andcurve.weblog - The weblog of Kevin Teljeur. Somewhere within all the noise, there is a note you need to hear.

I’m going to be a ‘Sole Trader’. I’m going to do work for people, charge them for it, and then with that give them an invoice with a silly name on it which is the name I will be trading under. Sort of like a company name, which allow me to justifiably get a URL based on that (even an Irish one, in fact, although it’s generally a tedious and vastly over-priced process) and to design an identity for it. So, in a nutshell, I need to come up with a name for my professional endeavours, something which is reasonably simple, reflective of what I’m about as a Freelance operator (I promised to write more about that, and I will) and will be something that in years to come will be synonymous with the work I’ve done and the quality of that work. A brand name.

So, I’ve had to start thinking about it, and it’s actually a bit difficult. I originally envisaged andCurve being that brand, but now here you are, reading some occasionally entertaining diatribes on a number of issues, and I have to actually keep that separate from my professional life. I still might release software under this name, but that’s a separate issue. It’s now a brand for my hobby, as it were (though that’s no bad thing, and I think everyone should have a brand for their hobby; if it’s a good hobby, get an office, get an identity, hire some people and incorporate. The thing is, when you run out of money it’ll all end in tears, and you’ll wish you’d taken up knitting instead.) and I’d like to keep them separate so as not to confuse people. Or indeed offend potential or existing customers.

Names: well, here go. A list. I used to come up with names for my ‘umbrella projects’ (my various ideas for things I wanted to do, encapsulated in big, sprawing concepts which never went anywhere) on a weekly basis, and I’ve started looking through the notebooks again to help me out. I was a lot more creative back then, which actually means I was churning out a lot more redundant and downright useless ideas back then.

Clever IT company-type names

• EnergyPoint
  We are a point of energy. At this point, you can find energy. With us. At the point. Where there is energy.
• Dynamik
  Dynamik reflects how we are energetic and forward-thinking. We are also different, which is why we misspelled the word.
• Vertex
  The top. We are the highest point of this game, because we are clever and used a mathematical-sounding name. We are better and should also be paid more, even though we have a cheap-sounding name.
• Gorkon
  Has potential. A name of power. Could be responsible for oil spills and eating shareholder’s babies. Respect us.

Dark, powerful meat-eater type names

• Shibboleth
  Suggests something summoned from the other world, come to steal souls and create fear, while building your website.
• Krull, Eater of Souls And DeFlowerer of Virgins!!!
  Could be handy for trading in Westmeath, where this kind of thing is generally respected. Might be a bit heavy on the dark conotations though.
• Karkass
  You know, dead stuff. Stuff that is dead. We killed it. We are dead. I don’t know, really. Ask a Goth (if you know how to communicate with one, you’ll probably go for this one anyway). Hrrrgh, as they say.
• Gorkon
  Has potential. A name of power. Could be responsible for oil spills and eating shareholder’s babies. Fear us.

Edgy, designer, new-media industry type names

• MuffCramp
  Edgy. Might offend women (and everyone else), but suggests being at the cutting edge of creativity. We have such a good time it hurts. When we’re done with you, you’ll be sore too.
• CockPoint
  We point to solutions, with our cocks. There’s a sort of homoerotic thing going on there, except there’s not because we’re not benders. We’re just very subversive and yet amazingly talented, which is why we can overtly base our identity around penis imagery.
• Jizz
  Simple, elegant. We spurt creative goodness at you, and we’re so clever and good at what we do that we can call ourselves something like this and believe that you’ll think we’re amazing too. And not full of shit.

Weird nonsense names

• Bxx5!
  Oh yes. My favourite word of the moment. Utterly meaningless, beyond being an exclamation which fascinates David Donohoe somewhat through my insistence on using it (that’s sort of an endorsement, so I’ll consider it). I should name my enterprises after it.
• YakNeep
  Yaks are big, and we will be too. Neep is… »
• Mr Squirrel
  Squirrels are cool and they do stuff. Just like us. We do stuff and are really cute too.
• GurnardHead
  Gurnards are the best fish going, because they have Gurnard Heads. Find one, stare into it’s big, wet eyes and you will see what I mean. We are like Gurnards, and have little fin feet too.

Names that I’m actually considering using

• andProcess
  Follows the andWhatever naming convention I’m into over the last few years. I’m a fan of process, so I’d like to communicate that in the name.
• andAgile
  Follows the andWhatever naming convention I’m into over the last few years. I think ‘agile’ reflects lightweight flexibilty, which is something I think is very important in what I’m setting out to do.
• adaptiveProcess
  I’m big into process, and I believe process should change and adapt to the needs of the situation.

