Welcome To 2006

Welcome To 2006 everyone, hope you had a great 2005, but here's to a happy new year and plenty more games. Hopefully you've all recovered from your celebrations last night by now, I'm just about back in the land of the living, but I would like to thank The Prince Of Wales pub for my huge hangover today. Hope you all had a good time, and I'll have some new games for you soon.

Entry 1583, Sunday, January 1st 2006, Filed In Diary
Comments(28)

Logo Competition : Entries So Far

The Lazylaces Logo Competition is still underway, with entries open until 28th Dec 2005 at 09:00GMT. Read my original post for all the rules, competition details and, most importantly, what the prize is. I have now also put together a page of the entries so far so you can see what you are up against - I've included all the entries regardless of what I think of them - do you think you can do better?

Entry 1563, Thursday, December 15th 2005, Filed In Diary
Comments(57)

Lazylaces Logo Competition

I've just done some work to update the blue stylesheet version of this site - you can switch between the site stylesheets at any time by using the red and blue squares at the bottom of the righthand column (or use the hyperlinks I've just written out). Anyway, that's not my point. While I was doing the work I got to thinking that it's about time I updated the lazylaces logo...

The original, and still in use, logo was created when I took an image from the results of a google image search for "laces" and then had some kind of artistic accident with it in Paint Shop which I still don't fully understand. Anyway it's meant to show some shoes tied in a lazy fashion - I have no idea if it succeeds - I stopped thinking about it about 3 years ago. What I'd like to do is replace it now, and if someone with more artistic ability than me can help, all the better, so in that vein I propose a lazylaces logo competition... here are the details (which I am not making up as I go along - honest):

Prize
The creator of the best entry will receive a token to the value of $30 for Amazon.com (or the nearest GBP equivalent for Amazon.co.uk). I'm afraid my budget won't stretch any further. In addition if I love the entry enough it will become the new logo for the site. All other reasonable, and probably all awful, entries will be featured on the site with a credit.

Guidelines

The logo should either be, or be able to fit within, a banner 630 x 80.
In GIF or JPG format, with as small a file size as possible.
It would be nice, but not essential, if the words "lazy" and "laces" were somehow represented.

Rules

The Closing Date is 28th Dec 2005 at 09:00GMT.
Artwork may be altered by me for use on this site.
All submitted artwork may be distributed and used by lazylaces.com free of charge.
Graeme's decision is final.

Ok. That's it I think. Hopefully someone comes up with something cool, otherwise the new year will see me having a painful session with Paint Shop. I'm sure I'll do an update before the closing date so look out for that [idea from a comment by Oxyacetylene].

Entry 1545, Saturday, December 10th 2005, Filed In Diary
Comments(68)

Forum Poll Results

Just a quick update on the "should there be a lazylaces forum" poll I ran the other week. I can't work out how to close off the poll, but I'm taking the votes as of now as the final result, so, in reverse order:

Don't care - 172 votes.
Yes - 473 votes.
No - 506 votes.

So, no forum for now. Maybe I'll rethink this at some future date, but for now I'm happy with the result. As a number of you pointed out I'm busy enough as it without patroling forum threads half the day which was something I hadn't really thought through. I would like some kind of general posting/chat area at some point which I thought I could do using a forum, but maybe I'll put my thinking hat on and see if there is another way of doing this.

PS. Thanks to Quimble for the quick and easy polling - a sinch to set up and so easy to use - recommended (and free) if you have any kind of poll to do.

Entry 1544, Saturday, December 10th 2005, Filed In Diary
Comments(12)

Web User

Well I'm still not well, but I've had enough of sitting around feeling sorry for myself and watching really bad daytime television from under the bedcovers, so it's time to post some stuff...

