Saturday, 5th March, 2005

Tales of Stoopidity

Number One: Kath and Siobhan's inability to use a VCR.

I am, you may have noticed, quite a technically-minded sort of girl. One who doesn't usually have problems navigating their way through the sometimes confusing series of menu screens that video recorders throw at you. One who gets a little irked when people throw their hands up in disarray and claim that they're 'no good with technology', whilst quietly mutering to myself "pfft How hard can it be?!"

So the task of setting the VCR to record The World is Not Enough last night on ITV shouldn't really have presented too much of a challenge — especially seeing as Kath's VCR has VideoPlus built in.

There was some quite good TV on last night you see — at 9.00pm on BBC 2 there was a documentary about Cicero's first big trial (it was very good ) And following that, a short piece about letters to the BBC , and then, over on Channel Four, the true genius that is Nathan Barley.

All this clashed with everyone's favourite, Bond James Bond, however. So, embracing the Brave New World of time-shifting, I started to call out Videoplus numbers to Kath.

Ah, VideoPlus ... what we did before Sky+ eh? The sheer joy of just being able to whack a few numbers into a remote control, then rest easy in the knowledge that the VCR is all set — and even if the programme starts late or something, the technological beauty of PDC will step in and wait until the programme actually starts before the timer kicks in.

That's assuming though, that you haven't decided to record something that takes a half-hour pause in the middle for the ITN News...

I mean, pfft Who on earth would only want to record the first part of a film? Why didn't the Videoplus numbers for the first and second part match up?! How was I to know that we'd only set it to record the first part?!

Arse. And we were really getting into it as well

Never mind — it was a BOnd film, it's not like it's never going to be shown on telly ever again

...

Number Two: Skimming the Red Line

A long time ago, I wrote a little piece about how little I trusted the petrol guage on my car. It seems to vary enormously fro day to day as to just how much petrol is actually in the tank. Sometimes, if I go round a sharp bend, it'll change there and then, depending on which way the bend goes — up for left, down for right — and I don't really believe what it tells me to be honest.

With my old Mini, I always knew exactly how far I had to go when the needle hit the red line, but I've never been too sure with the Punto. I seem to be able to exist for weeks with the little orange light on...

There are, I imagine, several places where it's OK to run out of petrol: #1 Outside your house; #2 Outside a petrol station; #3 On the motorway in a free-recovery road-works scenario. So I guess that #4 must be ... outside your girlfriend's house.

I was loving my car on the way round to Kathie's last night — she was nipping in and out of traffic on the one-way system like she was a formula one car ... light as a feather and so easy to manouver. It was just as I got to the top of the hill that Kath lives on that I discovered just why she was light as a feather.

splutter

vroom

hesitate

vroom

stop

Poo I know I'm not meant to let her run dry (because of her catalytic converter or something ) So I decided that crawling my way to the petrol station was a bad idea, abandoned her at Kath's and then begged one of those red cans off a friend this morning.

So, as a public service, if you drive a pre-1999 Fiat Punto, and the needle on the petrol guage is half a millimeter above the gap between the two red chunky lines at the bottom of the scale, you've got exactly 1.2 miles to go before you're in shit

Oh, OK — I didn't know that Is that like how driving through a puddle and splashing pedestrians is also 'driving without due care and attention'?

Struggling With Colour Balance

Sometimes it can be really infuriating being a trannie and trying to take pictures. This afternoon, for example, on a bit of a whim, I did my make-up and plonked myself in front of the camera for about half an hour. Now, admittedly, I didn't take very long over my make-up, which probably explains the nasty yellowness of my face. Despite having a multitude of Photoshop tricks up my sleeve, I just couldn't quite get it right today. Hence the black and white shot

(Note to self — don't felete images of Flickr if you've used them in your blog )

Hmm, I think it should now be a word

Graffiti artists hack Conservative party billboard

(via flickr.com/people/nic0)

One of these went up in the car park opposite Sainsburys in Lancaster recently. I'm sure there's a debate about semantics to be had here, but the first time I saw the new Tory election posters I thought "Yes it IS!" Thankfully, someone in Reading has expressed this sentiment already

(This, incidently, is the first time I've blogged someone else's picture using the thing I wrote the other day. I'm not sure how ethical this is — using someone else's picture like this. I'll have to (a) mull this over in my head a bit, and (b) tidy my code up a bit. My dream of one-click-blogging still has a long way to go...)

LOL Kylie Yeah, to be honest, I still haven't worked out how to get the best out of this new SLR What really bugs me is that what I see in the mirror just before I take the shot (and before anyone asks, yes, the camera is right where my eyeline is) bears little resemblence to what ends up on the screen

Why do you think all my images end up heavily processed?

Perhaps I should take a course I think it's got a lot to do with the lighting though.