Greetings! For the past week I have mostly been in Edinburgh attending a few shows at the Fringe Festival and generally catching up with people through there. Much fun was had as we saw quite a wide range of comedians from Josie Long’s slightly surreal sense of whimsy to Stewart Lee performing material that will be in a TV show coming out in 2011. The one low point from all of the shows we attended was the world’s most annoying woman who seemed to think it was acceptable to repeat every punchline to her friend while laughing the most exaggerated laugh I have ever heard. She also seemed to think that whooping whenever alcohol was mentioned was a welcome thing to do.

The week also allowed me and my host for the week, Alex to play our way through the first 3 movies/books in Lego Harry Potter which was very entertaining, often accidentally so thanks to things like Hagrid’s umbrella did not look especially family friendly. I would say that it does seem to be the buggiest of the Lego … games that I have played but the formula is still a winning one.

This is where I'll be spending most of what is left of Sunday. Sockmonkey is a rubbish piano teacher but he does try so hard.

Red Dead Redemption glitches continue to crack me up.

Download now or watch on posterous

MVI_0370.MOV (53515 KB)

It's been too long since I've updated anything like this so here's a picture someone showed me the other day that raised a smile. Will try and put something up here from the Edinburgh Fringe next week.

A week later the thing turns up and it’s absolutely tiny:

It’s like a camera for gnomes or something. I am led to believe it is essentially an unbranded version of the Veho Muvi.

I’ve not had a chance to check it out properly yet except for a brief test in my office yesterday.

Hopefully I’ll get a good opportunity to put it through it’s paces shortly and report back here.

I’m no stranger to driving from Edinburgh to Dundee and back having been doing it most weeks for the past 6 months. Today however was different and instead of just shooting along the motorway I was accompanied by the one we call Chimp.

Chimp not showing his face as if he's in the SAS.

He rather bravely decided to make his first long trip a visit to Edinburgh and I had decided to come to Dundee on Saturday so it made sense for us to stick together and take the more scenic route back.

Having not been out for any sort of road trip in a while we elected to head to North Queensferry to take a few pictures however an early mistake was the not including this in our directions. Not including it in the directions became something of a moot point as I left mine and a can of my beloved Berry flavoured Relentless on a table in my living room. Well done Scott, have a gold star.

Eventually we made it to North Queensferry where we took a few photos like the one below:

Forth Bridge from North Queensferry

Photos suitably captured we decided to head for our final destination of Dundee. This didn’t go to plan. We came to the decision that I would lead along roads that I didn’t know and also as mentioned previously my directions are still sitting in Edinburgh, mocking me.

We drove through countless towns and villages for what seemed like forever and then finally, there was a Eureka moment. What if there was some sort of application that could give you directions from your current location to your desired destination. Some sort of satellite based navigation, or sat nav for short… What if it was called Co-Pilot and was already installed on my G1. Oh wait…

Yep I’m that slow sometimes. Half an hour later we’d crossed the Tay Road Bridge and all was good.

A few people have asked my why my domain name is www.stompyrobot.net and the truth is that it was the first thing that entered my mind when needing to get some webspace to hold my coursework at uni. I think it all stems from a video project me and a two friends had to do for one of our modules.

The brief was pretty vague with the basic task being “make a video”. We were given the choice of either doing a ‘Student Life’ documentary or a drama of any genre, naturally all the groups decided to take the easy route of the documentary. My group however opted for a B-Movie. The film was never finished but you can view some early raw footage by clicking the image at the top or you can view the trailer here.

The reason for doing it this way is to allow him to be able to start directing potential clients to his site and build a reputation while the rest of the development work is underway. Go have a look and let me know if I’ve broken anything.

Geocities was the best known of many quick WYSIWYG webpage creation sites and over time became synonymous with badly designed websites about nothing at all that were filled with animated backgrounds, lurid coloured text and blinking/scrolling paragraphs of pure joy.

I also remember there being other similar services such as Homestead and the flash based Moonfruit. Looking at them now it appears that both are still operating but for money instead of as hosting for advertising deals.

There is no doubt that Geocities was due to be put down for crimes against coding and design. It is also likely that few will miss it thanks to the rise of decent software and cheap hosting as well as social networks negating most people’s needs for personal web pages. Despite all of this I am thankful to it for giving me my first web space to play around in.