23 « January « 2007

23Jan/072

I’m so uncool

Children of Men movie image One of the great advantages of having an uncommon surname is that it's pretty simple to promote yourself.

I've been blogging for seven months now, and I own all but two of the first 20 Google search results for "Gorbould".

Yay me. But now I've discovered there's someone with almost my name, who is way, way cooler than I'll ever be. In fact, Paul Corbould is living the life of my dreams.

Turns out that Paul Corbould is the special effects supervisor for the film Children of Men, as well as just about everything else that is awesome about Hollywood [hat tip to Sue, who highly recommends the movie.] Corbould also did V for Vendetta, King Arthur, Saving Private Ryan, and Amadeus. (Well... he also did a Superman movie, but it was the dreaded #3. Making Richard Pryor fly isn't nearly as cool as doing General Zod's laser eyes!)

And it's not just Paul... Corbould's whole family is cooler than mine. His brothers both do SFX too: Chris Corbould does all the Bond flicks, and Neil Corbould won an Oscar for Gladiator.

Ebenezer Gorbould

I suppose I can take some consolation in the fact that some genealogy sites say that Gorbould (and Gorbold) are related to Corbould.

Records of that name dates back to 1395 in Suffolk, England. Best I can find of Gorbould is bloke named Ebenezer, who ran a pub in Roydon.

And I thought I was uncool.

Filed under: Blather 2 Comments

23Jan/072

Spending the night with Ella

Just a quick note to say that I'm not dead, I'm just upgrading.

After a few days off, I was going to post something clever tonight (delusions!) but I got sidetracked, in a good way. WordPress has just released version 2.1, codenamed "Ella" (yep, after Ella Fitzgerald.) I had neglected any upgrades thus far, and it was long overdue... so I spent the night with Ella. And here she is.

It was a rather pleasant night, all things considered. One of those things to consider was how hellishly awful my upgrade from Blogger to Wordpress was. By comparison, this was a snap.

To make a long story short, Ella is designed to make my life easier, not yours. You won't notice any of the major changes, but they include:

Autosaving
Tabs between WYSIWYG and HTML views
spell checker
faster interface
an upload manager
blogroll subcategories
a new antispam plugin

So far my site seems to be working just fine. I haven't been able to get a couple of the new features to work yet, but they aren't essential, and it's probably just a matter of doing some reading.

[EDIT: Ooops, just noticed that there's a problem with my recent posts plugin... seems to have the same cutline for everything. Have to fix that...]

Anyhow, this is mostly a test post. There are a bunch of new image management features I should try too. So, er, um... here's a picture of some bears my daughter drew.