Category: Other

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Me Other

New design for the blog

As should be pretty obvious, I’ve re-designed the blog. Again. If it looks peculiar on your computer, let me know. I’ve pretty much decided not to make the extra effort to make the site work on early versions of Internet Explorer, but if it’s not looking right on IE6 I might need to do something about it.

Can I just say how fucking annoying it is that CSS doesn’t seem to support blocks where the bottom is defined relative to the bottom of the webpage (i.e. the document rather than the screen).

The swifts are taken from this picture on Flickr.

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Other

Google Analytics

Google have just launched a free web-traffic analysis service which looks pretty damn good. At the moment, they seem to be struggling under the weight of people joining up, so it hasn’t recognised my site yet. Presumably they’ll get it sorted soon enough. I don’t quite see how they’re going to make money at it, though; it’s only free up to 5 million hits a month, but that’s *a lot* – about 800 times more traffic than this site gets, for example. Even if you go over that, you only need to make a $5 deposit and open a Google Adwords account to get unlimited stats. Mind you, given the sheer staggering oomph of computer power Google must have, perhaps the extra processing is fairly trivial.

Categories
Culture Me Other

Flickr interesting photo meme

Well, it’s not actually a meme unless anyone copies the idea, but hey-ho. Or at least, I guess technically it still is a meme, just an unsuccessful one. Don’t get me started on evolutionary theory.

Search Flickr for photos tagged with your first name. View them ordered as ‘most interesting’. Post the most interesting photo to your blog. The most interesting photo tagged with ‘Harry’ is a Dutch cuckooflower:

cuckooflower

Free bit of trivia – cuckooflower is also known as ‘milkmaid’ or ‘ladies smock’.

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Other

England vs Argentina

I’m looking forward to the footy this afternoon. The only question is whether Sven will manage his usual trick of taking all the fun out of friendlies by creating an atmosphere where no-one cares enough. Surely even Sven can’t take the sting out of England vs Argentina?

Categories
Nature Other

wireless networks, bunnies

I’ve spent most of the afternoon browsing around the web looking for the best way to fix the wireless network* so that it works everywhere it needs to. I’ve now officially lost the will to live. Here’s a calming picture of some bunnies:

bunnies

*The problem is that the current router (a Belkin F5D7630, since you ask) isn’t very flexible or upgradeable – you can’t plug in an antenna, and Belkin’s own range extender thingy doesn’t work with it. So whatever I do is going to involve buying a new base station. My instinct is to just buy Apple stuff, since all the computers are Macs and will play nicely with it. An Airport Extreme base station and an Airport Express to act as a range extender would (probably) sort out the problem. And they look pretty. But they’re more expensive than the competition. There are various MIMO/Pre-N routers whch should have greater range and might sort out the problem – but if they didn’t, I’d be back where I started, except 60 quid down.

Categories
Culture Other

On the subject of iTunes

I’m sure this is old news to a lot of you, but humour me.

I’m amazed by how much it has changed my listening experience, having all my music on the computer. I didn’t actually intend to put all my music on the hard disk when I got the computer – the CD player is within easy reach of my desk anyway, and I don’t have an mp3 player – but I tried it out mainly because I wanted to play with the software on my new machine. What makes the difference isn’t the way that all your music is at your fingertips, although that’s nice. It’s that I have a whole load of albums which I like, but don’t particularly want to listen to all of at once. The simple fact that the computer mixes up tracks from different albums breathes life into your collection, just because you don’t have to take the decision to listen to a whole hour of acid house, or Breton folk, or early blues, or whatever it might be.

I thought that if was going to make a lot of use of the playlist function it would be making playlists like ‘funky stuff’ or ‘easy-cheesy’ or ‘Americana’: specific selections to suit my mood. In fact my main playlist completely ignores genre and mood; it consists of a combination of:

high-rated songs that haven’t been played for four days
unrated songs that haven’t been played for two weeks
current favourites

Oddly enough, the fact that the playlist might go ‘Charles Aznavour – The Prodigy – Bob Marley’ isn’t as much of a problem as I would have expected. I thought that switching between wildly different kinds of music would just be annoying – but actually I quite like the variety.