If anyone has a better suggestion, not matter how bizarre or how many, comment below! And that means you too, Michaela.

Yeah, this whole freelance thing is tough. In the meantime, I’ve ordered my new notebook, an Apple MacBook Pro 2Ghz with vast amounts of… Everything, in fact. And books. Lots of books. And Windows XP which (believe it or not) I’ll install on my Mac when I get it; the new Macs all support Windows too, now and since I’ll have to support all the major systems (all two of them, and of those two, Windows is a good 94% plus of the the market) I might as well get one good notebook to do the job.

More on the way about my last week and last day on the job, a great game of footie, a hell of a weekend (some remarkable adventures kicked off recently), and what’s next. Oh, and for those of you who give a shit, the weather here has been fantastic. It really has. Started to break this evening but in Ireland all you need is that week and half of beaming ultraviolet and you know you’ve lived.
Myself, looking somewhat mean in the blazing sun a week ago after an interesting encounter in the phoenix park. And getting slightly burnt. Click image to view larger version

You know the way ‘They’ say, on food packaging, ‘serve while piping hot’? It’s too hot to eat then! They’re morons! It’s not relevent to anything, I know this, but I had to get it off my chest. It was bothering me.

It’s time for linkage! That’s right, after not posting for weeks on end, I return from the darkness only to irritate everyone with links to stuff they’ve already seen elsewhere three weeks ago, and it was a lot funnier then too! Oddly enough, people actually started asking me what was up, which suggests I may have more than two and a half readers out there. I’ve been beavering away (You like that, huh? Beavering away? Beaver? Makes you think of something else, right? You dirty scumbag!) and up to all sorts of things, which I surely promise I will explain with tedious attention to detail in a follow-on post for my long suffering, moderately loyal readers (Really, if it’s bothering you then check out Dave’s blog. His RSS feed seems to be broken but he makes jokes and seems to do some cool stuff. Just ask Tony.) Yes, I’ve been pretty busy, and some big, interesting things are afoot in my life, but we shall speak of them no more at this time. There are dark forces at work, and we must be wary of them…

Incidentally, this is my second time writing this post. It’s bigger and improved. I lost that last one due to some silly modifications I made to my Firefox browser which I use at work. I still recommend Firefox as the way you view the internet (instead of, for example, Internet Explorer), and some of the extensions are great but be careful. You can really fuck things up with them too.

Many of this weeks links have been filched from Memepool, which is a great place to find weird shit.

Life and nightlife (working and going out) in Harbin, China.
Exactly what it says on the tin, all delivered in pithy prose learnt in Celbridge!
http://haharbin.wordpress.com/
Dylan used to work in Parallel IT, where I work now, but during the rough and tumble of the post-dotcom boom when it all went pear-shaped for a while he founf himself doing a bit of this, a bit of that and made the fateful decision to go and teach English in China. We’ve always kept in touch though, and traded stories (and I still can’t get over his story about him walking in to his local Chinese store on a visit back to Celbridge not so long ago). I discovered a while ago that he actually reads my blog; in fact, I might have inadvertently planted the seeds of an idea, to write about his experiences, when I asked him to write something on this site; instead he went off and set up his own site! So go check it out, it is well written, entertaining and informative.

The best blonde joke on the Internet
The funniest, bestest blonde joke on the Internet, ever!
http://weblog.burningbird.net/2006/01/12/the-joke-is/
Follow the link to get to the best blonde joke on the internet ever.

Random Garfield cartoon generator
Garfield as zen philosophy!
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/natetrue/gar.html
Remember Garfield? Of course you do, Garfield is the poster-child of inane drivel, publisher as a syndicated cartoon the world over; it’s a bit slower these days but there was a time when is was practically a cult. The thing is, Garfield was actually funny once, when the cartoon started (I still have the first three books in the series, before Jim Davis got into a tedious formula) but there’s only so much you can do with a cat before it all gets repetitive. I checked out the website; they’re a real money-making machine with this drivel.

Anyway, the point of this link is that you can, with a random generator, create your own Garfield cartoons. Since it is repetitive, meaningless drivel, it actually works quite well.

Google video selection
The craziest, insanest video collection ever!
http://homepage.mac.com/pockyrevolution/Personal25.html
As some of you are aware, Google recently started putting up videos, and within a short space of time a vast amount of… stuff… was uploaded to their servers, converted to Flash video, and you can go and browse it, such as here. Some of it is, in some people’s eyes, pure gold and the link above is a ‘best of’ compilation by some guy of stuff that really did it for him. Saves you the trouble of having to browse it all yourself.

