"Where every concept pleases, and only man is vile."
I haven’t got much to say today, so I’m going to take Shane McChesney‘s advice and say nothing.
But, if you fancy a little detour go and check out the biscuit of the week, courtesy of Ciaran. Well, it made me smile anyway. Oh, and Mr Hennessy, you can’t call yourself a sad techie unless you have your own web site. Get with the programme old man, even Jonny Palmer has one.
Its one of the great paradoxes – “I haven’t got anything to wear”, to which the attendant 2nd party says “But what about those wardrobes full of clothes?”. Which we all know is a foolish response.
Today we will extend that with “There is nothing to eat”, to which the reply “But what about the fridge full of fresh vegetables, fruit and cheeses, the freezer full of ready meals and the pantry cupboard with enough dried food to feed a family of five for a month” is also judged superfluous.
They should take us chaps* round the back of the bike sheds at school and let us know the real meaning of these phrases. We wouldn’t then spend our formative relationship years in a constant state of confusion and ear bashing, not to mention the associated wallet emptying that we have to go through to teach us a lesson. Or maybe, as Jonathon Delacour says very well in this piece, we only learn by negative reinforcement. I will let you know when I get back from the supermarket.
*Not trying to be sexist here, but I couldn’t help myself. There go my feminist credentials.
For the first time on this blog, here is a quote of the day;
Phillip Lopate. “The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and ‘have fun’.” [Quotes of the Day]
We are off on holiday to Batemans Bay for a week to lounge around on the beach. Make sure you behave whilst we are away and I expect you all back here in eight days time when we return.
I may have mentioned here before how much I love my job, but for those with short memories – its great. So great in fact that a colleague and I have today started an e-mail phrase contest.
Its quite simple really, all you have to do to win a point is include a selected phrase in an e-mail. To make it checkable the other party has to be copied on the message and its purpose can’t be to simply use up a phrase. We are starting simply and currently only have two phrases;
“I want never gets, please may I have sometimes does” – courtesy of my parents
“cognitive dissonance presumes the existence of cognition” – courtesy of EmptyBottle.org
That should keep us amused for a while.
Mum, get my old Commodore 64 out of the loft. Apparently I can press it into service as a web server. Don’t believe me? Have a look here.
Every time I stumble across one of these web sites (usually via the lovely people at Metafilter) it brightens my day. It reminds me that there are people in the world who aren’t solely driven by the profit motive, or social position, or blind naked ambition, but who just do things because they are fun. Bless em.
Another productive day at work. All I’ve managed to achieve is to transfer some pictures from my new camera to my laptop, copy them to my web server and include one of them in this post. Here you see a picture of my beloved fiance doing what she does best, reclining on the sofa with Bagpuss.
Isn’t technology marvellous, all it took was a whole day to get that photo up here. Alternatively I could have used an old fashioned camera, taken some photos and probably printed up a copy each of that shot for everyone who reads this blog.
You can still call me David Bailey though.
Today I went out and bought a digital camera. Well, to be precise I purchased a Canon Digital IXUS V from the lovely people at Paxtons.
I got a digital camera so that I could take lots of quick photos and easily post them on the web, either here, or at my other site. We now run into our first hurdle.
Even on a reasonable setting the jpg files the camera produces are 200k or so in size. Not the kind of thing you want to slot into a blog. So I had a look in the box to see what software came bundled with the camera to allow me to manipulate these images and make them small enough to include here. All we get is PhotoImpression 3.0 from ArcSoft. This, of course, allows you to perform all sorts of image manipulations apart from the one I want. You can reduce red eye, you can layer your photo, you can add textual captions to your photos, you can even add a fancy border to your photo. You cannot, as far as I can tell, resize it from 1024×768 pixels to something like 256×192 pixels. Which would be nice. So no pictures here.
Luckily I have a copy of Paint Shop Pro. All I need to do is transfer it to this machine and we should be up, up and away. I bet you can’t wait now, can you?
An entry for my beloved. You can now play your favourite computer game on line. Courtesy of the lovely people at Flash Arcade (and one of my hard working colleagues), here is Bubble Trouble.
At the moment I drive to work. On my journey I pass a public school. I’m not sure of the terms here in Australia but it would be called a junior school in the UK. The children they teach range (I guess) from 5 to about 12 (when they go to high school).
I quite enjoy driving past this school every day as they have a notice board facing the road. They also have a conscientious member of staff who updates the message on it every few days. I always look forward to a new message brightening up my morning journey.
Which brings us today. Today the notice board said;
“The school band and string ensemble are practising really well.”
To which there is only one response – uh?
One more thing whilst I am here. I promised two weeks ago to update my style sheets to make this web site slightly easier on the eye. I’ve reviewed my HTML and CSS and, surprisingly, it is a bigger job than I thought. The result is that I will need to perform at least the equivalent of another site re-design to achieve this.
This effort will be a bit like repairing a road. Lots of effort, disruption and bum cracks, but at the end no noticeable difference. It will be worth it though, even if the only outwardly visible sign of all of this hard work is a drop down list allowing you to display this page in the colour scheme of your choice, just like Mark Pilgrim has done on his blog.
For the technically literate, I’m going to try and follow Mark’s Accessibility Statement as well.
Suffice it to say this will not be done in a hurry. Sorry for any delay but we will endeavour to maintain normal service for the duration.