Another week and I would have gone one month without blogging. Although I’m definitely not setting any records I have to say this is probably the first time I’ve gone without blogging for a long period of time and genuinely missed it. Here is a quick Q&A regarding the last entry and what I’ve been up to in a nutshell.
“Why not just have a separate site for all that professional stuff?”
I feel I’ve already embraced my professional identity in most aspects of my life - my website is just going to be updated to reflect this. However the tone will remain rather informal - after all my views on design and art are still my own personal views. There will still be a few personal entries based on my life and the happenings within it, they just won’t be as frequent.
“[name removed] from [website removed] has stolen ur (sic) layout idea and images.”
I’ve e-mailed said person asking if they could kindly take down the images they took from this website. It doesn’t really bother me since this layout has no real significance for me and the young perpetrator only runs a small blogsite. If it were portfolio work, or a well planned layout it’d be a different matter altogether.
Progress on the re-branding has come to a temporary standstill since my sketchbooks and materials have only just recently been unpacked. Mike and I have moved into an adorable little flat just outside Cambridge. It’s only up until the end of August whilst I work locally but we’re very pleased.
Work itself has been an odd arrangement. When I arrived I was promptly told that they weren’t ready for me and sat me down to do some icons. Not exactly my ideal line of work and perhaps the dullest thing to do from nine till five thirty but at least they’re keeping me busy for the next few weeks. When they are ready for me I will be doing some interactive design on a cutting edge application. It’s an exciting prospect!
Back to the re-branding, there will be blog entries highlighting key points which I’ve found interesting. There are some things I’ve found out about myself which I didn’t realise until scrutinising everything I like and why. It’s returned some surprising results!
On a final note I wanted to thank all of you guys. Everyone has been very supportive of my project despite it being under wraps. I look froward to sharing it with you all.
Comments are offYou might think that I’ve finally stopped using song titles for blog entries but you are sorely mistaken. Name the band and I will feed you e-cookies. But for once the title is related to the entry. It involves a tale of two cats, chicken and some random updates which have nothing to do with but I will share them with you anyway.
Yesterday my brother, Will, and dad went to Tesco’s to do their tri-weekly £100 run of junk food that my brother consumes in a little under 48 hours. They came out of the supermarket feeling fulfilled at that they had pushed our household further into debt when they saw a kitty in the car park dodging traffic. He was running up to people, jumping on them, meowing and generally looked very disorientated. So naturally being cat owners themselves, Will and my dad picked up the little kitty and brought him back home.
When he got here, Billy (my cat) was not best pleased. He’s a very jealous cat and will even get miffed if we pet a cat outside the house and he catches us. We locked up the newcomer in our front room with some food and a litter tray and made a call to the RSPCA. A recording told us that the centre opened at 10am so the kitty was to stay the night at ours.
Dinner was certainly interesting. The cat we brought back was well groomed, healthy looking. A little skinny and startled but otherwise a normal, very loving cat. He begged for some scraps whilst I was serving dinner so I gave him chicken. Next thing we knew he was jumping up on the table trying to snatch our dinner. Eventually we left him the leftovers and he ended up eating a whopping two legs, a whole breast and the wings. Kitty was a bit hungry me thinks. He had already eaten Billy’s food by this point as well.
So the next day, being today, after being rudely awakened by the kitty having a hissing contest with Billy and enduring a nail biting thirty minutes when he escaped outside and wouldn’t come back when we called him, we finally took the kitty to the RSPCA. At the RSPCA they checked his chip and told us that his name is Tom. He’s been missing for two months having been reported missing on the 2nd of August. His owners were contacted and they started to make their way over straight away, as any loving owner would. It was the best outcome yet, talk about a fairy tell ending!
I might stick some pictures up later of Tom. We took a few in when we went around the houses opposite Tesco’s to see if anyone owned him. I’m really pleased that he had a loving home to go back to. His family must be so happy! I don’t know what I would do if Billy went missing. He’s an old fat grouchy cat, so not very people friendly. Luckily he’s pretty savvy and knows to stay close to home.
And now for some updates - I’m changing all the links to match my domain name so you won’t be seeing any more calm banana links up in the address bar. This may take a while, but hopefully no links will be broken in the process.
