Solitude 

Time is quite important to us all and something I’ve been thinking about a bit recently. Not in any really deep way, mind.

On Friday, my watch stopped. This, to me, is devastating. I check my watch constantly to make sure I’ve got enough time to do whatever I want to before having to go do something else (I’m watching the computer clock now to make sure I’ve got enough time to write this before going out).

Now being a Friday meant that I couldn’t get a new battery fitted until today (Monday). So I thought, “Hmm… wear one of your other watches”. What did I find? They’re all broken. I let them cut out one after another, moving onto the next without replacing the last. Stupid mistake! So, I had to endure a weekend of not knowing exactly what time it is. This bothers me.

Only yesterday, British Summer Time started, often shortened to BST. Now, that won’t mean much to most people, but losing an hour in bed means a lot to me, especially since I’ve been sleeping quite erratically recently. Why can’t we just keep getting an extra hour in bed? After 12 years of moving forward twice a year (instead of forward once and back once), things would end up working out.

Shit, why not move forward twice a month and we’d get the whole cycle sorted inside a year and get plenty of extra time in bed? Best plan of all time, if you ask me.

Anyway, the whole situation has worked out: I’ve adjusted to the hour stolen from me (still looking forward to getting it back in October), and two of my watches are now working.

In addition to changes made a few days ago, I’ve updated my style sheets again. This time I’ve removed elements common to both style sheets and all of my other style sheets. Basically, this amounts to all the CSS for the buttons I use, my margin-collapsing rules and other common elements being thrown together in one place to be used ad infinitum. Hooray for re-use!

Separately, I’ve made the margins for lists smaller, the text for them bigger and their headings (dt in definition lists) bigger. There are a few more little changes that won’t be noticed at all. This post is really just so I remember when I did what; feel free to ignore.

A man arrested for insider dealing has claimed he is a time traveller. In trying to explain how he went from $800 dollars to a portfolio worth $350m he claimed he was from 200 years in the future.

The full article adds some odd details but I, like others suspect this is an early April Fool’s Joke.

I’ve made some very minor changes to both of the CSS files this site currently uses.

All paragraphs have a larger leading space, a greater line height and slightly larger font. Combined, these changes make things a bit easier to read (hopefully). It’s still in need of some tweaking but that can wait until some other day.

If you can’t see a difference, press CTRL + F5 together to reload the stylesheet.

I have no idea what practical use I could have for this, but Kevin from Centricle has added a favelet that works as a ruler.

This is quite cool in that it shows how far favlets can be pushed. Worth messing around with for a while, at least.

I found a link to nntprss the other day and have to say how great an idea it is. It allows you to read RSS feeds in any newsgroup reading software that you might have.

Now, not a lot of people use newsgroups anymore (compared to when it was the killer app of the net), but I do. So being able to read news from all the sites I visit in a simple straight-forward manner in a familiar interface (in my case, Outlook express) is very useful. I recommend this to anyone who uses newsgroups and reads any site with an RSS feed.

I just need to set it up as a windows service, rather than having to use the command prompt everytime I start-up, and it’ll be perfect.

Update: I’ve created a very fast and nasty way or working around the problem of executing nntprss at start-up. Just use the following code as a batch file:batch-file code.

UPDATE: The word “start” has been added to the code to make the command prompt created by the batch file disappear on completion. Thanks to WildShaft!

A few nights ago, I went to see the excellent Biffy Clyro play live. Here’s what happened.

First, support band were the very poor Span. Sounding very much like a poor man’s Danko Jones they failed to impress from the outset. This was further compounded by the lead singers ill-advised and badly put speech about George Bush and the war. Unfortunately for him, he was playing in front of a largely pro-war crowd.

Next support band was the amazing JetPlane Landing, Whom I’ve seen before. They were, as usual, excellent; mixing new songs and old comfortably. From their 8 or so song set 4 new songs were played: the name of the first wasn’t mentioned (I think it was “Effect A Change”), “Strength Of Our Convictions”, “Conventional Thought” (the best of the bunch) and “The Violence”. How many bands are confident enough in their new material to devote half of a half-hour set to it? Importantly, though, it worked.

After what seemed like a moment of absolute genius, they left the stage and made way for Biffy themselves. I was surprised by just how good they were (to be honest, it was JetPlane Landing as support that convinced me to get a ticket). They rocked. But, at the end of the last song of the main set, Simon, lead singer, decided to jump off the amp stack; he landed badly and had to be carried off stage, and no encore. Turns out his leg is broken.

All in all a good night. I bought another copy of “Zero For Conduct” by JetPlane Landing, this time on vinyl and, with the exception of Span, enjoyed the whole thing.

Mike Davison on the standards-compliant redesign of ESPN.com:

Through a dizzying array of table tricks, transparent spacer images, and JavaScript hacks, we found a way to make things look great to the human eye through the window of a graphical web browser without worrying about what everything looked like under the hood. Now that digital lifestyle devices, tablets, wireless phones, and other Internet appliances are beginning to come of age, we need to worry about presenting our content to these devices so that it is optimized for their display capabilities. Do we want to send a 100KB index page full of Flash, images, and tables to a small wireless device or would we rather send them our top story, our top headlines, and essential navigation to get through our site? By separating our content pieces in a logical way rather than a graphical way, we are free to restyle this content for any device which supports open standards.

I’ve talked about standards and proper web design more than a few times on this site. It feels good to know that the people in charge of a major site sees it the same way. Who will be next to join the standards race?

The full interview with Mike can be found on DevEdge

A week ago, I was searching for something on Google and came across a link to this very site in my search results. It was linked to a page in my archives about PHP. So, I did the natural thing of clicking on it.

Because of the way the archives worked, the page no longer had any entries regarding PHP. Every time a new entry was added, each entry was pushed back by 1 entry on the archive. After 5 entries were added, it had been pushed off that archive page altogether.

This worried me. A URI should point to the same information all the time. So I began work on a new archive system today. It’s now done and available for all to see (the Archives are here for those who don’t know).

This time pages are archived by date, rather than some arbitary position that doesn’t matter. So, it’s now far more static and indexable.

Some surprises came out in this years oscars: the only oscar for Adaptation was given to Chris Cooper (Best Supporting Actor). How they managed to lose Best Adapted Screenplay is beyond me. Stupid academy.

I’m quite glad the Lord Of The Rings didn’t win many awards this year. The films have been moderately impressive visually, but quite overblown. There’s a big difference between epics and tedious detail; Peter Jackson just doesn’t see it.