Flashback

One day one a bus

“Does this go to Glasgow?” I asked. “Near a station?”

I had stressed the second part like a typical briton on a foreign holiday, trying to make a local understand them by talking louder. It wasn’t really necessary in the event, as the driver had replied in such a thick Glasweigan accent that Rab C Nesbit himself would have struggled to pick it up.

“Aye – goestae Central – Glasgae Central!” He spat, stressing the last part in case I was a foreigner.

“Thanks – I’ll just have a single then.”

“Tae whair?”

I blinked once to see if he was taking the smeg, but he wasn’t so I told him “Glasgae Centrul” in the best scottish accent I could muster. It came out like a bad impression of the driver.

Why is that? I wish I could understand why my scottish accent is crap whenever I’m trying to put on a scottish accent. I know I spent three years in Cornwall, but that was fourteen years ago now and I’m well aware that I have a scottish accent of sorts.

Anyway, I sit on this bus after quite a surreal adventure involving crossing a field in what appeared to be the middle on nowhere, but turned out to be right beside a dual carriageway. I had turned up at the bus stop, via the field, clutching a recently burned copy of Windows 98 with absolutely no idea where I was or in which part of Glasgow.

An hour and a half before I had struck up a conversation with a stranger in a computer shop in the city. I had told him that my developers copy of Windows 98 had expired and he offered to drive me to his place and give me a copy, which was nice.

I didn’t realise at the time that the 30 minute drive was a one way trip and that Mr Helpful would bid me goodbye with a brief wave in the direction of civilisation and one of those head-tilt-wink things that scottish people do when they say “Seeyie”

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Journal

Eggcellent!

Wahey – Easter is upon us and aside from being the second mini consumer-fest of the year (after Valentines day), it’s the first proper holiday of the year too. I’ll be making the trek up to Scotland to spend some time with family and friends and hopefully enjoy some mild weather.

I have a sneaky suspicion that I wont see any of the latter, but it cant hurt to hope!

Have a good one, where ever you are :o)

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Zoned out

I spent a large part of last weekend working on WipeoutZone, redesigning the front end and customising the new release of phpBB.

The latter turned out to be quite a task, as it’s less customisable than the older version of the forum and with virtually every page being built with includes and from the database it made finding what I wanted to alter a bit of a chore. I got it done to a reasonable standard in the end, and although I really wanted to re-do the icons I just ran out of time. I knew if I rushed them they’d look like crap too, so maybe some day I’ll get back to them.

The re-design was a bit unnecessary, really, as I’d only just re-done the whole site in early January. However, there were some codey issues with NN6 and Mozzila due to the page stretching to fit the screen, so I had to scrap that. I also wanted to take a step back from Wipeout Fusion to concentrate a bit more on the previous versions of the game once more, which meant re-designing the banner of the site as well. I’m finding it hard to compete on a level playing field with the official sites in terms of material, and with WipeoutZone originally being a Wipeout 3 fan site it makes sense to cater for that audience until Wipeout Fusion no longer has an official site.

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