Comments are offVamos para la luna caribe! If I start one more blog entry using song lyrics and the ilk I think I’m going to start having to pay the rights to their respective music labels. I’m really not at all that uncreative, I just lack the skills to make a proper topic title. Although this one does relate to what this entry is about. Unfortunately I think I’ve forgotten what I wanted to write about whilst faffing in this paragraph, so I’ll just disappoint you all with some more dull updates on the website, general randomness and er, dancing.
Right-o chaps. Firstly my wonderful content is back online. It’s all there in it’s glorious splendour with some added goodies so go hither. Spam my ask and answer, have a gander at my new photos or simply gaze vacantly at my site info. With so much to do and so much to see how could you possibly resist?
And if that’s not enough I also have some stupidity in store for you. Erin (that’s another webpage you can check out - the people in my blog!) and I were rolling along in her awesome Mini when we saw a Mini in the other lane approaching. Not sure how many of you know this but it’s a Mini tradition to flash your headlights at another Mini. So our conversation goes something like this:
Me: Erin aren’t you going to flash that Mini?
Erin: It’s an estate. I don’t flash estate agents.
It brought about the lulz as so many popular internet folks would put it.
My life has been boring as of late, so I’m going to rest the fate of my blogging in your hands my dear readers. What would you like to see me ramble on about? Maybe a piece on cultivating eggplants, hand rearing leeches or how to make children shut the hell up. I leave it up to you all, make up a topic, blog title or something entertaining for me to blog about. Could be about anything, anyone or everybody needs somebody to love… Damnit, I’ve done it again with the song lyrics.
Comments are offI’m going to be even more obnoxious than usual and post a website centric blog entry. It makes a change from my usual egocentric blogging, ramblings and generally intellectually insulting banter. What was I talking about again? The website I believe - it is pink, grey and has a chequerboard pattern repeated throughout. It has also been a brief semi-hiatus with all my content being offline.
Well rejoice (or not) for today is the day that I finished uploading and converting all my pages! I’ve installed new scripts, happiness and updated areas that were still tainted with FrontPage coding. It was difficult work and I’m still not 100% valid, but it’s getting there. You can have a sneaky peak by following some links on my site however I’m not going to point you at them. You’ll have to find them yourself. Like an inaccessible treasure hunt.
Please note these pages are not finished and therefore may or may not spontaneously burst into flames. I am still messing around with the sidebar and such which is pretty simply but knowing me I’ll cock it up in some way or another. ‘Get function’ errors here I come. This also means that I don’t need any errors reported back to myself seeing as I’ll probably be in the process of fixing them or making them worse.
Apart from that everything is fully functional, up to date and ever so sexy. I will be more, once I’ve sussed everything out.
Speaking of more, gimme gimme more, gimme more, what does everyone think of Britney’s comeback? I watched some clips on YouTube and holy crap on a stick! She really doesn’t care any more does she? With lip syncing that bad and such a poor performance overall I don’t think she’ll last much longer. Honestly I think she should stick to having her sanity make a come back rather than her career. Poor Britters. If you find some clips, look out for 50 Cent. His expression is priceless.
Comments are offI know everyone is going to love this entry for it’s spontaneity. Firstly tomorrow I’m shopping in London so I’m excited about that. Secondly I have my first driving lesson today that I’ve had in ages or since my last driving fiasco. Thirdly Erin and I have had some funny conversations.
Well since I’ve not much to say on London except I have a lot of cash and a lot of shopping to do, I’m going to skip straight to driving. I haven’t driven in a little over six months. My last driving instructor always seemed to lack faith in my mad driving skillz such as pointing at squirrels in bushes and putting the car sideways on my driveway (that took a while to fix). Having said all that my driving is not that bad and I do know a thing or two.
Anyway I’m doing intensive driving lessons now for two weeks at the most everyday for a few hours. It’s the only way I’ll learn but I’m really nervous about getting behind the wheel again. My last instructor literally gave up on me and stopped answering my calls and texts. It didn’t really help my self confidence as you can imagine.
Yesterday I was on the phone to Erin and we were discussing people who had screwed us over in the past by being devious, back-stabbing bastards. I don’t know how we meet these people, but there you go. In any case I came out with the cliché phrase “You think you know somebody…” to which Erin added “And then they treat you to some surprise sex.” Maybe it’s in bad taste but I laughed.
And of what of this website? Well I haven’t had a chance to look at it for a while because I’ve been so busy. And as you can see I will be even busier. Anyway I will try my best to do as much as I can today so that the site can be up by this weekend sometime. It’s been fairly easy to upload my site thanks to the wonderful FanUpdate but it’s just time consuming.
