Not long now! Toni’s over 34 weeks and going well but i’m telling you… I’m getting really sick of waiting! I’ve been getting ready for months and now it’s near I just have no patience, and not to mention the two weeks off i’ll get with them

Filed under: Personal on October 31st, 2006 | No Comments »

Morphy Richards have launched a set of retro’ hair styling products called ‘Head Gear Retro’ for which I have just completed a website.

The styling is a homage to the packaging, which is in turn a homage to 50’s American glamour illustration. The competition which is a key part of the content is quite nice in that we are looking for girls to submit glamorous photos of themselves in the hopes of becoming the ‘Morphy Richards Most Glamorous Girl’. Entrants upload photos, while users can vote online or by SMS.

Filed under: My Work on October 17th, 2006 | No Comments »

Dude! This online NES emulator is THE only way to waste time in work if, like me, you are too cool for school!

Filed under: Cool Stuff on October 10th, 2006 | No Comments »

Listening to some new Deftones this morning that I’ve had not too long. Saturday Night Wrist – great title, hehehe. Sounds really good. It’ll be hard to top White Pony for me though which is the best album they’ve ever done IMHO. I love albums like White Pony that have a definite mood about them. You know the one’s I mean, where you listen to it and you would only listen to it in order and the whole thing at once. Pink Floyd have made a carreer out of making albums like that. Iron Maiden’s Brave New World is like that for me too. Also Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits (I don’t care whether you don’t like them, I do!).

Toni and I went to the Spaceport in Birkenhead on Saturday afternoon ‘cos we were bored, so I got my TomTom and headed off. I’d heard some stuff about it and looked at the website a few times and thought it looked quite good. My god how I was wrong! It tried to be one of those hands-on museums, but just turned out to be rather boring, and a lot of the exhibits actually made hardly any sense. I don’t know how kids would get on. Co-incidentally, we found out when we got there that a week earlier a new Doctor Who exhibition had started inside. As a result the queues were large to say the least. In fact, this turned out to be the best thing about the whole afternoon. I’m not into Doctor Who in any way, but the exhibits were really cool and saved the whole trip. I took a few pictures of the exhibits and put them on my Flickr account.

Mmmmm…. Spinach & Ricotta.

Filed under: Personal on October 10th, 2006 | No Comments »

Here is another one of those cool relationship programs called TuneGlue. This one is for music. I had a play around with it and it’s quite accurate and could be a pretty useful tool for finding new music/bands e.t.c. It’s nothing that hasn’t been done before by sites like Last.fm, but has a nice interface.

Filed under: Cool Stuff on October 9th, 2006 | No Comments »

Well… it’s going quite well this sleep training all things considered. I’m now going to bed at 12 and getting up at 6.30. I’ll probably just drop half an hour next week to 6 hours. Apart from the obvious problem of tiredness, it really isn’t that bad at all. I’ve got loads more time in the mornings to tinker about and download stuff, play with my music collection e.t.c. The biggest bummer is having to keep it up over the weekend! I think the reason it isn’t hitting me as hard is because i’ve managed to get up at un-godly hours consistently.

Anyhoo… with this extra time i’ve managed to finally finish all of my ‘anal’ tweaks to my mp3 music collection. Adding artwork, years, correct track orders and what-have-you. I tend to get a little obsessive the tagging of my mp3 collection, but it’s absolutely great now especially in the new iTunes which has the dukebox-esque artwork carousel. It seems to have added value to what was quite a throw away thing and elevated it closer to a real object.

I also checked out my Last.fm music profile the other day… My god What the hell my collection looks like if you didn’t know me!? The thing is it only updates the music I listen to directly from my computer and not from my iPod which is what I use mainly. The thing is, that when we listen to music at home, we generally shuffle the whole 80GB worth which is both my music, Toni’s music and music, like a blackbird, I have acquired from friends at work e.t.c. Needless to say, I wasn’t too happy with the reported stats. I may have to start listening to stuff on purpose to skew the results – Music Propaganda!

Filed under: Personal on October 7th, 2006 | No Comments »

Pretty grumpy today. I’m not used to it though as i’m generally in various shades of happy. The reason I think is because i’ve been training myself (or more accurately my body) to need less sleep because the babies will be here soon.

I’ve always had between 8 and 9 hours sleep, and if for any reason I lost a decent chunk in a night, there have been a few times i’ve nearly paid dearly by falling asleep on the motorway during the journey home from work. I figure when the twins are here i’m going to lose more than a decent chunk, so rather than them growing up without a father, i’m dropping 1 hours sleep a night per week. Last week i dropped to 7.5 hours a night and yesterday started a further drop to 6.5. Whoa! Jesus I was grumpy this morning.

Speaking of which, Toni is over 30 weeks pregnant now. 36 weeks is generally considered full-term for twins. The hospital have said to expect them any time after 32 weeks though as twins generally appear early… Not long to go at all!

Really excited when I get chance to sit and think about it, but as it goes, I really have lots to do. The nursery is the biggest thing. It’s sort of been a storage room since we moved in, and the knock on effect of emptying that room reverberated throughout the entire house. Everything has to be housed somewhere or binned and in many instances it meant that cupboard rooms, had to be stripped and decorated, walk-in wardrobes had to be built, then the room had to be gutted and now plastered before it can be decorated. We’ve got a front room 5 foot high full of self-assembly nursery furniture that cost nearly £800 that can’t go anywhere until the plaster has dried and the room has been decorated.

The hallway, stairs and landing have needed doing aswell so i’ve just finished decorating that which has given me that valuable feeling of achievement which makes me feel better because it’s like things are getting done you know. At the moment it’s hard to appreciate it because i’ve got my amp, cab and guitar stuff there, which makes it VERY hard for Toni to get in and out of the front door. Not sure what’ll happen about that when the kids arrive actually. That is the only place that stuff can go in our house, and it absolutely can’t go there after they’re born as There isn’t enough space to fit even a car seat, let alone a double pram.

Filed under: Personal on October 3rd, 2006 | No Comments »