28 November 2006

Junior Science Lesson 1 - Creating Lightening.

You will need:
Scissors
Selotape
Aluminum pie tin (one careful owner)
Styrofoam takeaway chip box (one not so careful pissed owner)

Directions:
Wash the leftover ketchup from the chip box.
Cut an L shaped-corner out of it and tape the corner onto the centre of the pie tin.
Rub the remains of the chip box vigorously on the hair of a willing volunteer. I used my boyfriend as his last haircut was several months ago and he now has a curly afro, he wasn’t actually that willing but i have my ways...
Put the chip box on the floor and, picking it up by its styrofoam handle, drop the pie tin on to it.
Touch your finger to the pie tin and watch the sparks fly!!
If you pick the pie tray up by the handle and touch the tin again it will spark again!
If the tin stops sparking, just rub the chip box on someone’s head again and go again, or go back to watching Eastenders.




How it works:
Electrons get passed to the chip box by rubbing it on your hair. When you add the pie tin on top, free electrons in the metal try to move as far away from the Styrofoam as possible

*N.B. I take no responsibility whatsoever done to yourself, your kitchen or your relationship. If you stupidly chose to use the biggest bit of aluminum and styrofoam you could get your hands on then you deserve to die from eating that amount of pie and chips ;)

Next lesson - the Pinhole Camera.

27 November 2006

Spong!

I have, **ahem**, obtained a copy of Photoshop CS2 9 so i post this for your animated delect.



Once i have learned how to use some of the new features I will expand your minds... (and mine).

24 November 2006

Internet Explorer V Firefox.

When i booted up my PC this morning it kindly asked if i would like to download Internet Explorer 7. What the hell, i thought, after all it couldn’t be any worse than version 6 and i always have Firefox 2 to fall back on if version 7 is also rubbish. My next thought was, what the hell am i talking about? I don’t even know what the differences between Internet Explorer and Firefox are, I had just heard people berating both - so I have found out.

Internet Explorer 6 v Internet Explorer 7
In version 7, the bulky top bar containing home, refresh, print etc... has gone leaving a substantially simplified bar. The next big difference you will notice are the 'Tabs'. Instead of having to open a new window for each web page you are in you can now just open a new tab and click to move between them. You can even add a group of tabs to your favorites so that all the windows will open at once. Version 7 has also fixed some existing memory leaks so you should now see nearly a doubling in performance.


What does all this mean? Basically your pages are more efficiently organised and should load a lot faster on the new version. You can download IE7 here.

Internet Explorer 7 v Firefox 2
Firefox has proved to be almost twice as quick as IE7. It also has tabs, although you have to manually open a new tab from the 'File' menu. New security features exist that stop hackers trying to get onto your machine, and there is an inline spell checker. You can download Firefox2 here



Conclusions
Don’t bother with IE7 go straight to using Firefox. It is almost 4 times as quick as IE6 so you should feel a noticeable difference. They already have a 10% market share and who wants to line Microsofts' pockets even more anyway...

23 November 2006

Tabilda MCP, MCSD, MCTS

Yay I passed my exam so now I am a Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist.

I spent £80 on some Transcender practice exams, i have used these before and there is more than often a few questions that are identical in the real exam. Today - nothing, not one single recognisable question! Lucky i had done lots of revision then and i scrape through with 788/100 (79%).

I am very glad that’s all over, next step - the world!

In un-related news, I went for a test drive in a 1972 Bond Bug on Wednesday:

It was amazing, i must have one...

17 November 2006

Here kitty kitty!

You will be glad to know I woke up in a much better mood than I went to sleep in yesterday (apologies for the swearing), afterall it's Friday and I have paid £1 in aid of Children In Need for the privelege of coming to work in dress-down.

Another reason for my cheerier self is my latest technological acquisition. We have been lucky enough to get hold of one of the first hundred PetPortes that have been made and i took ownership of this sparkly white new bit of kit on Wednesday.



We werent asked if we wanted one of these because the vet is a friend and it hasnt come off the back of a lorry, more the fact that the vets know mine and Pingus' name off by heart after the number of times she has been attacked by other cats. After all she is very pretty and smells nice, just like her owner...

Im sorry but no it doesnt magically transport the cat particle by particle from one side of the flap to another, it simply only allows those cats you have programmed it to accept to use the catflap. It recognises the correct cats via an identity microchip that most pets have these days, saving the need for dangerous magnetic collars. It would even work for a small dog, and will keep the unwanted un-neutered cats from raping and pillaging my little Pingu in our new house.

Sorry no time for a rubbishly animated cartoon today, i'm on a deadline! Have nice weekends, think of me while i'm revising.

16 November 2006

F^ckwit b*stard incompetent twats...

So i got about 2 hours sleep last night, revision running through my mind in little lines of code creating SQL Assemblys and Stored Procedures, I chewed off all my nails, and woke up at 7am this morning looking like a character out of Shaun of the Dead.

I drove nervously to the Prometric Test Centre, sat down with the IT-illiterate adjudicator and began the sample test that they make you do at the beginning to ensure you know how to use the system. 3 minutes later the machine crashed. In came the adjudicator who decides it would be a good idea to reboot the machine and start again. He couldn’t actually say this by then as another candidate had arrived and was happily tucking into a driving theory test on the machine next to me. So everything was said in a mixture of sign language, body language and poorly-written handwriting, all while i started to seethe at the injustice of it all...

Half an hour later and we are still there, as the machine decided that im already taking a test on one of the other machines so wont let me take another. I start to cry silently, and the adjudicator suggests it might be better if i come back another day. Another half an hour later and Prometric kindly inform me that i have to pay for the exam again as i was rescheduling it. 80 quid that exam cost me not to take!!!! The ironic thing is that if I had failed I would get one free re-take.