So if I’m going to get anything done I better stop blogging and get cracking. I’m going to leave you all with a few songs you must listen to:
Not my most overplayed but they’re some new additions to my music collection. I like them so you might find them funky too.
Comments are offI’ve just downloaded and installed FanUpdate due to Rachael’s wise words to do so. After some fiddling with it I think I’ve got the hang of it. There are still a few bits I’m unsure about but I think it’ll be easy to convert to PHP. I’ll be done in no time.
Does anyone know how to make the paragraph tags in WordPress work? I’m fed up of abusing line breaks. And WordPress deletes my line breaks everytime I edit an entry! It’s a little stupid really. I enjoy writing in seperate paragraphs.
Anyway this means I will probably be displaying content soon. Next up is figuring out why I can change my nameservers. Does anyone have any clue what’s going on?:
Error text: Nameserver ns1.calmbanana.co.uk doesn’t exists in the registry
Sodding thing. I’ve done the normal thing of logging in, clicking on a huge link that says ‘Nameservers’ and adding the freaking servers! No I’m not misspelling it. No I’m not an edict and I know that the nameserver is right. Yes I’ve tried using the IP instead.
GAH! Hopefully I’ll have this fixed soon, this mental URL is driving me mad.
Comments are offI think I have a problem. Blogging is something I love doing anyway but didn’t do frequently because it used to be difficult to update everything manually. Now I haven’t got that excuse I feel like I could blog daily. Hopefully I won’t tire you all! I have things to blog about now I’m actually motivated to do so. And no more spelling mistakes! Thanks to the spell checker you won’t have to cope with my horrendous spelling anymore :p
All that’s left is to change the smilies. How on earth do I do that? I could find them anywhere!
Many of you will have noticed that the layout is back! I coded it as a proper Wordpress theme (of sorts, I used a generator for the bones, all the styling is mine). I’ve worked with Wordpress before, I found it was OK to work with. I am very familiar with CSS and feel pretty at home with it. I understand PHP, but I copied my pages before I saved or edited them just in case! Anyway I got the theme up and running much quicker than I thought I would. I will be making free themes and installing other ones for the site soon!
The pages will be along shortly. I’m going to update them using FanUpdate which should make my life much easier. However I will need to download and install it first, then find out how to use it. Hopefully it shouldn’t be too hard, it looks fairly simple to use. Having said that I screwed up Wordpress pretty well before I installed it properly, so there are no guarantee’s.
Well, apart from updates there’s nothing I really want to say! Well there’s a lot I want to say but I’ll wait to see what Rachael thinks. We’ve been brainstorming like two smelly banana’s. I won’t say anything more!
Thanks to everyone who has been commenting whilst I’ve been skinning the site. Your support lifts my spirits when I’m knee deep in CSS!
Comments are offI’ve been attempting to skin Wordpress. It’s been going swimmingly but it will take a lot of work. I still need to upload my content and such and get round to getting all my links up. I am aware I have not added a few people, that’s just because I’ve stopped halfway through as I’ve run out of time. How hectic!
I tried changing the nameserver on my host to point at Calm Banana where I’m being hosted and the thing went anal. It keeps popping up with an error. Please people never ever use 123-Reg for anything! They’re cheap and their service is irrefutably reflective of that. I don’t know how it’s faring now but hopefully it’s working like before (not well but it leads you to this place at the very least!).
Thank you all for the lovely birthday wishes. It means a lot to me! No really it does. I will come up with something nice for everyone. My 20th was a special birthday made so by my friends and those who have been kind to me.
And now for a question: how do you spell bizzerk? I know that’s not how it’s spelt but I can’t seem to find anywhere that has the correct spelling! I would look it up in the dictionary but we don’t have one in the house. Let’s not start on how sad it is that a capable university student depends on the internet and the shift f7 function on Word in order to expand her lexical knowledge and not a trustworthy dictionary or thesaurus.
Perhaps I should have asked for one for my birthday! Christmas it is.
Tomorrow I go back to work after having a long weekend. I only have four more days left but I’m sure it’s natural that I really don’t want to go! I can’t wait to finish. I got to London Tuesday, and before that on Monday I have my first driving lesson… well since my last driving instructor upped and left me.
More information another time, I will only leave you with an enigmatic trail of my personal life for you all to speculate at. Look at me sounding all poetic! I suppose if that’s the best I can do then I really do need a dictionary.
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