Gig – Saint Etienne, Ritz, Manchester

I went to see Saint Etienne at the Ritz in Manchester last night. It was a very good gig, but I’ve realised I’m too old for gigging now:

1) Strobe lighting – thinking to yourself, wow, that looks good because you haven’t seen it for about 5 years and then thinking – well, no-one warned us there would be strobe lighting, what if someone has epilepsy?

2) The only thing that had changed in the 13 years since I was in the Ritz last was the bar staff, who would all have been around 6 at the time.

3) One of said barmaids spoke to me really slow and said “ARE YOU ENJOYING IT?” to which I replied “OH YES, IT’S LOVERLEY.”

4) The music was loud, but not blearing, I would say it was at a comfortable level.

5) There was a young girl stood in front of us who talked all the way through the gig and I nearly asked her to be quiet as I couldn’t hear every word she was singing.

6) Got home thinking to myself I’ll clean the soles of my shoes as it was a bit sticky in there.

Oh well.

Lauren in the Final!

I got a phone call from my niece, Lauren, tonight.   She was all excited because they have got through to the final, where they will play either Ferryhill or Durham Johnston.

She plays in goal and is very much looking forward to the final.

Hope you win Lauren, congratulations to you and all your team from me, Jeanette, Dave the hamster, and all our friends!

Stag Do

I had the unfortunate event of being told that my stag do was all arranged for the weekend of 26th June.  I say unfortunate, because I don’t know where I’m going and probably won’t find out until I get there!

Having said that, I did do the same to Glen, although, he did know we were going to Poland, just not exactly where abouts in Poland.

I really don’t like not knowing where I’m going and to be honest, everyone has been quite restrained in not letting me know where I’m being taken.  It has come out, however, that there is an airoplane involved, so I’m happy with that.  Derek tried to retract that statement by saying “Well, Exeter is a long drive away and it’s better to fly”. 

I’m in safe hands though, as Glen is fully aware that I didn’t do anything to him and kept him safe at all times.  Please bear this in mine fella…..

Congratulations Nick and Jessica

Nick and Jessica

Here is a picture of our friends Nick and Jessica Watson at their wedding in Napa, California, 16th February 2009.  Congratulations to you both.  He did look a bit happy with himself all day, and rightly so.

Endurance Event

Endurance Race Results

Here is the photograph from the podium of the Karting Endurance Event for Nick’s stag do.  If you look closely, you will see that me and Nick appear to be holding a bottle of Champagne.  Oh, yes, I remember now, that’s because we won!

Eat my carbon monoxide, losers.

Well done Nick, and a good time was had by all.

Minnie is No More

Here are my favourite photos of Minnie. Unfortunately, the cancer in her nose proved too much for her and we had to take her to the vet to be put to sleep. She battled on, but couldn’t breath and had too many sleepless nights.

We ‘borrowed’ her from Manchester Dogs home around four years ago and then decided we couldn’t send her back, so we had to adopt her. She lived a very quiet life, in fact, it was about three months before she even made a sound, when she barked at Dave when he came in the house.

We still can’t believe she was there in the first place. She was very well house trained and highly independant. We only ever needed to put her on the lead to cross the road, or to stop other dogs having a go at her. She did have a bit of a tissue fetish though, which we never quite worked out. We’d get up on a morning and the top of the stairs would be covered in used tissues that she’d tear into strips. Still, you’ve got to amuse yourself in this life. She did have to go on Hormone Replacement Therapy though, which was amusing.

She always slept a lot and liked a brew and toast in the mornings, but doesn’t everyone?

I don’t know if they have the internet in doggy heaven, but if you’re reading this Minnie, we hope you have met up with Pippa and are having a great time barking at cats again.

The Coming Of The “New Man”

I came across a posting on a website that I had to share. Thing is, I recognised it and I’m sure everyone reading this will have recognised the same in their time. It is an article on the ‘New Man’. I won’t describe it, as it will take away from you reading the document. I don’t want to start a bidding war of any kind, but I’ve encountered two ‘New Men’.

I know that one of these got his come-uppance and few years ago, and rightly so. I’m not a bitter man, but I’m sure the second one is just around the corner.

Here is the article, it is very well written and the comments are also, Enjoy!

Metapixel

Ok, I admit. I thrashed the Digg.com servers for a little while using an open source website mirroring tool, which I wont mention, but it’s easy to find. About 30,000 user icons later, I present to you a product created by a couple very short and sweet command line tools.

1024×768
1280×1024
1680×1050
1900×1200

On an unrelated note, I’ll be disabling hotlinking of images shortly, so if you’re going to steal my content, please rehost these images yourself.

So how can you make your own mosaic? Simple! Download and install metapixel, if you’re running Ubuntu, it’s located in the universe repository.

Then we are just a few commands away from generating sweet photomosaics. First, we prepare the images.

metapixel-prepare -r source destination --width=48 --height=48

This copies all images from the “source” folder, (recursively) searching into every folder within, and dumps every image it finds into the “destination” folder after resizing them into 48×48 pixel images. You’ll want to modify the width and height to fit the source images. This took a LONG time for me, since my library of images was so gigantic – but once we’re done preparing the images, you don’t have to do it again. Woohoo!

Next, we actually generate the output file(s) with this one liner:

metapixel --metapixel input.jpg output.png --library destination --scale=35 --distance=500

This takes input.jpg and increases the output size by 35 times (i.e. REALLY BIG IMAGE), uses the library destination and does not repeat any images found in the library closer than 500. It’ll spit output.png after a little while. If you don’t care about repeating images, removing the distance flag will result in MUCH, MUCH faster generation times.

Here’s a another I generated, this HUGE image was scaled down from about 228 megapixels.

In related news, here’s a groovy post over at Kristen Symonds’s blog with a ton of GIMP/Photoshop brushes, check it out, good stuff.

Which images would you like to see rendered in Digg user icons? I’ve got lots more ideas but not much time to use them, since I’ve got some holiday shopping to do.

I’m back, here are some more…

Bill:

Imogen:

StumbleUpon:

Reddit:

Ok last update, promise… this is actually pretty darn fun.

Last Jedi Supper:
The original was a 460 megapixels PNG file (30720×15040 – 370MB) scaled down to 7680×3760 – only 28MP, saved as 70% quality JPEG ended up as about a 7MB file… still HUGE! The GIMP was using about 1.2GB of RAM (Thank god I upgraded last week to 4GB!) while scaling the image.

England Manager

Just for the record, I’m still declaring myself up for the job.

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