Neil Crosby

Considered Thoughts

1. Mamma Mia - a Movie review by workingwithme

   ABBA songs transposed to enjoyable Greek comedy. Gentle sing-along fun.

   

   Sun, 20 Jul 2008 14:45:57 PDT

2. Lab Rats - a TV Show review by workingwithme

   Unfunny and obvious BBC2 sitcom. Armando Iannucci fails (with snails).

   

   Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:05:32 PDT

3. Monkeybone - a Movie review by workingwithme

   Coma'd cartoonist brings creation from nightmare to reality. Box-office flop.

   

   Sun, 13 Jul 2008 03:21:22 PDT

4. Hancock - a Movie review by workingwithme

   Slobby superhero drinks, destroys and goes to prison. Entertaining tosh.

   

   Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:47:52 PDT

5. Doctor Who - Journey's End - a TV Show review by workingwithme

   Ah, so _that's_ why it's just started raining lots then?

   

   Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:41:03 PDT

6. The Chronicles of Narnia - Prince Caspian - a Movie review by workingwithme

   Snarky comments abound as Jesus-lion helps murderous youths save Narnia.

   

   Sat, 28 Jun 2008 17:37:27 PDT

7. Mashed 2008 - an Event review by workingwithme

   Possible due to the unique way the BBC is funded.

   

   Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:52:29 PDT

8. Captain Morgan's Black Label Rum - a Food review by workingwithme

   A tasty dark rum, as sold by a pirate. Yarr!

   

   Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:58:21 PDT

9. Doctor Who - Midnight - a TV Show review by workingwithme

   Classic paranoia. RTD redeems himself before handing reins to Moffat.

   

   Sun, 15 Jun 2008 23:57:19 PDT

10. Beware of Beard

    I bought this shirt a few months ago now, when I was in the full flow of not shaving for Bearduary. The world was good, my life was happy, but my beard was starting to take on a life of its own - it had to be stopped! “Beware of Beard” is a full frontal [...]

    Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:59:56 PDT

11. Ratatouille - a Movie review by workingwithme

    Even cute rats can't rescue this slightly disappointing Pixar tale.

    

    Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:59:29 PDT

12. The Syndicate's numbers

    

    Sat, 07 Jun 2008 03:11:42 PDT

13. The Ten Word Review Monkey

    

    Fri, 23 May 2008 02:32:25 PDT

14. Noodle Surprise v2

    

    Wed, 21 May 2008 03:11:02 PDT

15. Noodle Surprise

    This shirt is perfect for me. For those of you who don’t know, I’m missing the top third of the ring finger on my left hand. Of course, no-one ever notices, so I end up showing them and telling the the story about how I lost it. In the real world it happened in a [...]

    Tue, 20 May 2008 13:46:04 PDT

16. Control? Escape!

    Since it’s GTA IV week, what could be better than a good old geek inspired cops ‘n’ robbers based t-shirt? Not many things, that’s what. The t-shirt itself is pretty simple. A CTRL key dressed like a policeman is chasing after an ESC key. Obviously, the ESC key tried to fight the law, [...]

    Mon, 28 Apr 2008 06:40:45 PDT

17. Rebranding Effort, Attempt #1

    

    Wed, 16 Apr 2008 08:25:41 PDT

18. Beware of Quizzical Beards

    

    Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:43:56 PDT

19. Mr File Attachment Got Dumped

    This file attachment in a OS X style trash bin was just so darned cute, I had to have him. Files have feelings too, you know. Unlike the actual OS X trash can though, this bin is for recyclables. You see? As well as wearing a groovy t-shirt with a very cute piece [...]

    Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:45:36 PDT

20. The Mondays

    Is it wrong to wear this t-shirt on a friday? Probably, but since it only arrived today that’s when I’m wearing it. Ian Brock has pitched this t-shirt from Uneetee at just the right level. I’m sure that all of you out there who work in an office have taken to doodling on post-it [...]

    Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:10:58 PDT

21. Teenage Mutant Ninja 80s Reference

    Ah, the 80s. Weren’t they great? Rubik’s Cubes, and power suits and Turtles. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They were awesome. Of course, in the UK some of the awesome got removed when the word “Ninja” had to be replaced by “Hero”, but that’s just being picky. The Turtles were [...]

    Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:10:21 PDT

22. My eye's looking a little bloodshot

    

    Sun, 06 Apr 2008 11:13:55 PDT

23. It’s okay Pluto, I’m not a planet either

    When I saw this t-shirt on Snorg, I immediately knew that I was going to buy it for myself. Things didn’t quite work out that way though - I showed it to Becca, she loved it too, so I bought it for her instead. There’s been some controversy about whether Pluto is a planet or [...]

    Thu, 03 Apr 2008 08:40:11 PDT

24. Choose Wisely

    Rock, Paper, Scissors - The eternal struggle between good, evil and mediocrity. Or so my mother said. “Choose Wisely” is the first tee that I’ve bought from Snorg Tees and it’s pretty nice. Whilst the triptych is fairly simplistic, the icons are recongisable enough surface that childhood memory of managing to win five games [...]

    Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:49:42 PDT

25. Summer Glau: Because SkyNet is kinky

    

    Sat, 29 Mar 2008 05:27:39 PDT

26. Joss Whedon is my Master now

    Apparently, no-one knows who Joss Whedon is. At least, that’s the message I get whenever I wear this shirt. “But who is he?”, everyone says. “Only the writer of such hit shows and movies as Buffy, Angel, Firefly and Serenity”, say I. So, there you go. The copy I bought of this [...]

    Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:35:03 PDT

27. /Everybody stand back/

    If you don’t already know about fantastically geeky web comic xkcd, go and have a look. No, really, I’ll still be here when you get back. For my money, there aren’t enough t-shirts available about regular expressions. Sure, they aren’t as glamorous as, say, String Theory or Quantum Mechanics, but where would we be [...]

    Sun, 23 Mar 2008 06:20:38 PDT

28. Easter Eggs: The Gathering

    

    Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:53:44 PDT

29. Twitter Bots

    So, this last weekend was BarCamp Brighton 2. I’ve already posted about that elsewhere, but what I haven’t blogged about yet is my talk.

    Recently I’ve been playing around with Twitter Bots. I had a need to be able to let just the people I work with when someone had brought food into the office, so I created yahoofood. I wanted near real-time updates of when The Ten Word Review was updated, so I created the ttwr bot. I also want to allow people to review things on The Ten Word Review using their mobile phones, so I’m going to be needing to create a bot for that.

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    Wed, 19 Mar 2008 05:19:04 PDT

30. The cake is a lie (your mum is a lie)

    

    Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:47:35 PDT

31. tantek was wrong

    

    Sat, 08 Mar 2008 03:15:03 PST

32. Ignoring Bots in IRC Channels using Colloquy

    I’ve recently started using IRC again. Unfortunately, one of the channels that I use is somewhat infested with bots. This is a pity because when there’s signal in the channel it’s very useful stuff to be aware of. So, instead of whining like a little girl I decided to “man up” and do something about removing the bots and related noise from my view.

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    Sat, 08 Mar 2008 03:07:40 PST

33. 404: Number Plate Not Found

    

    Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:38:30 PST

34. "Another Sortable Table"

    

    Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:10:03 PST

35. Hello, my super power is YUI

    

    Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:15:36 PST

36. See no evil, speak no evil, WTF?

    

    Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:14:52 PST

37. A Pox on Apple

    Last weekend I upgraded my AppleTV to “Take Two” and my MacBook Pro and Mac Mini from Tiger to Leopard. I also bought an Airport Extreme and an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard. Oh boy, that was fun… Here’s a list of the problems I’ve encountered: The AppleTV is now unfit for its intended purpose. After [...]

    Thu, 21 Feb 2008 01:17:08 PST

38. GZipping Web Content for Fun and Performance

    I’ve known about the benefits that gzipping the content on my sites would give me for quite some time (files are zipped up as they travel to your users, making them faster to download and leaving you with a smaller bandwidth bill), but I never got around to enabling it because, well, I’m lazy.

    It’s really easy to set up things on your server to automatically gzip all sensible files though, and most of the code you need is very easily found in the Apache 2 documentation. All you have to do is copy and paste the following into your .htaccess file, and all your files (except images) will end up being gzipped for you. Awesome.

