Flipflops.org

It really annoys me when I get phoned up by a guy (or girl) trying to sell me a holiday in Florida… or a satelite dish or double glazing… especially double glazing. I live in a listed building and I couldn’t get UPVC even if I wanted to - ever night I’m cold and reminded that I am cold becuase I went for looks when I bought a house.

I suppose I could flog a kidney and pay for replacement double glazed sash windows (if I was lucky) - but hell everthing needs doing the wiring, the insulation, the…

I spent a summer as a telemarketer once as a student and almost got sucked into another job desperate for cash when I got back from my rouned the world trip, so I do have some sympathy. Not a lot mind you, but some… people used to threaten to kill me - which isn’t very nice.

This isn’t very nice either but it is funny:

http://howtoprankatelemarketer.ytmnd.com/

There are a couple of lists of the top 10 spaceships ever. Not very good lists.

• Wired.com
• Filmcritic.com

Here is mine (in no particular order) - but there is no question about it books need to be included too.

Discovery One (2001: A Space Odyssey) - Nothing much needs to be said. The discovery sets the benchmark.

Valley Forge (Silent Running) - A wonderful mechano monster - space flight as heavy engineering. The Joan Baez soundtrack is awesome.

Sulaco (Aliens) - The giant prawn is great look for a spaceship and has been copied many many times. Pretty Cool.

Warlock Class Destroyer (Babylon 5) - Also into the giant prawn look - there is certainly a degree of homage to the Sulaco - we used to get wasted and watch Babylon 5 at university.

Cygnus (The Black Hole) - I still think this is one of the scariest films (don’t laugh) ever made - I saw it one Christmas when I was about five. A wonderful gothic nightmare of a spaceship.

Nostalgia for Infinity (Revelation Space) - The gothic spaceship against which all others must be judged.

Lady Macbeth (The Reality Dysfunction) - It probably doesn’t look very exciting but who can tell. No pictures I’m afraid.

Harkonen Flagship (Dune) - From the much (and unfairly) maligned David Lynch film Dune - based on the Frank Herberts classic novel. The shot of all the Harkonens charging out of the spaceship in those great rubber suits… wow.

Serenity (Serenity / Firefly) - The wild west with a slightly bigger horse.

Pictures to follow.

Lately I’ve been building both my first WordPress Plugins and my first diddy little applicationlets in CakePHP.

Both have been good - WordPress is doable and not grim to work with although the quantity of functions to wade through is quite bewildering at times, but at the end of the day it’s just like the stuff I do all day at work.

Cake however is a revalation I feel I have to mis-appropriate the WordPress moto and apply it to Cake - Code really can be Poetry - but the best part is it just works.

The trouble with Search Engines isn’t that the things you want to find aren’t there (they usually, but not always are) - the problem is wracking your brain to find the right bloody words to search for.

Still got there in the end - this is how you make Dreamweaver recognise CakePHP .thtml files as PHP - and give you the pretty colours you need and love. 

http://friendsofed.infopop.net/2/OpenTopic?a=tpc&s=989094322&f=5283032876&m=3441048931

Locate the following file: C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Dreamweaver 8\Configuration\DocumentTypes\MMDocumentTypes.xml.

Open the file and locate the following line (around line 75): 

winfileextension=”php,php3,php4,php5″
  macfileextension=”php,php3,php4,php5″ file=”Default.php” writebyteordermark=”false”>
Change it to this:
  winfileextension=”php,php3,php4,php5,thtml”
  macfileextension=”php,php3,php4,php5,thtml” file=”Default.php” writebyteordermark=”false”>

Save and restart Dreamweaver.