June 30th, 2006
Here we are folks, Bad Joke Friday returns with the Underwater theme… feel free to let loose with the worst you can and I look forward to joining in… I will start you off right now with:
2 fish walk into a bar, one says to the other… What the f**k is that doing here?
Enjoy folks!
UPDATE: I should point out that the object of this is to make up jokes based on the theme, they can be as bad as you like or just be a play on words that’ll make anyone groan.
June 28th, 2006
Oh my god…. The Spiderman 3 teaser trailer has appeared for us to enjoy. I am a huge spiderman fan as some of you may know and I have been looking forward to this for a while, well since the last film actually 
Man I wish I had HD on all of my hardware, my mate has an HD projector that I am very envious of, he put me onto the teaser last night and then told me he was off to download it in HD and check it on his projector… What a dick!!!
Please let me know what you think of the trailer, I know it has my movie juices flowing 
The next thing on the cards definitely has to be the Transformers movie which will no doubt be awesome too although it isn’t out until next year… bummer huh?
What movies are you looking forward to? Am I missing anything else that I should really be turning my attention to? Caroline just rearranged our living room yesterday which means I can now use my Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound system again when watching movies, you have no idea how sad I am, I have taken to listening to films almost more than watching them when i have the digital sound.
Lord only knows how many times I have watched the rescue of Morpheus in The Matrix at extreme volume and gotten a boner when the mini gun goes off and I can hear shells falling behind me and water splashing up my walls and bullets fly past my ears… The bit where Neo dodges the agents bullets for the first time as they scream out of a Desert Eagle towards him is just one of the best sounds ever…
Geez… that got me started!
June 27th, 2006
Man I hate it when I am ill…. for those of you that follow what I blether on about, you might have noticed that I have been a little abcent from writing over the past week. It started with Charlotte being ill on Sunday when she came back from her dads and proceeded into a room full of four people being ill and was no pretty sight. To top it off I was off work for a few days as a result and will have lost out on a substantial amount of cash 
At the end of the day family come first and that is where my heart is so that is where I was… still don’t think my guts are 100%!
Enough about the poorly monkey, before I came home and decided to mingle with the afflicted, I was down in London for @media2006 and I would have to say it totally rocked. This year I decided to avoid the talks that were (what I presumed to be) more tutorial based and went to listen to folk that were really deeply involved with the more interesting aspects of what is going on on the web.
I have to say, it is a very good thing to meet up with like minded individuals and share a passion and interest, it is also nice to meet people that you wouldn’t ordinarily cross paths with. Never in my life would I have though that I would be just feet away from the guy that invented the box model hack or the guy that built Internet Explorer, the browser of that brings any modern web developer a host of nightmares and woes (note from me… sorry to those non tech heads out there that haven’t got a f’ing scoobie what I am talking about).
I met some nice people this year, some of the guys that I used to work with were down in London and in turn some of their old work buddies were in attendence also and I am glad to have met them… Top blokes!
This is kind of the hard part… If I were to sum up the highlights of my visit, some of them would be as follows:
- Hooking up with folk I met last year
- Listening to some truely inspirational people talking about what my professional future holds
- Getting bemused by magic lights in Hamleys toy shop
- Finally understanding what the fuck microformats are about
- Speaking to people who I knew didn’t want to speak to me (it’s always nice to wind folk up )
- Having lunch on the the Saturday meetup and meeting Chris Heilmann who was genuinely nice and a pleasure to be about
- Meeting the the guys from the Multipack
- Being completely agnostic about the football when it was on in the pub… not being funny folks but footballl sucks ass lol
- Coming home…
Those are just some of the things I would highlight about the experience, for those of you that hummed and hawed about the whole thing… get a grip and just buy a ticket, it is worth it, I’ll see you next year!
So to wrap this up and bring it to a close… I haven’t talked enough about microformats (me and Mark have an idea brewing on this front) but I think I will post about that next, it is getting late here so I am gonna call an end to this post but now that I am back and feeling 98.7%, watch out for the podcast on Thursday and of course… Bad Joke Friday Pt 2 on Friday…
Speak to you soon peeps….
