Category: Uncategorized

I don’t know why for the past couple of posts I’ve started making my titles groups of three things… strange! Ah well. I went home overnight last night, it was good to see my parents again and be back home. It did make me glad that I’m now a Linux user though – my mum’s computer seems to have got some kind of spyware on it. I’ve run Ad-Aware, and I’ve run Spybot, but still occasionally it pops up with an advertising window and the net sometimes runs incredibly slow. I’m glad I’m immune to all that stuff!

Anyway. I’ve started coming up with a design for this site. I’m not entirely sure which way to go with it, i.e. whether I’ll make WordPress the whole site, or whether it would be better to have this as the blog and all the other stuff as static pages. I’m kind of inclined at the moment to let WordPress handle most of the work, but I’m not sure. Ah well, the design should be basically the same!

Speaking of websites – on my last blog post, Matthew commented:

And what’s wrong with tables, might I ask? I’ve been using them a lot recently, though I have been getting rather annoyed with trying to get everything in the right place. I’m redesigning my own blog at the mo, and so far I’ve been using tables to achieve this. If there is a better way, do let me know…

I replied to him there, but I just wanted to say on the main page: CSS is the way forward. My experiences over the past few weeks and months have highlighted to me that the old way of designing websites is really on the way out. CSS is so much cleaner, it’s so much more powerful – once you’ve started using it, you won’t go back! (Not unless you really have to anyway – sometimes it’s unavoidable). To see what I mean, check out CSS Zen Garden: it’s a site written in XHTML and you can browse different stylesheets applied to the same code. Quite eye-opening! You try doing that with a table layout…

Hmmm, before I made this post, there were 666 posts in total on this blog! Having said that, apparently the “mark of the beast” is actually meant to be something like 626, they added it up wrong. Or, um, something. I don’t know!

Anyway. Yesterday evening was rather annoying – our internet at home was down! This was annoying because I was trying to come up with a new website design for this blog. Which brings me neatly on to the subject of Internet Explorer.

Is anyone else fed up with Internet Explorer, and its lack of CSS support? The web is ready to move on – it’s embracing cool new changes like CSS and XHTML. Things are rapidly changing, a few years ago it was acceptable to have a non-compliant website with table layouts etc. A lot of websites still do (because for a business, these things are often embedded and difficult to change, and there are probably still some layouts which it’s best to use tables for). But today, more and more websites are starting to write W3C standard code (I believe it’s become mandatory for government websites), Accessibility is an issue (check out the WAI homepage), and in general web designers are realising the power that pure-CSS designs can have.

And here, we have poor old Internet Explorer, stuck in the past, still not properly supporting CSS attributes such as “float”… unfortunately, it’s what 80% of internet users use, so you’re forced to make your site look good in IE (well, not really, the current design for phillsacre.me.uk doesn’t actually display properly in IE but that’s just because I can’t be bothered to hack a perfectly good website so it will display properly in a stupid browser). I am absolutely fed up of having to be careful with what CSS I’m going to use because it won’t display properly in Internet Explorer.

Come on, all those of you stuck in the past – use a decent browser such as Mozilla Firefox! Standards are the way forward and Microsoft have got to learn that if they don’t want to play nicely, they’re going to suffer….

I found an interesting article today on the Guardian. It’s about “Lads’ Mags”. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I think (despite this article sounding like a huge rant) I actually agree with it.

Are lads’ mags a bit of harmless fun, or do they cause harm which may not be obvious? I think quite a telling question to ask is, “Men have been accused of looking at women as objects. Do lads’ mags encourage this, or discourage it?” Some will answer that it makes no difference. I don’t know, I just think at very best lads’ mags can be a neutral influence on society, I suspect it may well be worse than that.

No real reason I’m posting this because none of my ‘readership’ (including myself) read lads’ mags (to my knowledge)… it’s just something I have feelings about. It just worries me to see how popular they are and the seeming spread of our sex-saturated culture…

I recorded a breaks mix last week, the genre is “(mostly) Nu-Skool Breaks” 🙂

TRACKLIST

1. Metric – Hell Yeah (Quest & Mutiny Remix)
2. DJ Killer – Born to Be
3. Sneaky Pimps – Spin Spin Saccharin
4. Superstyle Deluxe – Step it Up (Smithmonger Remix)
5. Breakfastaz – Melody
6. Control Z – Badman
7. CNM – Compounded (Remix)
8. Loopdigga – Economy Class
9. Cut & Run – Pacific Breaks
10. Deep Impact – Rockin’ With the Best
11. Control Z – Can’t Wait

DOWNLOAD

Right-click, save as [MP3; ~46 MB, 50 minutes long]

Last night it was Sarah’s birthday, so she had a gathering at the Rover’s Tye. Sarah and Jon, Simon, Luke and Sarah, Michael (a friend of Jon’s from work) and me all met up at around 7 to eat. I had a Chicken Tikka Masala, which was pretty good – it was the first time that I’ve ever been served a curry with chips! It had rice as well, and in fact everything else you normally get with a curry (apart from maybe mango sauce which you get at Wetherspoons pubs), but it just came with chips. Unusual, but I’m not complaining!

