Eaten alive, originally uploaded by dafyd.
This poor Lego chap appears to have become something’s lunch – my bet is on the mice that seem to have moved in…
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Eaten alive
February 23, 2009 by dafyd
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Starting for 10
February 23, 2009 by dafyd
Tonight is the final of series 15 of University Challenge, as Corpus Christi, Oxford, take on Manchester. Both teams have done phenomenally well in all of their previous games, so tonight promises to be a tough game.
I’m tipping Manchester to win. I know a lot has been written about about Corpus Christi’s captain, Gail Trimble, and she’s certainly very bright, but I think Manchester has a better team overall. Trimble has dragged her team through the previous four rounds – without her, I doubt they’d have made the second round – whereas all four of Manchester’s team members contribute a great deal (also, the Manchester captain is doing a PhD on “the history of the book” – awesome).
Team Durham, two years ago, did rather well (if I say so myself) because we were able to rely on each other, rather than having one person answering all the questions. Kudos to Trimble, though – she’s a general knowledge machine. I’d love to see her on Mastermind. Heck, she could easily have been the sixth Egghead. I really can’t work out what angle this article in the Sun is going for – are they suggesting that she’s out of touch, elitist, or that it’s good that she doesn’t bother with such trivia? Knowing the Sun, I’d say the latter, but the tone of the article suggests the former. Curiouser and curiouser…
Category: 1 | Tags: quiz, sun, tv, universitychallenge | Comments Off
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What do you do..?
February 17, 2009 by dafyd
A quick snippet of a track from the brilliant Avenue Q, which describes pretty well how I feel about job hunting at the moment…
On a related note, the West End production of Avenue Q closes at the end of March. If you haven’t seen it, go now. If you have seen it, go again – I’m fairly certain I’m going to…
Category: 1 | Tags: avenueq, jobs, music, theatre | Comments Off
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Moi j’aime le music hall
February 17, 2009 by dafyd
It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these, but I really don’t feel like posting anything else at the moment.
Rules: 1. Put your iPod, iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. on shuffle. 2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer, hit skip if you get the same artist. 3. You must write down that song name, no matter how silly it sounds. 4. Have fun!
If someone asks if you’re OK, you say… “We’re in the Money” by the Original Broadway Cast of 42nd Street
How would you describe yourself? “Sugar and Spice” by the Searchers
What do you look for in a girl? “Brown Eyed Girl” by Everclear
How do you feel today? “Hurt” by Johnny Cash
What is your life’s purpose? “Purpose” by the Original Broadway Cast of Avenue Q (Seriously, this is what came up. I think iTunes is slowly turning into HAL…)
What’s your motto? “Walk Like an Egyptian” by the Bangles
What do your friends think of you? “Crazy” by Aerosmith
What do your parents think of you? “Wonderful” by the Original Broadway Cast of Wicked
What do you think about very often? “Little Moments” by Brad Paisley
What do you think about your first kiss? “La Belle et le Bad Boy” by MC Solaar
What do you think of your best friend? “Rolling Stock” by the Original London Cast of Starlight Express
What is your life story? “Crippled Inside” by Widespread Panic
What do you want to be when you grow up? “I Wish I Was James Bond” by Scouting for Girls
What do you think when you see the person you like? “You Raise Me Up” by Josh Groban
What will you dance to at your wedding? “Megamix” by the 1991 London Palladium Cast of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat Seriously.
What will they play at your funeral? “Raiders March” by John Williams
What is your hobby/interest? “100,000,000,000 Green Bottles” by Max Boyce
What is your biggest fear? “If I Can’t Love Her (from Beauty and the Beast)” by John Barrowman
What is your biggest secret? “(I’m Spending) Hannukah in Santa Monica” by Tom Lehrer
What do you want right now? “The Perfect Nanny” by the Original London Cast of Mary Poppins
What do you think of your friends? “Fat Bottomed Girls” by Queen
What title will you give this post? “Moi j’aime le music hall” by Charles Trenet
Category: 1 | Tags: me, Memes, music | Comments Off
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Ah, yes…
February 8, 2009 by dafyd
So, when I said that I’d be blogging more frequently, it looks like I lied. Sorry about that. No real excuse – just didn’t have anything to say.
I’ve still not got a proper job, seven months after graduating, which is incredibly frustrating. I’ve been doing odd bits of freelance website work, which keeps me busy, but I don’t think counts as a job, and certainly isn’t what I wanted to be doing. Lots of applications, lots of rejections, lots of not hearing anything at all. Most frustrating? Being told that you’re “over qualified” or would “feel restricted by the role”. Frankly, I don’t care – I just want to work!
Still, light at the end of the tunnel, and all that: there’s a 50-50 chance that I’ll end up in the States, where there’s an even bigger jobs market in which to not find work. I’m also seriously tempted to take a PGCE – teaching seems to tick all the boxes on my “what I want from a job” list, and they pay you to train, so that may be what I’m doing next year if the dates work out. I’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime, a snippet from an email I received from East Midlands Trains. Seems they need to revise the difference between “less” and “fewer”…
Category: 1 | Tags: grammar, jobs, me | Comments Off
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Dewey
December 22, 2008 by dafyd
I’ve decided to sort my books. I have four bookcases in my room, giving 21 shelves, and another two cases in the attic. Lots of books, most of which are where they are simply because that’s the only place there was room for them.
So now they’re not on the shelves, but rather on the floor. Yay. All are being catalogued and sorted, and will then be reshelved according to an approximation of the Dewey Decimal System. An approximation, because there are various books/types of book that I want/have to put in different places.
