Month: August 2002

Fixing up someone else’s DTP is one thing… pulling an all-nighter doing it is quite another. Still, 27 programme proposal documents done (plus title pages), and the folder is in the post looking a damn sight better than its equivalent of last year. But still – I’m freelance – shouldn’t I be able to invoice for this shit? [sigh]

Sites like this help restore my faith in Americans. Priceless, if perhaps betrayed as a tad obsessive by its sheer length.

Morcheeba‘s new album Charango is, thankfully, dashed near Big Calm‘s magnificence. That is to say, it’s considerably better listening than their last effort. Best of all, buy the limited edition to receive a ‘free’ extra instrumental disc. Then you too can play ‘spot the forthcoming car advert.’ Nice.

While I’m usually awake, I’m not often sufficiently conscious to take in Saturday’s Today Programme. A pity, since the whole concept of ‘news in front of a live studio audience’ is delightfully barking. Particularly since they always seem to end up crammed into a village hall, in one of those forgotten little hamlets the Ordnance Survey insists is actually three miles further down the road. World news, followed by the perspective from Lesser Wendligham. Genius.

Today, I finished a bar of soap. This is, I believe, the first time I’ve achieved complete dispersion, rather than have my nerve fail, resulting in abandonment of the grotty final sliver.

Inconsequential, you might think, but I firmly believe such trivia is what weblogging was invented for. Soon we shall drown in a sea of wasted bandwidth, as if in some demented James Bond plot.

Ah, Flash Gordon – the original 1936 series. On DVD. Tops. If, like me, you’re struggling to cope with just how dreadful it is, take heart. The Rock Men in episode 8 are truly wonderful, with their ‘ancient language.’ A language that, remarkably, Doctor Zarkov can instantly speak… and a language that also sounds, inexplicably, like an audio track being run backwards. Wonderful.

For anyone who’s reading AND interested (hah! like, that’s going to be a large area on the Venn diagram of my life), It Likes You is still down. I know, I know. Sorry. There’s some barf between the old version of Geeklog it’s still running, and the latest software updates on the server.

I do have an updated version running locally, but am waiting until I have chance to do a new, more dashing page layout. So stand by for ILY 2.0. Sometime this month, with any luck.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion that, for my father, setting up a ‘router’ involved large amounts of sawdust and some sucking of teeth. For me, it involves large amounts of coffee… and some sucking of teeth.

However – and in the completely groundless belief that someone may actually read this – I can heartily recommend Netgear’s RP114 cable modem NAT router (Inmac uk link). Not only because it’s small and dashingly blue, and not merely because configuration and even upgrade do not depend on Windows, though all of this is accurate. No – it’s a cute piece of kit because of one cunning setting in one cunning web control panel thingy; ‘Spoof WAN MAC address as this LAN PC: (then enter a local IP).’ Deeply simple and cool way of setting up routing on, for example, NTLWorld cable broadband, here in the UK.

Once I’d found that, it took all of ten seconds to get everything working. Without it, I don’t think I could have got NTLWorld up and running – they require one to register a new MAC device by using it to browse to a specific IP address. Which, of course, doesn’t work if the thing has no browser.

On Tuesday I will set up broadband for my Dad’s LAN (you know broadband’s arrived when even your Dad has it, by the way). Unfortunately, he’s on ADSL, so we’re having to settle for a NetGear DG814. Sadly, this box departs from NetGear’s trademark blue. Tsk.