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NON to the Constitution

Tuesday, May 31st, 2005

So the French said “NON” to the EU Constitution last Sunday. (yes, I mean NO)

Affagvotez

I am usually quite fond of the French, they got a beautiful language, a mesmerizing country and lifestyle, and for what it’s worth, great food as well.

So I was very disappointed when the referendum ended up on a negative note, especially when most people that voted didn’t even care to know what the Constitution was all about, but instead decided to give a kick in the rear to their government. It’s also true that those who did know what was going on probably voted NON because this means this is no longer France’s EU .. new players have come in, others countries who once were weaker have risen and take charge (A good example being the Iberians) .. so, does this mean unless we sing the French tune, the French wont let us sing at all ?

I don’t think so .. it might take a while longer for them to accept it, but eventually the French will play ball with the rest of us. If these elections were held in the US or Australia (basically any other major country outside EU) the people going to vote still would not know a thing about what they were voting for, people tend to do what their so called “Leaders” tell them to do, and that’s the sum of it, if people stop trusting their leaders, they stop listening on what to do .!

Chirac pleaded for people not to take a backslash at the government by voting NON, I guess people just didn’t care much for Chirac either .. one good thing, Raffarin is finally out (Honestly, has he been out before this, we most likely would have see a OUI) .. and guess who is in .. De Villepin :)

Who doesn’t remember De Villepin marching against the “Coalition of the Willing” AKA “Bush’s Toy Soldiers” when the war in Iraq was brewing (the second time), I wonder who else will get sacked .. after 10 years .. perhaps is time for Chirac to say Adieu as well.

I can only see the halls of the political parties outside of the EU, laughing at those Europeans, “they can’t even agree on a Constitution” they might say … well, nothing comes easy, unfortunately there was never a Plan B .. but we have done fine until now without a Constitution, we will continue to do fine until all members can agree one one .. it might take a decade .. but good things come to those who wait.

I personally love the EU idea, I don’t perticuly subscribe to the continuous expansion, we might be taking on more than we can handle, and more than we need .. the whole constitution proposal might be flawed as well, after all, I too subscribe to the plan because the politicians that i support tell me to, but hey, I’m just a geek, what do i know ?

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Pings Sketch

Monday, May 30th, 2005

I’m trying to revive “thePINGS” cartoons with a new artist’s help.

Esboco-Pinguin-01
He has sent me this first sketch of a few modifications we will be using, one of them is the inclusion of actual hands (before it was just finns) and more expressions to their faces.

It’s looking real nice, I’m writing the script for a few stories, and I hope we will post one sometime in June.

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OSX Automator

Sunday, May 29th, 2005

Today I started playing with “Automator”, a new program that came with OSX 10.4 (Tiger).

Automator
I am impressed, I was able to setup a task to take a screenshot of my workspace, resize it to a width of 800 Pixels, create a 128 pixel wide thumbnail, upload both into this site and then bin the local files.

The result is the “Screen” feature now on my sidebar

But the amazing thing is, it took just a few drag and drops of the commands, and then just hit “Play” for all these mundane tasks to be performed.

Automator-Ftp

Very impressive, and I have just scratched the surface :)

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Toon Girls I

Sunday, May 29th, 2005

A Brazilian artist friend of mine is designing some toon caricatures of my family, he sent me the first draft of my 3 daughters, the one on the left can use some work, but the other two are right on the money

Filhas-Carlos-Sketche-1
This is the first sketch .. still allot of work to be done, but impressive neither the less, if they look “Disney” like, it’s on purpose :)

His website (currently under construction) is http://brayners.com

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There’s your Sign

Sunday, May 29th, 2005

I decide to start posting every time I see a weird or odd Sign ..

Today while walking with my daughters to the park, I saw this one in a post, maybe it’s because I just moved from the US, were we don’t usually see the word “DEATH” on a sign .. either way, it would it was funny (the words below are the equivalent in Welsh)

2005-05-29 13-29-17
Walk into the abyss, and you might die !!

It was there to scare off people from wandering into the small cliff off the road.

Empadao

Saturday, May 28th, 2005

I think this is about the same as “Shepherd’s Pie” in the US, we call it “Empadao” in Portugal.

2005-05-23 12-08-22-1

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jVisitors

Friday, May 27th, 2005

I been messing for the past few days with a WordPress plugin called jVisitors.

I changed the colors and style around, and have made it part of the template .. so looks quite good http://nullmind.com/stats/

I’m just starting to test it, but so far, looks definitely to be a must have for WordPress blogs :)

ItunesClassical Guitar by Eric Clapton

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2405FPW

Thursday, May 26th, 2005

If nothing else, I love the UK post delivery is fairly early in the morning.

This morning at 8:45 a knock on my door… it was the delivery service with my new Dell 2405FPW :)

My First reaction was surprise to how much wider the box itself was, compared to the 2005FPW box .. I rush in to open it up and set the monitor up, but we had an appointment for the girl’s doctors at 9:30, so it would have to wait till I come back from it before I could lay my eyes on it …
Dsc00058-3 Dsc00061

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I think I can

Wednesday, May 25th, 2005

I absolutely hate to fly

As I write this on my blackberry, I am on a train from Manchester to Cardiff …. And we are 15 minutes late

The reason for it is that the trains engine keeps failing … At almost every station it stops , the engine dies and the conductor has to start it again … So we are crawling our way to Cardiff were the train will make his last stop and be fixed I am sure

What makes it all ok is my paranoiac fear of flying … I tell myself .. Ok, so we 15 minutes late, i’ll just order a beer, sit back, relax and write a note for my blog… If I was on a plane that the engines kept shutting down, I doubt the stewardess would have time to bring me that beer before we became a hole in the ground.

Coming Soon: 2405FPW

Tuesday, May 24th, 2005

I bought a set of 20″ Screens from dell a few months back, a pic of them can be seen [here]

But lately I’ve been taunted by the new 24″ 2405FPW .. that’s twenty four inches of pure TFT :D

So this week I gave in, since the XBOX 360 is to be release later this year, I decided just to sell my XBOX and use the cash to help get two 24″ instead.

I went back to the seller that had sold me my 20″‘s and he gave me some good pricing .. so I placed the order for the first one yesterday, hopefully it will be here by the end of the week, and i’ll place the order for the remaining one next week once I get rid of the two 20″

My wife thinks I’m crazy, never being happy with what I got .. she is probably right .. but then again .. 3840*1200 vs 3360*1050 gives me 1,080,000 more pixels .. about 25% more real estate.

Amazingly enough I am looking forward more than anything to those extra 150 lines, as it means Adium will have more space to extend vertically, showing more of my 200+ contacts list.

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