Thursday night is painting night in the Handley household. Our task for August is to paint all the remaining bits and pieces of unfinished woodwork (the door, skirting board, couple of shelves – that kind of thing). Last week was sanding, tonight was priming the bare wood and putting an undercoat on the door. We aim to do around an hour each night, but have a specific task, rather than a time limit.
Finished off by watching Extras, which is quite amusing, but also a bit sad, somehow. Biting satire is one thing, but it sometimes feels like a bit too accurate a reflection of life. Dilbert manages to be just enough over the top not to fall into this trap, and actually speaking of everyone’s favourite office worker, today was a particularly good one I thought.
Anyway, the DIY doesn’t end with the Kitchen, oh no – August bank holiday (which means Monday and Tuesday off for slackers like me) I shall be attacking the study with abandon. Looking around as I type I could get disheartened, so I probably should just wrap this up and go to bed. The lady of the house is on t’phone, so there’s no point in getting too excited about bed just yet – mind you I could always read a bit more of Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down
(it is the book I’m reading, incidently, but it was born out of that website).
Oh go on then – if we’re doing books, I just finished In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (by all accounts the last in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series), which was fab, and also managed to get hold of Shadowmancer, which is probably my next read. That said, someone at work has recommended Snow Falling on Ceders to me, which both A. and I were sure we had on our shelves, but I can’t find it so perhaps not… Anyway, said colleague is going to lend it to me, so I can make my own mind up.
I should probably keep a record on here too of the religious books I’ve read, but that seems a bit heavy somehow, although I do get them dreadfully confused. I’m partially reminded of this because I got my first copy of the Apocrypha today – mainly inspired by Miss Garnet’s Angel, which in turn is heavily inspired by the story from the Book of Tobit (which, I confess, I’d never heard of before). But I was also thinking it was about time I had a copy of it too, so it was a good spur.
P.S. Top strategy is to think of the title after writing the entry – I always end up writing more/differently from what I thought I would when I write the title!!
Have managed to remove the annoying little gap in my stave, but I then discovered that my combination of tables and CSS was enough to crash Netscape 4. I’ve already got stuff in place that serves up “simple” CSS to older browsers, so it was just a case of removing the stuff that causes them to break, while leaving in as much as possible so that browsers which can handle full CSS will.
I’ve also been fiddling around with text based browsers – the site will detect if you’re using Links or Lynx, and serve up slightly different content, specifically:
The menu at the top of screen loses its divs
The links on the left aren’t served at all (well, actually they are served, but are commented out. Bit hacky, I know)
Lots of extra <hr>s put in to delimit stuff
It’s not perfect yet; in particular my to see list has gone a bit nasty. 🙁 I suspect this is a hard-coded width issue, which I shall track down another day. For now my sandwiches have gone, so it’s back to work.
Phew – back to business as usual, at least in the Ben department. Didn’t hear a peep all evening (although to be fair I was out at the School of Computing BBQ yesterday evening), and he’s asleep even now (7am). Very nice too.
The BBQ was fun – got to meet lots of other halves and offspring, and see a few faces that I don’t see so much anymore. Needless to say at one point it rained, but it was actually only a light drizzle and soon passed. Also as usual the Pentanq (sp?) set appeared, and much fun was had by all.
Didn’t get home too late in the end, which was nice – although Harrogate trains are only one an hour after about 18.30, so perhaps left a little earlier than I might in order to get the 20.29. No – stop, I refuse to start writing journal entries about train timetables!
That said, the live departure boards done by the National Rail people are cool and useful.
Minor excitements; I’ve moved backed to a fundamentally table based layout now, as this site renders so hideously badly in a text based browser, and it’s not so hot on my PDA either. The whistles, bells, formatting, and precise placement are still very much CSS, but it’s operating within a table framework. It has introduced an annoying gap in my stave though, which I shall have to fix. 🙂
Bad night last night – Ben woke up every couple of hours and screamed and screamed until he was picked up, then screamed and screamed until he was put back down, at which point he went straight back to sleep (for another couple of hours). No idea why.
