Manchester Pride

I promised to blog a bit about Manc Pride, so here goes.

Manchester Pride was very very busy.

The end.

Okay... a little more. We set off for Manchester on Saturday Lunchtime. We queued through the roadworks on the M6. We queued in the traffic jam snaking it's way through the city centre. We queued to turn our tickets into wrist-bands to get into the cordoned-off areas of pride. We queued to get down a heaving Canal Street. We queued to buy drinks. We wandered around and saw some of the sights until we got bored and headed back to the hotel to relax before heading out again for the evening.

The evening was like the day, but with more queuing.

It was too busy. It was about 45 minutes before I managed to get a drink, in the upstairs bar of AXN, which for some reason seemed to have decided it was going to be a quiet night and only put on 2 bar staff. Everywhere else was the same. All the outdoor entertainment stopped at 11pm, which caused the bars to fill up with even more people looking for entertainment.

Eventually we found sanctuary on the boat-bar outside Eden, and the evening started to look up. After a few drinks and a relaxing time there we elected to head back to the hotel bar, where drinks weren't cheap but were rapidly forthcoming. It was Summer's first night out en-femme, and her first experience of the GLBT community, which was a bit of a shame, as it left her and her wife with the impression that "gay nightlife = queuing". But they say they had fun!

We headed back into the gay pride area on Sunday and had a much nicer time. Well, apart from the moment Jess and I suddenly shot 200 foot into the air suspended only by two thin bits of elastic...

Are the stars out tonight?

Ooh, this looks like it could do for Astronomy what Google Earth does for Geography: Stellarium. If like me you've got an amateur appreciation of the night sky, I highly recommend downloading this free application, available for PC, Mac and Linux/Unix.

I don't work for Google

I'm a bit of a Google evangelist at work. Every time Google comes out with a new insanely cool toy I'm usually the first to say "look at this guys!", and quite often I've pointed people to Google's superior tools. I mean, who in their right mind uses Mapquest when there's Google Maps?

So recently it's become a running joke in the office that "Simon works for Google", which I've strenuously denied but played along with good naturedly.

What no-one in my office knows is that I have this site, and on this site I have Google Adsense ads, which earn me revenue. I got my monthly cheque in the post today, and I couldn't resist having this little exchange with one of my colleagues just before I walked out of the door...

"Mark... you know you said I should work for Google?"

"Yeah?"

"Take a look at this..."

I flashed him the cheque, clearly printed with my name and the Google logo.

"Crikey! What's that for!?"

"Services rendered," I said smiling, as I walked out the door.

That was fun! :-)

Why doesn't everyone have a domain?

I mean, how can people hold their head up high in this digital age when they don't even have their own domain name? I'm not suggesting that everyone should have their own website, it's a well known fact that only transvestites and kitten owners are required by law to have a website. No, what I'm talking about is a domain name that you can call your own for emails etc, and follows you around the internet like your own textual avatar.

So many people seem to make do with being "jenny_tv_2005@yahoo.com" or "yetanotherdavesmith@hotmail.com" when they could be "me@princessjenny.co.uk" or "dave@thesmithmeister.me.uk", and it costs a pittance!

For 3 pounds a year people like UKReg will sell you a nice .me.uk or .co.uk domain name and even give you free mail forwarding to any other email account.

If you're not sure what that means, take me as an example:

I own beckysweb.co.uk, but all of the emails that are sent to anything@beckysweb.co.uk are automatically forwarded to my gmail account. Because I own the whole beckysweb domain name (for 3 quid a year, remember!) I also effectively own all of the email addresses at that domain. This is handy in itself, I can give different people different email addresses and they'll still all get back to me. British Telecom think my email address is btjunk@beckysweb.co.uk. That way if they ever decide to sell on my email address to another person, and I start getting junk mail from that person, I'll know that BT sold them my address because it because the email will have been sent to "BTjunk". Clever eh?

Gmail has recently been cleverly updated to allow you to send on behalf of another address too. So even though I use Gmail as my email client, which has a address like boring@gmail.com, all my sent mail appears to come from beckysweb.co.uk. Even more cleverer huh?

