Fish

A new and sociable theme

As I am sure you will have noticed if you have visited here recently, I have updated the theme of my blog. I really like the new look, I hope you do too. It is not just the appearances that has changed, I have added a few new social features. If you look at the top of the page, you should see two new exciting buttons. One is a link to my Facebook profile, the other is my RSS feed. Also, after each post, there is the option to share the content in question on Twitter, Facebook and WordPress.

I have not been posting on here very often recently. I am now less busy than I was however, so I hope to start posting more frequently from now on… perhaps around three times a week. A big thanks to everyone who has continued to read and comment on this blog throughout the drought.

Finally, I received a couple of interesting comments on my last post. Here is a little something for superjess:

My Memetastic award – update

Last week I was given a super Memetastic award. As part of me receiving this fantastic award I had to list five things about myself, four of which were lies. thanks to everyone who voted. I can now exclusively reveal that the true statement is that I own a large collection of pencil sharpenings. Indeed, I collected them when I was around 10 years old and to this day I still keep them in a large jar in my parents’ house. With regards to the four false statements:

• I like rabbits, you can see me feeding one here.
• I have never tried chocolate coated chicken wings, but I do like to eat chicken cooked in Coca-Cola.
• I am a rather slow reader, even when the books are the right way up. I have never tried to read a book upside down.
• I have only ever owned one car (about seven years ago now). It was blue.

As for who I will pass the Memetastic award onto, I have decided that everyone who voted on my poll (you know who you are) shall get the award. Congratulations!

My Memetastic award

Ok, here is the deal. Having decided to reduce the number of posts I publish on this blog each week, I thought that writing posts would be easy. It isn’t. While struggling to find something to write about today, I saw that Sandra of Wizards and Ogres and Elves…oh my! fame has presented me with a Memetastic award. This means that I should do a few things:

• You must proudly display the award in a post.
• You must list five things about yourself and four of the five must be Lies.
  (your readers must guess which one is the truth)
• And you must then pass this prestigious award on, to five deserving bloggers.

Ok, first of all, I am not usually a fan of these things (e.g. send this message to 20 other people or else…). In this instance however, it seems like a bit of fun, so here we go!

That was my amazing award, here is the poll. Remember, only one of these five statements is true.

 

I will reveal the true statement and announce the five people I have chosen to receive the Memetastic award in a few days. Stay tuned!

Ambigrams

I have not been feeling well today, so it’s going to be another short post. Whilst thinking of what to write about, I remembered something really interesting that I had read about in Angels and Demons. The book features a number of ambigrams. These are essentially words written in such a way such that they look the same from another angle (often upside down) as they do normally. Here is an ambigram of my name that I found here.

How to make a cardboard box

As the title says, this post is about making a box out of cardboard. It may sound quite simple but I had trouble finding a template online that told me where to cut and glue ect. Therefore, I thought it might be quite useful to post the method I used here in case anyone wants to do a similar thing to me.

The box I wanted to make was the type where the lid could be completly removed, similar to those used for board games. Therefore, the base and the lid would be made seperatly. The cardboard I used was around 1.5mm in thickness. If you can get cardboard of 1 or 1.25mm, go with that instead. The thicker the cardboard, the harder it is to bend. The template I used is shown here:

Step one: Mark the template for both the base and the lid on a sheet of card. The lid should be able to fit completly over the base. Therefore, the top section of the lid should be slightly larger than the bottom section of the base. The top section of my lid was 23 * 16mm. The bottom section of my base was 22 * 15mm. The sides of both the base and the lid were 3.5mm in height.

Step two: Using a knife, cut round the edge of the template for both the base and the lid. If you want to end up with stright lines (and all fingers intact), it is advisable to use a metal ruler here.

Step three: Use the knife again to score the folds of both the base and the lid. Also, cut out one side of each of the flaps.

Step four: Apply glue to the reverse of each flap. It is probabily a good idea to do just two flaps at a time. If you want to know why this is a good idea, go ahead and glue all four flaps at once.

Step five: Stick the flaps onto the sides of the base/lid. If you have trouble bending the sides, score the folds a bit more deeply. You may need to hold the joins while the glue dries. This is the very moment your mum will phone you… be strong, don’t answer, keep holding those joins.

Once all four flaps have been glued to the sides of both the base and the lid, you should have somthing resembling this. Hopefully, the base and the lid should fit snugly together. If they don’t fit snugly together… no, I’m sure they will fit perfectly.

My blog – 2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 5,900 times in 2010. That’s about 14 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 122 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 283 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 95mb. That’s about 5 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was April 5th with 92 views. The most popular post that day was About me.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, en.blog.wordpress.com, digg.com, healthyperson.com, and carsite.sex992.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for wenlock, clear sky, duck billed platypus, million dots poster, and singapore casino.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

About me January 2010
2 comments

2

About my work January 2010
1 comment

3

About this blog January 2010

4

1 million dots May 2010

5

Fifteen places to visit in the UK April 2010

The Post Every Day challenge

There are just a few minutes to go until midnight on the 1st January 2011 and I have come across an interesting challenge from WordPress.com

 

Daily habits are the best way to make change happen. If you can remember to do something every day, by the end of the year, you’ll have done that thing over 300 times! Simple and amazing.

As part of the DailyPost, we’re launching two campaigns:

• Post a Day 2011: Post something to your blog every single day through 2011
• Post a Week 2011: Post to your blog at least once a week through 2011

 

At first I thought I would do the ‘Post a Week’ challenge… but I kind of already do that. So then I thought, why not go all out? Why not promise to post here every day?

I am not sure how long this will last, perhaps just a week or a month. I am also not sure about what my posts will be like. I am sure however, that whatever the result, it will be a bit of fun while it lasts. Please support me and if you have any suggestions of things I can post about, let me know in a comment.

Merry Christmas!

Visualising friendships

I came across this amazing image the other day. It shows a map of friendships taken from a sample of around 10 million. Each line represents the number of friendships that exist between the two places it connects. The brighter the line, the more friendships exist. Whilst the extent to which the data reproduces in detail the outline of landmasses and the location of cities is startling, it is also sobering to note the absence of many prominent areas of the world. A high resolution image can be seen here.