Thanks Advertising/Design Goodness and Ad Agency Ruf Lanz Werbeagentur, Zurich
Technorati Tags: advertisements, prince_charles, images
]]>Materials & Ingredients:
Method:
Notes:
Use ice even if all or any other main ingredients are frozen.
Lemon and salt are fundamental (garlic salt can also be used, but easy with it).
Measures given are for serious alcoholics with depraved senses of taste and smell - reduce according to (lack of) experience.
Celery is a somewhat distracting embellishment, inappropriate for hard drinkers but appealing to vegetarians. Stick or finger is better.
Enjoy it with all necessary caution. Change to something else after 2/3 glasses.
Technorati Tags: cocktails, foodanddrink, vodka, Bloody_Mary,
]]>A debilitating succession of such chasms between intent and action mark out the broken lives of all chronic sufferers of advanced blog blockage syndrome (BBS); twixt the idea and the written words, the story in the head and the story on the page, the rough draft and the next draft, any draft and the final draft, final draft and the new entry form, new entry form and the preview, twixt the preview and the publish button, here lie the beckoning exits along the via dolorosa of the blocked blogger.
Oh, its tea-time at Headingley. With England on a magic 222 for 2, only right that I join our resurgent lads in a cup of Yorkshire Gold, which will hopefully refresh my spirits sufficiently to see this disappearing post through to a proper conclusion. What a huge day for Michael Vaughan (just reached his century -the Barmy Army go barmy), what another tragic day for the Windies, such a far cry from that majestic team of the eighties. When they were playing then, I was squatting in Electric Lane, Brixton, the culture which made them jumping all around me. Now I’m in a cute flint cottage on the North Norfolk coast, on top of Hungry Hill. So much has happened since he last entry penned in New Cross, so much content under the bridge, so few (no) posts. What a waste.
Oh hoh, I’m just starting to wonder whether the time has come to jack this entry in - can’t remember what it was really about, except a snappy headline. Same old same old.
Wait a minute, I think it may be coming back to me. The cure for Blogger’s Block? Publish something. Anything. Just do it and hopefully the rest will follow, pouring out through the crack you make in the ice.
Technorati Tags: blogging, Norfolk_UK, cricket, Brixton,
]]>1980s music video from Finland - the ultimate in slick?
Technorati Tags: video, Finland, Googlevideo, theworstmusicvideo_EVER,
]]>What I’m especially grateful to Pandora for already is reminding me how ideal the wonderful Mogwai are for writing to while you listen. Until Scottish scribbler Ian Rankin of Rebus fame highlighed this fact somewhere or other, I had not been able to write anything more challenging than an I.O.U. while any music was on, (spoken radio was of course even worse), but like Rankin I find Mogwai just perfect for everything this side of poetry. Thought I’d share this, while putting in the plug for Pandora, with which (or whom) I have nothing to do, beyond the obligations of admiration.
Technorati Tags: Pandora, Mogwai, IanRankin, music, Web2.0, AJAX, Flash
]]>From the Transport for London site:
]]> What is happening and why?What! So forget about more seats, extra passenger satisfaction etc, its just to get more passengers (i.e. tourists) in. Thanks, Kenny.
(As news sinks in..): But why does this require closing down the Jubilee for four days, thus confining everyone south east of London Bridge to an isolated and static term of home arrest at the very height of the festive season?
And especially why is this, after the Jubilee Line has been running a ‘reduced service’ (i.e. no trains) since last Friday which is promised to continue until Boxing Day, for exactly the same loudly-stated reason? What’s so mind-numbingly difficult about adding an extra carriage to every train?
How to make a Jubilee Line super seven stretch job::
Surely nothing so simple would require the total shut down of London’s newest most high-tech tube line at the worst time of the year? (Would it?)
So, assuming (perish the thought) some nefarious deal has not been made with LUL employees whereby they get four days off at Christmas in exchange for keeping schtum about how-much-it-cost/massive-hidden-danger/doomed-after-14-days/whatever., then what else could justify this absurd shut down??