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    Tue, 19 Feb 2008 03:19:57 PST

39. A Useful CVS Status Checker

    cvs status 2>/dev/null | grep Status: | grep -v "to-date"
    

    That’s what I use on the command line to see which files aren’t up to date within my CVS tree at work (at home I use SVN, which in my opinion is a lot nicer).

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    Sat, 16 Feb 2008 08:15:39 PST

40. Candles

    

    Fri, 15 Feb 2008 06:29:40 PST

41. Where is my happy face, take 2

    

    Thu, 07 Feb 2008 09:50:31 PST

42. Yahoo! brand hair restoration elixir

    

    Sun, 27 Jan 2008 04:03:46 PST

43. Vintage Action Shot

    

    Sun, 27 Jan 2008 03:32:33 PST

44. Laptop, the well-travelled suitcase years

    

    Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:57:06 PST

45. singstarLEK

    

    Sun, 20 Jan 2008 10:19:15 PST

46. The iPhone is rubbish - here’s why

    So, I bought myself an iPhone. I said I wasn’t going to, but I did it anyway. Unfortunately, from my point of view as a user there are a lot of things wrong with it. Here are just a few of them… When signing up, my phone number to be ported had to be [...]

    Wed, 26 Dec 2007 03:20:24 PST

47. Syncing the Next n Unwatched TV Shows to your iPod, AppleTV or iPhone using iTunes

    Storage space on an iPhone is at a premium. There just isn’t enough space on it to be able to store an entire season of a TV Show that you’ve ripped from the DVDs you bought. But then, there shouldn’t really need to be - most people will only need or want to watch a couple of episodes of something between times that they’re able to dock with their home machine. So, it would make sense to be able to just sync the next couple of unwatched episodes of a few shows to your iPhone, iPod etc. You’d think you’d be able to just do that with iTunes, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, out of the box you can’t.

    What you can do though is run a little AppleScript voodoo that’ll do the job for you. Installing the script onto your system will take at most five minutes, and then you’ll simply have to run the script before you sync your iPhone so that it knows which episodes need syncing.

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    Sat, 08 Dec 2007 04:30:00 PST

48. My First BarCamp

    This last weekend I attended BarCamp London 3, at Google’s Headquarters. Even though I’d managed to get tickets for the previous two I’d wussed out at the last minute, thinking that I hadn’t got anything of worth to add to the proceedings. Well, the first time I also had the fact that it was going to be the first full weekend that my then girlfriend (now fiancée) Becca and I were going to have had together for about 3 months. The point is, this was my first one.

    I’ve got to say, I had fun. I stayed up all night with David and presented my talk about automating TV downloads first thing on the Sunday morning bleary eyed but to what I like to think were a receptive audience. I’ll be putting an expanded version of my notes from the talk up in a couple of days so that people can make use of, and expand on, my technique.

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    Thu, 29 Nov 2007 03:45:55 PST

49. Why I won't be buying an iPhone

    First off, lets get one thing straight. Generally, I love my Apple products. I have a MacBook Pro, a Mac Mini, a G4 iBook, a 160Gb AppleTV, a 30Gb iPod Video and a 1Gb iPod Nano so that I can use my Nike+ trainers. So, I’m not about to go into an “I hate Apple rant”.

    That said, I definitely won’t be buying an iPhone. Why? Lets get started…

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    Tue, 06 Nov 2007 22:36:27 PST

50. Galaxy wobbly chocolate is rubbish

    Bloody Mars. They’ve only gone and made the joins on their Galaxy chocolate bars all wibbly wobbly. Chocolate bar joins should be straight, not wobbly! It makes no sense, you must acquit!

    Tue, 23 Oct 2007 07:38:05 PDT

51. Would you like to start Working With Me?

    I’ve been working in Yahoo’s London offices for just over a year now, and I’m loving it. Awesome people to work with, as much free coke as I can drink, good projects to work on and Pool, Foosball and Ping-pong tables to play on. What more could a boy want? Not a lot really.

    And, guess what? We’re looking for six more awesome people to come and join us in making super awesome websites that will be seen by countless people around the world. If you’re a web-developer with good all-round skills, are always willing and wanting to learn new things and are happy to be working in London’s groovy West End then I want to hear from you! Drop me a line and your CV at neil [dot] crosby [atatat] workingwith [dot] me [dot] uk and I’ll pass on your information to those who need it.