Afterwards some other people came down (including Matthew, Ellie, Chris I, Amy and Anna) and we attempted the quiz. I was in a team with Simon, Matthew, and one of Sarah’s friends called James (I think!). The operative word there really is “attempted” – I think we probably set some kind of record for the worst attempt at a pub quiz ever. Still, the questions were quite wide-ranging, going from 70s bands to French political parties of the 1940s to, erm, Coronation Street…

People have often asked me the question “Why do you blog?”. Actually, I think only one person has ever asked me that question, but I bet you it’s on the minds of a lot of people.

Well, I received the Dilbert Newsletter yesterday, which contained the best explanation I’ve heard yet of why I do this blog.

It goes something like this:

People who are trying to decide whether to create a blog or not go through a thought process much like this:

1. The world sure needs more of ME.
2. Maybe I’ll shout more often so that people nearby can experience the joy of knowing my thoughts.
3. No, wait, shouting looks too crazy.
4. I know – I’ll write down my daily thoughts and badger people to read them.
5. If only there was a description for this process that doesn’t involve the words egomaniac or unnecessary.
6. What? It’s called a blog? I’m there!

Of course, I bet Scott Adams is the kind of person who would actually have something slightly useful to say, as opposed to me — who doesn’t have anything useful to say at all!

Ah well, I’ll just join in the myriad throng of people who blog about something and nothing. But perhaps something useful will come in on the way…

I’m not sure what I make about this article. The reason being, I am uncertain about the whole “intelligent design” thing. I think if it is to be taught (and that would be no bad thing, by the way) it should be taught in Religion Education rather than science.

It is the goal of science to explain how this universe came into being, not necessarily why. Religion explains why, and I believe Christianity provides the ‘right’ answer. However, I do have some beef with the advocates of ‘Intelligent Design’ – the philosophy of these people seems to be the following: “We’ve decided that God created the earth in six literal days, and so we’re going to do research which agrees with our own pre-determined conclusion.” As opposed to the usual scientific method, where at least they call the pre-determined conclusion a hypothesis 😉

Kids should definitely be taught about God, and should learn that a lot of people believe God created everything. But I don’t know whether this is necessarily a task for the science classroom.

Um, well, I’m not really sure that’s an appropriate title, but it is sort of, and it’s alliterative, which is always a plus. What have I been up to this weekend? On Friday, Philippa came round in the evening and we had dinner before going to the “What?” bar for a couple of drinks. I had a rather interesting white beer called Hoegaarden (I think it’s Belgian). It was pretty expensive though, so I don’t think it’s one that I’ll be having too often! Quite nice though – not your average beer, it’s always good to have something a bit different. Makes a difference to what I normally have (Strongbow – I’m not a huge fan of lager and in a lot of bars they don’t have any ales).

On Saturday morning I went to Asda — oh, the excitement! — and in the evening Philippa and I rented out “It’s All Gone Pete Tong” from the local Blockbuster. It’s actually a very good film – I thought it was about clubbing / dance music, but in a sense that is only peripheral to the story. It’s more about someone struggling to overcome a disability. Quite uplifting actually, although you have to bear with it because it gets a bit dark in the middle (as uplifting stories tend to, when the main protagonist suffers from (insert something to suffer from here)). Incidentally, if you decide to watch it – remember that despite the message at the start saying that it’s based on a true story, it’s fictional!

Yesterday, I went to Fordham in the morning, spent most of yesterday afternoon working on this site, and then in the evening had a few people round (Philippa, Matthew, Ellie, Anne-Marie, Alex, Chris J) to have some pizza and watch a random episode of Monty Python and some other Weird Al music videos and MTV movie award spoofs and, uh, stuff and things. Good fun!

This morning it was cold, dark and rainy outside… I was really tired when I woke up – I’m looking forward to next weekend when we get an extra hour!

Well, I think just about every single blog post I’ve ever made is now on here! Yay! There were a couple of issues, in that the imported stuff doesn’t appear to have a category, but apart from that it’s all here. I’ve managed to import all my old blog posts from X-Blog and Blogger, so I’m all set to go!

It’s quite easy to import stuff actually, except for the the few problems I mentioned. I was able to hack together a script, no probs. Took a couple of hours from installing WordPress to having all posts imported… that’s pretty good going!

I’m going to take a break now, I think I’ve earned one!

Edit: Well, it seems to have missed a few out towards the beginning of the blog. There aren’t any of the first posts I made on Blogger… not that it matters! I’m through with importing things 😉

Edit (again): Nope, it’s all there OK! For some reason it’s not showing up, but all the posts are there OK. Just have to figure out why they’re not showing up – I’ll do it later 😉

Well, this is my first blog post on WordPress! And I have to say, I’m very impressed. It looks really nice and professional… I wish I had time to write stuff like this! As in, write code like this… unfortunately, I seem to spend most of my time cleaning up after other people (at work) and never actually getting around to finishing anything (at home). Ah well.

Let’s just see if this all works OK, at least…

Edit: Just managed to import all my old Blogger posts… nice!