Into November...

Well Halloween is nearly over. I have a real hard time tolerating the trick or treaters. Oh, well!

Last night my daughter had her friends over for a pre-Halloween party. I hid! I spent several hours playing Medal of Honor.

Which was nice.

My favourite pastime

Shopping. Not.

Just spent many hours watching my women shop.

However this enforced period of inactivity did turn up some interesting facts. For example you can spend £5K on a mobile phone! Who in their right mind would do that?

Excuse the picture, taken through glass with a camera phone (and the £5K phone doesn't even have a camera!)

Apple Store

At least there will soon be an Apple Store at Brent Cross.

Hurry up Apple!

I hate Halloween!

The apparent suicide of a woman found hanging from a tree went unreported for hours because passers-by thought the body was a Halloween decoration, authorities said. (AP)

tweaks

I decided that the photographs were too big at 800x600. Resized them to 700x500 and reloaded them. 700x500 isn't in direct proportion to 800x600 so had to crop them vertically. It's important to get the smallest images from a "time to download" viewpoint but retain sufficient quality in the image.

Web site updated

More photos uploaded to the site.

It's a bit long-winded because I didn't want simply to add them "as is", I cropped and resized them first, then created thumbnails as well. It all takes time, I'll have to see if I can find a way of automating the process.

Tally Ho!

Visited Duxford on Sunday, got a brilliant photograph of a Battle of Britain pilot (not the real thing, obviously!) - as soon as I saw it I thought "this will be just the picture I need for the web site". And so it is.

The original had a background of the hangar roof, so I ran it through Photoshop. I took the new sky background from a photo taken outside the same day, so I can say that the picture is authentic!

Now that the basic web site is up and running, my next task is to upload some of the other pictures I took at Duxford.

World Wide Wizzard!

Yeah!

My web site is now live!

My domain was registered today. I've uploaded the first version of the site. You can see the results at:

www.wizzardprang.co.uk

No news yet!

No news yet on my domain name. Because it's the weekend, I guess.

WWW here I come!

OK, well I've done the deed. I've decided on my domain name, picked a hosting company and submitted the domain for registration. It should be up and running within 48 hours but as it's the weekend now I'm not sure when it will be activated.

Fingers crossed, basically!

Bye bye, Shanghai

Well that wraps up the 2005 F1 season. Bad luck Ron, that drain needed looking in to! (Ha ha), As for Ferrari, well you know what you have to do!

I like many others mourn the passing of Jordan, Minardi and Sauber. Not necessarily because of what they brought to F1 from a performance point of view but they were the last of the small garagistes (as Enzo Ferrari called all the teams except his own!). With the exception of brave Sir Frank, and Ron, everyone else is a global manufacturer. Bang goes what remains of the charisma, spirit and enthusiasm. Hmm... we shall see.

Meanwhile in the land of dull, I have been working on the web site and stuff. I've found some new web dev s/w which I have yet to try out - I'll post my impressions in due course.

Switch

Had an evangelical conversation with colleagues, extolling the virtues of the Apple computer, iPod and iTunes.

Phenomenon of the recently converted!

Business as usual

An extremely frantic week. Guitar and web site - slow progress on both although I think the basic website is nearly ready to go.

The Kimster

Excellent result for Kimi. What a stupid points system - Kimi has now won more grands prix this year than Alonso!

Meantime, the guitar practice is slow (and painful), I spent hours watching the girls in my life shopping for clothes and I've been dabbling with the web site.

Typical Sunday, really.

no reason to get bored

At this time of night it's too late to play the guitar so I've been working on the website.

It's coming along fairly well. I'm about ready to get the hosting set up.

Watch this space !

Oh no! Suzuka!

Kimi Raikkonen will have to drop ten places on the grid for Sunday's race after yet another engine change penalty...

I don't believe it! McLaren are never going to get the constructors championship until Mercedes sort out their reliability.

Guitar

I was told "you are never too old to learn to play a guitar" so I'm slowly learning electric guitar. Only been playing for 2 weeks so I'm no threat to Slash! - and I know I never will be.

Anyway its a bit of fun and, once I get the feeling back in my fingers, a means of destressification (Where would we be without G Dubbya - he's proved we can invent new words at the drop of a hat!)

Another bite of the Apple

My latest acquisition is an Apple iBook G4, running Mac OS X (10.4.2); PowerPC 1.33GHz 512MB and it's a little corker!

Previously I have used Win XP on a Dell Inspiron laptop but I've passed this on to my eldest daughter for schoolwork (Hrm..).

The speed of the Mac is astounding compared to XP, fast boot up, brighter graphics - and The Sims 2 runs much faster! OK, so software is a bit more expensive but if you shop around this needn't be the case. For example I bought Photoshop Elements 3 and The Sims2 from Amazon for a lot less than RRP.

I never normally recommend anything but if you are fed up with Mr Gates' offerings do consider an Apple - I don't think you'll regret it!

(See the links in the sidebar)

Apple v. Microsoft

I've been using MS Windows for many years but in the last 12 months or so I've finally become disenchantment to the point where I felt I had to do something - trojans, spyware, and XP just being, well, XP!

After much thought I bought a Mac - and I am hooked.

More about Macs v. Windows in a later episode.

Web Site News

Had some spare time today so I started designing the site graphics, spent some time setting some buttons for the nav bar and a logo. I've been using Photoshop Elements 3 since I got my Apple iBook, it's a great piece of software.

As this is my first Mac, I didn't have a HTML editor. I found a free one on the net which looks quite good - it's by Taco software (www.tacosw.com) - worth a try if you want an easy HTML editor.

Made a change from painting the living room - I hate decorating!

The beginning

I've created a new blog at blogger.com. Be interesting to compare to MSN Spaces. For now its a series of disjointed ramblings, although I plan to use it to track the development of my new website. Watch out for changes.