My Blog Posts

At the moment I drive to work. On my journey I pass a public school. I’m not sure of the terms here in Australia but it would be called a junior school in the UK. The children they teach range (I guess) from 5 to about 12 (when they go to high school). I quite enjoy driving past this school every day as they have a notice board facing the road. They also have a conscientious member of staff who updates the message on it every few days. I always look forward to a new message brightening up my morning journey.

Its the end of summer and it is raining. This caused my tennis game to be cut short last night. Which was not nice. Even after nearly six years in Sydney I still have trouble remembering that Summer is actually the rainy season. Roll on Autumn - which either begins tomorrow or around the 21st of March depending on who you listen to - when the sun still shines but the humidity drops and the rain is usually absent.

One more thing whilst I am here. I promised two weeks ago to update my style sheets to make this web site slightly easier on the eye. I’ve reviewed my HTML and CSS and, surprisingly, it is a bigger job than I thought. The result is that I will need to perform at least the equivalent of another site re-design to achieve this. This effort will be a bit like repairing a road. Lots of effort, disruption and bum cracks, but at the end no noticeable difference. It will be worth it though, even if the only outwardly visible sign of all of this hard work is a drop down list allowing you to display this page in the colour scheme of your choice, just like Mark Pilgrim has done on his blog.

Every Tuesday morning on the Triple J breakfast show Adam and Will invite the lovely boys from Tripod to compose and perform a song in under an hour. Today’s subject was the potential meeting of Bill Clinton and H.M the Queen who are both going to be in Australia this week. Their work was an elegant piece entitled “I fell in love in the arse end of the world”. Just pure quality.

Oh dear, an exert from an ICQ conversation with Ciaran, prompted by this article in the Register; andy47: SELECT * FROM lusers WHERE name = ‘Oxygen Thief’ andy47: 65535 rows returned andy47: buffer overflow Ciaranh: lol Ciaranh: that could be a tshirt

Well, the good news is that the dress has been purchased. The bad news is that the wedding reception venue is, apparently, inadequate. Just shoot me, shoot me now and take away the pain. Please. I had a jaunty little post in mind for today. Something about it being Monday and how the weekend had flown by, and it did, but somehow I don’t feel the need to talk about how nice the sailing was yesterday, or how well I thought I was hitting the ball in my tennis lesson on Saturday.

Can you outhink a goldfish? Shame on you if you can’t. This link from the lovely people at MetaFilter. The reason I am posting to my blog at 6:34pm on a Saturday afternoon is because Bobo and Alix have kicked me off the sofa so that they can look at wedding magazines. Oh, dear lord save me. Save me now. Not to mention that the Super 12 is on, at least I can just catch the television from here at the back of the living room. Even if I can’t sit in comfort.

An observation, today’s date is palindromic if used in a certain format. The format of choice is DD.MM.YYYY which makes the date 20.02.2002. Remove the dots and you have 20022002 which reads the same backwards as it does forwards. How often does that happen?

Quote of the day: Last week, I went to Philidelphia, but it was closed. W. C. Fields (1890 - 1946) [ from QOTD ] I’m not saying that I am a magpie, but I use this phrase a lot. Until today I didn’t know the definitive source, now I do. That means I have learnt something. Which is nice. I still maintain that I went to Perth and it was closed.

Ah work, without it we would all be sane. Today I found myself confronted by a colleague who was of the opinion that we didn’t need any kind of source code control. My immediate response was one of incredulity and downright bewilderment - “what sort of idiot would think to implement a computer system without source code control”, etc. Because to me this is a black and white issue. If we write computer programs, we put the source code under some kind of version control. Full stop.

Our phrase for today is “God Bless the BBC.”

Many people complain that Civilization rules their lives. Ciaran had to remove Civ 3 from his machine because he wasn’t getting any work done. Well, back in my day the killer game was Elite. And I’ve got a copy running on this laptop [from the lovely people at newkind]. Yee-ha, there goes any semblance of productivity or sociable behaviour.

Oh, and the invites have been printed. Many thanks to J Palmer esq. All I need to do now is chase down the brochures for Woodbury Park, or I could just put their URL on the back of each envelope.

Right, it must be something in the water, but talk of laying out web sites in CSS is now all over the web. Dave Winer is asking the questions here, but I’m with Mark Pilgrim, who shows you what you can do with ‘proper’ layout here, he also has some links to very good CSS resources here. There goes my weekend.

So, the latest wedding news is that we still haven’t got the invites printed, the brochures for the venue haven’t turned up at my parents house and my own brother can’t spare the time to attend. Situation normal then, lovely. Bobo has also been informed that four months is a ridiculously short period of time to allocate to choosing a wedding dress. At this piece of wisdom from Mrs Palmer and Alix my wallet just basically crawled into the corner and cried. I can’t believe that any rational person would go to this much trouble to acquire something that they will wear once and then keep in a box.

Two things. (that phrase is for Richard Billington, wherever he is these days - possibly Nottingham). I have had reports that this diary is hard to read. The initial answer is - get a bigger monitor. The polite answer is, I will look at changing the style sometime in the next week or two. You will be glad that the site re-design I performed over Christmas and the New Year made extensive use of CSS because that will make the update a lot easier. If I hadn’t converted the site to CSS the response to these quibbles would be short, blunt and very Anglo-Saxon.

Finally, I managed to achieve something today. Unfortunately, all I did was to update my CD stacker page. Trip on over for top musical listings, and thats about it.

It is 11:20am. I have been at work since 8am. I have sent four emails and filled in last week’s timesheet. I need to either get motivated or get a new job.

The good news is that I’ve found another Roy and H.G. fan. Step forward Jonathon Delacour. Of course it is a coincidence that he lives in Sydney.

Boy bands are tut. That is what this cartoon from the lovely people at UserFriendly epitomises and I couldn’t agree more.