Are they lengthening all the Jubilee Line platforms? In four days? Surely not. A more likely response to such length-orientated problems, in keeping with the merry tradition of passenger mindfuck games already up-and-running, would be simply requiring passengers to escape from platform-deprived carriages by ‘using the front set of doors’ or ‘exiting via the next carriage up’, or any variation on this well-loved theme the driver might think up to brighten his day while simultaneously bringing about maximum despair among his happy customers.
Perhaps these four lost days have been taken from us to train staff on the ins and outs of the new seven carriage challenge, so radically different to the old deprecated six-carriage technology we have sadly grown so used to
“Erm… this is an extra carriage. What this means is you’ll now have to remember you have a seven carriage payload during standard quantification procedures and not the old six as you may from time to time imagine. So…any questions? No, Mrs Patel-Prendergast, we feel sure your memorably robotic voice will reach easily throughout the extra carriage without any need to strain it further, thanks to the advanced public address electronics we have installed as a plugin module for the carriage enhancement system. Oh yes Mr Sandringham-Churchill, you are as ever right - it will very much be necessary for drivers to include the additional carriage in all designated search operations for bombs, terrorists, WMDs, passengers on line, suspect packages, etcetera, and yes,of course, all extra time such stretching of available resources will inevitably incur will be reflected in overtime disbursements, disordered stress compensation payments and so forth, to which you are justifiably and legally entitled, plus a little bit more for luck.”
And so on…tra la la…
Technorati Tags: LondonUnderground, Christmas, London, KenLivingstone, travel, rants, Jubilee_Line
]]>Problem: cannot read (or can hardly read) Adobe Help files or Bridge Center due to weird fonts.
]]> Weird Fix:Apparently this is nothing to do with Adobe CS, but a Windows problem with fonts. To fix it you will need a font management program like the no-longer available Adobe Type Manager or Extensis Suitcase (free trial version available from Extensis).
Deactivate your installed or active fonts until you have 300 or less active fonts.
Adobe CS Help and Bridge Center will now appear in their (clear) default font!!
There is another perhaps [old] related font problem when running Opera on Windows when you have Adobe Type Manager also installed - Opera becomes entirely unreadable. If you remove Adobe Type Manager, it clears up. However, while there is a Firefox, I would rather keep the type manager and solve problems like the above.
So, problems reading Help files are all the rage. What will they think of next?
Technorati Tags: adobe, adobecs2, adobebridge, adobehelpcenter, software_problems, fonts, windows
]]>Problem: when you try to access Visual Studio help and/or MSDN Library you get a ‘Server not found’ or similar message.
]]> Weird Fix:Using Windows Explorer, make a new directory/folder in Documents and Settings > [main user] > Local Settings and call it, for instance, TIF.
Open Internet Explorer - even (!) if its not your primary browser - then open Tools > Internet Options. On the General tab in Internet Options, under Temporary Internet Files click on Settings...
In the Settings window, in the section called Temporary Internet files folder click on Move Folder.... Then navigate to the folder you just made (e.g. `TIF’) and select that, then go on clicking OK until everything closes.
You should now be able to open Visual Studio Help and other MSDN Library files in the Microsoft Document Explorer!! I believe you can even - although I haven’t tried it - move your Internet Explorer temporary files back to the Temporary Internet Files directory in Local Settings and I’m told it will still carry on working. Not an easy one to guess.
Technorati Tags: , microsoft, visualstudio, visualstudio, msdn, softwareproblems
]]>
Thanks Advertising/Design Goodness and Ad Agency Ruf Lanz Werbeagentur, Zurich
Technorati Tags: advertisements, prince_charles, images
]]>It was just soooo great when the only person who might have caused a ripple of concern among the New Labour politburo - bloated, unreconstructed, compromised, corrupted good ol’ (very ol’) Ken Clarke – got voted out at the first fence, just like he always had before, along with any other threats to the New Labour hegemony like poofy Portuguese Portillo or the magnificent chest-thumping Heseltine before him. Ken provided a louche winter echo to the brilliant but beaten Shane Warne of the summer.