However, after a lot of swearing from myself and my new best friend Ken-the-adjudicator, we talked them into re-scheduling it for free next Thursday at 7.30am. Positive point: more revision time. Negative point: no beers for me tonight...

15 November 2006

Tomorrow...

...I will mostly be taking the Microsoft exam 70-431.

Its one of those nerve-racking ones where you get the results as soon as you hit the 'Finish' button, if your slippery hand can manage the mouse by then.

Hopefully, shortly afterwards i will be able to add the letters MCTS to the end of my name. Or i will cry at the waste of many evenings and lunch hours hard work when i could have been watching Eastenders or shopping.

Either way, I will then go out and get drunk...

10 November 2006

11 things you can do with Google

1.Learn to cook:
Search for something like 'recipe pumpkin' (i have a pumpkin that has seen better days but that i don’t want to waste), and Google will refine your search to recipes only if you want.

2.Get the answer to life:
Type in 'the answer to life, the universe, and everything', the Google geeks have obviously read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

3.Search in Klingon:
Go Here for Klingon-translated searching.


4.Use it like a calculator:
Type in 21+43 and hit the 'Search' button, Google does the calculations for you. It will even do calculation in mathmatical order i.e. 10*5/5 (answer could be 10 or 1).

5.Find a definition:
Type in 'define:geek' and hit the 'search' button. Google finds sites that give a definition for the word entered.

6.Find movie reviews:
Enter 'movie:london' as your search term for example, Google brings back reviews and even show times!

7.Search a specific site:
Type in 'tabilda site:http://www.b3ta.com/' and Google searches for references to Tabilda from B3ta only.

8.Search in page titles only:
Type in 'intitle:tabilda' and only results with tabilda actually in the title will be displayed. Similarly 'intext:tabilda' restricts the search to look inside the text of a page.

9.Currency conversion:
Type in '£5 in usd' or '5 pounds in dollars' and Google will return an answer: '5 British pounds = 9.5245 U.S. dollars'. This also works for measurement conversion i.e. feet in metres.

10.Discover dodgy American dealings!
Go HERE to search for stuff what that silly president has been trying to hide...

11.Exclude words from your Search.
Yes, I know that you can do this in advanced search but this is the short-hand way. Put a "-" immediately in front of the word you want to exclude. I was doing a search for 'Polka' the other day, but did not mean the 'dot' type, using this cut down my search from millions to a couple of hundred results.Also you can use the "~" character in front of a word if you want to search for words LIKE the one you search on.

09 November 2006

Pimps 'R us!

Yesterday I set myself up a basic MySpace account, but the default format looked crap so I went in search of ways to vamp it up a bit. Obviously i didn’t want to pay for anything, it didn’t take long to find this Pimp My Profile.

I hunted through the supplied templates but they were all so over the top that eventually i settled on using their editor to create my own. I picked a page background colour, a table background colour, set the table border to on with a solid line style of 1 pixel. Once you get to the 'Finish' tab you can generate a sample page using your preferences, and finally receive the code to modify your page.

Once you have logged into your MySpace account, paste the code supplied at the top of the 'About Me' section of your profile. Et hey presto, a much more tasteful MySpace account than most you see around.



But it was lacking pictures, so I found Grown-up Geeks who supplied me with the code to put some of their hosted animated GIF's into my profile too.

All of which proves that if you have any kind of design streak (which i dont) you can have a tasteful MySpace page which neednt look like someone vomited all over it.


*EDIT: Do you like my new Dali-esqu random comment generator?

08 November 2006

A quick update

My evenings recently have been spent desperately painting so that i don’t have to spend another month paying rent AND a mortgage, so i haven’t been posting much lately. When i have broadband in the new house i wont be able to stop!

In the meantime I have found time to create a MySpace account http://www.myspace.com/tabilda, again theres not much on it yet but hopefully i can find lots of ways to modify it and post details here.

p.s. the mouse repellant does seem to be working - no signs of mice yet!

03 November 2006

Mousework

My boyfriend and i have recently bought an old cottage (previously owned by a divorcing pair of hippies) that had aquamarine/pink walls with a mint green bathroom. We ripped away some walls whilst refurbing (not the lovely green and pink walls surely?), and to our delight we found a few dead mice (4!) in traps. I cant think of a nastier way to die than dislocating my shoulders trying in vain to get out of a mousetrap and then starving to death, so in the interest of humanity i binned them all. Besides, we'll be taking our 2 cats and they will rip them to pieces...

This all meant that i had to come up with a humane way of keeping the mice at bay, after much goggling i came up with this: The ultrasonic pest repeller

It works in two ways:

Firstly; it sends an electro-magnetic pulse through the wiring of your house. The electromagnetic pulse (also known as EMP) is a high-intensity, short-duration burst of electromagnetic energy that is meant to be very irritating to the mouse. When you plug the repeller in it travels through the wiring to surround the whole house.

Secondly; it also emits ultrasonic sound waves. These waves are at such a high frequency they are above the range of human hearing - gain the aim being to annoy your unwanted guests (would work well with children especially well as the younger you can hear high pitched frequencies).

Both of which should culminate in pests being driven from your house - all without affecting the cats! I will let you know how it works once it arrives... The aim of the PestGuard is to make 'as hostile environment as possible for the pest' Yay - a reason for me to be even more argumentative!!!.



Not my most technical of posts, although i think that mentioning electromagnetic pulses and ultrasonic sound waves in one post is quite good for me, but i am too busy painting to learn anything new :)