bucketFountain

A curse on virgin.net “broadband”! It has been incredibly slllloooooowwww for weeks now. It may take, say, 10 minutes (while I make the tea and watch a bit of telly) to download just the top graphic on a page. They have promised that come the 14th of November all will be well, but I will believe it when I see it. To celebrate I will download Mandrake Linux 9.2 and Notes 6.5 so I can have a poke around.

The worst thing about virgin is that they still haven’t replied to my email asking for an explanation – I have had to try and check their web site, which is an odyssey in human patience. However, when I spoke to a friend who’s also on virgin he said he was having no problems….

I go to a film course on a Tuesday night – on my way home tonight a guy had finished with his newspaper and offered it to the bloke next to him. The simple act of generosity made them both very happy.

You wait ages for a Concorde and then three come at once!

I haven’t used Internet Explorer at home for a few months and I see today that it doesn’t render bucketFountain 100% since I changed the default font-size a few weeks back. It had occurred to me that in making the text resizable, it was quite possible that certain, hmm, shall we say, ‘inexperienced users’ would find the site unreadable and not realise that they had accidentally resized the text size in IE (using their scroll wheel and the ctrl key).

To solve the problem I immediately went to Ben Poole’s most excellent site, and, as I suspected, found that he didn’t suffer from the problem. I also remember Ben writing that he had based his style sheets on those from bluerobot.com , a good, solid option.

The solution was simple – the font was set to 97%, and that’s what I did here. Although there are only so many screen sizes/resolutions that I can test on, it has not broken on any that I have tried so far.

And perhaps Microsoft could take a leaf out of Mozilla’s superlative book, and let the user choose if they enable those slightly unusual key/mouse combo’s (Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Mouse Wheel) that you are likely to be using without even knowing it.

And, this just in from Jess , there is another convert to one of my favourite movies, Vanishing Point. The recent Audioslave (starring Chris Cornell, the man who brought you Soundgarden) video for “Show Me How To Live” is made up of scenes from the original 1971 film Vanishing Point (not to be confused with the truly diabolical nineties re-hash). Cool. It begins with the most well-known line from the film: “In honour of the last American hero, to whom speed means freedom of the soul”.

Chris Cornell doesn’t look quite as cool as Barry Newman at the wheel of the beautiful Dodge Challenger, but hey, I’ll forgive the guy.

Audioslave are not the first group to have been inspired by Vanishing Point. Primal Scream named their 1997 album after the film, and one of the tracks is called ‘Kowalski’, after the films hero. I’ve also heard an electronic number that featured samples from the movie, but, helpfully, I’ve no idea who it is by.

okaaay again – I just realised that the site search doesn’t always work. Hmmm. I have my best man on the job and perhaps, one day, he might fix it.

So I go out and get a sandwich at lunchtime and I’m walking back to work and I see a freaking guy riding a horse down the street. He’s one of those mounted police. A horse I’m telling you, in the middle of the city. Now, I come from a country that has a reputation for being agricultural, and I’m pretty darn sure that I’ve never seen livestock wandering around the capital city. To top it all, he was riding the wrong way down a one way street.

Now check this: a new theory says that the shape of the universe is spherical – kind of like a soccer ball. OK – that fits. It also states that you can theoretically fly into the side of the universe, and keep going, but you would ‘come out’ the opposite wall… like a mirror for matter. So I re-adjust my world view, and the universe is finite. So, can we go beyond the edge? What is there? Well, Jeff Weeks, a mathematician put’s it like this: “The universe is finite,but there’s no boundary to it”. Great.

Pretty f-ing wild, that’s what I think.

oh crap – I just spilt beer on the keyboard….