UnorthodoxY Archive It's wasn't what you thought

April 5, 2008

EU 2008 Progress

Filed under: Life,Site,Travel — Tags: , , — SpaceDog @ 9:08 am

For those of you just joining us I’m trying to visit all 27 EU countries in 2008. We’re about a quarter of the way through the year so time for a progress update.

There’s a selection of pictures on my Flickr stream and I’m caught up with all the posts. Hopefully you’ve found some of it interesting.

Plenty more to go of course, is it still possible? I’m fairly confident it is, but it’s looking pretty tight on the number of days holiday I’ve got to play with. I’ve had to reel in some of my more ambitious plans but I still think I can get a decent visit to somewhere in each of the remaining countries.

It’s over a quarter of the way through the year, and I’ve visited four new countries and seven countries in total, that’s just under where I should be if I’m covering everything equally. I just have to keep on plugging away.

Anyroads, here’s the list:

With 102 non-working days left I still need to visit 16 countries (20 to do then in all ’08.)
Countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom.
Countries I’ve visited pre-2008 are in grey, countries visited in 2008 are linked to their posts.

For the number crunchers amongst you, and those concerned about my carbon footprint, here are some stats:

In 2007 I visited 8 other countries, taking 18 flights (2 long haul), travelling around 35,750 km (33,000km by plane).
In 2008 I’ve visited 7 other countries, taking 4 flights (all short haul), travelling around 6,200km (3,400km by plane).

March 3, 2008

Late Thoughts …

Filed under: Life,Site,Travel — Tags: , , , — SpaceDog @ 8:53 pm

I meant to write this much earlier but apparently a week of traveling, too much booze and too little sleep isn’t good for you — I’ve felt pretty rough for the last few days.

I’m back from my travels and I will get round to posts for individual places (promise) so this is just a collection of thoughts.

Glance up and you’ll see one of the first of set of all new header images for 2008. It was pretty disturbing going through my photos to find images to use — there’s a handful of photos with me in them and I look progressively more haggard as you the week goes on. Scary stuff.

Anyroads, some advice after the jump.
(more…)

January 10, 2008

Anniversaries …

Filed under: Life,Site — Tags: , , , — SpaceDog @ 1:46 pm

I missed the first one, yesterday was the two year anniversary of this site. Woo-hoo !

This post is the 185th post on the site, almost one post every four days, which is sounds so unlikely that I had to check the figures three times to be sure.

Today is the one year anniversary of the the first phone call I made to get my bathroom sorted and refitted. It’s still not finished, but it’s a damn site further on than it was a week ago so I’m mostly happy. I expect there will be at least one more bathroom post when it’s all finished.

January 9, 2007

One year ago …

Filed under: General,Site — SpaceDog @ 11:33 am

Well the new UnorthodoxY is one year old today (kind of, depending how you measure it).

There are currently 109 posts and 34 comments.

Not including this post, so that’s around 2 a week which isn’t bad. I started the site as part of my regular January flurry of doing stuff. The majority of those good intentions are normally tossed aside by the end of February so I’m quite impressed we’re still here, posting may have been sporadic but I’ve generally kept it going.

I’d expect everything to continue in much the same way this year, hopefully I can find some more interesting content and have to resort to blatant filler less. I must get more pictures sorted out, I’ve tons lying around (in a digital sense) that I’ve not sorted through yet.

So to all of you, from those just joining us to those that were here a year ago, thanks for reading.

January 2, 2007

Video Test

Filed under: Photo,Site — SpaceDog @ 12:31 pm

Edit: Changed the date to push this off the front page due to video player issues.

Those looking for deep insight may want to skip this post.

I’ve known for a while that my webhost (the wonderful, and cheap, DreamHost) offers video streaming bits and bobs. I’ve only just discovered that they’ll automatically convert your videos to YouTube-style embedded Flash. So lets try one, this is the first video I found (warning: has sound, although it’s just noise really):

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Cars: I’ve no idea why I recorded this — I there’s probably something cool that you can’t see because it’s too dark.

That’s pretty spiffy, and the process is just press a button, wait, cut-and-paste the result.

Nice. Now I’ll have to see if I’ve any interesting videos, or go out and shoot some.

November 2, 2006

Where’s the kaboom?

Filed under: Site,Web — SpaceDog @ 6:05 pm

… there was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom.

At my last job I maintained the voice-menu/voicemail server, one of the number that went to server worked as a test number and played that clip when you dialed it. If you heard Marvin then you knew that the server was running. I wonder if the number still works …

And that demonstrates why, despite it’s flaws, wikipedia is great because I didn’t doubt for a second that there would be a Marvin page on there. I wonder what the most obscure/unlikely page on wikipedia is, one that has actually content rather than a stub. Just clicking ‘Random article‘ a couple of times in a journey in itself.

You may have gathered that this post contains little real content, there’s still not that much to talk about. The picture viewer I’ve been rambling about is actually live on the site but I’m still not happy with it, so no fanfare until I’m satisfied or I admit defeat and decide to put up with it as it is.

If you’re looking to create an Earth-shattering kaboom of your own I can recommend this page on How to destroy the Earth (with handy current Earth destruction status page, in case you’re worried that there was a kaboom and you just missed it.) Although it might be better for all of us if you devoted your time to solving this puzzle which has been annoying me for almost two weeks now.

June 8, 2006

LiveJournal Syndication

Filed under: Site — SpaceDog @ 11:09 am

Hopefully this post will get cross-posted to my, previously neglected, LiveJournal. Thanks to the wonders of LiveJournal Crossposter.

Why? Because I can, and because it’ll allow the lj peoples to keep track of the posts via their friends list. But it’s mostly just because I can.

Hopefully.

Edit: Hey, it worked. First time. Sorry about the lack of posts this week, been a bit hectic, hopefully more soon.

March 9, 2006

Readers, Comments and Contacts (Oh My!)

Filed under: Site — SpaceDog @ 11:30 pm

Well I’ve had comments from three separate people, which means my readership is at least double what I might have expected.

Anyroads I’ve changed the comments so that they’ll post without requiring me to authorise them unless they look particularly spammy. So it should no longer look like your comments lurk in the ether for a random amount of time.

Just to prove I do listen to the comments I’ve added a contact form to the About page. I’m not going to post an e-mail address as I get enough spam to various UnorthodoxY addresses already, and that’s without any of them published on the web.

March 6, 2006

More Tweaking

Filed under: Site — SpaceDog @ 11:04 pm

I’ve discovered that you can embedded your current bloglines subscription into a page so it’s always up to date. No idea how I missed that when I first looked.

I’ve rejigged the links page to use that, so you can now see exactly what sites are distracting me from work.

January 17, 2006

More links added.

Filed under: Site — cosmichound @ 12:32 pm

Well I’ve finally persuaded WordPress to import my BlogLines links into the links page. So you can now check out all the stuff that distracts me from work. Yes, I know some of them are a bit odd.

I might get round to splitting them into more categories and restyling the links page, or I might not — I kinda like the braindump-esque format.

Now to see if the RSS feeds pick up this post …

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