Queendar posted this link on the Firefly Forum – you have to see it to believe it!  I am SO going home and getting some Diet Coke and Mentos, to see what happens!!

http://eepybird.com/dcm1.html#featured-video

Very, very VERY cool!

Cxx

Oh god, how embarrasing.  I get the rest of the way through the registration process, only to discover just by looking at the layout, that it’s in some way connected to MySpace.  Or at the very least, they’re using MySpace templates.  And if you want to make your avatar more personalised, you have to pay for the privilege.  It’s a MangaMoneyMaking Scheme, please ignore my email invite.

Until it’s free, it’s not going to take off.  Until it’s free at everything but a very premium level, it’s not going to be satisfactory, not in my book.

So again, my apologies for sending you that email via IMVU.  *wishes ground would become swallowy*  Won’t happen again!

Does my Geekiness know no bounds?!

The other day I was walking around Edinburgh with my iPod in, thinking about the last few episodes of Doctor Who, and how poor the latest one was (the Absorbaloff episode), how disappointing it was after previous weeks, especially after the two eps with the beast in the pit.  I got to thinking (as you do when you’re wandering) about how COOL it would be to be a Doctors Companion, but how you really need nerves of steel. 

Then this song came on my iPod, Proud by Heather Small.  It was very big in the UK, but I think practically unknown in the US.  Aussies would maybe only recognise it if they happen to do Body Pump or Body Balance classes – it’s a cool-down track for both of them.  It was introduced to me by my fitness trainer (the highly inspirational Coach Brad), who exhorted us to “listen to the lyrics, guys” as we were stretching.  I listened, and as I did, I realised that if you were ever to have a soundtrack to your life, you’d want this song to be part of it.

So I was listening to Proud, walking around the streets of Edinburgh, thinking about Doctor Who, and in particular about the regeneration that the Doctor goes through to cheat death.  Then some of the lyrics of the song pound into me, “you could be so many people”.  I smile, and think about how we’re on the 10th Doctor by now.  Then I stop (mentally, not physically, I’d have caused a traffic jam on the pavement), and begin counting on my fingers to the meter of the song, “you1 could2 be3 so4 ma5 6 ny7 peo 8 9 ple10″, ten even beats, ten beats for ten doctors, a bit longer for the last two (for the last two doctors of the 21st century revival, Eccleston & Tennant).

An idea begins to germinate.  I’ve been slowly introduced to Fanvids by ErnieMay from my knitting group and lately from the Firefly Forum, and I race home to do an internet search – has anyone done a Doctor Who fanvid to this song before?  My search is fruitless, which in this case is an entirely good thing.  I start to think more about the song, “what have you done today, to make you feel proud/ it’s never too late to try”.  It all slots so SMOOTHLY into place!

Thus was born my very first fanvideo, themed to all the heroic things which the Doctor and Rose have been doing this season, and how proud they are of each other.  I threw it out to some of the fanvid experts on my forum first, to see what critiques they had, and got some very helpful constructive criticism.  Learned more about video editing in the process, too!  So now I think it’s ready for the general public.  I’ve posted it up on YouTube, which is an online video repository, with an online media player as well.  If you can be bothered sitting through 4 minutes of David Tennanty goodness (there’s lots of Rose action too, and a pretty white horse!), then click on the link below, and feed my ego by giving at a rating and/or a comment after you’ve seen it…

My first ever fanvid!

For those of you who may be poo-pooing and saying, “what a terrible waste of time”, think of it this way – I learned more about video editing this past week than I did my entire life before this!!  And I learned how to do it all, thinking about something which I found inspiring.

Isn’t it funny how you can stay in a city for almost a year, and not develop a proper, fun social group until about 10 months in?  I’ve just got home from a great night with the Chic Geek Girls of Edinburgh, a fabulous bunch of chicks who love all things Firefly, who (mostly) think that although Eccleston made a fantastic Dr Who, Tennant is even better, and who can all quote Zoolander line for line.  Does it get much better than that?  We started the evening with dinner and Dr Who chez moi, and although we were disappointed by the sheer lack of David Tennant action this week (last week was too magnificent for words!), we left the flat for cocktails with the promise of more David Tennantage in the form of Casanova in coming weeks.

