The Bing Logo

Dear Microsoft,

Fix this damn logo. For something that you intend to be as ubiquitous as Google, you could have at least not stretched the ever-loving shit out of the type. It’s really that bad.

Thanks, Henry

The Windows 7 Experience(tm)

It still sucks.

Tried installing a fresh copy of Windows 7 on my pc. Got to the point of selecting the hard disk and the installation fails with a nice cryptic error code - 0x80300024. No error text at all.

After a bit of quick googling, it turns out Windows will helpfully spit out this little bit of awesome if the disk you are installing Windows to is not the primary disk in the machine. Ridiculous. I can’t imagine this is at all an uncommon system configuration. Even if there is some stupid Microsoft voodoo which will ever prevent this configuration from working, they could have at least given a half-decent error message.

I can’t wait to see what other gems Windows 7 will bring…

Painting MX-5 Miata Center Caps

The center caps on my 99 MX-5 have been starting to show their age, so I decided to try re-painting them, considering how expensive replacing them would be…

I found some wheel paint in the local crap emporium. According to the tin it’s especially formulated for wheels; more resilient and a bit thicker compared to regular touch-up paint. It was $17, a bit more expensive than the other paint I was considering (metallic silver touch-up paint), but I went for it anyway.

First step is to remove the caps from the wheels. Easily done with a flat-headed screwdriver and some moderate force. Just be sure not to mark the wheels. It helps if you can pry them off a few mm, then stick the screwdriver all the way in and press in one of the side clips, then it comes off very easily.

I gave them a good wash in warm soapy water, then rinsed them in warm water. Make sure to scrub them really well, considering the rough, pitted surface would probably be filled with heaps of road grime and other crap.

After letting them dry for an hour, I took them outside to paint.

Painting the concave curves on these is a bit tricky, more-so considering it’s where most of the pain is missing from. For this reason I set them on a box covered in newspaper, and painted them from the side, turning after I’d done each side. Some needed a bit more on the edges so I touched them up while it was still wet. There had been enough over-spray that there wasn’t much needed on the top, so I just gave them a few very light coats.

They came out pretty well imho. Though the first one must have got a drop of something on it (sweat probably - damn you humidity!), but I’ll try touching it up later. The wheel paint reckons it takes 2 hours to harden, so sit back and watch that paint dry…

Recent Family Additions

Here are some photos of some recent additions to our family. It all started with Manny (grey male cockatiel). Then we just had to get him a mate (Audrey, cinnamon pied female). Of course they wound up doing what they wanted, and we ended up with some babies. From biggest to smallest we have Charlie, Frankie, and Lulu. We’re not 100% sure of the sex of any of them at the moment, but our biggest hunch is that Charlie is a female. Either that or he just loves cuddles.

The First Article

Ah yes, the mythical first article. Almost never seen, generally produced in a state of mild panic and excitement. It’s the pioneer of it’s small content management world, venturing where no styled text has gone before, in an attempt to see if that paragraph needs more line-height, or if the creator has forgotten to add some styling to some of it’s forgotten children.

This is as good a place as any to ramble on about the site…

This site is built on the Symphony Content Management System. I use Symphony every day to build websites for other people, so it only made sense to use it for my own.

I’m not a designer, and I have difficult coming up with something that isn’t totally heinous most of the time. To make things easier on myself, I’ve kept the design as simple as possible. Pages are kept longer than normal, and articles don’t have summaries or any of that rubbish, despite it being very easy to accomplish with Symphony.

Some fun incredily boring facts no one but me will ever read:

• I chose the blue accents because it was the first colour I randomly chose from the OS X colour picker that I liked
• Built using Coda
• My internet was shaped horribly half-way through development, so I had to move everything locally
• I have not looked at this site in anything but Firefox and Safari yet
• The heading and intro font is Times New Roman (I know, right)
• Pasta and noodles fuelled much of the development
• I decided to add the more personal date below the regular date, as I often write things that don’t make a lot of sense at certain times of the day. Perhaps logging these bouts of retardation will allow me to find a pattern. (I’m not really looking for an excuse or anything guys)