random… very random

There are about a million reasons I tend to not go out at night. Feeling tired after work, just having “one” too many beers or just general lethargy. Tonight, the weather is absolutely awful - the wind will literally take your breath away, but Scooby just wouldn’t chill out, so Yve and I wrapped up and headed out for a trudge in the dark.

Grabbing the camera on the way out of the door was a last minute decision, I certainly didn’t expect to get any images, but on the walk I found a few bollards where I could anchor the camera for the 30 or so seconds needed to get any kind of exposure at all.

I love the anticipation with viewing a night exposure for the first time. Waiting around for what seems like an eternity trying to hold the camera still whilst the wind and rain do their best to introduce extreme camera shake. When you finally get to look at the LCD it could be completely black, or completely blurred, but just sometimes an image appears that just defies reality - the lights of a distant town illuminating the clouds and fantastic colours that just appear from nowhere.

Yve still thinks I’m mad though…

We’ve found the perfect band for our wedding!

They’re called Gothic Chicken and Yve, Ed and I went for a night out in Weymouth last night to check ‘em out.

These guys are brilliant. They do a really authentic psychadelic set, with classics from the 60s and some of their own material. They’ve even got a real Hammond, complete with whirling Leslie cabinet. They were tight, and great fun - pretty much perfect for the occasion.

Check out some photos from the gig here.

I used the gig opportunity to have a practice at some low light gig photography - believe me, it was really dark in there so I had to open the aperture all the way and push the ISO way higher than I would normally like, shooting at this sort of setting without flash is a massive challenge and there is an absolute ton of noise in the images but I’m quite happy with some of the pictures and I definitely learnt a lot!

It never ceases to amaze me how Internet Explorer can break on seemingly straightforward pages.

For the past couple of days I have been playing with the site templates, getting my new layout “just so” and then I look at it in IE. Bugger. I’m now going to have to spend this evening hacking my layout - for some reason all the content is being shoved down below the sidebars, which means that there is a huge empty space below the headline.

It would be interesting to work out how much development time has been lost worldwide just trying to make things look right on the dominant browser platform on the Web. I bet if that time was turned into dollars, it would make a sizeable dent in Microsofts profit.

Oh well, at least IE7 manages to show the transparent bits on my menu properly. Now if it would only display it without that pixel gap below the menu items…

Hmm, it seems I am not the only one having problems - I suddenly noticed that bits of the page are randomly disappearing in IE7, but then reappearing if you scroll up or down. This reminds me of the old peekaboo bug in IE6 and a quick Google later reveals that this is a new IE7 bug. How lovely.

See Rick Hursts description of the problem

That time of year again. The festivities are over, and with most people nursing a day old hangover we make the traditional journey back into the office.

What will I find? An inbox overflowing with spam and troubles from our beloved clients I have no doubt. I hope they all had a Merry Christmas at least, that way they should be in a reasonable mood!

Jump
Originally uploaded by Mike Kneller.

Nothing he likes better than jumping!

The best thing about the Christmas break is that there’s nobody around when we go for our walks. The weather was a bit bleak for good nature photography, so I satisfied myself by snapping Scooby in action.

So, there I was searching for guitar tutorials on YouTube, and I ran across this guy.

I couldn’t decide if this was just a piss take or not (I was watching with my mate Jez, and we couldn’t stop laughing all the way through). Either the character is a brilliant satirist (not to mention a virtuoso metal guitarist) and this is some huge joke, or this guy has absorbed all the rock and metal folklore and it has melted his brain.

A quick search on Google reveals that indeed, this is a real guitarist and Random Mullet are a real band.

God help us all… although I can’t help but hope they make it really big.