This was originally going to be an essay on the background of The Matrix (don’t worry, I’ll get round to doing that at some point). But, after I accidently hit the back button in my browser, the entire thing was gone. Disaster!

So, my question is: just how suitable are browsers for working with long pieces of work? Although I don’t have enough time to really look at this (I spent a fair while doing the deleted essay), it seems to be an important issue. How many people have actually lost work because their browsers didn’t remember the state of forms after an accidental page traversal? I know it’s not the first time it’s happened to me. The backspace button seems particularly prone to allowing this: try to remove some characters whilst getting ready to put in upper cases characters, accidently hit shift and ka-put: An essay gone.

There’s not even a decent way of saving text midway through typing. You know “saving”; that basic and obligatory function in every application since the beginning of back-up media. Sure, we could open a text file and cut-and-paste, but that’s too much hassle for real people to do it. Also, it also supposes that we expect a disaster. If we expected disaster, then we’d make sure to backup constantly. Without an easily accessible save function, it’s not natural to do this. State in other media (pen and paper) is automatically saved for us.

Maybe, I’m just angry at having lost hard work, but it does seem like the sort of feature all browsers should have.

After 2 poor support bands and a far-from-capacity crowd, The Cooper Temple Clause were going to have to pull out something special to make it a worthwhile night. While they didn’t fully succeed in making it a fantastic gig, it was fun.

Despite playing too many new songs to begin with (“Promises, Promises” sounding good), they got going when songs from See This Through And Leave started flowing more freely. Best moment was the double-whammy of Film-maker/Been Training Dogs, easing into the last part of the set.

Even though the crowd clearly wanted more, they band didn’t play a very long set (around an hour) and no encore. On that front, they have to be looked down on.

I came across Ryochiji’s interesting new blog-matching site called, surprisingly, BlogMatcher (via mrry). It indexes blogs that ping weblogs.com and finds similarity in links. You, the imaginary user, then come along and give it a blog to find matches for. It then provides you with a list of similar sites.

Most of my BlogMatched sites focus on XHTML and other similar issues; not surprisingly, considering how tired I am of writing that acronym – really need to automate that. There are a few entries on random stuff (Halle Berry, Dreamcatcher, etc) as well.

Also, I hate BlogShares. I started playing a month or two ago for 10-15 minutes a day; slowly amassing money. And then I bought into FSP 1.1. Shares bought at $15.63 have dropped to $0.81, scrubbing $800 from my pockets. DAMMIT! Oh well, I made a grand on another site overnight so karma balanced.

Recently, I’ve been reading about Uberman’s Sleep Schedule – a way of hot-wiring your brain into allowing 2 hours sleep a day. I don’t think I could make it work just now (where could I sleep at university every 4 hours?), but might experiment a bit during the summer.

There was more, but it’s gone for now.

Further to my post about Content Sent Correctly, I’ve been added to Evan’s list of sites that pass all 3 tests called “The X-Philes“. So far, only 11 sites are on that list.

What I didn’t mention before-hand, is that there is actually a 4th test: Why do you use XHTML? So thought it might be worth answering that one, even if it isn’t necessary.

1. To learn – the best way to learn a new technology, for better or worse, is to use it in a practical application. For XHTML, that means building a website,
2. Because XHTML is XML – I like XML. It’s well-formed, logical, and if something isn’t how you wanted it to be, it’s probably your fault (rather than a browser bug, as is usually the case in HTML). It’s also scrappable. If I want to extract any part of my markup without going to stupid lengths, I can do so with any XML parser,
3. It’s semantically richer – no more name tag, only one language attribute, and lots more redundancy is gone.

I’m sure there are other reasons that I’ve forgotten for now, but I think those are sufficient reasons.

The single greatest innovation of recent times: automated pub crawling. Just give it some location data (post code, or city name) and it’ll generate a random pub crawl for you to go on. It changes every time, so the alcoholics (read: students) out there will never get bored. Isn’t technology wonderful?