With apologies to Douglas Adams for nicking the line uttered when Arthur Dent uses his bottle of Retsina to gain access to the flying perpetual party in HHGTTG. But I discovered a new pleasure tonight. Thatchers Coxs Single Varietal cider. It’s really tangy and crisp. Delicious chilled and over heaps of ice. Even better, they sell it in a Tesco store I pass on the way home from work. I bought one a few days ago to taste it. I’ll be getting more 🙂
I had my yearly TC check-up today. Is it really a year since the last one? Had the usual physical exam and a chest x-ray. Assuming the x-ray is clear, and it should be, I’ll have another exam same time next year.
Happy days 🙂
You may have noticed that I’ve changed the theme in use by WordPress for the Soapbox. The new one is based on Man~ja. I want to change the colours of the entry headers to blue and the colours of the links in posts to a different colour as well. I’d also like to change the Posted by… text to a different colour as well. However no matter what changes I make to the style.css file the colours won’t change. I’ll sort it out later! I like the new theme. I think it is cleaner than the previous one. A few more tweaks and I’ll be happy.
UPDATE: Looks like the colour changes I made to the CSS file are working today. I think the blue is a bit bright so I’ve changed it to be Dark Blue (#00008B). I think the style sheet must be getting cached somewhere between me and the Gradwell servers. So I’ll see tomorrow, after the cache has expired, how the new colours look.
I suggest you read this. Do yourself a favour and look at the alternatives to Zune first if you don’t want an iPod. Then do yourself a big favour and buy an iPod anyway.
Saw this on Brian May’s Soapbox. New initiative to try and preserve dark skies at night so that people can see and appreciate the stars, nebulae and other celestial objects. At present the amount of light that goes up into the sky from lights is ridiculous. Just take a look at the pictures of cities, or indeed the Earth from space, at night. Or look out the window from a plane when landing in a city at night. Lots of light from street lamps, building lights, etc. goes up into the sky. Surely if nothing else this is a waste of electricity? If street lights had mirrored reflective hoods to project all the light downwards would this not allow a reduction in the amount of energy required to light a location and also reduce the amount of light that was wasted and allowed to escape upwards? Surely in these times of awareness of climate change and the impact of power generation on the CO2 emissions this is the perfect time to address the light pollution issue as well?
I’m having another look at MacJournal to see if it’ll work as my personal diary tool and also as a blog editing tool. I’m writing this entry using v4.1d4, which is the latest available development build from Dan Schimpf. The editor is nice. Probably a bit better than ecto form a Macintosh GUI perspective.
I was able to download all 190 entries from my Soapbox okay after pointing it at the base URL. When I tried this in a previous version it only downloaded a subset of them. Not sure if that was as result of something I did wrong or the program itself.
In theory I should be able to use this one program to compose and store both personal entries and public entries for the Soapbox. Anyone want to take bets on how long it’ll be before a private entry gets posted here 🙂
Here is a screen grab of this entry being composed in MacJournal. If picture uploading is working then you’ll be able to see it. If not I’ll need to do some more tweaking!
Click on picture for larger view
Update: Obviously pictures are being scaled to fit the column width. Have to fix that. Three options:
• Find out if MacJournal can mimic the behaviour of ecto. The latter will include a thumbnail of the image in the post and will display the image in a new window when it’s double clicked. This would be my preference for a fix.
• Amend the CSS templates for the WordPress theme to stop images being scaled. If anyone knows how to do this post in the comments.
• Change the WordPress scheme to not use a single centred column. Might be time to go to a normal full window width theme anyway.
Update 2: The images are okay in the RSS feed from the site. Which is how everyone reads blogs anyway! Right?
Update 3: I’ve edited the picture to make it a thumbnail with a link to the larger version.
I’m moving to a new job!! If you look at the side bar it says that I’m employed as an IT Consultant by a UK based IT services company. I live in Belfast, UK, and work mainly in Northern Ireland. Well that’ll soon have to change to something like I’m employed as a Senior Solutions Architect by a UK based IT services company. I live in Belfast, UK, am based there but my work is focused on the education sector in England.
I’m moving sideways in the company I work for into the Managed Services Education section that delivers solutions for the Building Schools for the Future project. The new job will be helping to deliver environments and solutions to the education sector. It involves using technologies to create flexible learning environments, both physical and virtual, so that students can learn at their own pace, access lesson materials when not able to attend lessons (for whatever reason), adopt new technology to enhance learning (podcasts, digital media etc.).
I’m really looking forward to it. It’ll involve finding out how people learn. How the environment they are learning in influences this. How technology can help keep students interested and make them want to learn. Obviously the job will involve more than that, but I’ll learn that as I go along. I’ll transfer to the new role in January. Can’t wait.
The Royal Society of Chemistry have started a Podcast, hosted by Chris Smith of Naked Scientists and Nature Podcast fame. You can get the RSC podcast here.
And has every right to be. The march of the religious right in the USA has taken a few knocks. Read his thoughts, and celebrations, about it at SFGate.
Finished reading Michael Palin’s excellent Diaries 1969-1979 The Python Years yesterday. I loved it. It gives an inside view (abridged admittedly) of the birth of Python, the ups and downs and tensions within the group and the transition from the TV series to the films of the 1970’s. Palin’s thoughts on the Ripping Yarns TV series are very welcome as well. All in all a wonderful read. I note that on 12th July 1979 petrol hit £1 per gallon. It nearly hit that per litre a few months ago! I hope there will be another volume. I want to read about the making of the film Brazil, the making of the Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (I’m sure there where some tensions in that process), although the initial writing for the 4th Python film just makes an appearance towards the end of 1979 in this volume. Reading some of the entries I wondered how so many activities were crammed into some days. As a counterpoint to some of the hectic days we also read of Palin’s family life and more normal activities. I really enjoyed it.
David Gerrold wrote in his book World’s of Wonder that “…your first million words are for practice. They don’t count.” Meaning that to be a writer you have to write a lot of words. Like any activity you get better with practise. Want to play the guitar? Learn chords and practise. Want to be a good bowler in cricket? Get in the nets and bowl. Want to be a writer. Write lots of words, sentences, articles and stories. Practise, practise, practise. Good advice from Mr. Gerrold I reckon. I started a diary of sorts myself whilst reading Palin’s book. Mainly in response to Gerrold’s maxim on writing, rather than hoping the diary will be of any interest to anyone. No one will see it until i croak anyway! On a technical note I’m using the Journal feature of SOHO Notes as the place where I write and store my daily scribbling. I have a few articles and other ideas that I want to write and the more writing I do the better I’ll get at it!
Hubble has returned many stunning images in its lifetime. Hopefully now that NASA plan to send another service mission to replace faulty parts and install updated instruments it’ll continue to provide images for a few years more. There is a collection of the top 100 Hubble Space Telescope Images at the spacetelescope.org site.