Wordle Me This
Apr0
Wordle Cloud
I was just playing around with Wordle, a word cloud generator, and thought it looked quite cool. So, here are the most popular 150 words from the front page of my blog.
Give it a go if you have a block of text you’d like summarising in an entertaining, colourful (or if you’d prefer, not colourful) and visually appealing way.
Anyway, that’s a mere sideline to the rest of today, which has been occupied with a variety of nonsense from all walks of life. I’ve had to program in Prolog (which has stopped working for reasons I can’t fathom), design and order tickets for The Drama Society’s upcoming production (I’m the PR master), tweaking Facebook and Twitter to help advertise the show, buying a fan to help turn my room into less of a sauna in the wonderful summer heat, drinking coffee, eating fajitas, cleaning the kitchen and finally wondering when I’m going to actually be able to learn the lines for my part which – as I discovered yesterday – involves stripping down to my boxers in a no doubt hilarious scene. Actually, there’s unnecessary sarcasm there – it actually is very funny.
So, come see the show. On a slightly related note, any recommendations for any good, comfortable and possibly funny (whilst still covering everything without any chance of slippage) underwear?
Love Vector Images
May0
It is with great pleasure that I announce that I’ve finally gotten around to recreating The Drama Society’s logo in glorious vector format, meaning that we can scale it up indefinitely for great victory!
I took the original, small and somewhat low quality JPEG we had (Since the original creator of the logo either didn’t leave us a high quality version, or it has become misplaced somewhere) and then ramped up the scale, despeckled, sharpened it and converted it to PNG in The GIMP. I then had a marginally better quality version to load into Inkscape and use the ‘trace bitmap’ feature on. Sadly this left behind some very wobbly edges due to scaling, so it was out with the path editing tool and some heavy-handed deleting of spline points. I think the result is quite good.
Nick Makes Awesome Flats
Apr0
So, Teechers is finally over. We can all now sit back, relax, and reflect on just how awesome a job we all actually did in spite of a very not-easy road to get there involving some of us (aka Nick the Awesome Stage Manager Person) fighting wind, rain, hail, snow, B&Q, ScrewFix, the SU, the AU, the Lincoln traffic light control centre, flat batteries and just about everything else in order to build the sets.
Which, because I’m the Awesome Stage Manager Person, actually look almost exactly the same as the design drawings. They fold down into easily moveable packs which fit at least two to a small car, and with a bit of simple assembly and some bolting together turn into 80cm wide, 2.4m high wheeled flats with Velcro tags suitable for attaching all manner of pre-printed scenery to.
A Minor Observation
Nov2
At the risk of feeling the wrath of the Drama Society presidents, I feel obliged to comment about some of the acting.
With less than a week to go until the first performance of our Pantomime (As an aside, we still don’t have all the sets painted, and I don’t know what I’m doing!), some of the roles would be better played by Keanu Reaves. Now by training I am a techie with lighting as a specialist subject, but I have walked boldly across enough stages in my time to say that I could do a better job in some of the roles. I sincerely hope to God that this is only due to the lack of stage and audience, because if not the production will be ranked somewhere between Gigli and the icky black stuff on the bottom of our still-drying flats.
All that said, if you don’t mind a mildly poor script with a spattering of highlights and are happy to drink sufficient alcohol that you’ll find the endless penis jokes (Yes, I’m looking at you, the American Football team!) funny, then come and see it. Posters are around the Uni, tickets are on sale, and to be perfectly honest you’re not going to have anything better to do on a Monday/Friday/Saturday evening before the clubs open.
Editor’s Note: Yes, I know the above paragraph is phrased so it sounds like the American Football team are the penis jokes. I’ll leave it to other people to work out how valid that statement is.
Societies and Savoury Mince
Oct0
I’ve joined two (Yes, two!) societies here at Lincoln. V-GAS (The Video-Gaming Appreciation Society) and the Drama Society. Thieving bastards, £5 for V-GAS and £20 for Drama. Apparently I get a free t-shirt though, so it must be worth it.
I also think I’m the only person who understands savoury mince. When I cooked it today, people just looked at me blankly and said “Meh? What’s savoury mince?”. When I explained it, people went “Oh, bolognese!” and I had to respond with something along the lines of “No, it’s not bolognese! If it was bolognese I would have said bolognese! It’s savoury mince!”
Foreigners.