Journal: March 2007

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One of those days
Mon 26/03/07 (Link to this entry)

I've been having an even dozier day than usual today. It started badly when I found that my bike's rear tyre had deflated overnight - either I have yet another puncture somewhere or the patch I put on last night has failed. Either way, I had to run for the bus this morning - not fun when my left knee's giving me gyp just now!

The nice thing about getting to Sun is that if all else fails, there's always the free shuttle bus service they operate between the campus and all the local train stations. Sadly, when catching buses, it's usually a good idea to leave work on time - something I didn't manage this evening. Happily Anton was on hand to play pool until half six, as he didn't fancy fighting his way through the rush hour traffic on the M3. No sweat there then :-)

My pièce de résistance of stupidity for the day was yet to come, though. I came home feeling fairly knackered, having had a sapping day and not having slept well the previous night. At least, that's what I'm using as my excuse for somehow managing to confuse shampoo with shower gel and massaging the latter into my scalp. The sound of a forehead being slapped is amplified most impressively when one is in the shower...

Here's hoping my head's less foggy tomorrow as I'm on a training course for the next few days. Better go get some sleep, otherwise I'll be falling asleep during the lectures!

CSS = w00t
Tues 20/3/07 (Link to this entry)

I'm really glad I've done my website styling with CSS. I decided today that my website might look better if I subtly reduced the size of my default paragraph font (you won't notice it on here since I use my 'small' style for journal entries). Thanks to CSS, I only had to change one character in a single file to make the change across my entire site. Whoever came up with that concept deserves a medal.

Glad I missed that
Sun 18/3/07 (Link to this entry)

Whilst performing my duties today as the Club Webmonkey for Green Hollow Bowmen, I was amused to hear that it had snowed at the club's Captaincy shoot. Only eight die-hards actually made it along - the rest of the club must be going all wussy in my absence! My dad wasn't complaining though - it just meant less competition on the way to a third captaincy in a row for the big show-off.

This week's been fairly busy at work but fairly uneventful otherwise, hence the lack of updates on here (I take the view that if I've nothing interesting to write, it's better to write nothing than to put boring fluff up instead). Sadly, I can't write about the most interesting things we've been doing at work lately because it's all strictly NDA stuff; Sun haven't even announced anything yet about the stuff we're dealing with in the labs, so I guess they'd frown on me writing about it on a public journal...

One productive thing I've finally gotten around to doing this weekend is putting up a collection of pictures from Paris, which is something I've been meaning to do for a while. I'm rather fond of the silhouetted statue, I didn't think that one would turn out well but I think it worked quite nicely :-)

Pyromania
Mon 12/3/07 (Link to this entry)

I've had a fun weekend. I've been spending a fair bit of time with Charlotte lately and we've been having a good laugh. We went to see Norbit (an Eddie Murphy slapstick-o-rama) at the Basingstoke Vue on Saturday and it was actually pretty funny.

I usually avoid that kind of movie but I decided to give it a go and it was not bad, even if I did spend half the film looking through my fingers in sheer embarrassment ("He's not really going to do that, is he? Oh god, yes he is. Oh no, and they're not going to tastefully cut away from the scene... <whimper>"). I swear I will never be able to hear Kelis' Milkshake again with a straight face (which is an improvement on its normal effect, which is to make me scowl at her out-of-tune warbling...).

Sunday involved a barbecue and bonfire round at ours which was hard work but good fun. Craig decided he wanted to spruce up the garden for the summer so Vicky, Jason and I mucked in for a few hours helping to get the place looking good. I then proceeded to create a giant conflagration that coated half the garden in ash and cinders :-D

Mouseover the image for a "before and after" effect...