There’s a cool little pub on Hanover St in Edinburgh, not far from where I live, called Jekyll & Hyde’s.  I wasn’t aware before I came here, but the story of Jekyll & Hyde was based on a real life man in Edinburgh who lived a very respectable life by day, but who lead a less than kosher night life.  I can’t remember the exact story, but I believe it involved body snatching and thievery of various sorts, just the sort of thing to inspire a monster story.  Anyway, this pub is very turn of the century monster flick in terms of decor – the toilets are concealed cleverly within bookcases with NO markings to show that the loos are there, let alone which ones are for girls and which are for boys.  It’s a fun thing to find for the first time when you’re BUSTING for a piss.

The place is full of old looking alchemy equipment on shelves in glass cabinets, with things in jars, bones piled high, and lots of tubes and pipes and beakers and test tubes.  The place is a must-see if you ever make it to Edinburgh.  They have fabulous Seven Deadly Sins cocktails for more than decent prices – of course, after our thwarted Tennant-fest, we had to start off the night with the Lust cocktail – red and fruity and delightful.

It was the perfect setting for my pub-parlour-trick, which involves sucking in a mouthful of lighter gas, and then breathing a small plume of flame with the help of a lighter.  The girls all had camera phones at the ready, and I thought I HAVE to share this photo, as much as a testament to the leaps and bounds that camera phones have been making recently, as to share (unfortunately only the aftermath) of my fire-breathing excapades:

  

Alright photo for having been taken on a phone, pity the timing’s so hard to judge!!

A while back I signed up to a website which offers free previewscreenings for movies which wouldn’t usually get the marketing budget of a big Hollywood blockbuster – the idea being that word of mouth does much more for quirky, hard-to-pin-down movies.  I’ve had a few invitations to films, but have only been to see a couple.  The first was enjoyable, but not completely mindblowing.  The one I saw last week though?  Woah.  Wow.  Holy Shit.  As EricaLea put it, “Dayam!”

The movie we saw (for free!) that evening was Thankyou for Smoking, a black comedy about one of Big Tobacco’s top spin doctors, Nick Naylor.  Without giving too much away, I’ll start by saying that all three of us who went along were totally up for walking straight back in again and watching it again, if just to burn more of the incredible dialogue into our brains.

This will be one of these sleeper hits which will live on in the same league as … I’m trying to think of another equivalent which matches it in terms of biting humour, relevence, honesty, charm and quirkiness, but I’m coming up blank.  This movie just had SO many layers to it, from the way our hero deconstructs the politics and media of the West for his son, using chocolate and vanilla icecream as his example, to the camaraderie of the MOD Squad (MOD meaning Merchants of Death, made up of the three spin doctors from the Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco industries) who meet regularly for lunch and discuss the problems surrounding thier jobs, and whose industry kills more people every year.  The fact that these three people can have such a conversation and not appear to be complete arseholes is a testament to the script, which I believe was written by Rob Riener’s son, who also directed it.

If there’s one move you have to see this summer (though I think that it’s already come and gone in the US), you have to see Thankyou For Smoking.  Finally an intelligent movie to almost make us forget that the likes of X-Men 3 wasn’t written and directed by Joss Whedon (how great would that have been?!).  Katie Holmes played the seductress in Journalist clothing beautifully (despite my problems with her scientologically brainwashed state), and a cameo appearence by Rob Lowe had us in stitches of laughter.  What’s more, I’ve always maintained that Aaron Eckhart should get more meaty lead roles; well, Thankyou for Smoking proves just that.  Mormon or not, he was utterly brilliant.

Speaking of Aaron being a Mormon, one little bit of the movie made me giggle for something other than the quick paced story – at one point Aaron’s character orders a very pricey bottle of wine at dinner with Katie Holmes character, and when she asks, “is it really that good?”, he replies with, “it’ll make you believe in god!”.  Maybe it’s just me, but the resonance with real life was just too much to keep the snort from escaping my nose, Aaron being Mormon, and Katie belonging to a religion which holds that the world’s religions are the result of alien brainwashing…

Cripes.

Ahem.  Anyway, do go and see Thankyou for Smoking, I don’t think you’ll regret it.

He’s gone over to the dark side.  Mark’s gone and got himself a MySpace account.  This whole MySpace kinda wierds me out a little bit - it’s almost become a distinct web culture (not even subculture).  All the bands and artists have a MySpace site now, and all the kiddies have their own MySpace accounts where they live out their teen angst online.  It’s taken up where Livejournal just didn’t seem to cope, and has presented us with a veritable MacDonalds web-analogue, fast food for the web: instant website, blog, media player, friend network, all bundled into an easy-to-use, wysiwyg format.

And thus was born the organic-sites argument for the interwebnet.  Webmaster Matt and I were talking about this the other day, about a new distinction which is becoming apparent online – the distinction between organic websites, and the more recent spate of quick-fix websites/easy-to-build/full-of-additives like MySpace.