Incidentally, this whole video venture is Google getting into the ring with Apple and their iTunes Store to see if they can do a better job of selling videos. By all accounts, so far it’s not going very well. Time will tell.

Car Stuck Girls
Scantily dressed girls with cars that are stuck in stuff!
http://www.carstuckgirls.com/
Let’s not mince words here. It is porn. Sick, evil porn! Bad! Evil! But fun.

Right, I better start writing meaningful stuff soon, or people will get irritated.

(edited 21.12.05)
That didn’t work very well, did it? This is a re-edit of an accidental posting I made using the Flock browser which is based on Firefox but has some fancy features for working with blogs. However, it’s apparent that it doesn’t do it very well despite seeming to be able to, and so I ended up putting live a test post. It just goes to show that I shouldn’t try to muck about with pre-release software, as exciting as it all seems.

I’d have taken it down, only now people have commented so it’s too late. Poo.

More adventures to be written about later, we had the company Christmas party on Friday and today I was in the UK on a business trip, all very exciting, and Friday (my first day of Christmas holiday) I’ll be in hospital for some sort of examination. Nothing too serious, but doubtless I’ll be walking funny for a few days. Let your feeble imaginations run riot with that one. Also, there have been many more entertaining posts over on www.ideasforcheapstuff.com with the ever-delightful Tee and her girleens so get over there and check it out.

If any of you, my loyal and ever diminishing readership, want to come over to Los Blancheles for a drink over Christmas, or to meet up for a pint in Dublin, let me know; you’re not only welcome, I invite it.

(edited 21.12.05)
This might come in handy: http://www.andcurve.com/wordpress/contact/

Right, oodles to post about, but I’ll start of the fun and games with some more linkage (as Ciaran might say; I haven’t full managed Lyner-speak yet, it is an arcane language.) to various things that have recently amused me.

Firefox
The all-new, gleaming, spanking, Firefox 1.5 web browser!
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

If you’re not running Firefox as your web browser, then you should be. Firefox is a great browser, remarkably fast, safe from attack, sticks (by and large) to the web standards and is by far the best browser out there for PC, Mac or Linux, it really is. If you’re still using Internet Explorer on Windows then I hope you have a good reason for it. If you’re using Mac OS 9 for some reason then use Netscape 7, which you can get from this site (go to the bottom of the page and follow the links – it’s a bit fiddly but well worth it). Don’t use IE for Mac, there is NO GOOD REASON.

I’ve been using Firefox for some time now, having been tempted by finding it on my PC at work after coming back from my travels last year; Tony had been using the PC before and although I was suspicious at first (Tony’s fingerprints were over most of the projects and everyone kept telling my how wonderful he was, always a bad sign) I decided to give it a go and lo and behold! It was good. This latest release is even better than the last and so, go and at the very least try it. You’ll experience the Internet again.

Climate Change
It seems that, once again, we’re doomed!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4485840.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1654803,00.html

The recent thinking has been that in Europe we’re going to see a sharp climate drop before we see any warming, which will be as destructive over the short term, though nothing Europe hasn’t had before over the last few hundred years (something I read a couple of years ago referred to the fact that in the middle ages, it was cold enough for Denmark to walk over to Sweden (across the frozen sea) and set about them.). Personally, I really do think that it’s a game of brinkmanship that the US is playing with the rest of the world that’s going to decide the fate of the world at large, and moreover all of us will ultimately lose out, because this is probably the biggest challenge we (collectively) have ever faced. If you’re not as cynical as me (quite likely) then you might want to get over to www.combatclimatechange.ie and do something about it. I’m wearing the t-shirt as I type this!

Oh no! Java is doomed
Again, Java is finished! A new dawn awaits for programmers!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/30/beyond_java/

That is rubbish. People are still programming in C and C++, and they’ll be programming in Java for years to come so I reckon it’s just hype and hysteria to sell a book about nothing at all. More on this in a later post.

$100 Laptop
A wireless portable for people who need food, clean water and sanitation!
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051128-5639.html

It’s great idea, and I hope it flies, but I still question the usefulness of handing out a laptop like this to people who need various other things much more than they need a cheap laptop. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great piece of technology being used in the right way, but maybe the money could be spent more wisely?

They’ll be on sale to the rest of us too, and I’m sure the money will go to funding more projects like this.

Terrorist website competition
The winning entry gets to mastermind an attack on a US Military base!
http://www.breakingnews.ie/2005/12/01/story232992.html
Really, that is exactly what this is about. Frightening and yet bizarrely funny, in a Monty Python kind of way. It won’t be so funny when people start getting killed though.

