Holy camera goodness batman

Digital "polaroid" camera.

Wow.

I bet it's incredibly expensive to buy & run.

But it'd be nice to have one.

http://www.zink.com/tomy-xiao

What I wore 28/11/08

original tank girl boots!
click image to enlarge

Gay pop idol

Boyzone have never been among the playlisted bands in my life. In fact, I've never given them much thought at all beyond 'bleurgh'.

Today though, I am pretty happy and surprised with them, their management and their video direction/writing people. They have broken new pop ground by allowing openly gay band member, Stephen Gately, to play a romantic story line with a man in their new video*.

Yay for progressive pappy pop videos - this might be enough to make me watch it on You Tube.

As seen in the Guardian.

*previously he was always forced to play alongside women - despite his audience being, if not fully aware then inclined to believe, that he was gay.

Super fantastico exhaustion

I spent today exercising like I've never exercised before, then sleeping like a complete baby (with my glasses all crooked on my face) from pure exhaustion (see previously mentioned exercise).

I was fortunate enough to get to have a go at the physical activity test for the fire service entry exams this morning. And I'm totally psyched to report that I either cleanly passed or very nearly passed all of them!

Ladder climb - climb a ladder, get a knee brace & take your hands off to look over your shoulder - passed!
Breathing apparatus - crawl about in the dark turn a twisty tunnel with breathing mask & helmet on - passed!
Assemble equipment - fiddle about with ancient gadget to put it together in correct order - passed!
Ladder lift - lift 25kg weight to simulate the end of a ladder above my head - utterly exhausting, but I just passed on my second attempt!
Dummy run - drag a fake corpse 30ft - passed!
Equipment carry - ridiculous string of activities involving running and carrying heavy and awkwardly shaped stuff - nearly passed, just 3 seconds over the time limit!

Now I know what's got to be done to make myself fit and strong enough to ace the test on the the actual day - time to join a gym and get into training.

Gales of change

image from A message for Obama Flickr group, taken by grammardog.

You might already be aware, Barak Obama won the presidential election in the USA.

Breathe a sigh of relief that it wasn't a McCain & Palin double act for the win. But be ready for some disappointments too.

There is a huge amount of excitement about Obama's success (including me), but it's going to take a lot more than an election to get the ball rolling towards change. It'll take a good while for it to pick up speed as well.

Good luck to him, I can't begin to imagine the amount of pressure he must be under to live up to the high expectations of over half a country*.

* yeh, I know he's the one that gave them high expectations in the first place, but he's a mere man and it's getting a but zealoty.

Week in pictures

I spent three nights this week trying to fix the Subtext website (at the moment I'm still unsuccessful), Claire came round and kept my company one evening - she made felt badges while I scratched my head and struggled with coding.

Went out on Wednesday to see the fireworks at Nottingham castle. Quick drink in the pub before hand.

Unfortunately we didn't get tickets in time & it sold out. Turns out free fireworks are a good deal better!

The weather has been so cloudy and miserable all week - hooray then that the sun is shining today. This is my view from work - the weird spidery reflection is the spider plants in my window.

How do web masters do it?

I'm a web master (mistress), but there's currently no live site to prove it. I forgot to renew the hosting for Subtext, and now it's expired. At first I thought, no biggie! I was going to transfer to a new hosting company soon anyway. Then I realised I had no idea how to work the internet. PHP and MySQL scripts are not languages I even remotely understand, and I have broken my FTP client.

It turns out it is not as easy as it all looks.

Anyone know how to a) fix everything, and b) build me a nice site on Joomla or Drupal that I can't break?

Fingers crossed.

What I wore 30/10/08

Reversible hat: 'Columbia', from the shop where my boyfriend works

Red coat: H&M a few years ago

Black skirt: a shop I can't remember the name of in NYC

Leopard print tights: a concession in the Broadmarsh Centre, Nottingham

Boots: handmade for me by Green Shoes

Cassette tape bag: Lunacy boutique

Stripey bag: new, from a stall at Camden market