I finally solved a Rubik’s Cube (click on the image above for the full shot).

I promise it was scrambled beforehand.

Last night I got back from Majorca.  We stayed in Palma Nova, which was a great place with nice people and plenty of sunshine!  We also checked out Magaluf – a bit more lively but a bit less respectable, though great if you’re in the party mood.  I’ve uploaded plenty of photos and some videos to my Flickr account.  You can check out the full set here.  Here are some highlights:

And finally, how brilliant is this sand castle fortress we seen on the Palma Nova beach?  Breathtaking skills and attention to detail:

Majorca 2009 on Flickr.

I’m off to Majorca for a week later this evening.  Everything is packed and the PSP is loaded with films and TV episodes for the trip (hoping the battery holds up so I can watch at least one item on the plane).  I’ve a few plans for blog posts I want to write once I get back to hopefully get back into the swing of blogging.

Adios!

So I thought it was about time I gave the blog a breath of fresh air using a new theme (Rihanna for Wordpress).  Hopefully it doesn’t feel too cluttered.  I like it anyway!

Note: Since my old theme worked with images up to a width of 480 and this new one works only to 450, I’ve had to scale some of the images on old posts down.  They look fine on Firefox, but IE’s resizing of images seems to be a bit naff.  Anyway, thank God for the max-width CSS :-)

Wordle generates a “word cloud” from whatever text or site you provide it with.  I decided to give it a go on this blog, and here it is:

Hmmm… I swear I’m not an Xbox fanboy.

*cough*

This week I’m travelling to Amsterdam (Tuesday) then moving onwards to Belgium (Wednesday) to the Pukkelpop music festival where I’ll be in the company of this lot:

Sigur Rós, The Killers, Metallica, Bloc Party, The Flaming Lips, Iron & Wine, Stereophonics, Editors, We Are Scientists, Plain White T’s, Hot Chip, The Futureheads, Manic Street Preachers, Alkaline Trio, Klaxons, Tricky, Within Temptation, M83, Dropkick Murphys, Thrice, The Subways, Killswitch Engage, The Dresden Dolls, Anti-Flag, Less Than Jake, The National, MGMT, Elbow, Dirty Pretty Things, Cold War Kids, Pendulum, MxPx, As I Lay Dying, Soulfly, Simian Mobile Disco, The Cribs, Soulwax, Robyn, The Ting Tings, The Breeders, Caribou, British Sea Power, Serj Tankian, The Wombats, OneRepublic, Mercury Rev, Ian Brown, Epica, Foals, Louis XIV, Menomena, Uffie, Crystal Castles, Be Your Own Pet, Meshuggah, Stereo MC’s, Junkie XL, Róisín Murphy, Girl Talk, Jamie Lidell, Late of the Pier, Tindersticks, Yelle, Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Danko Jones, Miss Kittin & The Hacker, Los Campesinos!, Amy Macdonald, Santogold, Diplo, Boys Noize, Martina Topley-Bird, Black Kids, Sons and Daughters, SebastiAn, Ricardo Villalobos, Midnight Juggernauts, Tunng, Black Mountain, The Unseen, Neurosis, High Contrast, Clutch, Hadouken!, The Whip, DJ Mehdi, Two Gallants, Blood Red Shoes, 2 Many DJ’s, The Casualties, Drive-By Truckers, Lykke Li, Yeasayer, Cult of Luna, Disco Ensemble, Michael Franti & Spearhead, Kaizers Orchestra, Infadels, Etienne de Crécy, Sam Sparro, Lightspeed Champion, Holy Fuck, A Wilhelm Scream, Nina Nastasia, Operator Please, Joan as Police Woman, DJ Hype, Feadz, Switch, Dan Deacon, Carl Craig, Girls in Hawaii, One Night Only, SoKo, Deadmau5, Surkin, Das Pop, The Sword, Fuck Buttons, Bob Mould, Tocadisco, Stephen Marley, State Radio, The Dodos, Volbeat, These New Puritans, Benga, Alela Diane, Flying Lotus, Black Light Burns, Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip, The Like, Little Dragon, Have Heart, Those Dancing Days, Henry Rollins, Headman, Móveis Coloniais de Acaju, The Ocean, Chase & Status, Dusty Kid, TC, Witchcraft, The Dø, El Guincho, Arsenal, Yuksek, The Gutter Twins, A-Trak, Erol Alkan, Shackleton, Animal Alpha, Kid Sister, Leila, A Brand, Crookers, autoKratz, Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip, DJ Friction, The Heavy, Kid Harpoon, Pivot, The Bloody Beetroots, Le Le, Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong, aka The Junkies, Year Long Disaster, Monza, Radioclit, The Subs, Red Light Company, Dr. Lektroluv, Pete & The Pirates, A Mountain Of One, XX Teens, Amenra, Brodinski, Amen Ra, Chrome Hoof, The Shoes, This Is Menace, Scroobius Pip, The Count & Sinden, The Black Box Relevation, Tim Vanhamel, White Lies, Headphone, Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig, Motek, Freaky Age, Creature With The Atom Brain, Count & Sinden, Jubilee, Dan Le Sac, Kitty, Daisy & Lewis, The Germans, Coem, The hickey underworld, Lady Linn and her Magnificent Seven, Santagold, Sons Of Albion, Daddy Earl, The Rones, Modeselektor & Pfadfinderei, MaxNormal.TV, Uffie & Feadz, DJ Hype & Daddy Earl and Hi Fi Handgrenades

I’m a little excited… Just a little!  Keep an eye on my Twitter for on-the-go updates from the festival!

I finally got round to adding a search facility to the blog.  It took all of 10 seconds once I knew how, but a lot longer to find out how.  For Wordpress it was just a matter of enabling Widgets, adding a search widget, then doing a slight bit of editing to the widgets.php in ‘/wp-includes’ to give the search form a class in order to style it in the CSS stylesheet.

I also just realised its been a long time since I’ve blogged about games (I mean properly… World of Warcraft doesn’t count!).  Expect a blog post soon on the games I’ve been enjoying.

Finally my big deadline for this part of the year has passed, and hopefully I’ll now be able to update this a bit more.  Expect some posts next week, including a gaming update and some music I’m enjoying.

Yes, I know, the page has gone somewhat quiet.  The reasons for this are quite simple: the stresses of life.  Between broken relationships and University workload, my life is quite the mess these days!  So, just so you know, I will do my best to update the page with some worthwhile content in the near future, but expect a lower frequency of updates until maybe June time.

Hope all my readers are keeping well – both of you!

Over the last couple of days whilst working furiously on some PhD stuff, I’ve been doing some spring cleaning and touching up on the blog. Firstly, I’ve changed the Twitter feed from a Flash badge to an rss text feed – I think this looks more consistent and makes for easier viewing of previous tweets. Also, it will no longer show conversations (using “@” on Twitter). As well as this, at the bottom of the side bar I have now added a feed from my Digg user profile, so that any stories I digg will appear down there, which I think is a cool way for me to show stories from around the web which I thought were cool, without having to writing a full post about them. This was implemented using the FeedList plugin for Wordpress.

The only thing I’m not happy with now is the Last.fm feed and the Flickr badge. I may change the Last.fm feed back to text as well very soon. The Flickr badge is pretty much the only one I can’t think of a better alternative for.