Very exciting day – our new floor is going down in our hall and dining room. We’ve been in this house for nearly 4 and a half years now, and when we bought it it was “in need of modernisation”. We’ve been slowly (but surely) doing said modernising since then, and it’s a very slow and tedious process, but possibly – just possibly – the end is nigh!

Once the floor is down, they’ll inevitably be some finishing touches (spots of painting here and there), and that just leaves us with our spare bedroom to paint, and then the study to paint. And then it’s finished. Finto. Everything done! Just in time to move house. 🙂

Incidently, for just about as long as Ben’s been around (i.e. 18 months), our dining room has been a banned area for him, either because of extreme splinter-ville floorboards, or because it was packed full of bits and pieces from other rooms being decorated. But as of probably this weekend, he’ll have free roam of it. I think the study will be out of bounds forever, because it’s just too hard making it child friendly.

It seems to me that ‘blogs are increasingly coming more like mini-press releases or CVS-esque logs. Whereas they all used to either be a strange combination of diary, journal, and column, now they are more and more things like “Microsoft Developer’s Blog” or “Cisco developer’s blog”. They even get pointed to by the main websites as releases of interest.

I’d be the first to admit that this ‘ere blog is inane rubbish, and for the life of me I can’t imagine why anyone would read it – it’s main purpose in life is as a creative outlet for my thoughts (although some might argue with creative), although in the mix is also an excuse to tinker with web-based stuff, and of course a historical record (far too grand a term, I know, but you get the picture). I suppose friends/family who are not in particularly close contact but remain interested might browser from time to time.

On the other hand, I’m fully aware that I find other people’s blogs strangely compelling – and I’ve certainly written about blogs before – and I can see that there would be a genuine interest in reading about “bleeding edge” development from someone on the inside… but it doesn’t seem to be in the right spirit, somehow.

PS Notice how I snuck the new search facility in there? Will do something more sensible in due course.

Can’t really win at this time of year – yesterday it was sort of cold and cloudy, which wasn’t very nice, but today it’s hot but muggy, and there seems to be loads of pollen around. I’m not a huge hay fever sufferer, but it does restrict my breathing a bit (in a hang-over from my asthma days), and occasionally gives me runny eyes and sneezles. 🙁

On a lighter note, decided to go ahead with the title thing; d’ya like?

Also on a lighter note, my ad-hoc weight loss programme is in a temporary success stage, as I’ve slipped down to a mere 77kg, or 12 and a bit stone. My target weight range is probably 70-75kg, and then I’ll have to admit that my proto-beer belly will actually require exercise to address. It’s actually quite reassuring, because I seem to have been constantly hungry recently!

Been wondering about adding the facility of titles to Letters from Leeds. Would make much more sense from an RSS point of view to have the title rather than the first line of the entry – but it would mean a bit of work to implement it, plus arguably I should back-date all the old (200 and something) entries.

I suppose it could be optional; if an entry has a title then it’s used, otherwise nothing is shown. Shall ponder.

Just thinking – the feature that’s probably changed my web browsing habits the most is the “Live bookmark” feature of Firefox. Now instead of visiting the website directly, I flick open my live bookmark, and I can see what the latest articles are, and if I want to read them. Of course it depends on said website having an RSS feed, but as I’ve proved, that’s really not too hard to set up.

So now sites like BBC News and The Register get scanned for interesting stories without having the bother of going to their front-page! And similarly a site like DPReview I can check for an (interesting) update without having to actually go there. It’s grand!

Quite enjoyed Sith, although my ongoing cold didn’t enhance matters too greatly. I ended up spending nearly all day yesterday in bed, but am starting to feel a little bit better now…
I might hold off a review for a few days, but suffice to say I was annoyed at the apparant Jedi inability to finish the job. Despite a clear opportunity apiece for the Emperor and Vader to be bumped off, they both live to fight another day. Why Obi-wan didn’t finish off his fight particularly rankled.
I also got to wondering about why Obi-Wan calls Darth Vader “Darth” in episode IV? At the time I had assumed “Darth Vader” was his name, but rather “Darth” would seem to be the title of the Sith Lords; much like you would be a “Doctor” or “Sir”. Mind you “Strike me down, Sir, and I will become more powerful then you can possibly imagine.” would pass..

