Doors Open Days

During the past month the public have been able to get into sites and buildings every weekend for free. From Corstorphine Police Station to Lothian Buses PLC, these are just two examples of the types of sites opened up for public viewing in Edinburgh. Plenty of churches, schools and University of Edinburgh buildings also granted public access.

Steinunn and I visited the Anatomy Lecture Theatre and Anatomy Resource Centre in the University’s medical building but unfortunately most of the exhibition was closed due to unforeseen circumstances. We did see 2 African elephants’ skeletons and five or so female pelvises. Each pelvis had been taken from women who had died during or shortly after giving birth.

Modified Qwilm Theme

I’ve just updated my blog theme as my own design sucked to tell the truth. My new theme is based on Qwilm, modified to fit with the HTML structure of WordPress.com’s Sandbox Skin ‘No Stylesheet by Nobody’. Because I can’t touch the HTML there are a few things I cannot style properly. There’s still some tweaking to do and icons to add but I’m happy with the look so far.

Metal Hearts – Socialize

Take a few minutes out and listen to this tune. I love the structure of this song, how it builds up around a repeating riff, is stripped bare, sparkles for a bit in the middle, then ends with the chanting chorus… sooo-she-liize, sooo-she-liize, sooo-she-liize…

WordPress now support Odeo so below is a past that starts of with the tune linked to above, only it is at double speed for some reason. Still sounds good though.

[odeo=http://www.odeo.com/audio/624826/view]

Rare Radiohead Interview circa 1995

I don’t remember ever seeing an interview any member of Radiohead other than Thom Yorke. This video, shot whilst in Italy I think, features Colin, Ed, Phil and Thom, all chatting away happily. Actually, Phil excuses himself 5 minutes in to the footage. Must have needed the toilet or something.

How not to interview

Yesterday was the first time I’ve sat in on an interview. An interview my colleagues and I knew about literally 2 seconds before the guy walked in through the door. My boss failed to tell us (the tech team) about the interview, which meant no time to prepare, no time to look at the guy’s CV, no time draft up a list of pertinent questions. Instead, the boss gave a rambled history of the company, the interviewee spoke about his flickered job history (this guy never stood still) and the tech team asked a series of unstructured questions and tried to keep the interview together.

I’m only writing about this because I happened to read a blog post by Seth Godin where he states that interviews are a waste of time. I concur. His alternative is for the job candidate to do a very short stint of work experience. Both parties get a much better deal out of this compared to the standard interview process. Makes perfect sense to me. You?

technorati tags: job interviews

Stingrays – Don’t mess with them!

Poor Mr. Steve Irwin. His heart was pierced by the spine of a stingray. What a way to go! He’d have preferred death by croc I’m sure, though nevertheless died doing the adventurous stuff he’s known for. From what I saw of him on TV, he was a lively, entertaining sole, one his family will sorely miss.

Handy Icelandic Phrases

Update: You can now listen to an audio file of the most common Icelandic phrases as spoken by my partner, a native Icelander.

Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the most common phrases in 100 languages. Language 39 is Icelandic. The Wikipedia page is marked for deletion because it’s too long and uses non-standard pronounciation information. For my own reference and before the page is deleted, I’ve copied the phrases from Wikipedia, minus the pronounciation info:

Win for Iceland in Euro 2008 qualifier

Steinunn will be pleased. On second thoughts, she probably won’t care that Iceland won its first European 2008 qualifier game against Northern Ireland. I’m sure her nephew, Kolbjörn, was watching though, as I spoke to him the other day via Skype for the first time. His first question was whether I liked football. I think I disappointed him by saying “not really” followed by a feeble “I watch internationals though”, a poor attempt at redeeming myself in his eyes.

I’m watching England vs Andorra at the mo via the new Telewest cable box. The picture is crystal clear compared to the shoddy reception of the rooftop aerial. We have about 40 channels, including BBC 3 and 4, more4, FilmFour and Sky One, plus 2MB broadband. All for £20 per month. Read my previous entry about why I switched and the savings I’m making. And by the way, it’s 2-0 to England right now.