Tag: Me

Categories
Me

Sexy CSS

And no, I’m not referring to Cansei der Ser Sexy. I’m referring to the ingenious way I hacked a WordPress plugin and then did some CSS wizardry to make it display the way I wanted, so that, for a short time only, you can see my Archives By Date the way I want them.

Only slight drawback: they look crap in IE 5.2 for Macintosh (but really, who uses that?) and they also don’t work in Opera. In fact in some circumstances they make it crash, which I find deeply mysterious. Still, this is what they look like for the moment:

What’s so good about that, you ask? Well, without using a table, I have the dates flush right and the post titles flush left, so there’s an even space between the two.

However… I may not care about IE for Mac, but Opera is a proper, current browser (and I haven’t even tested it on IE for Windows). So tomorrow, probably, I’ll change it back. Ho-hum.

Categories
Me

Site Redesign

As should be obvious, unless you’re reading this via the RSS feed, I’ve redesigned the site again. I was just a bit bored with the old look, basically. As usual, I haven’t tested it in Internet Explorer for Windows, so if anything looks obviously wrong, let me know.

Categories
Culture Me

Holiday book report: Bleak House

By Charles Dickens, obviously. I have to admit, this isn’t really my idea of holiday reading: it’s just too long for that. But I half-inched it from a hotel I stayed at in Quito. It was either that or Harry Potter in Finnish.

It’s odd reading Dickens; sometimes he seems so dated — so sentimental, so cosy, so verbose, so typical of everything about the Victorians which has aged least well, like the Albert Memorial and majolica. In Bleak House, this is typified by ‘Esther’s Narrative’, those chapters, probably about 1/3 of the book, which are a first-person narrative in the voice of the angelic heroine of the story. I find the syrupiness of her portrayal unbearable. It sets my teeth on edge.

But at the same time there’s a thick vein of weirdness which is all his own. Dickens’s grotesquery is always tinged with a reassuring touch of comedy, but it’s a fag-paper from being something much more radical and scarier. Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the Courts of Chancery, and Miss Flite’s birds Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach: it seems just a tweak in mood from being Kafka. And one particular chapter, the death of Krook, is not just grotesque, it’s genuinely and stomach-turningly nasty.

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that some aspects of a book age better than others, but I still find Dickens a bit schizophrenic. And I know Bleak House is one of his darker books, but even looking at his work generally I think that his enormous popularity, his firm place in the canon and his sentimentality tend to disguise the fact that he’s a much odder writer than his image suggests.

Categories
Culture Me Nature Other

Galapagos pics

I finally got round to uploading some photos from the Galapagos to Flickr. The whole set is here. It includes some sealions:

boobies:

and of course tourists:

Categories
Me Nature

Birding in the clouds

Well, I may be back in gloomy England, but I think I’ll return to my thoughts about the cloudforest. Sadly, the cloudforest isn’t a forest made of clouds. That would be like a Disney computer game come to life! You could jump from cloud to cloud collecting candy. Or something.

The lodge was at 2000m, and just enough cooler that all that thick humid air coming up from the lowlands tends to form clouds there. So, much of the time, particularly in the afternoons, you’re walking through thick white mist, which is atmospheric but has slightly mixed implications for birdwatching. Obviously bad visibility is a Bad Thing for a birder; birds which would normally be in easy identification range can be reduced to grey blobs, and even when you can see slightly more than that all the colour and contrast tends to be lost. So it can be very frustrating. But there is an upside, which is that many birds seem to be much more approachable in mist. Perhaps because they simply can’t see you, though it always feels more subtle than that. So you sometimes get remarkable close encounters with birds that would normally be difficult to see — I had great views of Chestnut-crowned Antpitta, for example.

And it is, as I say, atmospheric. Your vision being greatly reduced, you find yourself being more sensitised to sounds. Sound is always important to birding, and especially so when you’re in thick vegetation, but in the mist it almost becomes the primary sense. All the twitterings, rustling foliage and wingbeats seem amplified. In a weird way it makes the world seem more three-dimensional.

Categories
Me

Cloudforest

Well, here I am, back in Quito from the couldforest.I managed not to get robbed this time. I have all sorts of no-doubt fascinating thoughts about cloudforests but I think I might be too tired to share them. Plus for some reason the text I’m now typing is appearing very very tiny and I’m not sure I can be bothered to work out how to fix it. And it hurts my eyes trying to read it. On the other hand I don’t have anything else to do tonight, so I might be back later.