Various facts and figures:
- I’ve catalogued 750 books so far, and haven’t started on those in the attic.
- I’ve only found 3 duplicates (as in, exactly identical books). One’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, one is Pears Ultimate Quiz Companion, and one is a 1964 Livres de Poche edition of Zola’s Germinal.
- There are 34 Harry Potter books on my shelves, in five languages, with only the one duplicate.
- Somewhat inevitably, the busiest Dewey numbers are 440 and 840 (French Language and French Literature, respectively).
- The ISBN was invented before the barcode.
Category: 1 | Tags: books, deweydecimalsystem, me, mess | Comments Off
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Slow news day
December 6, 2008 by dafyd
The BBC homepage at 2.15 this afternoon…
Category: 1 | Tags: bbc, news, oops | Comments Off
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We apologise for the interruption
December 4, 2008 by dafyd
So, I’ve been told off several times in the past couple of weeks for not having blogged since the beginning of August. I sincerely apologise. It was not my intention to let down my, literally, dozens of readers. Truth be told, I broke my blog publishing system just after that post, and I simply never got round to fixing it. Until now.
So, shiny new site. And a shiny new domain at dafydjon.es – see what I did there? (dafyd.me.uk/dafydjones.co.uk will continue to work, of course – I just have some ideas for the different domains that may come to something eventually.)
I’m quite a fan of my Snapshots pages, which presents all of my photos from Flickr in a new light. Sort of. (Geeky aside: there’s some heavy-duty PHP fu happening with the Flickr API pulling those photos in here – if you’re interested, I’d be happy to explain what’s happening.)
The Footprints page tracks what I’m doing elsewhere on the web, just in case you were bothered.
There will, inevitably, be broken links and files that no longer exist. If you’re looking for something in particular, give me a shout and I’ll hunt it out for you. Oh, comments on blog entries now work properly. Yay.
There are various things that I want to add, features that were on the old site that I’ll be bringing across as well as some super-duper new stuff.
For those who care, this is version 5 of my site. Version 4 was (more or less) alive for just over four years. Definitely time for an update.
So, more blogging to come shortly. Much has happened over the past few months, some of which I will be sharing.
Category: 1 | Tags: blogging, me, web | Comments Off
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Less grammar. More driving pleasure.
August 24, 2008 by dafyd
I just caught this BMW advert, narrated by Donald Sutherland, during the Grand Prix:
Pretty advert, sure, but it’s that last card, the tagline, that annoys me. Any GCSE student – let alone a copywriter at a major agency, working on a huge campaign for a massive client – could tell you that you can’t say “less emissions”. It should be “fewer emissions”, as “emissions” is a countable noun. I’d be perfectly happy with “less gunk emitted”. Even “less gas” would be fine. But absolutely not “less emissions”.
That said, Fowler says that
less can be idiomatically used with plural nouns when these denote something closer to an amount than a numerical quantity, as with distances, periods of time, ages, and sums of money: less than 5 miles to go | less than six weeks | children less than three years old | less than £100
In this context, I suppose, “emissions” is denoting the total amount of gunk being emitted, so this could, feasibly, be correct. I’m not convinced, though – it just seems sloppy to me, using ungrammatical English to fit the meter of the tagline.
The Engine Room (a blog about language, not cars) has an interesting discussion about the same thing…
Category: 1 | Tags: advert, bmw, cars, english, grammar, language, video | Comments Off
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iPhone wishlist
August 10, 2008 by dafyd
I’ve had my shiny new iPhone 3G for four weeks now, and while I love everything about it, I can’t help but feel that there’s more that it could be doing…
Fortunately, Apple has enabled users of the iPhone to download additional applications for the phone through the App Store, which works very much like the iTunes Music Store, except that instead of downloading music you’re downloading full-blown programmes to provide extra functionality.
Of the dozen-or-so that I’ve downloaded so far, the Facebook app is probably the one I use most, providing (almost) all the functionality of the website in a quick, shiny, touch-optimised interface. The Google app ties in nicely with the GPS functions of the phone to keep search results relevant to where you are (a search for “pizza” finds your nearest takeaway), for example. NetNewsWire does exactly what the Mac application does (or it did, until the latest iPhone firmware update killed it – a fix is in the pipeline).
I love the Apple Remote app, which lets me control iTunes on my Mac/PC from anywhere in the house. Last.fm provides me with a huge number of streaming songs, based on my listening history, with which to supplement my iPod playlists. Shazam does what it has been doing for years, identifying music based on a few seconds of it – perfect for pub quizzes…! The TubeStatus app will doubtless come in useful the next time I’m in London.
Did I mention that all of these apps were free? There are, of course, others that cost, including a few fairly decent games, but I’m happy with what I’ve got. Almost.
I can think of a few things I’d like my iPhone to do for me that it doesn’t at the moment:
- Flight tracking. There’s a Dashboard Widget to do it, so why is there no iPhone app to track planes?
- Trains. A National Rail arrivals/departures app, based on the live National Rail data. Surely this can’t be too complicated?
- TV listings. The Radio Times listings data is perfect for an iPhone app, isn’t it?
- SlingPlayer. Apparently this is coming. It will be awesome.
- BBC Radio. The new iPlayer is very flair, but because it wraps the Now Playing/Listen Again streams in Flash, they don’t work on the iPhone. I’d love for the Beeb to develop a nice touch-friendly interface for Listen Again, so I never have to miss The Archers… They’ve done it (sort of) for the Podcasts.
If any of these already exist in the App Store and I’ve missed them, feel free to point me in their direction…
Category: 1 | Tags: apple, bbc, iphone, mac, phone, radio | 4 Comments
