wee doors banging

If you’ve come here expecting girv dot net, DON’T PANIC! After running the Wee Doors Banging blog on girv dot net for around a year, I found that I was writing articles covering three main topics: technical, cycling and “everything else”. Taking stock, I felt that these three subjects didn’t belong under one roof, so I’ve recently carried out a bit of reorganisation and split the original blog out into two standalone sites under their own domains. I now maintain four “personal” sites covering different topics…

I’ve been suckered into taking part in another Facebook meme – the album cover.

Instructions:

1. Go to Wikipedia and click Random
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
   The first random article you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to “Random Quotations”
   http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
   The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3. Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
   http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
   Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Use Photoshop, MS Paint, Paint.NET or similar to put it all together to make an album cover.
5. Post it to Facebook with this text in the “caption” and tag the friends you want to join in.

May I therefore now present my first album, “Capital to form a Corporation”, by Ned Berdard Stonehouse.

John Girvin is a software engineer, sci-fi buff, cyclist and retrocomputer fan (ie: nerd) from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

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The European Union is to fund the creation of an “Emulation Access Platform” that will be able to accurately render “digital objects” of various kinds, including video games. The intention is to develop new ways of storing and accessing images, sounds, documents and, yes, even video games, so that they may still be accessed long after the original platforms for which they were created have been made obsolete by the march of progress.

It was pointed out to me just recently that girv dot net is the top Google search result for “girv”. Me being the sort of person who doesn’t quite believe things until I try them myself, I duly entered the magic word into the search box and hit the go button. Lo, and indeed behold, there I was at the top of the list.

Yay me, I rock, I am so cool etc. … until you scroll down a little way (but still on the first page) to this result from the Urban Dictionary.

According to the Urban Dictionary, a “girv” is defined as a “lesbionic, ugly, scary creature”. There are those who would agree with that definition, at least in parts.

On the next page, they also have quite an apt definition for “girvinator“, which I’ve also been called in the past.

The internets give, and the internets taketh away I guess.

My only remaining question is why someone would search for “girv” in the first place!

John Girvin is a software engineer, sci-fi buff, cyclist and retrocomputer fan (ie: nerd) from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

If you liked this article, why not subscribe to the RSS feed for more?

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There’s a meme on Facebook at the moment where you write 25 random things about yourself that your friends may not realise, then send it to your friends and get them to do the same. Normally I don’t bother with these “do this zany fun thing then spam your friends” requests that seem to infest Facebook, but this one intrigued me. What 25 random things would I write about myself and could I successfuly transplant the idea to blog land?

Continuing my efforts to avoid doing any real work on my various projects and faff about tweaking things for no good reason, I’ve now migrated this blog to be Powered By WordPress. There was no compelling reason to move away from the previous platform (Serendipity), I was just curious about WordPress as it’s one of the most popular blogging platforms around today. First impressions are good…

Back in 1999 I created a version of Daleks in Javascript. It’s been offline for some time as, by today’s standards (if not 1999′s) it uses some very, very bad Javascript and HTML. But I’ve now hammered it back into some sort of working order for modern browsers and it kind of mostly works. Sorta. You get it…

Noldor from CPC Zone has posted some clever source to automatically decrypt Appleby Associates Amstrad CPC tape loader (a.k.a. the “GO! Loader” as it first appeared on U.S. Gold “GO!” branded games). Outwardly these loaders are characterised by a three digit counter smoothly counting down to zero, usually in the bottom left corner of the screen.

“9 Fingers” is a classic Amiga demo from Spaceballs, its major claim to fame being its 4th place at The Party 1993 competition. The main part of the demo features vector traced animations of real life dancers, and now the raw video tape footage that was used to create the animations has been posted on You Tube!

Welcome to my Grand Blog Experiment!