Website success story

Recently I have noticed several cases where my decision to have actual costume photos on my costume hire website was really useful to various people in the area and even outside the city. Many people also told me that they make decisions based on the photos shown. A film company rented my cosutmes for an advert after looking at my products and even people in neighbouring towns and cities used my products based on those. None of my competitors do this and hence their actual customer area is much smaller.

Trip to Robben Island

Yesterday I went on a trip to the Robben island museum by boat with my mother. The whole thing is quite well organised, including the history of the island and bus tour plus a tour through the prison by a former prisoner from the island. This also included visiting the former cell of Nelson Mandela. Quite amazing what these people had to survive for so many years. For what was offered, the trip was very cheap and enlightening.

The game Borderlands in multiplayer

Lately I have been playing the game Borderlands in multiplayer online. The whole process is quite seamless and the biggest hassle is either firewalls of other people and my slow 384kbps connection which causes me one to two seconds lag. Other than that it is quite interesting and the game actually makes the opponents harder if there are more players and rewards accordingly. The other reason to do this is to get quests done faster. The occasional car accidents and hectic shootouts with the locals are part of the fun. On LAN it works the same way but obviously with slightly less lag.

Damn Small Linux installation on a PC with issues

For two weeks as I had time, I have tried to install some operating system (Windows or Linux) on my old Pentium 3. The media restriction was CD ROM only since there is no USB booting option.

Windows XP installation bluescreened after formatting, Ubuntu Desktop could not find the live media that it just booted from, Ubuntu Server at least told me what the real problem was, GOS just froze, Mint died terribly, Damn Small Linux (DSL) twice nearly completed and once it told me that it could not read files. In the end it turned out that the CD ROM drive somehow switches off or something similar. Ubuntu Server and Damn Small Linux (DSL) essentially told me what the issue was.

After an installation without a username and password question, I had a system where I could not log in. After reading FAQs and forums, I concluded to install DSL yet again, this time with parameters to ask for those. Finally had a working system.

Clown costume fun

Recently I got various new costumes for my home based costume renting business. The problem was yet again that packaging photos promise too much and then various people are disappointed in the end. Also scanning in the packaging photo was not a great idea, the same with taking a photo of the packaging and then scaling it down for the website. Details from the packaging photo will be lost either way. The best way around this was if I wore the costume myself and took multiple photos.

As per usual, I did photos of the costume from the front, side and back. Since i did not want my face for those photos as well and my face would not have been the most ideal to go with the costume, I used a mask and some clown wig. It became at this point in time a lot of fun to do different poses and during the process, I happen to see how completely different I looked in the mirror. It was for me quite difficult to believe that the clown in the mirror was actually me in a suit. In the end I recorded a short video as well of just walking around a little bit in the room. The effect on a small video is not quite like in the mirror.