Everything, Everything

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2004: J F M A M J J A S O N D
November 2004
CSS
Monday 29th November, 2004 22:48
I just installed FireFox on SilentBob2 to have a look at the design. It works faitly well, but I don't like that it's ignored the background colour of the header, and for some reason there's a margin at the top, even though I say there's no margin in the body. Strange.
XHTML
Monday 29th November, 2004 19:49
I've decided to throw the new look homepage up. This also means all my diary entries must be XHTML 1.0 Strict, otherwise it means my homepage isn't very strict. Also motivates me to add a print stylesheet sooner rather than later. Maybe.
Dave's Forum
Monday 29th November, 2004 19:49
Gafffe

It seems a few people have stumbled onto my site after someone posted a link on Dave's forum - which I used to spend a lot of time on when I was at uni. A post from gafffe said "Just came across this . Don?t you just hate people who have blogs detailing every little boring-as-fuck detail of their meaningless lives?" - gee, thanks. I do hope he won't be talking about his own life at his own website. He used to have his own weblog for a few years too.
Fed Up
Monday 29th November, 2004 09:38
I don't want to go to work today. I don't want to do anything. I wouldn't mind having a tinker with XHTML and CSS (I'm beginning to think XHTML 1.0 Transitional is actually best, and XHTML 1.0 Strict and higher are just like XML and stylesheet transformations: useful to very few people), or playing with VirtualDub and CDex, but other than that... I just can't be bothered to do anything. I could quite happily 'nap' my life away right now. Perhaps I'll just read more of Prelude To Foundation today. Maybe I'll be in a better mood when I get home.
Ouch
Sunday 28th November, 2004 23:29
While cutting up my old credit card, I wasn't looking at what I was doing, and I've given myself a nasty cut on my thumb!

Starting to get the hang of CSS now, but all these div containers just remind me of tables. I know it's best not to use them, but they're sooooo good. None of this nested div/span alignment crap! Still, the updated new design for this site works.
Money
Sunday 28th November, 2004 15:42
Totally forgot that my cousin owed me money for the wireless kit. I'm not as poor as I thought.
New Design
Sunday 28th November, 2004 01:22
I'm bored of the old design of this site, so I'm thinking of launching a new one for the new year (that should just about give me enough time to finish it off). It'll use CSS and have different stylesheets, although you can't try the alternative ones out if (like me) you still use Internet Explorer. I'll write a print stylesheet once I've finished off the new design for the homepage using the first stylesheet - eventually I'll write a second.

I'm still learning as I go along, and it's a bit tricky, but I'm getting the hang of it. Still couldn't tell you what an ex or em stands for, but the units seem to work - I still think it'd be a lot easier if I kept using tables, rather than use lots of div tags to get the same effect! But it should be easier to hide div tags when printing the content (who wants to see the text links?)
With A Taste Of Poison Paradise
Saturday 27th November, 2004 22:49
Yes, I hate to admit it, but I'm really into the Britney Spears track Toxic right now. I wonder if there's any connection between the line "I'm loving it" and Justin's track?

Spooks wasn't that good tonight, I'm hoping the media aspect is something they plan on continuing throughtout the season, otherwise it was a pretty poor B story. And I'm guessing Adam's wife Fiona is the same Fiona who is joining the Spooks cast. I think we can be fairly certain Harry turns down the new job next week, we can't have Danny (leaving at the end of the series, I believe), Tom, Zoe and Harry all leave in the same season. The only reason to keep watching would be Sam and Ruth, and I don't think that's good enough. I still think we should have Harry bump into Tom at some point next season! Mind you, I also thought Danny might run off and join Zoe, rather than be a gentleman and tell the other guy where she is, but I guess he knows she'll never love him and it'd be pointless trying to win her over.

Fitted a ThermalTake Volcano 7 on my dad's computer tonight, replacing an old heatsink with an adaptor to take an 80mm fan. It's now got a 70mm fan that runs a little faster (on it's low setting of 3500rpm, if you can bear the noise of running faster it gets even cooler!), so it's slightly louder and higher pitched, but a lot more effective! Instead of running at about 75 under full load, it now runs at a shade over 50! Although when I took the old heatsink off I noticed I'd put it on back to front when I put the 1600+ chip in around 18 months ago - very embarrassing, but explains the high temps as the core wasn't centred on the heatsink.
Pleasure And Pain
Thursday 25th November, 2004 21:37
One of my friends had something bad happen, and another has had something good happen. Would I prefer that neither had happened, or am I glad that one has good news and the other will probably bounce back? Probably the latter.

But more importantly... I got another small award from work! Will probably receive a box of chocolates tomorrow.

My boss has run off to London as her daughter's gone into labour. This means I'm having to do all the work until she's back, and I have everyone (okay, so just a couple people so far) asking me if I know anything about the baby girl. Still, I've put in some long hours this week (although I was late getting in to work today).
Used
Wednesday 24th November, 2004 22:27
It's been a long day and I'm probably just reading too much into things, but I haven't heard back from Helen, and even though she popped into work and was in my area today, she still didn't say hello. Lynne already made me feel used over the part few years, I don't want that to happen again with Helen, even if she is as pretty and friendly as Lynne.
Haircut
Wednesday 24th November, 2004 22:27
I finally got myself a haircut on Tuesday morning, I'd been putting it off for weeks and it was looking quite awful, but it looks much better now. Trish even said I looked nice - first time I've really spoken or seen her in days, as I'd been keeping out of her way because she has an awful cold.
Fixed
Wednesday 24th November, 2004 19:39
Sorry that the site's been dodgy, Jonathan moved it to a new server with a new installation of Apache and PHP. It seems Apache2 defaults to UTF, which means question marks appear when you have lots of whitespace characters, changing the default to an ISO encoding seems to have solved that quirk. Then there were all the error messages, it turns out that Jonathan had renamed the database when he moved the site across, and my error catching code was actually hiding that it couldn't find the database (for obvious reasons, I didn't expect it to fail to find one). And finally, I've spent the last ten minutes or so trying to sort things out now that register_globals appears to be off (this is a very good thing, from a security point of view - it's configured like that on my home PC - but had never been implemented on the old server). With register_globals off it meant when I tried to get the month or year from the URL it was treated as a null value and so my code defaulted to the current month. Now if I can just sort out two little behind the scene bugs... ah well.
Test
Wednesday 24th November, 2004 19:39
Test
Meetings
Tuesday 23rd November, 2004 10:30
I have a couple meetings later today, really should get myself a haircut this morning. I'll go in a minute. Hopefully.
South Park
Thursday 18th November, 2004 20:56
South Park is signed up for three years from the begining of season eight! The shows will go on to at least season 10, but I suspect they'll run out of ideas sometime.
Telewest Fixed
Thursday 18th November, 2004 09:40
Our engineers advised that the faulty cable causing this issue has been replaced and service has been restored.