More Daleks
More zany Dalek humour!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/01/dalek_thespian/
Sort of funny in a way, but a bit over-cooked. It won’t be for everyone.

XBox 360
All your console are belong to Microsoft!
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/xbox360.ars
I really haven’t been getting up to much recently, have I? There was a possibility of my heading out to the XBox 360 launch party last night, though I never heard any more about it so that was fine, I got to read about the new console from Microsoft instead. It’s a detailed review of the first of the next-generation game console/multimedia/network devices, the others being Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s… thing. They all, interestingly have very similar hardware inside, and all are aimed at the Internet and connectivity. A little something for the stocking filler, maybe?

I’d better get on and get some real posting done, with big colour photos and perhaps some innocent pornography before I get accused of time-wasting…

The thing about doing lots of stuff and having an eventful week to write about is that because it was eventful and involved lots of doing stuff, I didn’t get around to writing anything. That is bothersome. Jacob Nielsen, who is not well known outside of web-design circles but famous and infamous in equal measure inside it for reasons I’ll explain shortly, recently put up his 10 points for good blogging (blogging is what I’m doing right now, writing a diary on the web) and one of those was to post regularly. If you post infrequently and erratically, he says, people are much less likely to repeat visit and of course repeat visits are what you want. He’s right, but he doesn’t get out much I’d say.

Nielsen made his name by making a lot of noise about how web sites should be designed in order to be usable; there was a time when web sites were a hit and miss affair because people didn’t understand the technology, tried to force it do things that it wasn’t meant for, didn’t understand how people were using it, all sorts of factors that have largely been eliminated by a sort of Darwinism.

So, no regular posts this week. Last week, the government published it’s transport plan which is a big event for me because as I’ve said before (and damn it, I’ll say it again!) I’m an infrastructure nerd and one of the things that bothers me most about this country is that it has terrible transport infrastructure. It’s a hell of a plan; 34 Billion euro over 15 years, which is apparently 9.5 million every day as of last week. Straight away we got… 20 new busses for Dublin. 20. Out of the 180 that they need to get people moving, they authorised 20. So more on this later. It’s a lot of money for winning an election. My money. Incidentally, today was my second trip out to Blanchardstown by train this week, and the second time that they had trouble with it resulting in delays and over crowding…

I had a good chat with Tee via MSN and tried to help her videos and photos and the like. She’ll have photos to post on the Interweb now, yay!

Rik the Belgian came over to visit for a couple of weeks, as I write this he is no doubt recovering from a hang-over on the Aran Islands somewhere.

Tee’s brother Joseph got married on Thursday to Diana, so they had a big party on Friday. The O’Reillys really can party, and Diana’s family and friends from home (who are all Croatian) know a thing or two about that too. I have plenty of photos to prove it. A good night, I stuck to my moderate drinking principle, with some… oddness in it (and I’d expect no less, particularly since I was there and Tee wasn’t) and I also played the videos she made which was emotional. In spite of the diabolical sound, which made most of what she was saying sound suspiciously like ‘Rarr rah rarr rerrr rar’. We need a bigger speaker…

The next day I went to see a room which I subsequently got in Blanchardstown. I’ve had interesting reactions from my friends. It’s not far from town, it’s a nice area, it’s all good… And yet, I could have moved to say, Swords or Newbridge for all the positive responses I’ve had. Garret (who believes everyone should live in Rathmines, and to prove the point he bought a house in Rialto, next to Beirut) has even started to try to see the positive side of it! He actually believes it’s that bad that he should be supportive! After a good initial mocking of course. I expected that.

Saturday night saw myself and Rik go to Dmitry and Alex’s party, which was great. I work with them, they’re a great pair of guys (both Russian) and know how to rock the joint, with the able help of our work colleagues as well as Tanya, Sarka, Vlad and Diana. I have a lot of photos from that too; I didn’t drink much but everyone else did and anarchy ensued (as usual). Rik drank so much that he got sick and I had to make sure he got back to town ok. He might have learned a lesson there. If you drink with Dmitry, don’t try to keep up.

I finally finished the Javascript Gallery software I’ve been writing for Keith (which, although Tee doesn’t know it yet, will also be making an appearance of sorts on her site too) and I’m very happy with it. It’s not perfect but it’s good lesson in Object Orientated Programming. I managed to find the last of the odds and ends I need to make sense of the Image manager I’ve been working on for Tee’s site so now it’s full steam ahead on that. I’ve also been moving slowly but surely into my new home. In fact, I’m posting this on the wireless broadband connection here from my bed.

I truly am a nerd-like being.