Things got better yet as – half Flintoff and half Petersen - the altogether more cherce nowhere boy Cameron, D. came galloping into the lead on the wings of a conference speech made (gasp) without notes, succulently drizzled by a week of knockabout hard drugs denial. Blair, Brown et al, secretly ecstatic at being confronted by such a toffed-up, policy-bereft, back-story burdened, old Etonian hooray Charlie rich brat iconette of the Notting Hill Tory yardie set, played along famously by hamming up this classic Tory bullet in the foot as being a greater regime threat than the mountainous form of the abandoned Clarke.
Meanwhile emulating the summer catharsis of Australian hubris has been the spectacular reverse momentum downward plunge demonstrated by initial party darling David Davies – who no-one outside the ranks of the faithful had ever heard of before and has learnt nothing about since, except he’s got a broken nose and supposedly lived on a council estate. Being such an obvious loser at this stage should in the scheme of things qualify him as eventual winner, especially as the polls begin to show that – glittered up in manic media attention – the pre-pubescent Cameron might conceivably make some ground against the dour boredom of a Gordon Brown Old Labour non-revival. Anything like that and the young chap’s days will be over as quickly as you can say Iain Duncan Smith.
Unhampered by anything like a Goliath, we look forward to these two tussling Davids brightening the dismal days ahead as we segue into winter time. As for a viable opposition – who needs it?
Technorati Tags: politics, Conservative Party, Tories, Tory Leadership
]]>Via support consultation with our great hosting company Openhosting, it turned out that the server on which brokenenglish is hosted was recently upgraded, and some problems connected with Perl module compatibility were being experienced.
Trawling the Movable Type Support Forums and googling around, I eventually located a Digest::MD5 package put together back in 2001 by Ben Trott of Ben and Mena, Movable Type’s illustrious founders and owners. After unpacking this, I uploaded just the Perl directory inside it into my
MT > extlib > Digest
directory within the MT installation, which (obviously) already existed inside extlib, and only contained a single MD5.pm file. After uploading the Perl dir from Ben Trott’s archive, this was added inside the Digest dir, and itself contained a second md5.pm file. Once done, eveything returned to normal with my Movable Type installation.
This rather garbled report may help others experiencing a similar error, which appears to be fairly widespread.
Technorati Tags: movabletype, software, plugins, md5, perl
]]>Anyone who has ever tried to sing (or be forced to listen to) God Save the Queen at a moment of high adrenaline patriotism will know just how badly England needs an anthem they can get behind (besides which GSTQ is the UK/British National Anthem, not specifically English at all).
With the London Olympics on the distant horizon, England’s sorry football team desperately needing to justify Sven’s salary (and also qualify for the World Cup if possible), and being already left behind by the Welsh and Scots in this department, NOW IS THE TIME to make sure Blake’s great hymnn for England gets on to the National song sheet.
The way the Oval crowd got behind belting out ‘our clouded hills’ and ‘O clouds unfold’ when the country prayed for bad light and a draw (both of which we got BTW) should convince anyone half sensible that Jerusalem has got everything necessary for the English psyche. And having a real anthem to mark the way ahead would give due respect to Michael, Freddie, KP and all for what they did (and not just for Woodworm bats either)- during this historic summer when England met Shane Warne.
Technorati Tags: cricket
]]>Speaking personally, almost the only words I knew about for sure were those classified below as ‘internet-challenged’ - those once hilarious, now rather sad searches still made thousands of time a day for google.com or www.yahoo.com.
Also, I suppose I recognised most of the ‘dirty’ searches, far as they are from being anything of the sort. Hopefully, this is an expurgated list, otherwise the renowned porno tendencies of the web come out looking decidedly limp when ‘nudist’, breasts’, ‘skinny dipping’, ‘panties’ and ‘hot chicks’ are the filthiest things anyone can think of lusting after. Rather like the unclean musings of a dodgy Victorian clergyman, they would be sweet if they weren’t so twee.
