[ originally posted Jan 21, 2010 @ 12:05 ]
At some point, you’ll have heard someone dispense the age-old sentence solution:
Be yourself.
I’m here today to tell you that, IMHO, “be yourself” is a very empowering statement. It’s also the most bullshit concept that ever existed.
And here’s why.
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[ originally posted Nov 17, 2008 @ 15:18 ]
Note: I’ve since gone back to using Bazaar on my laptop, because I really wanted local committing functionality. Unfortunately it is still awkward to use, particularly with TortoiseBzr for Windows, which sometimes mixes up its commands. My first choice for version control would now be git.
As a Windows-based developer, I was really enthusiastic about using Bazaar (BZR) for version control. At the time my SVN repository was on my home computer, and with being out of the house 13 hours a day there was no scope for making regular commits from my laptop.
Unfortunately, Bazaar’s Windows interface – TortoiseBzr – is still experimental, and DOS doesn’t make it easy to make partial commits because of its awkward copying and pasting functionality.
So even though Subversion is a centralised version control solution, I decided I wanted to go back to it – choosing to have a repository on my laptop.
It would have been simple to just export what I had so far and create a fresh branch in SVN, but I wanted to keep the 96 revisions I already had. Tags – which I began to use for version numbers – would have been useful too.
While there are tools for migrating to bzr from SVN, such as svn2bzr, there’s not much about going the other way. Actually, I had to do a lot of searching to find the tools.
The answer eventually came, in cryptic form, via someone else’s bug report. And for your convenience, here is my explanation, in plain English.
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[ originally posted Apr 2010 ]
Dating in the Dark is a spin-off concept from speed dating. I’ve been keen to do it since I’d first heard of it.
The speed dating company that originally promoted these events had stopped doing them due to a lack of interest, which meant that my hopes were shot. But thankfully, Slow Dating – one of the major speed dating companies – picked up the mantle. Their first publicised event was highly promoted, weeks in advance, through email newsletters.
[ originally posted Dec 27, 2007 @ 19:29 ]
Three years ago to the day, The Wheatsheaf Art Shop on Baker Street, closed for good.
I hadn’t seen it coming. They had a sale throughout their last month, with as much as 50% off art products (20% off craft products), which ended on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately for me, work commitments prevented me from visiting the store at that time.
I had only discovered this amazing shop a couple of months prior to the closure, and was incredibly impressed with their stock. There was something in the Wheatsheaf for artists, craftspeople, scrapbookers, graphic designers and anyone involved in creativity. Having been introduced to scrapbooking, I was particularly keen on their embossing inks and powders.
In the wake of the Wheatsheaf, a couple of other incredibly useful art shops have closed down:
The Art Club in Edgware looks like it’s in trouble too: it’s halved in size in recent times, with one half being home to an associated art gallery.
Our arts and craft stores need us.
[ originally posted May 5, 2010 @ 10:53 ]
This is my attempt to create a Chadwarden Munny figure.
The whole thing was created using a 4″ mini Munny figure, Super Sculpey, acrylic paint and some acrylic gloss varnish. I can’t say how long it took to complete because it’s been an on-and-off project.
By far the hardest part of the whole thing was the paint job: trying to get clean lines and a clean finish with all the colours. In the end, I still ended up with brush strokes! I’ve since decided that it’s not such a bad thing: details have never been my strong point.
Varnishing also proved to be a challenge: not only because it’s easy to end up with a tacky surface, but it’s near impossible to avoid dust and hairs sticking to the figure. Both ended up happening. Just my luck.
Right now I’m looking at removing the tacky varnish, and redoing some of the paint work.