I've also bought a domain for my boy email, at 3 pounds a year it seemed mad not to buy mysurname.me.uk. And that's also set to pump itself at my standard Gmail account. So all of my mail turns up in one place. Gmail will even let me choose which email address I want each outgoing mail to appear to come from. Granted, I have to be careful not to pick the wrong one sometimes! But I enjoy the convenience of collecting all my mail from one web-based location, and Gmail even lets you collect mail via POP, which means I can collect my mail via most any desktop mail client.

Gmail is the best free mail account by far at the moment, in my opinion. The only trouble is that you can still only get in via invitation from an existing gmail user, which used to be like hens teeth. But these days all existing Gmail users have invites coming out the wazoo, so if you'd like one just email me.

"But Becky," I hear you whine, "I don't want to stop using my existing email account! I like it! And what if Gmail gets crappy, won't you be stuck?"

Ah no, my dear, sweet, simple reader. The beauty of email forwarding is that if I get fed up with Gmail I can simply re-direct it elsewhere. So tomorrow beckysweb.co.uk might point somewhere completely different. It's just that at the moment I'm finding gmail a perfect match to my email needs.

As well as free email forwarding, UKreg also offers free web forwarding. So that if you do have a website or blog hosted on blogspot or whatever, you can point a your friendly domain name at it. It sounds a lot better if you say to people at parties "hey, check out my website, it's at www.SteveRocksBigTime.co.uk" rather than "hey, check out my website, it's at steverocks.server125.poxywebhosting.net.cz".

Oooh, I'm ranting about nerdy net stuff on my blog! I really need to admit defeat, buy a kitten and take pictures of it.

And before you ask, no I don't work for UKreg. I don't work for Google either... but that's a different story.

Preamble thin pretense for well-worn Shakespeare joke

The BBC have started advertising their autumn season with some strikingly colourful teaser trailers. In the trailers they've given
each clip a similar saturated look, so much so that at first I didn't realise that they were montages of several different dramas.

I don't know about you, but I'm really looking forward to seeing Johnny Vegas's bottom.

My quest for the perfect white eyeshadow

I promised to do some retrospective blogging once I got back and settled, so I thought I'd start with this little tale from my shopping trip on Friday.

I've talked before about my cosmetics fetish, and my favorite part of making up is the eyes. The eyes are the most expressive area of the face, and good eye makeup can really enhance this. I find this is the area where I can be the most creative, and I love seeing the ways that other girls do their eye makeup, particularly recently Miss K - those wide oriental eyes, what a great canvas to work on!

I like to mess about with different colour combinations and styles although to be honest I tend to stick to one or two "looks". I use a technique borrowed from the "drag" end of the spectrum, but toned down to be a bit more natural, but still dramatic and OTT compared to a "regular" girl's.

I like using white or gold just inside the brow to lift the brow line, blending it with a strong colour over the socket and eyelid, and a dark colour in the outside corner of the eye extending out a little way to widen and add drama the eye. I've got a horde of great strong eyeshadow colours, but I always had trouble finding a really good pure white eyeshadow. The Boots-counter jobs always seemed too silvery, or too pale, or just terrible at staying put.

So while I was in Birmingham Selfridges on Friday I thought I'd make a visit to their MAC counter. I love MAC stuff, as a tranny it presses all the right buttons. It's dramatic, well made, reassuringly expensive and they use Ru Paul as a spokesmodel, what more could a tranny want?!

The counter in Selfridges was very busy, but I knew there was a proper MAC shop somewhere outside the Bullring and in Birmingham town centre. After a bit of wandering about I found it in a side street. Like an up-market candy store they had all their 100+ eyeshadow colours laid out as samples to try... including 3 different kinds of white and one that was absolutely perfect. A white frost that went on sheer but was intensely white and blended well. Only one problem, they had none in stock!

It's times like this I wish there was some kind of tranny licence. These days I have no qualms about asking shop assistants about girly stuff (using the "my money's just as good as anyone else's" defence), it's just sometimes I wish they knew I was actually quite a dedicated tranny (albeit currently in male mode) who actually knew what he was talking about and was appreciative and aware of the different products on offer. Sometimes I worry that shop assistants think "oh it's just a tranny, I'll fob him off with anything". Maybe that's just paranoia.

Actually the assistant in MAC (who are supposedly more T-friendly than many) turned out to be quite helpful, and when I asked if she knew if the busy Selfridges counter would have it she offered to ring up and ask for me. Yes please!

They didn't. Would I like it if I rang the Harvey Nicholls counter?

Hang on... there are three MAC outlets in Birmingham?

Apparently so... and the third one did have the eyeshadow I was after.

Harvey Nicks is in a new-ish shopping centre in Birmingham called the Mailbox. It was the far side of the town centre from where I was... but worth the trek!

Thirty minutes later I was the proud owner of "White Frost"... the Perfect White Eyeshadow.

And the first person to get to try it was Sophie. During a vodka-fuelled session later that evening she asked (mad drunken fool!) to see what a "Becky" makeover would look like on her.

Oh... I also bought a dark blue eyeshadow, and a brown blusher cos I was feeling flush. The assistant reminded me that if you bring back six MAC empties they give you a free item. But judging by the fact that I've been using another MAC blusher for about 18 months and it's such high quality that it's gone down in level by about half a nanometre... I don't think I'll be having any empties any time soon!

Um... kind of a dull long-winded post about makeup. Sorry about that! I told you I was obsessed! Perhaps maybe some people appreciated the insight into makeup techniques, I can but hope.

Well, that's Friday restrospectively blogged... I'll get round to blogging the rest of the weekend eventually!

The weekend Hamster Sudoku really took off

I've just got home after 3 days away at Manchester Pride and environs, and I was planning to write about that tonight. Only to find that while I've been away my little project "Flickr Sudoku" is being talked about all over the internet!

It started on Friday when it got an out-of-the-blue mention by Tom Coates on plasticbag.org, who appears to have found the link via Siobhan. He described it as "one of the best uses I've seen for the [flickr] API yet".

I am so not worthy!

From there it then started popping up on all kinds of blogs, so much so that at one point it was even listed on del.icio.us's most popular page, which generated a load of traffic. At the time of writing it was stull number 8 on Daypop's top 40 of currently popular blog topics in the world. Pretty damn groovy!

Looking at my traffic logs the some of most popular tags to make puzzles from are...

• Hamster - it's the default setting for the game, and I think that the name "Hamster Sudoku" has kinda stuck as it's official title now!
  
  
• Cat and Kitten - proving that it must be the blog community visiting.
  
  
• Boobs - proving that my visitor demographic hasn't entirely changed after all.

So sorry about this rather self-congratulatory posting but I'm filled with a pretty rare warm glow from having done something that's not just of interest to people in or around the tranny scene, but appears to have busted out into the blogosphere proper. People are linking to my site because apparently I did something cool, and quite rightly the tranny thing is not an issue¹ at all.

Yay me!

¹Apart a rather sweet comment on the 4rthur links page: "Isn't Becky a clever um.. girl?"

At Jessica's

I'm still "on the road" as it were, staying at Jessica's apartment tonight after a two-day stint at Manchester Pride. It was a fun weekend, with a few negatives but mainly positives, I'll post a full report when I get back home. Also expect full details of "My Quest for the Perfect White Eyeshadow", "Summer's First Night Out", and "Me and Jessica Get Fired From a Catapult".

To answer the question from a couple of days ago about my definition "minor" shopping spree. Let me put it this way...

A second tornado hit Birmingham on Friday. Damage was extensive but localised to TK Maxx¹, Claire's Accessories², and the M.A.C. counter in Harvey Nicks³.

If you'd like to contribute to the Becky's Cashflow Emergency Relief Fund, please click on an advert on this page!

¹"£10 for a top? You can't afford not to buy 4!"
²"Ooooh... shiny things!!" Transvestite demonstrates the equivalent in taste and buying power of a whole classroom of 10 year old girls.
³"Ah, yes it it a little expensive Sir, perhaps Sir would like details of our indentured servitude plan?"

Shopmoblog

Bit of a minor shopping frenzy in TKmaxx, not done this in ages! Winter stuff is in already. The sad news is Bagpuss has apparently met a sticky end and been recycled as a scarf.

I need a long weekend

I've been wearing clear nail strengthening varnish for the last few days, carefully buffed so that it didn't look too shiny. Tonight I decided to take it off. So I loaded up a cotton ball with nail varnish remover and started to work.

The stuff seemed amazingly hard to shift. It just didn't want to come off! Maybe the buffing had somehow chemically bonded it with my nail??

After nearly five minutes of soaking and picking at the edges, I realised that instead of using a bottle of this... I was using a bottle of this.

Um... it doesn't remove nail varnish.

Pride comes before... another Pride.

After last weekend's outing to "Pride Lite" in Cambridge, I'm getting all set for more fun this weekend at the rather larger Manchester Pride.

I'm taking the day off tomorrow to shop for a few essentials (and a lot of non-essentials) before completing the first leg of the journey¹. So the blog will probably be neglected for a bit.

When I get back I promise to regale you with tales of the weekend. Including the first ever appearance by genuine tranny asylum seeker, Summer! :-)

¹ To Sophie's place. British Airways use Heathrow as a hub, British trannies use a third-floor flat in Derby.

PG12 Posting (Contains typefaces that may be disturbing for sensitive designers)

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the true horror that is...

A question...

When you change CSS to use only Comic Sans as part of National Comic Sans Day, can it still legitimately be called a Cascading Style Sheet?

I think that poor old Comic Sans has spent enough time as the typeface that everyone loves to hate, so I'm going to work on a font to take it's place as the Worst Font Ever.

It will take me a few minutes...

Meanwhile some light music.

Keep Transvestism for Transvestites!

Over the last few months I’ve noticed an alarming trend. A lot of people, including some of my non-tranny friends, are turning tranny. Completely “normal” people with no previous transvestite tendencies are crossing over the borders to transvestism. Some claim they are unhappy and oppressed in their orientations of origin, but many appear to be lured by our nicer clothes, improved job prospects, better parties, and higher educational standards.

Now, I’m not given to prejudice, but I do feel, as a natural-born transvestite, that this influx of new-comers is leading to an inevitable watering down and fragmentation of the tranny community. Many of them don’t even have a concept of the values and traditions that transvestites hold dear, such as guilt, purging, and self-delusion. Also, many of them show no desire to learn our language or customs. For example, there are already so-called transvestites living the lifestyle today that have never been to the Way Out Club!

So I say it’s time to take a stand against this influx of Jenni-Come-Latelys! It’s time to say enough is enough! It’s time to make it clear to them that we’ve Done Our Bit and that Transvestism is Full.

Of course, I’m not proposing a total ban on new transvestites. Many people have a legitimate claim to be a transvestite, and the community can gain from the skills they would bring. I’m just suggesting there should be stricter rules for the people we allow in from now on:

1. Every alternative lifestyle (including transvestism) should only have to accept a quota of straight individuals each year. Straight people seeking refuge should be allocated fairly amongst the non-straight communities. I am convinced that many straight refugees would be just as happy becoming (for example) a lesbian, given the right opportunities. It’s only the perceived attraction of transvestism from afar that means we’ve taken an unfairly large share of the load in the past.


2. People who set out to reach transvestite status should be stopped and processed at the first alternative lifestyle that they reach. For example, a person who has arrived at “a little bit, you know, poofy” on their way to transvestism should be held there until the proper tests are completed to prove they have legitimate grounds for leaving “straight”.


3. Once people have proved that they have genuine need to become a transvestite, there should be a compulsory re-education program to integrate them fully into the community. This should incorporate a minimum 10-year closeting period, including at least 4 purge cycles. Only once the necessary levels of guilt have been instilled in the individual should they be allowed full transvestite status.


4. To maintain the transvestite economy at grass-roots level, during the first 5 years all new transvestites should be required to buy all their clothes at Transformations.

This may sound a little harsh, but I believe that allowing just anyone to become a transvestite is removing our exclusivity and destroying the one thing that makes transvestism an attractive prospect in the first place. So, please join me in my fight to keep transvestism for transvestites, and display the poster below in your window, at your work-place, or on your web site.

Thank you and good night.