denyerec.co.uk

An old friend of mine Norm pointed me to Magical Trevor.

I nearly died laughing, this is genius beyond comparison.

If you don’t even smirk, you need help with your life.

Today is August 17th which means my beautiful girlfriend / soulmate / life-partner / handler / zookeeper turns Twenty….Three! (Not that you could tell ;))

We’re off out tonight to see one of Coley’s friends performing (She’s a stand-up comic) so we’re just hoping it turns out to be funny, as we’re hitching a ride home with them and don’t want to be in *too* awkward a spot!

Happy Birthday Coley!

The BBC, arguably the last great bastion of properly spoken and reported English in the UK (As everyone knows the UK is appallingly bad at teaching their youth the native language, usually meaning that if a foreigner can negate their accent they can always be detected by their impeccable grammar…), has fallen.

Fallen far.

I quote from an article on painkiller addiction:

With 50 brands to choose from, has the explosion in the painkiller market made us loose sight of the fact that our pain threshold acts as a signal to stop us from injuring ourselves?

“Loose” ? Bloody loose ?

FOR THE LOVE OF THE GODS PEOPLE, GET IT RIGHT. It’s LOSE, from the verb “To Lose“.

I simply cannot believe how stupid and lazy Microsoft Word has made people. If it’s not underlined in red it must be right, right? NO it’s not. Bloody well fire up a brain cell (Let’s face it, that’s all it takes) to read what you write before you show the world what an illiterate sod you have let yourself become.

Ugh. The BBC, of all institutions… There is no hope.

Some of you already know about this so this post is for those of you I don’t know and haven’t already told.
Ok, I’ll get to the point.
A while back I played around with a pre-built forum system called SMF (Simple Machines Forum), it was an absolute doozy to set up but as with all forums an utter swine to skin / theme / change to look like my website. Which is why it uses the default colours.

Anyway, the forum is for amateur and beginner photographers to huddle together for warmth, share advice and experiences and occasionally put up photos for everyone else to rip to pieces all in the name of constructive criticism. Oh, there’s also fortnightly “projects” so that some people with expensive camera gear are actually encouraged to go out and use it.

*cough*Scumbag*cough*

You do need to register to view certain sections and upload images, if things get popular I’ll insist on people hosting images remotely and linking to them to preserve some precious webspace and bandwidth.

With no further ado, I give you the Amateur Photography Forum !

Some of you might wonder why I’ve bothered and not just gone to another community type site. One main reason is this started with a small bunch of friends and online people, the other is that some communities get very… odd, so I thought I’d just start my own

Framing shops charge a lot. I discovered this when I decided to get a drawing I had done of an owl framed for my dad’s birthday. Don’t get me wrong, the shop did an absolutely wonderful job (Quickly too) but the cost did surprise me, especially when I enquired about just having “cardboard” mounts done for my photographs.

The idea quickly formed in my head to do it myself, so I got hold of a Longridge Mount Cutter and after slicing open my leg with the cutter on one famous occassion I finally got the hang of making the mount frames.

However, unless you can make the wooden frames yourself also, the mount cutter alone doesn’t help you produce a saleable product. Enter the 3M Adhesive Transfer Gun, or ATG for short. I purchased mine just the other day from DIY Framing in the UK and it arrived this morning.

I can now mount my artwork in single or double (Or triple, ohh err!) mounts for official sale, as they’re fully sealed and backed properly ready to be dropped into a pre-purchased frame of suitable depth. (A single mount and backboard measures approximately 3mm thick)

If you see any photo’s on my site you’d like printed and mounted, please contact me for information! I will be setting up a more formal method for doing this soon.

If you’d like to see some photos of the mount I put together today, just hit “more”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mary Berry, I owe you an official apology. Forensic analysis of the previous chocolate fudge cake revealed that the icing contained less than 53.2% (Approx.) of the required icing sugar. How this happened is unknown, but suspicion lies with a covert terrorist baking group based in the USA, whose agenda spans only so far as to undermine British cookery.
The recipe as listed here does in fact, after a short spell in the fridge, produce rather yummy chocolate “fudge” icing. It’s not quite fudge in the truest sense of the word but it does taste good. There was no chance of a photo of the whole cake as a housemate had slashed into it before I got downstairs to it in the morning, but there is a slim chance of a food-photo of the last surviving slice.

Mrs Berry, we salute you.

I must make an effort to chase someone up who has been stealing my work.

Someone also pointed out that the Creative Commons license thing would be a good idea for my site, though I forsee one problem which is people nicking my work and not crediting me. People have been doing it with my Amazon hack for WordPress, they use it and they don’t link to me when the ONLY condition for use is that they do so. Cheap sods.
One link, it’s not like it would cost them but NOooooooooooooooooooo.

Anyway, point being I don’t mind things being used for NON PROFIT stuff, providing I am fully credited with my name and website address. Terms and Conditions for all of this should follow soon but I’m a bit too busy trying to scrape this month’s rent off the floor.

It is important to know that what follows is NOT a recipe for chocolate fudge icing:

• 50g/2oz margarine
• 25g/1oz cocoa, sifted
• about 2 tbsp milk
• 225g/8oz icing sugar, sifted

To make the icing, melt the margarine in a small pan, add the cocoa and cook for 1 minute. Remove from the heat and stir in the milk and icing sugar. Beat well until smooth. Cool a little until of spreading consistency.

[Edit: PLEASE NOTE, the following comments were made after our 1st attempt. All subsequent attempts have been 100% successful and 100% tasty!!!]

[If prepared incorrectly… *cough*] It is more akin to chocolate sauce, but is definately not, as advertised, chocolate fudge icing. Mary Berry you lied to me and I am distraught. Must I take a recipe from the Americans ? Please, an alternative is needed for we want thick, goopy, fudge-like icing. Not this runny chocolate sauce concoction we appear to have ended up with. Perhaps we prepared it wrong, or need some expert guidance…

The cake’s nice though, regardless.

UPDATE