kiloalphatango.com {Insert catchy slogan here}

Sundays in Spring is a netlabel specialising in indie / acoustic style music. It's pretty easy listening, nice to have on in the background type music. The label is definitely worth checking out as pretty much everything up at the moment is good. Their home website seems to suggest that they have another couple of releases coming soon or already out. Hopefully they'll be uploaded to the Internet Archive soon as well.

I've taken this thing before and I'm sure I didn't get such a high score that time? Am I getting worse? 8-o

If the site is looking very strange / not working bear with me...I'm upgrading.

Hopefully I won't break anything.

Woo! I've performed a massive update and hopefully everything wil still be working OK. If you spot anything funny, please let me know. Some of the template that it is running off is a bit odd but I really cannot be bothered to try to fix it at the moment. I'm off to clear off my server and drop a temporary database - oh what an exciting life I lead ;-)

My wrist feels naked.

For the last couple of years I've been wearing a silver bracelet that my mum picked up at a boot sale or charity shop or something. It's hardly ever left my wrist. I only ever took it off a few times when playing badminton but normally I'd just leave it on. The band fits semi-tighly around the wrist so in order to take it off you have to bend it out so that a gap big enough to pass the wrist through is present. Any engineer worth their salt will tell you that constantly subjecting a material to cyclic stress like this is a 'Bad Thing' and so it has proved with this band. Today the band finally snapped in half.

Being the engineer I am I immediately examined the fracture surface and I freely admit to this being a rather sad thing to do :-) I took a photo of it anyway although I only have a couple of close up filters rather than a macro lens so there's a limit to how close I can get.

Stress Fracture Surface

No Brainer is a rather fun game. It's simple but very addictive and irritating when you get the simple questions wrong! The idea is to answer yes or no to easy questions and 'increase the size of your brain'.

I finally got some papers through for the job that I have been working at for the last couple of weeks. There's the standard offer letter (which is wrong - have to sort that out Tuesday when my manager gets back in) and the terms and conditions. There's a slightly higher wage attached which is always nice but at the back of the pack a nasty surprise lays in wait - The Security Check \ Counter Terrorist Check Questonaire.

Dear Kat, (Cust: 1234567)

Thank you for contacting us.

The system administrator has informed us that a hacker/attacker has tried to abuse one of your scripts (cgi/php)....

Oh well, it had to happen sometime. But why did it have to happen when I was having so much trouble actually logging on to the ftp server and staying on?

True horror is when you've deleted half of what makes the site tick, the ftp software refuses to connect and you know you'll have to force a restart of your browser to get a connection back, in the full knowledge that it'll log you out of your site when you need to stay logged in to make the update work. Still hopefully it'll be fixed now.

::sigh::

I finally took the plunge and submitted a couple of entries to Worth1000.com. They are Autumn Palette and Colour me "Granny" which is a colouring exercise for someone elses line art.

While in Hobbeycraft recently looking for some props for an entry to Worth1000.com I came across a book about how to draw Manga and I thought I'd give it a go. You can see my first attempt below.

Manga Girl: 1st try at drawing in the Manga style

I thought I'd have a play around with the copy of Painter Classic I got with my graphics tablet. After a bit of playing around I've come up with the picture below.

Ginger Cat

I've never been very good at drawing pictures of animate objects. I always see them with personalities in the way rather than seeing what's actually there. Any advice you can give over how to imporve would be appreciated. :-)

Edited to add: It looks so much better in the thumbnail! Small hides all the flaws!