NTL announced today that they are going to roll out 10Mb broadband to everyone. Well, that’s everyone on NTL, of course.
I was quite chuffed when they switched their most basic offering from 300k to 1Mb, but now it would appear that by the end of 2006 I could be on 10Mb at home. The press release doesn’t talk about what upstream rates are, but my money would be on between 500k and 1Mb, and this means I could quite realistically move my primary hosting of eutony.net to my Apache server at home. My website has hardly any traffic – I’m lucky to reach 40Mb a month – so I don’t suppose NTL would notice, even if they did mind.
The only slight reservation is that the connection does go down from time to time, and the IP address changes – which is fairly easy to get around, but still a pain.
One of the interesting things here is that they are apparantly changing their charging structure from ‘speed’ based to ‘usage’ based – so everyone will be on 10Mbs, and the top tier will have 75Gb/month allowance, but the lowest tier will presumably be something like 10Gb month? In many ways this is sensible, since it essentially costs NTL nothing to provide an x meg connection to my house, but it does cost them to ship my bits around.
Come up another couple of words that nobody says anymore; crumbs and crickey. Actually I don’t know how to spell that last one! I guess more “mature” words have superceded such mild exclamations of surprise, but I think they still have their place. A. suggested cripes, but I would categorise that in a similar way to lawks, which nobody has used outside a book (or irony) in recent times.
Another book I’ve made my way through is The Hungry Tide, which was actually quite an enjoyable book, if borderline dark. So many reviews to write..
In case you’re wondering, this book-fest has been inspired by a general cull and review of our bookshelves, which were creaking under the load.
Quick Ben update; he’s really got the hang of “hello” and “no” – there’s been the threat of “yes”, and today I’m sure he said “ready” after he put his coat on!!
Have you noticed how nobody says splendid anymore? Or rather (in the sense of something being “rather good”)? I tried them out a few times today, but nobody noticed, which was sad. It was in the context of cricket, so perhaps that’s somehow more acceptable.
Quintessential is another word people hardly ever use anymore, “essential” typically being taken to mean “Absolutely necessary, indispensably requisite” rather than being derived from “essence” (thanks to the OED for the definitions). For a long time I thought “essential oils” where oils that were required for a given task. 🙂
Also been devouring books recently – obviously Half Blood Prince, but a couple of fab books;
The Other Boleyn Girl / The Queen’s Fool. Both are about Tudor england (and both deserving their own review) – great reads. (see them on Amazon)
The Time Traveller’s Wife (amazon). Lest we forget – but this book deserves its own review.
Camelot’s Shadow was ok.
Oh yes, and I did get Mortal Engines in the end too – jolly good it is too.
My in-waiting list includes Attention all shipping and another Sally Vickers – Instances of the Number Three. My to-be-added-to-my-in-waiting list still has Philip Pullman’s trilogy, but also now the Shadowmancer series. Too lazy to do all the links!
Incidently, forgot to mention – found the wonderful SharpeMusique, a iTunes compatible client for Linux, on nanocrew.net.
Took a little bit of hacking to find it, and then even more to get it working, but once it is working it’s ever so fab – and yes, my first purchase was Hayley Hutchinson (79 pence – bargain!!) 🙂
Had a lovely weekend with Penguin, lots of chatting, catching up, and solving puzzles. We also talked a bit about ‘blogs and the like, and this conversation was enough to tip the balance for me from the title Letters from Leeds being a bit kooky/ironic into being sad/self-important – so I’ve renamed it to plain and simple “James’s Journal” (and it’s only not “diary” because I couldn’t resist the alliteration). It is, and always has been, essentially a diary, so why not just call a spade a spade?
But it got me thinking; one aspect I’m not wild about is the archive thing – especially now I title my entries. When one goes to “2005”, do you really want a huge page of all my journal entries? I think not! But I can’t decide what would be better. I guess the options are:
Just the titles, click to read
Titles and a short excert, click to read
“Page” based viewing, with 10 entries per page, or something
Something else, or a combination of the above
Then there’s the question of how you navigate from an entry – back to the list, or is there a “forward” button?
Not that I’ve got time at the moment anyway, but it’s something to mull..
