Category: Random

Lego Rules…

I recently found out one of my colleagues is a “Lego Master Builder”. He was given the title after he produced a full size guitar, or something like that…

Anyway, that little fact made the following list jump out at me when I saw it:

Top 10 Strangest Lego Creations

I use visits to my 4 year old nephew as an excuse play with Lego and relive my childhood. Although, I seldom build anything better than the USB stick 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Back to work…

I was off work for 3 days last week with a sinus infection. I spent most of the time sleeping, which was good as it cleared up really quickly. The bummer is that all the time in bed has left my back in a bit of a state. It doesn’t like being stationary for too long.

I guess the next couple of days will knock everything back into place.

Cheers

Tim…

Quality purchases…

I made a few quality purchases today, including:

– Germolene New Skin – It’s like fake plastic skin you can paint over cuts and grazes to stop you coating every piece of clothing you own with blood. I lost some skin off my knuckles on Wednesday night at Karate. What with showers, baths and swimming my knuckles didn’t look too happy this morning, until I gave them a new coating of skin. It will probably end up giving me cancer, but at least I don’t have blood all over my shirt sleves anymore 🙂

– Ghost in the Shell (Stand Alone Complex) 2nd GIG Volume 2 – This Manga series is totally cool. I’ve got everything that’s been released in the UK, including the two feature films. The 2nd GIG also has a really cool theme tune, which you can hear on the website.

– Placebo – Meds – The new CD from Placebo rocks. After almost 10 years I still find myself playing “Nancy Boy” and “Bruise Pristine” from the first CD on a weekly basis. I’ve been showing my age by listening to some quieter stuff recently, but now Rock is firmly back on the agenda.

Cheers

Tim…

Pub or pool?

Regarding yesterdays closing question, pub or pool? The answer was the pool.

I knocked out another mile. It’s definitely getting easier, but I think it’s because my technique is getting better, rather than any increase in fitness…

Of course, the next question is, how long can I keep this up before I get totally bored plodding up and down a pool each lunchtime? 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Lunchtimes…

Over the weekend I decided to start using my weekday lunch times for something other than reading/writing blogs and geeking out on the internet. Instead I’ve started swimming, something I’ve not done regularly since I was at University many years ago. OK. I go every week with my nephews, but I tend to float next to them, rather than actually swim!

Monday – It was just plain dire. What’s more, I was completely knackered when I got to Karate in the evening.

Tuesday – It wasn’t so hard, but it wasn’t good either.

Wednesday – It felt almost like I remembered how to swim again and I wasn’t too tired later on.

Thursday (today) – I managed to do a mile. It was no walk in the park, but I’m still alive to tell the tale.

Friday (tomorrow) – Do I go for another mile, or do I go to the pub? The jury is out at the moment. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Blog Aggregation and RSS…

I decided to write a basic blog aggregator using PHP and mySQL at the weekend, which is now on my website:

https://oracle-base.com/aggregator/index.php

I created a couple of tables in a mySQL database, wrote a few lines of PHP and “Bob’s your uncle”, as they say. I’m not sure if it will stay, but I thought is was worth a few minutes of my time to play around with it, just for the experience.

By far the most time consuming part of the job was writing the XML parser so that it was able to deal with all the formats of blogs I currently read (RSS, ATOM and RDF). Even within these formats, there are variations on tag names and date formats. It’s a real pain in the ass.

Just like everything else in IT, you take a simple idea (RSS), then let it diverge into a monster…

Cheers

Tim…