The first thing that cheered me up this week was Samorost 2, for me it's the gaming equivalent of a big *hug*, but some other news has penetrated the lazylaces bedcovers (ooo-er). The current issue of Web User magazine, "The UK's biggest selling internet magazine", featured Lazylaces in their "best new web sites" review! Oh the fame. Admittedly by "featured", I mean "was tucked away in a byline on page 17", but you have to take what you can, and they did describe me as an "old favourite". Thanks guys. Next time I'm aiming for at least a half page spread ;o)

Entry 1536, Friday, December 9th 2005, Filed In Diary
Comments(10)

A Close Shave

Turns out the rather odd and delayed train journey into work I experienced the other week was due to the fact that the train I was on only just managed to stop 300yds short of ploughing into another train. You'll be glad to know that your diligent on-the-spot reporter slept through the whole "potential major disaster" (it was 6.30am), decribing it later as "a nice lay in". So I live on to make another post...

Entry 1533, Sunday, December 4th 2005, Filed In Diary
Comments(28)

Forum Poll

I've been thinking about creating a lazylaces forum, something that would have a general forum to let people chat in, and maybe threads for some of the more popular games (where I believe the site comments get a bit unwieldy). What do you think? The site comments would still exist (in their current format), I'm hoping a forum would complement these and rather than replace them. The forum would require registration (I have enough trouble with spam on the comments), but I don't think anyone would have a problem with this, would you?

Anyway if you want to check out the sort of thing I'm thinking of look at snitz which is the free forum code I'm thinking of using (I really don't have time to do all that coding myself), and if you'd like to express you opinion add a comment on this post, or better still try the first lazylaces poll:

Entry 1525, Thursday, December 1st 2005, Filed In Diary
Comments(63)

Squeezebox

You were wondering what to get me for Christmas weren't you? Well as a public service I can tell you that the SqueezeBox is exactly what I want. Being able to wirelessly stream any music file from a computer in Lazylaces towers to my stereo system? Yes please. Stop that $299 burning a hole in your pocket and get ordering so it arrives in time. For reference the black version with the WiFi option is the one for me. That is all. I'm off to watch for the postman now. Oh, and one other thing, the fact that it's playing an obscure track in the marketing pic that I own means it's destiny, doesn't it? [via OhGizmo!].

Entry 1514, Sunday, November 27th 2005, Filed In Diary
Comments(6)

Lazylaces Mobile (Beta)

After sending a day a while back tinkering with creating web pages for mobile devices I never really finished off what I was doing, but I did get the comments made on this site available on some mobile pages. Since then I've checked the comments virtually everyday using my phone when I'm away from my PC (on the train mostly), so I thought it was finally time to clean up the pages and advertise them to all. So, as of now, the site comments are available on your mobile phone, simply point your WAP/GPRS device to:

http://lazylaces.com/mobile

The pages are written in XHTML-MP, which means that the pages should be readable from most modern, internet enabled, mobile devices, although I've only tested them from my Samsung (which uses the Openwave browser). You should be able to see the pages from a normal web browser as well, but obviously they don't look too good as they are formatted for devices with tiny screens (and the cool soft key links won't work either).

Anyway if your try it out on a mobile device I'd love to hear if you have any feedback. I'm already planning to add automatic redirection for mobile devices from the main site address to the mobile address, and, if I suddenly get lots of time (unlikely), I'll also look at expanding the mobile content available.

TTFN

Entry 1499, Monday, November 21st 2005, Filed In Diary
Comments(6)

Chase The Daise

People have complained that I don't keep my diary up to date!!!??? And I thought you were just here for the games. Anyways I don't have much time to write reams just now, maybe sometime soon. What I did want to do though was say a warm welcome back to Daisy, who in web years is an old friend of LL. She's been offline for sometime, but now she's back with a sparkly new site. *hugs* D, it's good to have you back. Incidently talking of web years, I've just realised the LL is 3 years old at the end of this month (at least in it's current format, it's getting on for 5 in total). Watch out for celebrations on the 29th.

Entry 1444, Wednesday, October 12th 2005, Filed In Diary
Comments(70)

SpaceBar

F**kIt!Myspacebarkeepssticking.Musthavedroppedsomethinginmy keyboard.Tryingtoeditmypostssoyoudon'tnotice,butI'msorryifthe wordsallcomeouttogether.Bo***ocks!