Stuff

Me iPaq is famous for its high quality, low light camera… Who was that masked man? That´ll be Fernando. And Javier´s Groucho…

How many times have I been to the Lucha Libre now? I´ve lost count to be honest. I´m starting to get a bit lucha fatigued, maybe cos of the inordinately long queues at the bar and the bloke who managed to tell me he wasn´t pushing in in front of me at the same exact time as ordering 2 beers with his nationally understood Mexican Hand Gestures… Git.

So anyway, I´ve got my computer back and it´s actually running better than ever. Thanks for your support and kind words during this trying time (Annelise & Dad 🙂 ) I spent a large part of yesterday watching progress bars crawl from left to right, but now I´ve more or less got the system as I wanted and can start working properly. It still sounds like a fridge with the temperature dial on -50 ºC though, but I´m going to get the parts on Ebay and after about 200 bucks should have a well behaved lappy back once again.

Alrighty, back to the grind. Hopefully in a few days I´ll be able to post a link to the fruits of my labours, and you can pick out some of the most expensive handcrafted jewellery Mexico has to offer.

PS Flickr tour #5/#6? to the Guachimontones on Sunday, meeting at 9am by the Arcos… Contact me for details!

Just want to tell the world that I got “ululate” and “anointed’ in a game of online scrabble. And still lost.

As you were.

So once again my laptop has died. I won´t go into details but suffice to say I´ve lost a fair amount of work. Sporadic posting once again will be the flavour of the week. Check out Flickr for some uplifting photos of people hawking their wears on a Sunday market during 10 inches or so of rainfall…

Slowly getting there with me latest ecommerce project… the PHP classes are coming in very hand though I don´t think my code
bares bairs bears close scrutiny… It’s taking up pretty much all of me time though hence the grinding to a halt of blogging this week after an auspicious start. Hey ho.

So it’s Friday so here are some three links to enjoy over the weekend:

Have you seen Cat Face yet? He’s got the body of a cat and the face of cat… There’s 3 episodes that’ll take about 2.5 minutes to look through.

Vector game thingy.

“There are two things that one can a director can add to absolutely any movie to make it at least three times better: zombies, and Gary Oldman”

Alrighty, back to the artisanal jewellery shop…

I finally managed a new minor film review (in the sidebar if you’re using a decent browser), and I’m trying to get back into my blogging groove, but I’ve got a fair bit of “chamba” on at the minute- translating movie scripts, site updates and getting my head around a WordPress e-commerce site.

This is also a test post to see if I can get a LightBox plug in going. Sorry if it screws up the RSS feed as I might need to keep editing this entry.

Yay, it appears to work. Click on John Craven to see another John in a balloon. Make sure the entire page has loaded first mind for the full ajaxy fun.

NB: Americans: First familiar”ize” yourselves with classic British kids TV programmes here… the first 30 seconds should be enough, then have an eyeful of Atticus´s latest landscape gardening attempt…

As visitors to our house may already know this is a regular occurrence whenever anyone drives away from young ‘Cus.

…for online tools to make you resemble Simpsons characters and Lego men and then 2 come along at once.

Behold! how I might look brandishing my PDA and electric guitar somewhere in the 8th circle of lego hell.

I´m liking the daily cartoons from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

So we´ve been to the cinema a few times this week and one of the adverts is for some car or other called the Edge or summink. Where Bono wanders into a record shop and the employees there are all excited “Is it really him”, then “Bono” leaves in his fancyish car. (Video below. Obviously)…

Sita and I had a heated debate about whether it was really Bono or not. First off the bloke looks just like Bono, BUT, he´s driving a pretty crappy car, there´s no U2 music in the ad and I don´t think Bono needs the cash from a cinema-only ad in Latin America and lastly I remembered some story or other on Weekend America or This American Life about a Bono Lookylikey taking advantage… And since I have my own corner of the interweb and Sita has nowt I can reveal to you that NO ES BONO. (As I type sita is saying “I can´t believe you´re blogging this…”, that´ll learn her for not even getting on FaceBook).

The evidence? Megafan.com.mx´s exposé and link to the impersonator´s site where in his list of gigs he mentions “11.22.06 Ford Motor Corp, Mexico City, Mexico”. Ta da!

It speaks fairly ill of Ocean´s 13 that I´m writing about the advert before it rather than the film itself…

Might be time for a jaunt to the hills…

Part of the rest and relaxation routine this week has involved a lot of American entertainment. Harry Potter, Ocean’s 13, The Office (US) and the end of the Sopranos. I’m also v. intrigued about how The Simpsons Movie’s going to be and more than a little concerned it might only be available round here in a dubbed version since the Mexican voice artists are almost as well known and well paid as the US lot…

Still, I happened upon this site today where you can upload a photo and after god knows how many attempts it’ll try to create a Simpsons version of you. I’m not convinced by the results, but it took 20 minutes I can’t have back to create this here avatar. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.

Taunton´s Somerset County Gazette is very excited about a “NEW” website that´s showing cine film videos of Taunton, shakily transferred to to VHS by a local firm, then recoded and uploaded to DailyMotion.com then presented in a website that is only missing animated gifs to make the 1996 web experience fully complete.

“It is a very time consuming process, but at least it keeps me out of mischief!” says the bloke who made it. Fair play to him, mind. And as the Gazette points out “The website is free to use”, so there´s a place to while away the hours for a few weeks… Another favourite line from the site: “Videos will be added regularly as time permits roughly in chronological order, so if you do not find anything to your liking please come back again later.”

Anyroad, best of luck, mate 😀

Mornin’ all. Things going v. well as per usual. We’re off hiking in Tapalpa today despite me trainers being drenched. 107 Photos over at Flickr from the last few days more to follow I’m fairly sure. Hasta pronto!

and thus no time to blog nor upload photos. Try again in a few days…

…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…

So along with the sunshine, Monica and Daniel left Guadalajara this morning at some point or another, we slept through the exodus. They took us out to the La Loteria cantina and the I Latina last night for a superlative send off. It’s been grand having them around. Some of many highlights include trips to Michoacan, watching entire seasons of TV programs, washing the dog, German/Mexican cuisine, more new restaurants than you can shake a fork at, Chacala, Spanish lessons in Starbucks and bars, Sanjuaneando, craft buying frenzies, accidental furniture shopping in the Baratillo, Lucha Libre, Tequila and lots more… Happy trails, Monica and OD!

… although the unicode lettering of all the entries is buggered up and I´ve no idea how to search and replace weird accents on a MySQL database. That´s my next project…

Never mind, it´s not like people read the archives anyway.

So what a weekend, Meg, Matt, Matera, Bowling, Pool, Sexual Diversity Parade, “Clubbing”, Tequila, tequila and even Lucha Libre. Then spectacular thunderstorms, power cuts and blog outages then last night Monica and OCD´s farewell gathering (they´re off on Thursday at the crack of dawn). I´ve got lots to catch up on but at least the heat should no longer be an issue… I´m wearing a long sleeved t-shirt today for the first time in 8 months you´ll be delighted to hear.

Meanwhile, in Gwod, we fit A LOT into yesterday. Flickr more or less sums up the first part. Part II was going out at 11h30 pm just like all the hip young Tapatians ready to party, but finding the music a bit too loud and settling for a night in playing Jenga and eating chocolate biscuits.

Matt’s permanently surprised with the number of cars that A) he’s never heard of and B) are allowed to circulate on the roads…