Apr 11

Pet Pillows…why?

This post from Boing Boing fianlly made the mainstream press over the weekend, with it being in the Telegraph yesterday and Metro today. The link to the homepage is now down. But would you have your favourite pet preserved and its fur made into a pillow cover?

But the reaction against it appears to be quite virulent – the animals are already dead, it’s not as though they were bred to be made into a fur cover.

I can understand the motivation behind people who would want to get their favourite animals stuffed so making a pillow cover is a far more practical option. But I’d just find it creepy..and have to ask why? The strawpoll around the office reflects this opinion…very creepy.

Apr 10

Timing is everything

The company has been undergoing some fairly major restructuring over the last 3 months. Ther have been multiple re-organisations of teams and markets and now it is the turn of my area, the IS function, and we have the big meeting on Tuesday. But they still have to work on communication a little – in my my mind it would have been far better to send out the notice for the meeting at 8.45 on Monday morning than at 4.45 on Friday evening

Apr 09

Marketing…good and bad.

It had to happen, someone offer’s their penis for an advertising tattoo. The aution on ebay has been taken down, so we can only speculate on the size of real-estate on offer. However, I’m interested in how he was going to generate traffic to view the ad!

However, this flash animation for Hitachi perpendicular drives is fun, and catchy. Annoyingly catchy.

perp1.jpg

Apr 09

Royal Transport

I love the site of the majority of the British Royal family clambering on a bus to get moved up the hill to the castle.

Apr 05

Workmen explained

I found out what the workmen on the next building have started doing – they are going to be adding an extra floor to Debenhams.

workmen.jpg

Apr 05

Google Maps Part 2

I love google maps…and now they’ve discovered the rest of the world, at least via Satellite. They have added satellite imagery to the site, with all the saem cool sliding and zooming, but a global version, to various resolutions. So I can take a closer look where I have just booked a holiday

Apr 05

Meme Tracking

Reading through the blogroll, it’s interesting tracking the various ideas and topics as they flow. But if you join in the conversation half way though, how can you make sure you have the picture? One of the recent topics has been this very subject, and now there’s an answer – BlogPulse. Using key words, you can now track which blogs mentioned something first and the meme epidemiology. So you can follow trends, hot words and the full path of conversations. There’s other tools out there, from Technorati to Blogrunner, but BlogPulse comes with some cool analytical tools and is well worth a play.

Apr 05

Pet hates

I hate this shop display. It first came out last summer, when it was warm, and a fun water-squirting flower seemed a good idea. But it’s been there ever since, every single day; all through the winter and now back into the spring. And it’s suffered; it’s got weaker and weaker. At the start, the flower used to zip around, splashing al round the container. Now, it wavers, often not having the strength to raise its head; it flops flacidly around, still performing, but only just.

It needs to go.

waterflower.jpg

Apr 04

Invites galore

Looking around yahoo360, I see that I have invites a plenty for the sharing (along with orkut and gmail…). Leave a comment if you want one.

And there’s quite a few others as well..whilst Jeremy Zawodny is way over his limit, there’s also this forum.

Apr 04

Pope John Paul…

For some reason I find the images of the embalmed(?) body of the pope very creepy..especially as it is obvious they’ve put him in new shoes

Apr 02

‘ow bist thee – family visits and ghosts

For Easter, I travelled to see the family. Sunday lunches are always fun, and this time we had 12 around the table. For some reason we got onto ghost stories: for a while my gradnparents have felt they have had a visting pair pf ghosts called George and Alice, so named following a visist from the loal medium who was asking whether they had relatives with such names. Presences are definitely felt, mainly just watching, and the dogs have seen something, refusing to go into rooms at times. However, the ghosts have been quiet lately; my Nan kept asking them what they wanted – I think they just got fed up of being hasselled by her!

Mom and Dad had their own story after that. Travelling back from a do late one evening they’d just turned a corner when a boy on a bike, with no lights, sped across the road immediately in front of them. Dad slammed the brakes on as the boy disappeared down a track to a farm. The spooky thing was the boy had appeared from the left side of the road, where there was nothing but a steep bank and a hedge, there being no way through, and there was no sight of him down the track when they got level. The farm was Yew Tree farm, where Carl Bridgewater, a newpaper boy on a bike was murdered in 1978. In the week the people who had been jailed for his murder started a successful appeal against their conviction, they’re convinced that Carl is whom they saw.

One thing about visiting is hearing the dialect I grew up with and heard on the buses (always pronounced with a z) and in the shops. It contains some nice mediaeval useages such a ‘bist’ for ‘are’, you can see the links to german/Dutch with these. More can be found on the BBC dialect sites

Apr 02

Friday Night Project

I was on TV last night, or at least the back of my head was. A few weeks ago, my friend Carmel had some tickets to go and see the filming of the Friday Night Project, staring Jimmy Carr at the LWT studios on the South Bank. I’d never been to a TV studio before, nor seen filming done beyond an episode of It’s a Knockout, a birthday treat a long time ago! It was slightly weird in that the programme was being filmed 3 weeks early, so there were topical jokes about weddings and races that took a while to get into. Sadie Frost was the guest and she did a good job and she did a good job of avoiding wife-swapping questions – and was not phased when there were a couple in the audience who had been to such parties 😉

A fun night – we’re now waiting for Top Gear tickets to come through…