The most interesting terms were, as always, the weirdest (and provided the initial reason for starting what has turned out to be this massive and personally debilitating exploration of lowest common denominators drizzled liberally with intricate mark-up!)
Possible explanations for the constantly high ranking of Googletestad as a search keyword have turned into a virtual SEO sub-industry of their own. Despite several heroic research projects. no-one has yet unearthed either any meaning for the term, nor cause for its endless popularity. Its like a ghost of the internet, everywhere but nowhere. What it has become, thanks to Wordtracker and its ilk, is the keyword for anyone looking for, or lacking, a keyword of their own. Build a webpage around googletestad, and the SEO punters will come flocking, hungry for ‘improving’ software.
Amoxil is (to me) a complete mystery, well ahead of such hyper-optimised terms as ‘Britney’ or ‘thongs’; is it something to do with (shhhh) sexually-transmitted disease? If not, why is it up there, when Viagra, let alone Osama Bin Laden, George W Bush or Iraq, are absolutely nowhere? (Answers to Sir Ian Blair on a postcard please - he needs them - or comment below for forwarding)
Being a limey (and having lumbered myself with a mass of useless research into some crappy American rock bands and even crappier American actresses as a consequence in taking on this exhausting piece) there were occasional nuggets of knowledge to be unearthed in attempting to quantify this Wordtracker list in terms of its net contribution to universal knowledge, albeit not many. (I should perhaps mention in mitigation that I used the latest Wordtracker email update of the top 300 keyword surges from the last 48 hours, rather than the paltry 30 surges posted on their website).
For instance, I did like ‘child gps’ riding high at # 37, which led to this fascinating scenario on the Larta site:
In the future, we won’t lose anything. Advances in global positioning system technology allow users to easily pinpoint the location of any object on earth. GPS boards have been reduced to the size of a postage stamp. Soon, we could attach GPS locators to everything we own - cell phones, briefcases, wallets - and even our children. GPS products are being developed for child safety and parental supervision, personal protection, Alzheimer and memory loss supervision, law enforcement, animal identification, property tracking, and a host of other applications.
Also, I seriously dug oakley sunglasses at # 191; as a must-have fashion accessory their ‘wearable electronics’ (cool shades with built-in mp3 players or mobile phones) beat over-priced and under-functional products like Burberry iPod cases any 48 hours.
If not unquestionably the answer to where we come from and where we’re going (although it could be), this Wordtracker snapshot of the current zeitgeist is at least ultimately reassuring: there will be no shortage of babies in the foreseeable future, Pamela Anderson endures despite everything, and it certainly looks like the Sedu company has hit a winning niche in the multi-cultural hair processing market.
As for Paris Hilton, what can anyone say? She will, whatever, always provide the best possible excuse for staying at the Crillon.
1 # 1 - games cheat, #2 - playstation game cheats
2 #5 dogs,
#103 zoo cams, #142 puppies, #255 dogs for sale, #256 wicked weasel, #276 neopets
3 #2 playstation game cheats
, #25 - britney spears,#33 my chemical romance, #36 green day, #42 teen, #45 breasts, #52 gameboy advance cheats, #66 tattoos, #73 myspace, #84 obituaries, #94 college girls
4 #4 paris hilton, #10 pamela anderson, #16 girls, #26 nudist, #31 pam anderson, #35 vagina, #45 breasts, #61 hot, #67 babes, #79 asian, #87 panties, #108 gay (.. and so on, down to… #138 skinny dipping, #169 swingers, #277 ls magazine, #280 taylor rain
5 #6 yahoo, #7 ebay, #8 google, #21 mapquest, #24 yahoo.com, #43 search engines, #50 ebay.com, #55 hotmail.com, #58 hotmail, #83 google.com, #95 amazon.com, #104 a, #130 myspace.com, #146 www.yahoo.com, #192 www.ebay.com, #260 1
6 #11 - poetry, #70 wedding vows, #200 love, #287 wife, #296 love poems
7 #1 (as above), #2 (as above), #23 play games, #29 games, #34 game cheats for ps2, #52 gameboy advance cheats, #276 neopets
8 #14 amoxil
9 #17 googletestad, #57 google dance
10 #4 paris hilton, #9 jessica simpson,
#10 pamela anderson, #12 jenna jameson, #15 carmen electra, #19 hilary duff, #25 britney spears, #30 jessica alba, #31 pam anderson, #41 jennifer lopez, #44 angelina jolie,#68 eminem, #71 jude law ….. #253 nikki nova, #268 bart simpson, #271 eva mendes
11 #22 sedu hair styles, #145 sedu flat iron, #161 sedu hair straightener, #222 sedu hair straighteners, #290 sedu beauty products.