The most exciting news is that Ben has taken his first few steps. He walked 4 steps from Mummy to Daddy entirely unaided yesterday evening – most of the time it was a barely controlled fall, but once or twice he definitely walked the small gap. So I guess we give him a couple of weeks and he’ll be running us off our feet!!

Bit more website fiddling; turns out that my PHP is riddled with errors! Not of a particularly major variety, just testing the value of undefined variables, which does causes the error log file to fill up. I found them because I was having a problem with my Gallery installation, which was down to file permissions, but then I noticed there was actually errors coming up in my normal webpages. Anyway, all fixed now, which may also improve performance a bit?

On a different note, I feel dreadful today – stuffed up full of cold, really sore throat, and feels like I hardly slept at all last night (not helped by Ben, incidently.) Got those horrible cold/hot shivers (which A tells me are called rigors), and probably should have just stayed in bed. 🙁
… the reason I didn’t is because a group of us from work are going to see Revenge of the Sith this evening, and I really want to see it (and indeed have already brought my ticket). Probably a bad idea, but Star Wars is Star Wars, and it is the last film (in our time, if not Star Wars time). Expect a review in due course.

Decided to take the XHTML plunge, so am proud to annouce that my pages are (almost) valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The almost is because I want the Eutony logo on the top left to be a link to the front page, which means I’ve put an anchor tag around a <div>. This is apparantly naughty, but every browser I’ve tried understands what I mean!!! The transitional is because strict is far too strict.

The process was actually fairly painless – I’m a sufficient nerd that most of my open/closing of tags was correct – the painful thing was sorting out all the <br> (etc) tags into <br />, especially as this involved fiddling with the database.
The other option was to dynamically sort out these tags as the pages are served, but that would just slow everything down.

On a totally different note, Ben is soooo nearly walking. He can stand unsupported for several seconds now, but then he loses his courage and sinks to his knees again.

This is turning out to be a fab weekend – had a lovely time at Chris and Katy’s wedding yesterday; they got married in South Parade Baptist Church in Leeds, and then the reception was in Harewood house. I was doing the ushering thing which was great fun (nothing like legitimately bossing people around), although it meant I didn’t get any photos at the service itself. Still, more than made up for that at the reception (possibly a bit snap happy, but hey!)

Tommorow is the missus’ birthday, so we’re having a curry tonight to celebrate, and then I’m taking the day off work so we can do something nice – probably going swimming with Ben or something. I almost get more excited about her birthday than about my own, but then I love organising things and planning surprises.

I also playing my djembe at church this morning, which was fun. They don’t really have any percussion (we’re spending a few months at another church a the moment, just to experience how other people do things), so it was good to be able to provide a bit of beat.

The only mild downside was that I forgot to set the video for Dr Who – fortunately it’s repeated on BBC 3 tonight (phew!)

Hah – vindication is mine! I’m not a completely out of touch old fogey for liking Radio 2; apparantly just over 8 million of us like listening to Terry Wogan in the morning, which is more than one in ten of radio listeners. So there!

On a different note, the election is over for another few years, and I have to say it’s probably the best result. I didn’t vote for Labour, and don’t particularly support their policies, but they have done a reasonable job of running the country (and certainly a lot better than the Conservatives last effort), so I’m not unhappy they’ve got back in. The best part is their hugely reduced majority; this means Parliament will operate more accountably and hopefully gives the cabinet a wake-up call.

To be honest, I don’t think our electoral system works very well. Looking at the BBC website, Labour secured 36% of the vote, yet have 57% of the seats in parliament. Conversely the Conservatives have 33% of the vote, but 31% of the seats. The Liberal Democrats manage 22% of the vote, yet have only 9% of the seats. I can’t see how the make up of parliament reflects the votes here – just considering the two biggest parties, why should a 3% advantage in votes lead to a something like 25% advantage in seats of parliament, and hence power?