Everything appears to be fine now, hurrah!

I was watching Scrubs last night, it was so funny that I spilt boiling hot coffee over my trousers. So I put on my jeans, and about a minute later I laughed so hard that I spilt coffee over my jeans! Thankfully I didn't spill any more, as I'm running out of clothes to wear. I'm not clumsy, it's just that Scrubs is so funny.
I Want To Take You To A
Tuesday 16th November, 2004 23:19
Gaybar - after Telewest started playing up again, I headed across to (ab)use my parents' connection, which seemed fine. Whilst looking up the status of the Blueyonder broadband service, I spotted a link from the Blueyonder page to some Electric Six downloads. There's a fan video for Gaybar, called "The Bush-Blair Remix" and the crude cutting makes it a hilarious (and big, at 8MB) quicktime video.

Helen finally got in touch with me today, she had to get a friend from work to email me as she didn't have my number (I knew it!) and for a while I was excited. But it turns out she wants to know about SMS and websites (apparently an E4 producer asked her if she knew anything, and she said she knew someone who probably did). It's been a few years since Refresh did anything, and prices seem to have gone up (although monthly fees are down, but when you're sending a lot of messages it's negligible). It looks like the way of sending is now hideously (and dangerously) easy or wildly complex. The complex way allows you to use anyone who supports the framework, while the easy one is actually nice and simple to incorporate into websites. I've found one site I like the look of, it appears to be a more mature SMS gateway provider than we used to use, and has loads of example code and support. They even do a free version, where you just pay for the messages (up to 10 a day), which I might consider splashing out on if I can incorporate it into this site!
Puncture
Monday 15th November, 2004 20:49
Turns out it was just a puncture (or 'punture' as the receipt says) so it didn't cost much to get repaired. Hopefully I won't have to pump my tyres up every couple weeks anymore, and no need to worry on my long drives down the motorway to visit friends.

Must get around to porting some ColdFusion code I've written across to PHP - wrote a prototype/proof of concept earlier today, but I haven't quite written the full thing in PHP. Still, the code was less than 6KB in ColdFusion, I suspect it may be even less when written in PHP, and if I'm (un)lucky Jonathan will use it for a future feature on Refresh. I'm hoping it'll scale well (should do). The bad news is I let it slip to a friend that I'd written something in ColdFusion and they know someone who wants something similar, so that could mean two people want my code!
Tyre
Sunday 14th November, 2004 18:32
Went to Kwik-Fit today, gave up after waiting for ages. Will sort it out before work, assuming I can be awake by then.

Watching The Parent Trap on Channel 5 now, Lindsay Lohan looks so young.
Flat Tyre
Saturday 13th November, 2004 23:33
For a few months one of the tyres on my car has been slowly getting flat, so every 2-3 weeks I pump it up again and all is well. It's probably been about 3 weeks since I last did it, and tonight the tyre was basically flat (my dad spotted it as I was about to leave - also explains why on the way here it felt a little bumpy driving along Bath Road). I've decided to stay the night at my parents and tomorrow I'll probably be buying a new tyre. I guess it was inevitable really, but at least it should be better for when I go visit friends. I was originally planning to see Jon and Lynne this weekend, but both were busy.

And I still owe Chloe a visit, although it could be after Xmas at this rate. Caz might be moving closer at some point, so hopefully I'll be able to visit her for the first time since I finished uni. Which reminds me, I really should write a few emails to some other friends.
Car
Monday 8th November, 2004 16:56
Trish got herself a Fiesta over the weekend.
Drilling
Sunday 7th November, 2004 08:15
It's barely gone 8 in the morning on a Sunday and they're drilling across the road!
Early
Friday 5th November, 2004 08:18
Somehow, I'm actually awake and considering getting out of bed before 9!
Midnight
Friday 5th November, 2004 00:03
I tried going to bed at half 9, but I couldn't sleep. Ended up listening to my iPod for a while, now I'm on the computer. I have some really good friends, they know how to make me feel far less miserable than I've been for most of today.
Parking
Wednesday 3rd November, 2004 22:14
It seems my flatmate intends to get a car (now she's just passed her test), which isn't bad by itself, but it appears she wants to use "our" space. I moved out purely so I could have my own space, and this is why we pay the same in rent yet she has the much larger bedroom. I can see myself moving back in with my parents at this rate - I thought things wouldn't change for at least a year. Life really sucks at times. I'm fed up of pretending to be happy. I'm undervalued, underpaid, barely challenged and messed around far too much for my liking.
Not Long
Monday 1st November, 2004 09:10
Not many weeks left until Xmas and my birthday. Need to work out a list, but they're always hard - I'm only really missing expensive items.
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