Pop Off the Penguin

So I came across an anim­a­tion I made when I was explor­ing Adobe Premier a few years ago. It’s about a pen­guin who sets off from Penguin Planet to col­on­ise Earth, and a “bad guy” pen­guin who tries to stop him. So sit back and enjoy the mediocrity that is Pop Off the Penguin, epis­ode 1.

There was an epis­ode 2, and I’d star­ted work on a third, but these seem to be lost to time and I don’t expect to see them again. 

What's my IP address?

Do you often sit around won­der­ing what your IP address is? You totally do, don’t you? Don’t lie. Well, won­der no longer, and head on down to http://ip.mmizzi.com/.

My toilet is revolting

Toilets have simple jobs. They sit around all day, then when some­body needs to they come and defec­ate in them, and the toi­let swal­lows it up. As jobs go, it’s hardly the most excit­ing, but surely more inter­est­ing than that of a basin or kettle.

Sometimes, the toilet’s job just isn’t enough excite­ment for a toi­let, and it decides to revolt. In the case of my toi­let yes­ter­day, it decided to express its rebel­lion by slowly filling its bowl up to and bey­ond the point where the water over­flows onto the floor. What a fuck­ing bastard.

Nokia E75 bluetooth

So the oth­er­wise awe­some E75 has some bluetooth issues. It seems it doesn’t want to con­nect to car kits.

One solu­tion men­tioned on the for­ums is to delete a bunch of saved SMS mes­sages. It sounds silly, but for me at least it seems to have worked. I had some 2,000 mes­sages in my inbox plus 200 sent mes­sages. I deleted them all but the last 10 or so in the inbox and sud­denly my phone con­nects to my shiny new MEX BT2750!

Ooh, pretty

Hey look, the whole site’s a little bit less ugly.

Bomb threat

Great Dane

Publisher files on Linux

Just put­ting this here for future ref­er­ence, or in case any­body else finds it useful.

It seems impossible to open MS Publisher files on Linux (and I guess on Windows too if you don’t have Publisher), but convert.neevia.com will con­veni­ently turn them into PDFs for free! Yay!

Ultrasound

Had an ultra­sound on Friday, turns out the baby’s a girl, so now it looks like we don’t need to worry about boys’ names.

So check out these, the first pho­tos of Amelia Rose Mizzi, due to be born on April 21 next year.

Click here for more.

Baby names

So my wife’s preg­nant. Now that the mind-numbing hor­ror has gone, and before the dreaded num­ber threes start, there’s the epic task of not only pick­ing but also agree­ing on pos­sible names.

We agreed on a girl’s name pretty quickly — I’m not going to tell you what it is because if you steal it we’ll be back at square one — but a good boy’s name that we both agree on has so far proved elusive.

The con­ver­sa­tions usu­ally go some­thing like this: I’ll come up with a per­fectly good, strong, mean­ing­ful name, and she’ll screw her nose up in a way that says “my ini­tial reac­tion is ‘no’ and I refuse to con­sider it fur­ther”. Then she’ll come up with some cliché, deliberately-badly-spelt-because-it-makes-it-seem-more-“exotic” name, to which I’ll screw my nose up in a way that says “I think it’s funny that I’m imit­at­ing your man­ner­isms but I’m acutely aware that it actu­ally just makes me look like a twat”.

Usually we’ll get through one or two more of these back-and-forths before we run out of ideas and I start sug­gest­ing some­thing silly like Smeagle or Chewbacca.

But ser­i­ously, who wouldn’t want to name their kid after this.

Yawn

Yaaaaaawn.

Sleepwalking fail

I know it’s pretty old, but this still cracks me up:

Menthols

The prob­lem with menthols, right, is that when you smoke them they leave you want­ing a cigarette.

Five nines

So today was the ninth of the ninth, two thou­sand and nine. And at nine past nine this morn­ing (that is, at 9:09 on 09÷09÷09) I snapped a pic­ture of the clock on my phone at work. This is a piece of his­tory right here.

I’m set­ting a reminder right now for 10:10am on the 10th of October next year.

Bipolar ice cap

Babysitting tips

Some good babysit­ting advice here. Keep it in mind next time you’re babysit­ting and you can’t go wrong.

(Baby from here, flames from here.)

You've got other things that rhyme with mail!

Also this:

Ghost caught on video

Hey so I was mess­ing about with this motion cap­ture soft­ware and left it run­ning overnight. I came back in the morn­ing to take a look and saw this.

It’s clearly a ghost — there’s no chance at all that it’s a moth that happened to wander past the infrared lamp. Nope. It’s def­in­itely a ghost.

Check it out:

You've got pail!

Get it? Cos it’s like “you’ve got mail” but with a pail?

Some shots of the dog

Just poke ‘em with the mouse to get a closer look: