Pesky lowercase

Okay, that's the last one for a while, promise. It's just that that one's been finished and burning a hole in my hard drive over the weekend, so I had to post it.

Let me know if you'd like more. (Read: "I'm pathetic and need constant positive feedback.")

:-)

The roof is digestives

I'm not a father, but I promised to put this on my blog in case any of you lot were interested. I'm pretty sure it's genuine, despite the fact she works for "Monkey Television" in the "Biscuit Building". I have an image of a troop of monkeys with cameras, munching on garibaldi partition walls.

But it's probably very professional and not like that at all. :-)

Hi Becky

I've just found your web site (through Google) and read it with great interest.

I am working on a pilot show for a series for Channel Five about devoted dads and daughters. The programme will reflect a diversity of circumstances in which fathers fulfil their roles. It will examine the positive impact dads have on their daughters' lives and development. Fathers are often represented in the media as being absent or uninvolved and our intention is buck this trend by featuring devoted fathers and daughters. We have started filming with two very different dads and daughters and are currently looking for a third relationship. I think it would be really interesting to talk to a dad who is a transsexual, transvestite or cross dresser and explore his relationship with his daughter. It might be a good opportunity to dispel any preconceptions that people might have about dads in transition and the impact it has on their relationship with their children.

I wondered whether this was something you might be able to help me with. I don't know whether you know anyone personally who might be interested or whether you could point me in the right direction to get in touch with people who might like to be involved.

If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask, I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best wishes
Rosie

Rosie Hinchliffe
Monkey Television
The Biscuit Building
10 Redchurch St
London
E2 7DD

0207 7493159
rosieh@monkeykingdom.com
www.monkeykingdom.com

Macbook Pro Battery Recall

Just a heads-up.

If you own a 15-inch Macbook Pro, head over to this page to see if your battery is one of the ones that don't meet Apple's "high standards for battery performance", and is elligible for free replacement.

I did, and discovered that my battery is one of dodgy ones. I suspected as much, it started playing up at the weekend - power dying suddenly. You might remember that I've already had my Macbook battery replaced under warranty once, so this will be my third!

At least Apple are doing the right thing by replacing them free of charge, I guess.

Kinky Fun

Over and out

Thanks to Jane wangling us some tickets, I spent the afternoon at an RAF families day.

Families days are basically the forces' way to show what all our taxes are being spent on. I'm exceptionally pleased to see mine have been spent on bouncy castles and beer tents. :-)

It was a jolly nice way to spend the last day of the heatwave (it officially ends tomorrow folks, and I don't need an illegal Met Office feed to tell me that).

One of the best bits was a display by the Red Arrows. I love the Red Arrows, they demonstrate what the British forces do best: incredibly precise manouvres very close together whilst clad in bright red camouflage. If we could get the red arrows to wear furry black busbies we would.

Well, I'm enjoying myself, that's the main thing

And now, in the spirit of my "never blog a meme you didn't start yourself" rule, and with cap doffed to David Renwick and the Two Ronnies, I give you...

The Answering the Previous Question to the One Being Asked Meme!

Q: Your name?
A: ...

Q: What's your favorite subject to blog about?
A: Becky Enverite.

Q: What do you wish you blogged less about?
A: Transvestism.

Q: How do you spend your working day?
A: Doing stuff with Flickr.

Q: What's your secret shame?
A: I work for the NHS.

Q: If you had a windfall of £1,000,000 how would you spend it?
A: Shopping at Transformation once.

Q: Describe your "look".
A: Mostly donations to charity.

Q: If you were invited to a ball, what outfit would you arrive in?
A: A short skirt and a smile.

Q: And if you're just pottering about the house?
A: A full length organza ballgown.

Q: What's the biggest lie you've ever told?
A: I never dress up girly at home.

Q: What's the best way to get popular in the tranny scene?
A: Telling big hairy trannies they look quite passable.

Q: And the best way to make enemies?
A: Just be yourself.

Q: When you meet up with tranny friends, what do you talk about?
A: Bitch about what other trannies are wearing.

Q: What other blogs do you enjoy?
A: Anything and everything, really.

Q: What's the best way you've found to get to sleep at night?
A: I like to read Joanna's Diary, Tranniefesto, the Dragnet...

Q: Finally, what's the one thing you'd attribute the success of your web site to?
A: Alcohol.

T*Art Modern - Bridget Love

Bridget Love is another TG artist that I became aware of via Flickr. I'm stunned by the quality of her work. It's has a very clean graffiti feel, which mixtures of hi-tech and retro imagery. This blend of sci-fi and seventies is probably the reason they remind me of reading my dad's OMNI magazines when I was a kid. (I've asked this before, but does anyone else remember OMNI?)

Bridget works in pen-and-ink before transferring the images to Photoshop to apply the flat colouring. It gives her pictures a stark appearance that retain the slight low-fi imperfections of the original pen drawing.

She recently had her first exhibition, and also maintains a web site, but I've been asked not to direct you to that, as she's "quite shy"!

Did you know...

that if you accidently add the property width="/" to an img tag it seems to make the picture invisible in IE6? Clever huh!? :-)

Um... you should be able to see the cartoon in my last post now.

So frickin' petite

Becky's First Law of the Tranniesphere

The number of trannies in your immediate blog & Flickr contacts lists is directly proportional to the number of times that you shout "oh FFS*!" at the screen a day.

I'm personally up to about three times a day. Two of those were just from looking at my contact's pictures just now. How about you?

--

*Not Full Facial Surgery. The other one.

Mosaic

I just thought I'd share this with you. It's a mosaic portrait Jim Bumgardner created of little old me, using photomosaic software he wrote himself.

You have to zoom in to see the full effect; the picture is made up of thousands of individual photographs of flowers. I think it's fantastic!

Jim is a bit of a Flickr star, he designed Colrpickr, a brilliant tool that finds pictures on Flickr based on colour. He also co-wrote the book Flickr Hacks, among many other projects. I feel quite honoured to be the subject of one of his works!

Touché

After talking to a couple of people, I think that the source material I pastiched in my previous post isn't as well-known as I thought it was.

It's based on Apple's current TV advertising campaign, featuring an anthropomorphized Mac and PC discussing their relative merits. They're wonderfully funny ads, not least because they're so outrageously biased towards Mac.

They actually backfire slightly, because if you're like me you'll end up liking the bumbling but well-meaning PC character more than the slick but slightly cocky Mac character.

The PC is played by John Hodgman, who's is also a regular contributor to The Daily Show as the "resident expert". In fact, in tonight's episode (on More4) he was hilariously cornered into saying his "I'm a PC" line while explaining how a two-tier Internet would work.

The Mac is played by Justin Long, who'll I'll always think of as the fanboy nerd in one of my fave films, Galaxy Quest (best line: "Let's get out of here before one of those things kills Guy!").

--

This blog post is dedicated to the Flickr photo stream of Karilou2006 "We hardly knew ye."

Tranny and TV

For the life of me, I can't think of a good title for this.

A little Flickr hack

Whilst I'm on a Flickr tip, I thought I'd share with you a little power-user hack I worked out the other day.

You know how in Flickr you can subscribe to an RSS feed of recent comments on your photos? It's a really handy feature, and a neat way of keeping up to speed on what's being said about your pics. Just go to the bottom of your Recent Activity page in Flickr and click on the "Feed" link near the bottom. This will give you the raw XML of your comments feed, with the URL in the address bar. You can use this URL in any feed aggregator. I like Bloglines.

But what if you want to subscribe to the latest comments on someone else's Flickr photostream? Maybe a friend's photostream who you'd like to keep an eye on. There's no feature in Flickr to present a "Recent Activity" page for a user other than yourself, so you can't get at their feed in the same way. There is a way around this though.

1. Go to your own "Recent Activity" page and use the "feed" link, and copy and paste the URL it gives you into a text editor.


2. The URL will look something like this:
   
   http://www.flickr.com/recent_comments_feed
   .gne?id=12345678@N00&format=rss_200
   
   The bit in bold is Flickr's internal user ID for your account.


3. We need to replace your user ID with the user ID of the person we want to grab the feed from. In Flickr, navigate to their photo stream or profile. Select the entire URL for this page and copy it.


4. Next, go to this page in the Flickr API exporer.


5. Paste the URL in your clipboard into the "Value" field. You can uncheck all of the checkboxes except the "send" one. Then click the "call method" button.


6. At the bottom of the page a bit of code will appear (if you're using Safari and it doesn't appear, try using another browser). You can ignore most of it except for the line that reads
   
   <user id="87654321@N00">


7. It's the bit in bold that you need. That's the user ID for the other user. Copy it and paste it into the line you saved in your text editor, replacing your user ID.


8. You now have a feed URL for the other user. Just copy and paste it into Bloglines or whatever feed aggregator you use, and away you go!

Unhealthy obsession

One of my many failings is getting obsessed when I think people are "cheating the system".

At the moment there's someone on Flickr who's posting loads of pictures to the tranny groups that she says are of herself, a male cross-dresser, and getting loads of comments about how fantastic and feminine she looks.

This is because it IS a woman. The pictures aren't of a tranny. I'm almost certain of it. The only slight wavering in my conviction is that so many other trannies on Flickr don't seem to realise it too. I know many friends DO share my view, but they're not as obsessed by it as I am.

Yeah, for those that remember, it's my Lana thing all over again. :-/

I'm poring over her pictures to find ways to prove she's a fake. There's very little good clues. It's subtle things like the complete lack of an Adam's apple, and a totally feminine body shape and face, which for a non-surgical non-hormone-assisted caucasian TV is more or less impossible.

It's not important I suppose, everyone fakes stuff. It's only Flickr.

Scratch that. It IS important or I wouldn't be getting worked up about it. I can't quite put my finger on why I think it's so important, it's something to do with giving other trannies realistic goals, and not lessening what I do with a lot of money, time, effort and emotional investment by just sticking up a picture of someone else and pretending it's all so "easy".

Ho hum.