12 #285 disturbed, #297 c, #295 x, #286 weird al, #262 wwe, #260 l, #245 best man speech, #220 disney, #214 pussycat dolls, #202 big, #187 bow wow, #170 horses, #153 slipknot, #149 a14a, #104 a
13 #3 top 100 baby names, #18 names and their meanings, #37 child gps, #70 wedding vows, #78 family guy, #116 meaning of names, #244 breast, #266 baby names, #298 recipes
14 #33 my chemical romance, #36 green day, #41 jennifer lopez, #46 music lyrics, #60 system of a down, #68 eminem, #72 christina aguilera, #82 50 cent, #97 beyonce ….. #275 metallica, #289 madonna, #294 ludacris
15 #13 free radio stations, #28 radio stations
16 #39 dodge charger, #53 kelly blue book, #81 maps, #96 cars,#168 traffic cameras, #175 used cars, #177 driving directions
17 #26 nudist, #27 california, #32 thongs, #38 bikini, #40 thong, #61 hot, #100 weather, #138 skinny dipping, #169 swingers,#186 flower tattoos, #189 wet, #190 nudists, #191 oakley sunglasses, #193 beach, #300 hot chicks
18 #4 paris hilton (undisputed queen of the keywords)
I had Lucida Sans or Lucida Unicode as standard Microsoft installations, but these were rarely, if ever, stipulated as alternatives in the stylesheets in question, so I ended up back in Verdana or Arial as usual, which were generally appended as habitual afterthoughts just before the final sans-serif catchall for those sad users who didn’t have anything at all (especially RAM).
For others equally deprived of Mac culture, Lucida Grande comes as part of the default font set of the Apple OSX system. Accordingly - presumably - it was thus assumed by Mac world denizens to be as globally available as Times New Roman is for the rest of us.
Well, its not. In fact, it took me quite a while to discover anywhere I could download a free version of the font re-engineered for Windows. I finally found the best emulations of all the OSX system fonts here, or a zip file of just the emulated Mac Lucida fonts here.
Since I discovered how good, and legible, Lucida Grande appears to be, I must say I have begun to put it into the style sheets of other sites I’ve been working on. Often (like my heroes) as the first choice. However, in the knowledge that perhaps 90 percent or more of any likely visitors will not have it on their systems, I also list Lucida Sans and Lucida as alternatives (which I think most people should have) and always add Arial and Helvetica as well - having gone off Verdana of late and never having seriously been into such outre choices as Trebuchet MS which have swept the web in the past.
I also test how a site which may have Lucida Grande as first choice looks in its Arial alternative, which is quite a bit different, to say the least. Lucida Grande is, as the name implies, quite a lot larger than either Lucida Sans or Arial at the same pixel size - which is what is most attractive about it as well.
In my most private moments, I sometimes dare to ask myself how designing a site primarily in Lucida Grande fits in with the ‘Standards-compliant’ philosophies which all my greatest heroes espouse so energetically. I presume its as cool as they are.
]]>Flintoff, Pietersen, Harmison all amazing, Vaughan a great captain (pity about the batting) and even Geraint Butterfingers Jones getting that final tensest-ever wicket, this somehow makes it all worth it. Just seeing Ponting’s face at the end…
Now its Old Trafford on Thursday, and the chance of greatness beckons….its been a long long time.
]]>