It’s May 1st – that means it’s reboot day . Must be on Californian time or something, haven’t seen much yet to make me think that it’s a big deal.
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Final episode of Sex in the City
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Sometime back in March they showed the final episode of “Sex in the City” here in England. It occurred to me that this was a cultural event (albeit a minor one, like the final of M*A*S*H, or when they changed the drinking age from 20 to 18 in NZ) and so I recorded it photographically.
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digi bag
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yeh yeh yeh – I bought one of these yesterday – I love Gravis . It is the most stylely laptop bag I have come across. Never thought I would get excited about a bag but there we are.I’ve signed up for broadband at last. I opted for virgin.net as not only do they not require a minimum 12 month commitment, they are also the cheapest. I have also joined a gym and intend to try a get up at the ungentlemanly hour of 7 tomorrow to sweat off some blubber. I will keep you posted, as the odds on me getting out of bed before 8 are pretty long…
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Gravis web site
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Gravis Shoes – they rock. Unfortunately the same thing can’t be said for the web site. I guess what happened is that a designer without much knowledge of designing for the web had been in charge of the site. This morning when I tried accessing the site it took AGES to load (this is over a 56k connection). The whole site is done in flash, which is not necessarily a bad thing (although I’m not a huge fan of Flash). Many (although not all) of the features on the site could have been achieved without the use of Flash. I’m sure we’ve all used Flash sites that may initially take a little while to load, but once loaded presents a catalogue which is then usable without a long delay between pages. I think that this constitutes reasonable performance.
The worst thing about the site that there is not always a ‘loading’ graphic. The upshot was that at first I thought that site was dead and wasn’t rendering pages. I tried again and figured out that the page was still loading. It must have taken about seven minutes to view the page for one shoe! That page consisted of a fancy menu and a picture of a shoe. That was it. When I clicked the ‘details’ link I again waited for nearly five minutes. I gave up in the end as I couldn’t be arsed waiting. It was the same story with the ‘dealers’ link. It would be easily solved with a link to a non-flash version of the site.
When I tried again later it loaded a lot faster, still a couple of minutes for each page to come up but this time a loading indicator appeared nearly as soon as the link to the page was clicked. Hmmm. I will forgive them but I still think that there should be a non-flash site.
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Tainted coffee and tainted software
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This is what I’m thinking of doing with the redesign. Andy commented that he quite likes the current design. Alright! I like it too, but it is time for a change. I will definitely keep a copy on the server for old times sake after I redecorate.
A few months ago I noticed that my coffee plunger was producing rancid cups of foulness instead of coffee. I put this down to having not cleaned the plunger one day, and then leaving it for about three weeks. In due course the contents went mouldy and smelt bad. One day I cleaned the plunger, made some coffee, drank a sip and nearly threw up. It was the worst tasting coffee I had ever had. Rather than clean the plunger thoroughly, I rinsed it out and gave up making my own coffee.
This morning I had to have a cup of coffee and used the plunger again. The first cup was fine, but the second resembled in flavour the very urine of satan himself. The plunger must still be tainted. I decided to search the net to see if this was a common phenomenon. Coffee makers can become tainted, but in my case it might be the jug I use to boil the water, or the plunger, or is it my lucky cup, which also goes mouldy periodically?
I got caught in a rain shower yesterday and took shelter in a bookshop. I ended up buying one of those “Teach Yourself in 24 hours” books on PHP, MySQL and Apache.
Hour 1, install MySQL. Easy.
Hour 2, install Apache. No sweat.
Hour 3, install PHP and get it to play with Apache. Hmmm.
After about 4 hours of trying all sorts of things I discovered that the version of Apache (2.0.43) and PHP (4.2.3) provided on the CD that comes with the book are incompatible. AY? php.net finally provided me with the answer:Apache 2.0 SAPI-support started with PHP 4.2.0. PHP 4.2.3 works with Apache 2.0.39, don’t use any other version of Apache with PHP 4.2.3.
I downloaded and installed a different version of PHP and it worked first time and with no problems. I wrote to the publisher and told them it was a ‘poor show’. It would have sucked even more if I’d been a real newbie and never done any kind of development.
But it all works now and I’m happy. Now hopefully I’m gonna get to the bottom of this coffee conundrum.
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blogging can be a drag….
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11 days it took me to get an entry on the site for April… have been writing a lot on PAPER, it’s too much hassle putting stuff online, especially when the server hosting my site seems to be a 286. Yes, it’s as slow as fuck. Anyone know of a good and cheap Domino host?
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St Peter’s Plaza
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After living in London for a year and a half, I have decided what my favourite newspaper is. The Guardian gets my seal of approval, and beats off competition from The Independent and The Times , both of which, IMHO, are also very good. I really like the international news in The Financial Times . My favourite tabloid is without a doubt The Mirror . I also quite like The Sun . I’m amazed at the completely untrue stories that The Sun seem to get away with printing. A man whose conversation I listened to on the train said that at the end of the day in the office tea room, it was always The Sun that was mixed up and scattered around the room because so many people had read it. The FT, The Times, and all the other respectable papers had only been read by one or two people and were still immaculate. Yep, that’s my experience too. It still amazes me that The Sun is by far the most popular paper in the UK.
My least favourite are the junk papers that appear to be serious newspapers and contain puerile editorial content that is packaged as news. By these I mean the likes of The Evening Standard (which is very popular but full of trash) and The Daily Express. At least when someone reads The Sun it is taken with a grain of salt (it’s hard not to with the sensationalist nature of the reporting).
The funny thing about the press in the UK is that it is regarded as a sign of your political orientation. This is not without good cause as all the papers seem to have a political affiliation.
It can be quite personal though. On a reality dating type TV show I saw ages ago, one of the contestants said something to the effect of “Oh dear, he doesn’t read The Telegraph. This is not going to work out.” The newspaper that you read is a reflection of your personality. People seem to have quite strong opinions about what type of character reads what. For instance, a bigoted, child-eating Daily Telegraph reader may say of a Guardian reader that they are a limp-wristed bleeding-heart liberal.
The situation in New Zealand is not like this at all. I really enjoy the diversity of the English press, and will often buy a range of papers, including ones that I don’t particularly like in an attempt to get broader coverage and opinion of events.
(Oh – I was joking about Telegraph readers being bigots – really.)
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Happy New Year
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I paid a visit to the transport museum in Covent Garden yesterday and this is what I saw:
The Metropolitan Line hasn’t changed much….New Years resolutions:
- drink more
- eat more
- smoke more
- do not go to the gym
- gain weight
- pick my nose whilst travelling on the tube
- fart in crowded lifts
