2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2

Here’s just one of the three 4′ tall ice sculptures:
{{popup ganesh.jpg ganesh 500×667}}Lord Ganesh
I took bloody tons of photos, but because I didn’t have a tripod, they’re all blurred to buggery due to atmospheric indoor lighting and shaky hands. I should’ve learnt by now. At Joop & Laura’s get together t’other night he showed me his new SLR digital camera. It was a sight to behold and to wield. I’m experiencing yet another bout of camera-envy… Anyone want to buy my Fuji Finepix S5000? One careful owner? 250 of your earth dollars… or 6 pounds, probably given the exchange rate these days.
Have you ever been to www.last.fm ? It rocks- enter 3 of your favourite artists, choose someone with a playlist that looks to your taste, then listen to streaming radio from that person’s favourites list. You rate the tracks as you go and teach it what you like and it should start showering you with nothing but tunes you like. It’s, like, a radio TIVO. And it’s free apparently. It might start weaning me off NPR and BBC Radio 4…

Puff and Merlin are being picked up in a couple of days. We’ll have to have some kind of celebration/ tea party to see them off. I don’t reckon Merlin will notice any change, mind. Puff will be missed.

On me way home to blighty t’other week, i listened to the Jon Stewart’s audiobook on America- Democracy Inaction- a grand listen and the best bit is he’s off promoting it around cable TV land, so yesterday we got to watch him on “The O’Reilly Factor” (A Rupert Murdoch-sponsored, right-wing talk show bastard-fest) defending all that is true and right. O’Reilly scolded him for saying “Je ne sais quoi” since they’re boycotting France for their Iraq stance on the program. Stewart says that’s bollocks and why not boycott Saudi Arabia, then? Anyroad, long story short, O’Reilly came off worse for once, having invited someone with an ounce of intelligence. Huzzah.

On the techie front, i’m switching my browser to Firefox, it’s ace. Especially with the new Explorer that installed itself at me with the XP Service Pack 2 thingy and seems to rival your average bonfire night for pop-ups. Can’t recommend it enough.

If you’ve yet to see Jon Stewart taking on the “Partisan Hackery” of CNN, click to enjoy 13 minutes of JS exposing the twunts on Crossfire

In other news, I’ve joined BritBlog.com. So if you’ve clicked through from there, then cheers. I have a guestbook you know… It’s been fun skimming through other UK peeps’ blogs.

And finally, I found a fantastic program online where you upload a photo, and it delivers you a rasterized version in as many sheets of paper as you want that you then assemble into a full size poster. Klem’s poster fell down, but pictured below is Sita in front of Lulu’s makeshift shrine:

…using a combination of knowledge from my PHP classes (I’m about to sign up for the advanced classes for next week) and this page on how to Search and Replace using PHPMyAdmin so now the apostrophe issue is cleared up and there aren’t enough other errors to make it worth my while. My Spanish blog‘s another story though, I ended up going in and editing each entry by hand… Luckily there aren’t that many pages.

So, it’s still raining and starting to get colder just in time for Stu’n’Anne’s visit. Hope they don’t mind too much. Atticus is certainly a bit bothered by it all and is showing early signs of SAD. He’s missing M&D too, mind, who phoned last night to say they’d spent 15 hours on the road and had made it Los Mochis, of all places. They’ve set a new record, they’re probably somewhere near the Canadian border if they’ve kept up the pace.

We watched Pan’s Labyrinth again last night, as Sita hadn’t seen it. I’d forgotten how powerful a film it is. It’s the ultimate fable on rejecting authority and a gruesome depiction of post civil war Spain. I saw the Devil’s Backbone (El Espinazo del Diablo) t’other week too which takes place in the same era but doesn’t have as clear a division between fantasy and reality. Still fine viewing though. Had a game of Scrabble too. I got all the good tiles…

In terms of the HTMLery I’m going to be putting together a shopping site for a high-end artesanal jewelry store to complement their flash site soonish which’ll be interesting and a chance to practice my PHP skillz. Also I read the readme file that came with the photoblog theme and it explained how to have thumbnails on the archive page, so I sorted that out. Looks quite nice, oi reckon. Shame i’ve now got two blogs that don’t quite render right on IE6 though, but frankly IE6 users deserve all they get.

And that’s all for today. Next up, dragging Atticus through the rain to pick up El Público with its weekly events listing, Ocio, and then paying the phone/interweb bill, rent, and PHP course… it’s going to be an expensive day this one…

And I bet it’s the .4444444° that makes all the difference… Luckily there’s an air-conditioned cinema nearby so we’ve been watching all kinds of nonsense. Pineapple Express, has its moments but is still nowhere near as good as Knocked Up. Tropic Thunder last night cracked me up a fair few times. Mark Kermode says if a comedy makes you laugh five times or more, it’s a success and thus it definitely qualifies and is worth watching for the panda scene alone. Hellboy II is an option for this afternoon…

There are all kinds of small, independant cinemas dotted around Portland, our nearest however was showing Mamma Mia for 3 weeks and has now moved on to The Sisterhood of the Traveling (sic) Pants II, so we’ll have to go a little further afield.

We also found a Fred Meyer down the road, a huge, air-conditioned superstore stocking everything from cider to sweetcorn holders to trees. If they let you take your dog in it would be perfect. As it is ‘Cus and me just head down to the park at the bottom of the street, stick to the shade and paddle in the river. Even the basement’s starting to heat up. Righty, I’m off to shut the windows and blinds. We’re adopting Andalucian living habits. Siestas included. Hasta pronto…