I apologise to everyone for this post: it is, as the title says, pointless. It’s for me to get a few things down now as a time marker. Feel free to read no further.

Today, I came closer than I’ve come before to getting fired. I didn’t do anything majorly wrong, just a few different small things working against me; mostly out of my control. Although, perhaps it was just unjustified worrying.

Either I’m spending more time online (summer holidays, after all) or people are updating far less (perhaps both), because I go through my rather substantial list of sites to visit every day now; it used to take a fortnight at least, with various sites being visited with varying frequency.

I’ve finally loaded my archive into Feedster. I don’t think it has been indexed yet though, since I can’t seem to find anything after using lines of text directly from old entries. Oh well.

Thunderbird is officially a great mail client. It is now my default.

I’m in the middle of redesigning my site and keep hitting walls. I’ve tried art deco style blocks of colour, shades of minty green, and a few other things. They all seem like great ideas in my head, but don’t pan out. Very frustrating.

Move over, Google! I’ve recently been looking at Feedster, and realised how insanely powerful it is. It has a bewildering array of options (thesauras, regex, soundex functions and more), and a highly up-to-date index.

While it’s ranking algorithm might not be as good as PageRank, it certainly makes up for it in the amount of things you can do with it. I hope the API documentation goes up soon, I’d seriously consider using it for my site search.

I’ll also soon be loading my entire archive into their system (via RSS), which will make an interesting off-site back-up.

Anyway, good work and good luck to those at Feedster.

Another reason why web standards should be promoted: a very nice looking CSS top menu, working in all but IE based browsers. The best part is how beautifully simple the HTML is for it. I can also see CSS3 seriously simplifying the CSS.

Definitely a great tech demo, if nothing else. Via mezzoblue.

A full write-up of my weekend at T In The Park would be huge in length and largely tedious. So I’m going to do this in the shortest style possible:

The Good:

• The weather – Sunny and bright throughout the weekend,
• Some of the bands – including Hell Is For Heroes, Idlewild, Biffy Clyro, The Mars Volta, The Darkness (entertaining, if musically poor), and Funeral For A Friend,
• The blood red moon on the closing night – worrying, yet cool,
• The good people at Lipton Ice Tea – giving a way a shedload of free ice cold liquid on a boiling hot day marks them as true heroes among men,
• The copy of “Chandelier” I managed to buy after looking for it for a year or two.

The Bad:

• The weather – Far too warm for most of the day, the queues for water got to be over half an hour long,
• Some of the bands – including REM, Turbonegro, The Flaming Lips (sorry, but the lead singer was just boring), The Streets, and The Polyphonic Spree.
• The finale by Caledon – embarassing and poorly done,
• The price of food – this was always going to be high, but it was ridiculous.

There’s bound to be more that I’ve missed, so I might update this entry as I remember.

The Echo Project finally has a name: Atom. While not my favourite, it’s not as bad as it could’ve been. Some of the names on the Project Name Proposals are truly awful.

Anyway, at least that chapter is over. We can concentrate on defining the format fully.