Jason did us proud on the barbie, expertly tending the coals and even managing to handle our flimsy veggie-burgers. My duties for the night were to keep the bonfire going to keep everyone warm; I succeeded in that, although I'm told that apparently setting up a blast furnace in the middle of the garden is a bit overkill. I'm particularly proud of my fire-raising efforts; we got through four huge wardrobes which one of Craig's mates was throwing out, as well as about three or four trees. For a sense of scale, the sides of the fence panels in the pictures above are about six feet long :-D

I got a good woodcutting axe in town which was quite fun to use (cue Tim Allen "hur-hur-hur"), but as my technique was initially somewhat lacking I've ended up with several blisters on my hands to go with the scorchmarks and singed hairs. It certainly made working in the lab today interesting; when doing heavy lifting I kept whimpering like a little girl and getting laughed at by Anton :-( It's all worth it though when you can produce a fire that shatters stones and smelts tin cans :-D

I think the shattering of the stones around the fire is the pinnacle of my pyromaniacal career. It's made especially funny by the fact that Craig went out and bought them especially to go around the fire site at two pounds a pop! As I said to him later, he should have gone for the more expensive ones - it's always important to look for the "McBrien Proof" certification logo when buying fire decorations ;-)

Firefox < My RSS Feed
Thu 8/3/07 (Link to this entry)

Well, Firefox has now finally joined the ranks of the browsers for which I've had to include nasty hacks in my web code to make them render my sites properly. That's now nearly a complete collection - I now have hacks in place to make up for deficiencies in IE, Gecko (FF/Mozilla) and Opera, not to mention noframes and noscript stuff for Lynx and search engine spiders. KHTML (Konqueror/Safari) is the only one left with no hacks in place - guess I need to test more thoroughly in that engine ;-p

The problem is that Firefox applies its own custom stylesheet to any RSS XML feeds it encounters. This is all well and good for raw XML, but it also does it when there is already a pre-defined XSL stylesheet. So basically, I'm saying "Hey, here's some XML data and look, here's a stylesheet that makes it look like the rest of my site. Ain't that cool?" and Firefox is going "NO, FUCK YOU, I'M GOING TO FUCKING RENDER IT MYSELF, BITCH" and making it look like arse...

The solution, amusingly, is to include a comment at least 512 bytes long before the <rss> tag in the XML files which contain my RSS entries. This basically makes Firefox's rendering engine not realise that it's an RSS feed (probably due to a bug in the parser). Nice to know I can cancel out one bug with another!

No entries lately due to me being very busy - I've not had much time to sit down since coming back from Paris. I didn't even get to work from home today because it would have meant there would only have been one intern out of five in the office (James was going nanny-sitting, Anton's in France and Lewis is still on holiday in China). Way I see it, Chris owes me one now :-D

Back home (sort of)
Sat 3/3/07 (Link to this entry)

Well, I'm now in a slightly less foreign country than I was in for the last two weeks. Only problem is, I don't have as much of an excuse for not being able to work out what people are saying half the time...

It was great being in Paris and I'm grateful for having had the opportunity to go there, but to a certain extent I'm glad to be back home. It'll be nice to get back into a routine at work and I've been missing the guys back here (homesick twice over - ouch). I just need to get out of the habit of thinking in French - several times on the way home I said 'Merci' or 'Pardon' which doubtless confused a fair few people ("why's this Scot with the funny hat speaking French at me?").

Quick note: I noticed a problem with my RSS feed on uploading this (dodgy cut-and-paste job - I hate laptop trackpads!). It's fixed now but you might have missed some entries from the end of last month...

A partir le lab
Vendredi 2/3/07 (Link to this entry)

Today was my last day in the lab so we spent a fair bit of time finishing things up and trying to make sure as much as possible is organised for next week. Anton's going to be coming over next week to help Iain get things complete, because as the room for the desktop machines is still unpowered we've not been able to do anything in there yet. The main lab is in pretty good shape though; we've cabled pretty much everything up and about 80% of the rackmounted systems are either completely sorted or awaiting parts. Not bad going, but it's where we wanted to be a week ago :-(

To celebrate the end of another hard week we were instructed to go and have a nice meal so we made a trip to Le Paradis De Fruits, which had established itself as our favourite restaurant in Paris (there's a few of them around the city, which is nice). Above is a picture of their "choose some entrées and an accompaniment"-style dishes as well as their truly gorgeous fruit cocktails. As you can see there's plenty there to keep you going; and the best thing is that it's all delicious and very healthy!

On the one hand I'm sad to be going back to England tomorrow but on the other it'll be nice to get back to a normal routine again as opposed to the ninety-mile-an-hour rush we've had over here. I daresay Craig will be glad to see me back too, if only because my rent money was due yesterday...

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