I was getting bizarre results the other day when using LIKE in an ACCESS query - it turns out then when creating a query in SQL view inside Access you need to use * as a wildcard, but from within ASP you use %.

for example:-

SELECT foo FROM Bar WHERE foo LIKE '*Bar*' <-- within Access

SELECT foo FROM Bar WHERE foo LIKE '%Bar%' <-- from within ASP

returns the same dataset.

until further notice. time to concentrate on more important things for a bit.

another year older and i'm reminded that I can't get away with the alcohol consumption levels that I used to in my student days. Friday night pre-birthday I drank a fair amount of wine, followed by a pint or two of real ale, followed by more wine. then some more wine. I won't go into what happenned next , but it's safe to say that i'm not going to be allowed to forget it easily and will be the subject of a fair amount of piss taking for some time to come. i'm also on day three of the monster hangover from hell....

today I really feel like i've learn't something new. for example at the simple end of things how to cut and paste and tab between applications and windows within applications on a mac (there's an apple key godammit!), and at the slightly more complicated end of things, how to download and install python libraries/modules on unix, and most excitingly (for my inner geek) how create python test scripts for web apps using mechanize.

Mechanize is a technology that allows you to open web pages within a virtual browser (i.e this all happens in code, you don't actually see anything), and do things like submit forms, follow links, check the content of tags etc. The idea is to create a set of scripts to perform tasks on a website such as creating an article within a content management system, using the HTML user interface, without needing to actually have a real browser open or someone's time taken up creating articles called "sdfsdfsfdf" (as test articles are invariably always called).

This means that once the scripts are set up, we can run them intermittently as we work on a project to check whether anything has been broken since the last test.

It was one of those situations where we needed a kick up the ass, one o' clock on saturday afternoon and my wife and I are losing motivation to walk up to Ashton court because of the grey skies. "But there's blue sky over there!", one of our friends said. So we reluctantly started walking, and within minutes it was sunny. By the time we reached the festival there wasn't a cloud in site and so we claimed our pitch near the main stage and enjoyed the festival picnic style, a group of friends getting sunburnt to the distorted sounds of local bands and the taste of beer, entertaining small people, or rather them entertaining us.

shoe wear

rain stops ollie practice so off to churchill

Where to skate in the wet?

skating to work on a longboard rocks

been meaning to scan some of these pictures of my Spanish adventure for 7 years now.... here's where I set up camp in el morreon, near Orgiva, Andalucia for a month or three.

so i'm in Sainsburys Central along with 1000 other people buying sandwiches, salads or "be good to yourself" carbohydrate and preservative laden stodge. I usually pay at the cigarette counter as I only have one item and I usually pay cash. Today there is a long queue at the cigarette counter and hardly anyone at the normal tills. why? is there something wrong with the normal tills, should I join the queue for the cigarette counter?

I eventually take the plunge and go for the normal tills - all goes without a hitch and within minutes i'm walking back up the road thinking why didn't those people just go for the normal tills rather than stand in that long queue? Then it dawned on me - maybe they were buying cigarettes!

As a life-long self-righteous non-smoker it honestly didn't occur to me that you might use the cigarette counter for anything other than avoiding the checkouts :-)

Early this morning im my pre-caffeine fog (cf: chicken and egg) I accidentally picked up a decaf coffee pod. Upon realising (phew just in time...), threw it down as if I had been electrocuted - should I worry about that? probably :-)

I downloaded iTunes yesterday, mainly so I could plunder my bosses music collection. Seems to work pretty well.... how long until I find myself ripping stuff to AAC/M4A rather than MP3 and commit to the de facto hard drive music player that i'm trying to ignore?

recently I have noticed loads of skate (or skateish) sites using iframes to display in particular news pages (usually in tiny print). I'm undecided on them. I'll agree they look good and keep things neat and compact, and i'm considering sticking one or two on this site, maybe for recently updated items and my skate blog. On the other hand they can be a bit fiddly - i'm not convinced they encourage people to read the contents.

I've also noticed a lot of people using the word "plethora", sometimes quite unexpectedly and out of context

... and there's something about the smell of the print thats slightly addictive...

For about two years I hardly bought any magazines, after I realised that they are usually 90% adverts and very little in them. Then I started skating again, and since then i've bought quite a few skate magazines. I'm trying to think why - enthusiasm mainly, trying to absorb stuff, get a feel for what people are doing. I also like the photography - I can sit and get lost in a full page photo in a magazine in a way that doesn't translate to the internet.

While my wrist was in plaster and I couldn't skate I bought a whole stack of magazines and soon filtered out the ones with too many adverts, and those that seemed to be too insular in content. I also got pissed off with one magazine after I emailed them suggesting they do an article on the revived old school/old git skate scene and I didn't recieve a reply, not even a "thanks but no thanks" That's pretty immature of me to take offense really, they might not have even recieved the email... anyway i'm getting sidetracked.

Today I opened a skate magazine on the shelf and read an overindulgent article about something that happenned back in may. I was there and I blogged it the next day. For that type of thing a magazine is always out of date, but then again magazines aren't newspapers, and newspapers aren't the internet.

I'm sure I had more to say on this...

I think hypothecate is getting neglected in favour of my too old to skate blog. I've never managed to nail the categorisation on this site - the whole point of skate blog is that it supposed to be just about skating, or more specifically me and skating. Hypothecate is about anything, but with skating generally removed because it all goes in the skate blog. As I result, hypothecate isn't getting updated regularly.

Also I want people to read the skate stuff (whether they want to or not!! ha aha ha hahahahaha ha!!) so from now on I will list the titles and link 3 most recent skate posts wheneverthree new posts have been added. starting now:-

Recently on too old to skate:-

it lives!
kaldera 002 (hurst disciple of sketch model)
The wedge