Fully organic sites
OK, so some websites (usually the more simplistic ones, I’ll grant you) have been built from scratch, through hours of laborious hard coding and (for the less skilled but no less devoted techies) book referencing to find the right HTML tags to make your page just the way you want it, and then uploaded via an FTP client to a domain which you’ve bought yourself, to webspace for which you have paid for the privilege of not enduring annoying banner ads.  Fully organic, grown with love, time, patience, and knowledge, and totally non-commercialised.  The uber-hippy of websites, created by those neo-hippies of the internet - designers and tech-heads.  I believe that Mark Saul’s website falls into this category – fully hand coded, and a delight to visit for its originality and freshness.

Semi organic sites
The you get other sites which may not be fully organic and natural, such as humble blog you are reading right now.  I don’t physically code every page on this blog, I allow an open source program called WordPress to do it for me.  I like to think of my website as being fully organic but for the fertiliser – WordPress is my fertiliser, but I know exactly what’s in it (cow dung, and the combined brilliance of thousands of coders more skilled than myself, donating their time and expertise to the ideal of an Intellectual-Property-free world).  I can mix this fertiliser to my specifications, which can have a far-reaching and powerful effect on the color and layout of my site – I have complete power over what it looks like (within the bounds of my coding skills, which are improving daily), and I know exactly where all the files are on my FTP server, making my blog delightfully advert-free for your viewing pleasure.  So, I cheat a little bit by using fertiliser, but look how red and juicy my tomatoes are!! I’m like the urban-hippy of the internet, dreadlocks a-plenty, but I still have my iPod tucked in the pocket of my Thai-Fisherman’s pants.

Fast food of the internet
Sites like MySpace have gained an incredible following in recent months (had anyone really heard of it 18 months ago?), and now everyone seems to have one.  Loud, garish, and very very simple to set up, they have made life so easy for bloggers of the Web 2.0 that a 9 year old with decent motor skills can get themselves a ready-to-network web presence better than any that LiveJournal ever provided, in just minutes.  You can blog, you can upload mp3s for your band, you can post photos, and make hundreds of “friends” (in the web-sense, meaning people that you’ll probably never meet, and perhaps chat to a handful of times online), all in this delightfully easy, but oh-so samey, plastic environment.  It actually makes my lip curl a little, just the way it’s homogenising the way young folk interact with each other and the world.  And there’s no craft involved, no hard work to give you the satisfaction of a great website.  Oh no, instead, just fill in the blanks, and start adding friends to your friends list.  Oh, and don’t forget to inject suitable amounts of teen angst, or noone will take you seriously.

… but it’s not all bad!
After bitching for an entire blog entry about MySpace, I will say this: it’s without a doubt one of the most useful – FREE – vehicles for bands to promote their stuff and reach their friends and fans throughout the world.  Long time readers will remember Chris and Pat the Crazy Canadians from my time in China – since their return to Canada they’ve been making more music, and have posted some of their stuff on MySpace, and friends like me would never had found it if it weren’t for the Internet’s fast food equivalent.

And I’ll admit, I do have a MySpace account myself, but that’s mostly so that I can contact people who have a MySpace presence.  And there’s NO WAY I’m giving you my MySpace contact details.  Nuh-uh.  Piss off.

An old uni chum is here to visit (Peter D, for all the uni friend readers) and so I took him on Greyfried’s Haunted Graveyard Ghost Tour last night.  As we were walking along on the tour, I thought I’d regale Pete with stories of the last time we intrepid Browncoats had embarked on one of Derek’s tours, and how one of the girlies had puked up in the mausoleum.  I almost got to the punch-line (ThursdayWeld’s fabulous call about it being attributable to “another sort of spirit” – yes, I can’t make up my own jokes so I have to use others’), when Pete chipped in and finished the story for me, cause he’d already read it on the blog – red faces on yours truly for that one – I hate retelling stories if the person’s already heard it, would dread to think that I’d become one of those senior cits who keep telling the same stories over and over again (so, did I tell you about the time when we met the cast of Firefly in Edinburgh? 

Anyway, then we get to the pub after the tour, and Derek AKA GreyFried joins us, and in a moment when I’m not playing fiddle in the session, I sit with Peter and Derek to share another story, which they’ve both already heard, cause they both read this here blog!!

I keep FORGETTING that there are folk other than those who post comments who actually READ this thing!  Pete asked me last night, “would you prefer that I post a comment just to let you know that I read it, even if I have nothing interesting to say?”.  My answer to that?  HELL YEAH!

