Have you been out today?

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Blimey. This blog was linked to by Drawn yesterday and thus my stats have suddenly gone through the roof (Tuesday's hits up roughly 2000% from Monday's). I'd better draw some new stuff sharpish before all these lovely new people go away again...

Back now. Very lovely it was too but for now I am too tired to tell you any more than that.

Zzzzzzzzz.

I am off to Inverness for a few days so you'll just have to amuse yourselves for a while till I'm back. Gather round the piano and have a good old sing song or something.

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I reckon we'll be seeing those little critters with the many eyeballs again, I like 'em...



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A happy daytrip with the missus to the seaside yesterday (of which I may say more later) was enhanced by the additional company (in my head) of Mr Ivor Cutler via this splendid podcast tribute by "Tim in London" of Radio Clash.

I recommend it highly. Don't put it on in the background when you're doing something else though. Listen to it when you're doing not very much at all and let the voice of a dead, wise, funny man fill your head. You'll be glad you did.

A very agreeable evening last night spent quizzing with chums Ade, Gary and Rosa at a pub that was once my local but these days is just quite local. Hadn't been in there in years and now don't know why. It's a good pub and, it turns out, runs a superior quiz of a Tuesday night. While our team (Three Weeks To Go - named for the advanced stage of Rosa's pregnancy) did creditably in the quiz proper (joint second or third, I think, and only two or three points behind the winners - oh if only we'd known the name of the Donnie Darko bunny and I'd been sure that there was a ballroom in Cluedo...) it was the end of evening big money question that we did well on because it strayed into an area of relative expertise for me. The rollover cash prize stood at £132 and the question was this:

Which famous cartoon character made his debut in a newspaper on January 17 1929?

And while I didn't know the answer for sure I could at least take a decent guess. So I did. And I was right - blimey, how exciting. But so was someone on another team. Darn! So the money wasn't ours yet.

Thus there was a tie break question which was:

In which year did Bugs Bunny first say "What's Up Doc?" to Elmer Fudd?

And, again, I didn't know but I reckoned I could get close. So I took another guess, somewhat aided by having watched a bunch of Bugs shorts relatively recently on DVD (I was buying a 4 DVD set for my godson and his siblings for Christmas and thought, bollocks, I'm having one of those for myself too). And I was right. And this time the other team weren't (they went 3 years too late) so we won the Big Money Prize. Hurrah! A top night out that left us all in profit - marvellous.

If anyone wants to have a go at answering the questions (and I'm trusting you all not to cheat with your internets and your books and such) then do so in the comments and maybe I'll think of a rubbish prize for anyone who gets them both right (or close to right, or hilariously wrong).

Most of you should skip this as it's just a plea for some technical advice...

If anyone out there knows anything much about wireless networks for Macs then please drop me a line. The missus has use of a wireless enabled iBook at present and wishes to share the use of my broadband connection. Now, as far as I can tell, if we went so far as to buy an Airport base station then I'd additionally have to get an Airport card for my G4 to make use of it. This seems like a deal more faff and expense than is warranted.

However, I'm led to believe by some sources that it might be possible to leave the G4 directly connected to my router (a Voyager 205 if that makes any difference to anything) as it is now, fit an Airport card and have it operate as a Software Base Station providing internet access to the iBook directly without the need for an actual physical base station at all. Anybody clever out there know if this is indeed the case?

Also, how do I tell if my G4 is "Airport Extreme-enabled"?

Sorry about all that. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Update:

Up and running now. Thanks to everyone who offered advice, especially Matt B and Pete. Got a Belkin Wireless G Router in the end which was up and running happily (with the old router as a modem) in about five minutes flat.

Sorting out the security settings then took about 3 hours of frustration and could still use some tweaking but still, on the whole a happy result.

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Happy birthday to me. Tra la la...

And while I'm here: I don't usually bother with them there meme things but seeing as I read about this one (over on Pete's blog, as with everything) on my birthday and it's about birthdays it would seem churlish to ignore it.

"Go to Wikipedia and put in your birth date. Don't put in the year. Post in your LJ/blog with three neat/important events, two births, and two deaths!"

April 8th

Events:

1820 - The Venus de Milo is discovered on the Aegean island of Melos.

1904 - France and the United Kingdom sign the Entente cordiale.

1994 - Body of Kurt Cobain discovered in his Washington home after having died three days earlier.

Births:

1929 - Jacques Brel, Belgian singer and composer (d. 1978)

1968 - Patricia Arquette, American actress (my long lost twin)

Deaths:

1950 - Vaslav Nijinsky, Polish-born ballet dancer (b. 1890)

1973 - Pablo Picasso, Spanish artist (b. 1881)




Update:

Had a very splendid day in the course of which I received this card from my good friend Mr Reynolds.



That's me that is.

Click on strip for special bonus material.
(Warning: contains inevitable bad pun)

It really must nearly be over now. The fibre tip is worn down to less than 0.5mm long. Maybe the ink will run out first but surely another page or two will see off the last remains of the tip. In the meantime, it draws on...



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Bit quiet here last week due, in part, to spending a couple of days in smelly London. Although actually Forest Hill, where I was visiting the excellent Mr Mark Stevenson and his good lady, Vic, is far enough out of the centre to be barely smelly at all. Mr S was a most fabulous host and Vic was amazingly indulgent of the racket we were making much of the time with various instruments and voices, especially considering that she was, at the time, busy writing a play. Our attempts to create innovative new musics met with, I think it is safe to say, limited success (though enjoyably so) but Mark bakes a darn fine cake and we came joint third in the pub quiz down the boozer in the evening so a good time was still very much had by all (except, conceivably, the neighbours). The quiz, incidentally, was hosted by Stephen Frost (cue an argument toward the end of the evening about the name of his ex-comedy and lager-advertising partner - it was Mark Arden, I was right. Hah!) and was to have featured an appearance from Johnny Vegas but he'd decided to have a quiet night in instead. Shame.

The next day I stopped off in the smelly centre of smelly London to visit the recently opened Cartoon Museum which was well worth a look. Happy, also, to find a book of Sherriffs film star caricatures for a tenner in the shop there. My mate Jonathan Edwards introduced me to his work some years back and sent me a few jpegs but I'd seldom seen anything of his in print before. Lovely work, economical and yet lush at the same time.