’m not Martin.
Them: Oh, right. Heh heh. You’re funny, Martin.
Me: No. I’m not martin.
Them: Heh heh. OK. So, y’alright, then?
Me: …hangs up.

This Martin must be one really funny guy.

In my previous posting “How To Temp and Keep Your Sanity”, I wrote about the usefulness of taking your own stuff with you to temp bookings. I thought I’d share the contents of my own Temping Kit, to perhaps inspire you to put together your own or to prove that the baggage I lug around every day ain’t just emotional…

Pens and Pencils

I carry a black pencil case in which I keep a selection from PigPog’s pretty massive pen and pencil collection, along with a few other essentials.

• A large twin-tip Sharpie
• A medium tip Sharpie
• Faber-Castell Grip Plus 0.7 automatic pencil (thanks Simon)
• A Rotring Xonox .3mm
• A couple of elastic bands
• Uniball Vision Elite in red, blue and black.
• Pentel GraphGear 1000 Pencil – Pinched from Michael while he’s busy lovin’ the Lamy
• A couple of Staedtler erasers.
• My Sheaffer Prelude Fountain Pen – review coming soon.
• 3 single-serve packs of demerara sugar. In case they have coffee but no sugar!

Filofax

Once again, Michael’s fickle ditherings over personal organisers has worked to my advantage, as I’ve managed to get my mitts on his cherished-for-about-five-minutes black leather A5 “Identity” filofax.

It’s organised into four sections:

• Work – Where I make/keep notes about wherever I’m working at the time.

• 2006 – Diary etc.

• Art – Space for PigPog scribblings, other writing, drawing etc.

• Archive – Old notes.

I’ve got a few DIY Planner forms in there, but I tend to rely on plain or lined paper. I haven’t got to the stage of organising my thoughts well enough to figure out what form to write them down on yet. I also have in there timesheets and other bumpf from whichever agency I’m working for at the time, and a picture to remind me that “It’s not a problem you can stop, it’s rock n’ roll”

This is all lugged around in my ever faithful Flapdoozy bag. Ph34r teh r00my ones.

So there you are, that’s what I lug around with me when I’m doing the temp thing. If I ever get a chance to do the permanent thing, I’ll let you know how it changes my ‘luggage’.

Dear Blog, You may recall some posts back that I was offered a permanent job. You may recall how surprisingly happy I was about it all. Despite the reams of forms I had to fill in for various checks and clearances, I was hoping to be starting work within a couple of weeks.

Nope.

Things haven’t quite gone according to plan. However, there may still be an opportunity for me to work there, so fingers crossed, just not in the job I wanted.

I’ve lost 3 weeks’ wages hanging around waiting for something to happen. It’s been driving me bonkers not knowing whether I’d be working again Monday, in a week, or in a month. I’ll find out about the other job in a couple of weeks, and hopefully starting in September. Hopefully. For now I’m temping once again, and joining the staff at a property company next week as an audio typist. It’ll do. As usual, I have to put up with “it’ll do” rather than “Wow! That’s exactly what I want!”.

If I get any more disappointed and angsty about all of this, I’m going to have to ditch this blog in favour of a LiveJournal.