Caption Competition

What's he thinking?

Inspired by Rappy

Logo Competition Winner

Its been exactly 1 week since the Logo Competition closed.

Thank you to everyone who has entered, not only have you sent me some great entries but also inspired me to learn more graphic design, its a really interesting area and one i would like to explore further.

Before i announce the winner of the Atari 2600, here are some of my favourite entries:

And the winner is…..

A chance to blog

Hi, i'm back.

The last week or so has been one of the most hectic in my life. Its been worth it.

I got a First in my project (70%) and the University have said they wish to use my program on a number of courses for teaching and programming their TAD Board. The Head of Robotics at Plymouth also said that its a completely commercially viable product and its currently in talks with another University to do with a possible sale.

The past month of hard work has paid off.

So I'm relaxing with Lauren for a couple of days before i start on my next project.

I've been taking lots of pictures recently, i only found out today what the ISO number on my camera means. You can check them all out on my flickr, i'm going to post my favourite one each day for a while.

I've also got a new Theme on my blog, although I'm not sure if i'm going to keep it or not, I just felt like a change. Talking of change, there are going to be a few. I'm not at liberty to say to much yet tho. Once Lauren has gone home and I've got ontop of my To Do list I'll fill you in with more details.

I've had my interweb connection upgraded to 4mb, its sooooo sweet. Downloading at about 400kB/s and uploads of about 45kB/s, i can use bittorrent and still surf the net like normal, if your with telewest then expect a free upgrade soon!

I've kinda missed a lot of news from around the web over the past week or so and I haven't caught up yet, so just one link for you: A nice list of all the april fools jokes around the web yesterday at Wikipeida

Thanks for all your entries on the Logo Competition, i haven't forgotten it. I'll be announcing the winner sometime next week. 

p.s. Thanks to everyone for the heads up on the new GTalk update.

Atariboy Logo Competition Relaunch

With one week to go until the deadline for the Logo competition closes i thought i would update everyone with the some changes and details.

I dont want Atari Logos, i’m sorry i didnt say this before, but i didnt realise it until every entry had an Atari logo on it, i dont want to worry about getting sued!

I’m looking for an icon/picture/visual representation similar to the firefox and songbird logos. Almost imagine it as a desktop icon for program called Atariboy.

 

Something like these popular ones is what im looking for. There is no need to include the name atariboy as i have the logo at the top with that in. I’m looking for a picture now.

There is still a week left

Closing Date: 12pm GMT 31st March 

Email: competition@atariboy.co.uk 

You can view all the current entries in this flickr set: Logo Competition

Oh and i almost forgot… The PRIZE!!!

An Atari 2600 with 5 games and 2 controllers, plus a free t-shirt with the Atariboy Logo on it!

Crash and Burn

Sorry for not posting yesterday, my coursework took priorty over the blog, and i didnt get a chance to look at the internet so i didnt really have much to write about either.

I finished my business coursework and handed it in today, and i feel much more relaxed. I now have a week and a half to concentrate solely on my project.

Last night i was busy coding a program for gary which allows control, calibrate and test up to 16 servos connected to a usb or serial servo controller, i was very proud of it and want to add more features and release it as a full piece of software after the projects are finished. I cant wait until gary finishes building his Robot and we can test it out properly and make it walk and dance and jump!
Screenshot:

I’ve also made myself yet another logo (I can’t stop playing around in photoshop), i’m really not into using the atari logo or game images for the t-shirt, for one thing i dont want copyright to be an issue and i want it to be more individual and less of a leech off the popularity of Atari, tbh i had never played on one for more than an hour until this week… oops i’ve said too much!

Thanks very much to CrazyBarbour and his great guide, i have managed to set up a Typo blog for testing. You can check it out here: Atariboy Testing

I really like the typo blog engine, it runs on Ruby on Rails, so your webhost needs to support it if you want to install it like Dreamhost. Its very smooth and dynamic and there are loads of very good looking themes at the TypoGarden.

I’m not going to be leaving wordpress myself, this is likely to become Laurens new blog, for all her pictures and thoughts.