God, do you guys KNOW how many spam comments I have to moderate every day to keep this blog from becoming a bill board for “enlarge your penis pills” and webcams for “Jennifer Aniston Naked”?  I have a pretty comprehensive spam filter going on – I’ve set it so that if you, dear reader, have already left a comment in the past, you get a free pass to leave comments without me having to review them first.  But new commenters get put in the moderation queue for me to review for approval or deletion.  I’ve blacklisted a lot of the words which appear more frequently so those spam comments get nuked automatically: beware using words like answerz, phentermine, ringtone, hardcore, casino, poker, mortgage, tramadol, or other words too unmentionable to type here – my young cousins in Edinburgh are reading!  If a comment comes through with any of those words, I never even see it, it just gets automatically deleted.  All the same, about 20-30 spam comments get through every day. 

So imagine my joy when I find one lone non-spam comment amongst them all!

Am I sounding like a sad pathetic loser yet?

Oh, purple nailpolish for a moment, did I mention that I finished the Road to Mandelay?  Only 5 people in my club actually finished, and it turns out that on top of the national prize draw for the Robbie tickets later this month in Amsterdam, there’s also a bike up for grabs just for the folk in our club who finished.  I like those odds!

 

Aaaand it’s back!  Mirrored now across the world, The Pirate Bay is back in action after protests in Stockholm demonstrating against the police shutdown of the site:

Click here for the full story

I’m so proud of them wily Swedes and their wily lawyers!

More Skye photos coming after I’ve recovered from my trip home.

Something awful happened today, which turned into something wonderful…  I travelled from Edinburgh to Skye early this morning, and much to my dismay I found that not only had my iPod had failed to charge last night, but I’d also forgotten to bring a charger for my Palm Pilot (on which is my latest eBook, Peter F Hamilton’s latest space opera, Judas Unchained – SOOO good!).   By the time I arrived at the town of Kyle of Lochalsh, there was no juice left in either gizmo, and then I found out that the ride which I thought would take me the rest of the way to Staffin – about another hour by car – had evaporated, and I had another hour and a half to wait before some kind soul could pick me up.

Woe betided me, for I had no book to read and no music to listen to, because I’d relied too much on my techno-gadgets.  I sulked for half an hour or so in a café for lunch, then thought “sod it, I’m going for a walk”.

It was only then that I realized how much I’d have missed if I’d just sat in a café and read my book and listened to my music.  Kyle of Lochalsh is the town at the end of the trainline which almost (but not quite) links Inverness to Skye.  The train line actually comes to an end RIGHT on the shore overlooking the loch which separates Skye from the mainland, and I’ve seen it enough times that I forget just how stunning the place is.  So I took out my camera (which fortunately still had some batteries) and indulged in some happy snaps…

This here is a boat called the Tormentor – one wonders why on earth they’d call a ship that.  The cool thing is that it’s moored to the edge of the train station, which is literally out on a little pier in the Loch.

(click to enlarge)

The texture of this seaweed and algae just fascinated me, had to share this little closeup:

(click to enlarge)

And this rusty chain on the boat ramp leading down to the Loch was totally fascinating:

(Click to enlarge)

This is the Skye Bridge, which links the island to the mainland at the narrowest stretch of water between the two bits of land.

(Click to enlarge)

Before the bridge was built, folk had to take the ferry from pretty much where the train line ended.  Then for many many years, the bridge had a toll on it, until just a few years ago when it was made free, finally giving Skye a no-strings-attached connection to the mainland.  One can only imagine that it’s been very good for tourism on the island.

Seriously, Skye is a very very special place.  The rocks, the mountains, the sea cliffs, all culminate to make it a mystical place, steeped in history – not only do many of the inhabitants speak Scottish Gallic as their first language, but the geology is some of the oldest on the planet (bits of it not far from where I’m typing this blog were featured in David Attenbourgh’s latest oeuvre, Planet Earth).

Tomorrow’s board meeting threatens to be a long drawn out affair, where I have been allocated a maximum of 2 minutes to present my new database to the assembled Trustees, so the rest of the time I shall be meandering around in an attempt to find you more photos of this magnificent place.

Love to all,
Charlotte

PS – after checking over this blog entry, it might appear that some of the photos have been in some way photoshopped, but I assure you that this weekend of all weekends, I have no access to my beloved photoshop, these photos are raw off the digital camera, not even any light correction!  The light this afternoon was just perfect.