June 16th, 2006
Jeez… what a few days, I apologise for my absense but I have been away at @media2006 in London so have been away from keyboard for a few days. This is the first chance I have had to get internet access and it is just going to be a quickie because I have ordered some food and gotta get back to the pub pretty quick.
Once again @media has not failed to entertain and provide a wonderful experience for us, the weather has been good, the people have been nice and the speaker have been most engaging.
To give you a quick summary of what I have enjoyed so far…
Jeffery Veen was truely inspirational, I had the pleasure (yes it was a pleasure) of listening to Chris Wilson (The man behind IE) tell us all about what is in store for the future. Tanktek didn’t dissapoint with his talk about Microformats, I cannot wait to play with them! WCAG 2.0 is a little bit of a headache that doesn’t look to be going anywhere too fast and I need to go to the loo (too many pints) and then go get my food….
Will be back home tomorrow night and will talk about it properly… and sorry for the short post but things are kinda crazy down here….
Speak to you all very soon… Feeding time!
June 11th, 2006
After reading a post about making the perfect omelette I decided it would be a good idea to have an omelette cook off seeing as I enjoy making them. This post is dedicated to the omelette I made today and if you want to use the recipe then feel free to do so… you won’t be dissapointed.
The Recipe
- 1 Green Pepper
- 1 Red Pepper
- 1 Onion
- 1 Red Chillie
- Thin sliced cured ham
- Austrian Smoked Cheese
- Cheddar Cheese
- 4 Eggs
- Milk
- Ground black pepper
- 4 tbl spoons of olive oil
The Method
- Dice your onions, chillie and peppers
- Grate your cheddar cheese & slice your Austrian smoked cheese
- Break 4 full eggs into a bowl, add a little milk and add black pepper to your taste then beat with a fork
- Add the olive oil to a hot frying pan heat it up and then add your onions, peppers and chillie
- Once your veg has gone a little soft, add your egg and milk mix
- Stir the egg lighly in the pan and mix it with the veg
- Allow the Omelette to cook for about 6 or 7 mins until it looks at a bit like this:
- Add your ham to the top of the omelette like so and place under a hot grill:
- Take it back out again once the ham has been lightly grilled.
- Sprinkle a little bit of cheddar cheese evenly around on top of your ham and top that up with your smoked cheese (I chose a nice pepperoni pizza style design…)
- Stick it back under the grill for a bit untill the cheddar has gone all oily and is bubbling whilst the smoked cheese has just gone all gloopy…
- Now comes the fun part, what you have to do is take a fish slice around the bottom of your omelette to make sure the whole thing will slide out your pan. Once you have done that, tilt your pan over your plate until just over half the omelette is out of the pan and then drag the pan back agross the omelette to fold it over.
- Now you have cooked you omelette it is time to serve it up, I usually cut it in half and then serve it between 2, with this particular omelette I decided to slice potatoes and mix them with olive oil, mixed herbs, garlic salt and a little hint of cajun spice and then oven them for the duration of this cook off. To top it off I used a garnish of quatered vine tomatoes which I was going to put in the omelette but decided against it.
I hope you like my omelette and maybe get some use out of the recipe… Omelettes are great fun to cook and don’t be afraid to experiment. I have made a few donkeys but generally they turn out okay in the end.
Happy eating!
June 8th, 2006
Right I dunno how easy or how hard this is going to be to pull off because a lot of puns are down to the pronunciation and this is a blog where nobody else can hear each other but here goes anyway…
As some of you know I am a big fan of both word play and also of bad jokes, I have decided that I would like to run a bad joke day every Friday in an attempt to broaden my repertoire and have a laugh at the same time. Chis and company over at Brainfuel have got the caption contest covered so I figured I should go down a slightly different path and get some good old fashioned humor on the go.
