With just a few hours to go until 2008 arrives, here are some happy photos of Guillaume and Martin, taken in Amiens over Christmas (they're Carolines' nephews).
The handlebars stand still just for a second whilst I take the photo...
Oh and this is what happens when Mabel gets hold of a 'cheap' tennis ball. It literally lasted 3 minutes. Then she was bored.
I meant to post these photos sooner, but didn't have time.
The annual Christmas-Card-making session that I go through each year is somewhat of a tradition. For me, it was my Dad with his almost religious devotion to hand made Christmas Cards, who has made this become a task which under no circumstances should be neglected over the festive season. So, every year I set about making my Christmas cards.
There are 2 basic requirements:
- It has to be festive. Normally I like to focus equally on Christmas and New Year, without any religious connotations. Yes, I realise its Christmas but Christmas has long been a concoction of various traditions. Besides, I send my cards to many people, not all of whom celebrate Christmas (!). However, I believe we could all do with some good-will and peace on this tiny rock we live on.
- It has to be simple. The practicalities of making rather a lot of cards in one go should be considered. Some years I've had more complicated designs that are harder to mass-produce and with little time, the quality can suffer as a result.
Of course, if you're on my Christmas-card list then you already know all this. Anyway. This year I went with a Christmas Tree theme. The thick stripes of 'tinsel' on the tree came to mind after remembering some 80's album cover designs.
Excuse the bad language but the utter, utter a***holes over at “they’re not even worthy of being linked to” 123-reg have done it for the final time.
Them and their lame arse excuse of a website for managing domains and DNS records seemed fine a few years ago when I started using them. But since then, frequent email forwarding issues were just about forgivable but this year has seen some major balls ups in their web services. Premium rate helpline numbers?! DNS changes that just get saved but not implemented, just so they can spam your domain with their own holding page for 24 hours when they do?!
A few searches on the internet reveal many, many similar ‘customers’ from 123-reg who’ve experienced the 123-rage.
Actually, at this point I might blame James Cridland. I am sure it was him who recommended them to me about 6 years ago (I’m sure he wouldn’t now though, he’s quite sensible really).
Anyway, if you got domains from 123-reg then get them out of there! 123-reg will come crashing down on you one day. Start dancing with your domains over to the lovely, helpful, polite and downright decent people at: www.domainmonsters.com.
Oh, and one last thing whilst on this rant - also avoid 1and1.com. Any website service provider who has over *8 pages* of advertising in Computer Arts magazine alone is obviously spending far too much money on advertising and not enough on things like customer service, or “knowing what the f*ck you’re talking about” (bad phone conversation).
They are truly useless and should be avoided at all costs.
I went to Malta last week for my Mums birthday. A small family holiday. It was great. Weather was a bit mixed and I managed to almost cut a finger off whilst trying to rescue some wine but I had a good time.
Here are some photos.
That hurt! It looked alot worse the day before though...
I recently had the chance to spend a week in Korea as part of NCsoft's 'Global Stars' program. Aha - That overtime did pay off!
It was an absolutely great week, spent enjoying the food & drink, discovering Seoul, visiting the G Star games expo, and generally learning about Korean culture. Here's a few photos from the trip...
Seoul - Lots of tall buildings, you find yourself mostly looking up...
...not all buildings are tall thankfully.
Thought this was cool. A little service area for your Nintendo DS, complete with clearning solution, screen wipes and dust blowers.
Life is THIS happy! Korea is full of cute things, this is part of a booth at G Star.
The inevitable booth babe shots. These gals are promoting upcoming NCsoft title, Aion.
Pretty feathers.
They start 'em young in Korea.
Percussion freaks!
Wow, the XBox360 has a Karaoke title!?
The upcoming game Punch Monster had some of the cutest characters I've ever seen.
The toilet was a new experience. No longer is there just a button for 'flush'.
Just got back after a few hours (and a few beers) at ThreeSpeech's ThreeRooms. or is it 3rooms? I can never remember...
Anyway, it was a good night, with full copies of Heavenly Sword to play around with on the nice uber-big Bravia TV's, as well as WarHawk (unfortunately the competition didn't quite work out) and fresh demos of Unchartered: Drakes Fortune and Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction (both awesoméz, by the way).
Heavenly Sword developers, Ninja Theory were also there to talk about development on the game and Andy Serkis just happened to pop in unannounced also, which was very nice of him. He gave a little talk on his role in the game and the importance of character performance within next gen computer games. Nice chap.
Anyway - to be perfectly honest I'm off to bed so here are a few snaps from the evening... And thanks to those guys at ThreeSpeech for the event.
This room is lovely. Big TV. Sofas that are actually beds, in disguise. And pillows the size of baby elephants...
Big shiny rounds thing, always a winner.
This is the pit of joy. A 50" Bravia. Comfy cushions. And awesome surround sound. Just look at those B&W PV1's tucked away either side of the stage there...
The new Ratchet and Clank game. Very slick.
Unchartered: Drakes Fortune. Another very good looking game upcoming on PS3... Plays well too.
It's a robot (in disguise).
Look! It's Andy Serkis. In one part of the photo he's a slobbering corrupt & evil king, and in the other part he's enjoying a glass of white wine...
The night wraps up with some friendly chit-chat and some magical tables possesing the very best in beer theft abilities (by the time I had finished taking this photo my beer [sitting on the table there] had vanished!)
Had a lovely weekend in Edinburgh, er - last weekend. Took a few photos...
Rather fun promotion for the Andy Warhol exhibition inside...
Great street performer called James James who did all sorts of clever magic tricks with Oranges and Melons. "Where would we be without humour?" Answer: "Germany".
The awesome watchtower at Edinburgh airport. A bit like a reverse Gherkin...
Spent last week in Cornwall. Bit of bad luck with the weather though - heavy rain and force 8 gales for most of the week. Camping anywhere in England during the week of Glastonbury = bad idea. Sought refuge at my Mums house mid-week to dry off and put the camping plans to rest.
Oh well. Caroline and I managed to enjoy the week none the less. Random pics...
The heat in the Eden Projects' Rainforest Biome is incredible. As are the plants, their scale is awesome.
Peter Randall-Page's Seed. It really was beautiful...