Talking of dynaminc webpages, here is a tutorial page full of tasty javascript bits and pieces you can add to your site to make it look more funky.

On the business card front, i have had better feedback from the new design, but i may be changing it again over the weekend. Im considering buying some Business Card CDs which i can print on at home and burn my own CV and small website on with an external link to my blog and websites.

I’ve been looking around a lot at other web companies logos and designs recently, and i happened to stumble across 2inches.com, which is a t-shirt site with some of the best designs i have seen since Threadless. They are also the sole printers of the very limited edition Songbird T-shirts, who by the way have released verison 0.11b which has fixed a lot of the bugs and improve the stababilty of the concept release. Download mirrors here.

Not much else to report at the moment, unfortunatly my blog is going to have to take a backseat for another week or so, due to project work, although there are more details and entries in the Logo competition coming over the weekend..

…. Watch this space

01100010 01101100 01101111 01100111

Busy day again today, but at least everything is running smoothly.

WordPress.com has been down pretty much all day, so i havent been able to post anything so its all squeezed into this one big post. Hope wordpress sorts out its relatbility issues soon.

I have a piece of coursework in on wednesday and one in on Friday. So im working on those at the mo, i’ve also got a meeting later with my tutor about my project, and then i will hopefully get the microcontroller board to program. Should be a little video coming soon of the LEDs flashing.

I’m also going to start up a little side project tonight with Ruby on Rails, more details coming tonight :P

If you hadnt already heard, i won the lottery on Blogmad, 26597 credits!! I wont need to surf for quite a while now!

Links
Lauren has signed herself up a DeviantART Account here, and she doesn’t know it yet but i’m going to buy her a subscription to it so she can enjoy it more and show off her art to the world.

I’ve you have a bit of money to invest in your website and cant wait for google anayltics then check out Mint, they provide a very nice stats service for $30 per site.

This post grinds my gears a bit, its quite obviously about nerds not geeks!! Its a good post tho, just needs the word geek changing to nerd.

Jens has a side project band which he just set up a myspace for, funny stuff, i’m hoping he will do an artic monkeys cover soon!

Did you know that the left boob is usually larger!! [Evatt]

And if you could Work out the title of this blog go here.

Logo Competition
I’ve had a couple more entries for the logo competition. On thursday i will be announcing the Grand Geek Prize for the competition which should hopefully draw a few more entries. I still dont want to give it away tho, anyway below are the two new entries for today from neff and mike:

Also please remember that the logo for printing on a Black, Red or Blue T-shirt, so make sure its nice and big and will stand out against one of those colours.

Avec Hangover

Last night was great fun, i went out for comaboys birthday to a number of cool bars, and i discovered a drink called Slate 20, its a bourbon drink, tastes amazing! I also had some lush cocktails like “Black Russian”, “Kamikarzi” and “Strawberry Daiquiri
” I’m sure i had more but i dont remember too well. We then went to an all night cafe called Goodbodys and had cooked breakfasts at 4am.
I managed to sneak a cup out too :P

So as you can imagine I’m a little worse for wear today, gunan take it easy and eat some Fried Chicken later :)

I got another logo entry for the competition from Doufer, heres a link to his blog although its in Brazillian Portuguese so you’ll have to translate it if you want to read it.

I got the prize for the competition yesterday and I dont want to give it away, its just that good! I’ll take some sneaky shots of it soon to hint at what you might win… for the moment all i’m going to say is you need one of these if your going in a row boat……..

Zombie Pie Fight – its about zombies, need i say more?

I’ve got a real craving for some greasy food at the moment, maybe i can print myself some bacon?

I tried out a LiveCD of Ubuntu 6.04 (Dapper Drake Flight 5) yesterday for a couple hours, and impressed me quite a lot, im going to wait for the final release before i install it fully tho (any idea when the planned release date is?), i did have a few issues with it; No sound, No media playing of any kind and i couldnt work out how to extend my desktop to the second monitor, but im sure that some friendly Linux chaps can help me out with that when i install it fully.
I’ve also got my hands on the current Beta release of Vista (5308), so i’ll be installing that after my open day too. Expect lots of screenshots soon.
Continium is a very nice blog (only 2 posts so far) but keep you eye on it, i think its going to be a good blog to read.