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    Wed, 17 Oct 2007 03:00:38 PDT

52. The xbox 360 Elite is Rubbish

    I got one of these beauties two weeks ago, and it’s a noisy bugger. An energy hog too. Before I bought the xbox 360, I’d been telling various friends about the fact that I own an Apple TV and that I re-encode my DVDs so that I can watch them on it. Pretty often they’d turn [...]

    Fri, 12 Oct 2007 04:27:55 PDT

53. Fopp is Rubbish

    I’m a fan of Fopp. Where I work we had a Fopp literally right across the road from us. I was not a happy bunny when they closed because of “cash flow problems”. Happily though, HMV decided to buy u pa few of the stores and run them as Fopp stores, with the values [...]

    Tue, 09 Oct 2007 01:52:47 PDT

54. Neil Crosby is engaged

    To the very lovely Rebecca Courtley. More details to follow once we get back from our holiday…

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    Tue, 18 Sep 2007 03:55:36 PDT

55. The new Apple wired keyboard is rubbish

    So, a little while ago, Apple brought out a couple of new keyboards - one wired, one wireless. The whole web community went a bit nutso, proclaiming them to be the best thing since sliced bread, gorgeous and so very very thin. After a little bit of internal agonising I decided to buy [...]

    Mon, 10 Sep 2007 08:26:53 PDT

56. Moo Sticker Bubblifier

    

    When moo.com brought out their stickers a couple of months ago, the ones from their sample book that I was most impressed with were the little speech bubble stickers with the oh so very “web 2.oh” phrases printed on them. Unfortunately, you weren’t able to make up similar ones on the site unless you wanted to create them yourself in PhotoShop first.

    No matter, I thought - that’ll be a nice little wizard that they’ll be sure to add to the site pretty quickly since I can’t be the only person who thinks that the speech bubbles are cool. That didn’t happen though, so In the spirit of all things web, I decided to make my own.

    The Moo Sticker Bubblifier that I’ve come up with is very simple - you give it some text (on multiple lines if you’d like to span multiple lines on the sticker), say what font and colour you want, and you’ll be magically presented with an image you can save and then use with moo to make some stickers.

    The are a couple of things I’m fairly pleased with about this hack. First off, the URLs used for the created images are nicely hackable, and look like they’re just any old image even though they’re being produced by PHP as and when they’re requested. Secondly, the wizard will dynamically resize the text you give to get you a best fit. So, if you wanted a sticker that said “WTF?” then the text would be larger than if you wanted a sticker that said “I alone am best!”. Currently all lines of text on a sticker are always the same size, but I might have a fiddle later so that you can choose to have differing text sizes within a sticker if it’s something that people want.

    So, there you go. What are you waiting for? Get out there and make some speech bubbles!

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    Sun, 09 Sep 2007 10:20:00 PDT

57. FaceBook’s regional networks are rubbish

    So, for a while now I’ve been using FaceBook. I’m enjoying the site and I’ve got back in contact with a good few people I used to know in school, so that’s all good. What’s not so good is the way that their regional networks. FaceBook has the concept of networks. You can [...]

    Mon, 23 Jul 2007 06:11:30 PDT

58. What a load of old cobblers

    Cobblers - another word for rubbish. So, who’s going to go and register everythingiscobblers.com then?

    Wed, 27 Jun 2007 01:48:55 PDT

59. Mobile Web is Rubbish

    It turns out that two thirds of students think that using the web on their mobile phones is rubbish. Quel surprise there really… A study carried out among students at five UK universities has concluded something we’ve known all long: the mobile web is crap. Two-thirds of the 1,000 students surveyed said the mobile web was [...]

    Sun, 13 May 2007 02:45:19 PDT

60. It’s joost so rubbish

    Why do they mention user generated content? Most of it is rubbish with low-grade production. I don’t see user generated content as value-add, it’s just other peoples content and it doesn’t marry well with high production value television content. Read all of Jon Folland’s critique of Joost.

    Fri, 04 May 2007 09:19:54 PDT