To add a twist, I will allocate a theme every Friday and it is open season for jokes based on whatever topic I set. I have seen myself play this for hours with some friends (I am thinking you here Mr Paul) and it always amuses me.
Todays theme is Lord of the Rings.
A few weeks ago I was set the same challenge as I have set you and I chose it because I am curious to see what other people come up with. I think one of the better ones that I managed was:
Q: Who was the first person from Lord of the Rings to hit the no. 1 slot in the charts?
A: Elfish Presley
See what I mean? I love bad jokes, especially ones that make me groan! I tend not to read jokes if they are too long in my mail box but I will certainly enjoy seeing what you can come up with…
Enjoy…
June 4th, 2006
Holy shit, who’d have thought it? I have kinda kept quiet on this one but when 9Rules opened up for submissions I was game for it so submitted this site. I am very passionate about the web and do my best to improve all the time, I believe in pushing myself and taking steps that I wouldn’t normally take and it pays to do these things.
A whopping 700 sites entered and only 111 got accepted, you can view the full list here… it’s nice to know that someone out there appreciates the efforts I put into what I do and now that I have a chance to do even better I intend to capitalise and hopefully grow as both a person and a professional.
So what is the 9Rules network? Well here is a blurb from the 9Rules site
We highlight the very best web content in the world, and package it in a nice bow for you to unwrap. Our members discuss a wide range of topics from interface design and technology, to business, humor, and many others.
…and what are these 9 rules I here you ask?
- Love what you do.
- Never stop learning.
- Form works with function.
- Simple is beautiful.
- Work hard, play hard.
- You get what you pay for.
- When you talk, we listen.
- Must constantly improve.
- Respect your inspiration.
These rules pretty much sum me up to a t anyway but I have a new family now and look forward to some great times with them all. Thanks to those of you that have supported the site and given me reason to keep going, I will do my best to not let you down…
I still have to officially accept the membership agreement, I guess the guys have been busy at the 9rules headquaters so I haven’t yet had an official email about it but I will not lie, I have a very sweet taste in my mouth and will be happy to sign on the dotted line (err unless I have to drink blood and sacrifice stuff).
Congratulations to everyone that got in, I look forward to meeting you all and making some new friends, here’s to the future…
Scrambles about to clear a space for his new shiney badge
I will post again once I know what is going in on…
June 2nd, 2006
Okay, many moons ago after a night out I stopped past my friends house to say hello and stuff, Kolin happens to be an audio master (Mainly known as Biomechanoid) and has made some awesome music over the years (more on that at a later date though). After very little discussion we decided to get me plugged in and record some ad hoc lyrics in his studio and the track you are about to hear is a bi-product of that little audio excursion.
In Winamp it says that this was made in 2003 but I would put it a lot further back than that, I think Kolin had a little play with it and mashed it up a bit further. Still, seeing as I never got a chance to record a podcast tonight, I am still duty bound to provide you with unique audio content on a regular basis and I think this qualifies seeing as it is part of the rather large backlog of things I have done over the years.
I actually caught up with Kolin the other week which was really nice, he seems to be doing well for himself and is creating soundbanks for Absynth and recording soundscape stuff for various people. Very talented individual who I have a lot of respect for.
Anyway, the long and short of that meeting is that hopefully we are going to hook up again soon and try to lay down some tracks. I am getting back into the creative side of life again and I will not tell a lie! I am loving it
Oh well, here goes, the track is called Monkey Business, please let me know what you think of it by leaving a comment!
[audio:http://www.azcazandco.com/podcasts/monkey-business-baby.mp3]
Download the track here
June 2nd, 2006
Ha ha, okay so I am slightly cheating this evening, something came up that has prevented me from getting a proper recording done for the site but instead I have decided to share a wee gem that I wrote a while back.
This little poem is called “Spots” and it goes a little like this:
[audio:http://www.azcazandco.com/podcasts/ive-got-a-blackhead.mp3]
I’ve got a blackhead
and I’ve got spots
I’ve got some that squirt little
and some that squirt lots!
Download this poem.