Chris Clark details his pant configuration . I have had a pant and suit jacket pocket configuration for years and didn’t even know it! Wallet and cell phone in the left back pocket (or left leg pocket on cargo/army pants), keys and change in the right back pocket, sundries in the right front or leg pocket. In my suit jacket when I’m working I have my wallet and cell phone on the left side (so my heart gets maximum exposure to the nasty radiation off the cell phone), and keys and change in the right side pockets. Yee haa.
-
The colour blue
‘Kiwi’s and Aussies are the most laid back white guys in the world’. A little wisdom from our Jamaican cab driver at 4am this morning. We were returning from the Greek islands which are fabulous. I don’t think I have felt this relaxed for three years. I just hope that I can maintain that feeling. While I’ve had plenty of time off and been to some lovely places, sitting by a pool in Thira (Santorini) doing sweet FA was the best thing I’ve done for some time. I have made a pledge: to take a proper, do nothing holiday every year. I’m sure that this simple action will add years to my life.
Looking at some photos I just realised the most amazing thing about Thira was the colour. I really miss the colour blue which I was so accustomed to growing up in Wellington with a great view of the harbour. As an office slave in London you really don’t see a lot of blue….
-
Gravis web site
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.
-
Tainted coffee and tainted software
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.
-
Aircraft line drawings from NASA
I found these on K10K/Kaliber ! Bitchin’.
The redesign is going well, I’ve ‘sketched’ a page in html that has got the look I want, now all I have to do is sit down and start coding. I’m quite excited about it.
-
Last days and birthdays
Alright! Last day at work. For a month or so anyway. It’s a bit like the last day of school. It was easy getting out of bed this morning, and the day is flying along.
I’m going to use the time off to do a little more exploring of Europe (shopping in France tomorrow, Greece in a couple of weeks), and start the redesign of the site. I hope to have the redesign done in time for the 1st anniversary of bucket_fountain, which is late May. Speaking of birthdays, ben poole marks the anniversary of the start of his blogs today, although I seem to remember that I’ve been reading his articles for longer than a year.
Jeez, I really can’t be arsed working today.
-
Moby Bogie and the War on Snot
I have been plumbing the depths of my nasal regions in search of ‘Moby Bogie’. I discovered the presence of Moby one evening before bed. For some reason I found myself looking up my nose with a mag-lite. I know that it’s weird, but that’s what happened. Anyway, deep within nose, up between the outcrops of flesh, I could see a through a slit at the top of my nose a large white formation. It was huge. I couldn’t do anything about it and assumed that soon enough it would descend.
Over the next day it played on my mind. I actually thought I could feel it, growing larger and more powerful by the hour. I checked again the following night, and sure enough Moby was still there. I asked Tash if she had any cotton buds. In the absence of those, I tried twisting a piece of toilet paper into a stick so I good try to dislodge the monster. I had no luck and resorted to trying to blow it out. That too failed.
It is still there, and I’m beginning to wonder if it might actually be an infection. What would Freud have thought?
-
The long walk to redesign
I actually made a change on the site today! It was minor, but a change none the less. When I set up my ‘previously’ links (to your right) I made a hash of the html in the view that builds the panel. I finally got around to fixing it (after the best part of, hmm, 10 months?) and am feeling rather pleased with myself. As to redesigning the site, I’m just no further ahead. Where do the likes of Ben Poole and others find the time?