I’ve also got about 4 Windows Messenger Live (MSN 8) invites going spare, better be quick tho!

Now im going to grab some nice greasy food, a big mug of tea and crash infront of a film for a few hours.

v7ndotcom elursrebmem

V7N are running a competition at the moment, and the prize is a healthy $4000 and an ipod, all you have to do is be the top ranking search on google for the search: v7ndotcom elursrebmem

Obivously the owner of v7ndotcomelursrebmem.com has put himself in pretty good stead, but just having that domain doesnt mean that you will be top automatically, if you search atariboy at google, you should find this blog comes out higher than both Atariboy.com and .co.uk, due to a lot of different factors, but mainly because its a lot more active and linked site than the other two.

The amount of links to your site is also important and with this in mind steve, the owner of http://www.the-elursrebmem.com/ added me on msn and asked if i would post him a link!

Hope this improves your rank a little.

You can read more details about the competition here, and even still enter if you like: http://www.v7n.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23744

sdrawkcaB golB

I’ve had another lazy day today.

I spent a good couple of hours writing my review of the Ergotron LX, its a bit of a shame that its only had 20 diggs tho :(

Couple of random links for you guys:

I could watch this page for hours!!

A wonderful bacon flavoured blog, very close to my heart

Stories of Stupid Tech support calls

A Dramatic Email Reading!

Why Vista wont suck – This preview details many of the new features coming in vista, if anything it made me want it more, and i will definatly be getting the Ultimate version, although (shush dont tell anyone) I prolly wont be paying for it!

I’ve also had another entry in the logo competition, one that is now very close to my heart:

eblogging

I’ve been coding all day, so im going to have a break and relax with my beloved blog, some bacon and a massive mug of tea.

My project is coming along nicely, i have finished off a lot of things that needed to be done and reduced my massive to-do list by quite a lot. If your particually interested you can read my project proposal here (PDF)
Quick Screen shot:

Seems that my earlier Speedblogging isnt a new thing, i dont have any links saved, but if you google it, a few pages come up, seems that its a blog without styling, just a large chunk of text and links to get the post out there as quickly as possible.

It was interesting, and i did it really fast, but afterwards i felt a bit like i had cheated, in the sense that it wasnt a very nice looking post, and not particually easy to read either. I doubt i will be doing it again for a while.

I’ve decided to compeletly stop the mega IM review, i dont have the time, or the inclination at the moment. Sorry guys.

Another thing i decided tonight is that at the start of april i will be dropping Windows XP, in favour of Win 2000 for gaming, Linux for general use and Vista for testing and coding. Prolly dual booting 2000 and linux on one drive and having vista on the other for when ever im feeling the need to tinker. No idea what distro i’ll use yet so any suggestions are welcome, keeping in mind that i much prefer UIs to Command Lines.

I’ve prefered Gnome to KDE the few times i’ve used them both, but im not too fussed as long as it works well and is easy to configure.

One other thing, can anyone confirm for me that the .net 2.0 framework is built into Vista? I’m pretty sure it is, but i cant find anything confirming it.

Keep those Atariboy logos coming too, there are some really good looking ones there, I have a definate fav at the moment, but there is still 2 weeks left, anything could happen!

Weblinks
Google have released a mobile verison of gmail, http://m.gmail.com its much more rapid than the normal verison, but it doesnt look anywhere near as nice.

There’s also a new verison of Windows Live search, although im not much a fan of microsofts previous search engines, i have to say this one is fast and responsive and give you good results too. [thanks rappy]
The Geeks of Hazzard – a very cool podcast/weblog, love the style sheet on their page too.

After Mikes IT crowd Remix, a contest has shown up and its got mike working on a much better verison with our resident mixmaster comaboy, i’ll keep you posted, but the guitar bits i can hear through the walls sound really good. [thanks crazy]

And i’ll finish with a plug for the IT Crowd group on flickr, which is great :P and a couple pics of the beautiful Lauren