Things to Remember
1. This was a good day.
2. Parents remember the strangest things.
3. Batteries don’t last long.
Archive for September, 2003
Probably Cheap Rubbish
I’ve decided that I shouldn’t mention any Blogbear updates here before they’re completed, that way you don’t all get to see how lazy I am when nothing gets done. In fact I didn’t get anything in my last update right. Well, maybe the procrastination. I didn’t visit any castles (was on a nice beach though), didn’t do any Blogbear and didn’t install any OS X builds (although I’ve just downloaded the latest Panther beta tonight).
I subscribed to Time magazine a little while ago, £35 for 52 issues. Incredibly cheap. I think I got a free PDA too. It’s probably cheap rubbish.
Monday, September 22nd 2003 at 9:52 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
I notice problems and UI issues…
If time permits this weekend, in-between the sleeping, installing the latest Mac OS X betas, visiting Scotland’s castles and the large helpings of procrastination, hopefully I’ll be able to add a couple more Blogbear features. I notice problems with the UI each time I post which need fixed, but mostly I want to finish off mage control and get the galleries working. In the perfect world I’d get RSS feeds implemented as well, but that might be wishful thinking.
I’ve been trying to think of the best way to do page templates, but without much success. They’re currently handled the same way as Chatbear, but I don’t know if things work that way on here. For instance, I can’t have a standard page surround because I personally want my image pages to have a different page surround than my post pages (so there’s more horizontal space for images). But if I do that as a seperate block, I make people who want both to look the same duplicate their design between the two. Right now I’m considering letting people create their own blocks and chain them from each other, but I don’t know if that just ends up complicating the issue for users with less HTML experience.
Friday, September 19th 2003 at 7:23 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
Chairs, Chairs, Chairs
I seem to have a problem with chairs at the moment. My office chair is broken (wheel has come off) and so was my home one (back no longer tightening, most of the padding gone).
Thankfully my replacement chair for home arrived this afternoon and it’s a doozy. I was in so much pain on Wednesday from sitting on that other one that I figured it was about time I bought a new one. It’s a big black leather one which is incredibly comfy but just a little too large for the space I’m trying to fit it in. So while it has a nice tilting motion that allows you lean back without compromising the support on your lower back (very important for me), I’m constrained by how much I can move.
This is why Argos should post item dimensions on their website.
Friday, September 19th 2003 at 7:15 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
Car Fixed
Well the car is all fixed up, I had it done on Tuesday morning. Turned out I needed a new centre pipe for the exhaust. Gillian in the office told me the same thing happened to her 206, so maybe this is a known design flaw. Total cost was £86, including VAT and labour, which I guess ain’t too bad. I’m sure somebody is going to tell me that Kwik-Fit would have done it for half the price, but the dealer I bought it from is nice and convenient.
It was certainly nice driving home on Tuesday night not feeling as everybody was looking at me when I stopped at each set of traffic lights.
Friday, September 19th 2003 at 7:03 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
Scaring Children
It appears that something has gone horribly wrong with the exhaust on my car, going by the horrible noise it’s been making this afternoon. That’s going to mean a visit to the garage tomorrow unfortunately, for at the moment it’s good for nothing except scaring children.
Thankfully with the number of boy racers shoving huge exhaust pieces on their cars to get that sound deliberately, I don’t feel out of place.
Sunday, September 14th 2003 at 5:16 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
Terminator
It was nice to finally sit down last night and see The Terminator (IMDB) from beginning to end (ignoring Channel 5’s ad-breaks). I’ve seen the film before, but never in such a concentrated burst. I’d seen the beginning at one time, the middle at another time and strangely the end about six times.
I would say on reflection that I prefer Terminator 2, there’s just something a lot more solid and comprehensive about the plot in comparison to the first one, where the idea is there, but it isn’t realised quite as well. I guess that’s down to the maturing of Cameron’s writing over the preceding years.
Saturday, September 13th 2003 at 8:43 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
Image Support
I added the beginnings of full image support to Blogbear tonight, so I thought I’d make the first post with an image being hosted by my little image system. Thumbnails are generated automatically when an image is uploaded, currently at 4 different sizes.
There’s a photo I took a few weeks ago from my back door. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have full gallery support.
UPDATE: I’ve changed the link so it goes to the newly added single image page with EXIF data displayed.
Thursday, September 11th 2003 at 12:15 am / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
Demo, Demo, Demo
Downloading the latest demos of PC games is not something I do often, mostly because I haven’t found a convincing reason to keep playing a game to the end for many years (ignoring the lunch time Quake 3 sessions) and therefore most PC games end up boring me after a couple of weeks (if they even last that long). For some reason a couple of weeks ago I had the urge to check out some upcoming stuff. Hit read more below to check out my full rundown.
Tuesday, September 9th 2003 at 12:09 am / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
DVD Collection
I finally sat down and catalogued all my DVD’s, using a bit of code I wrote to access Amazon and pull down the information for each title. The results are here, it’s not pretty, but it works.
235 titles in all, leaving me 5 short of Chan’s total and still probably a couple short should those I have on pre-order arrive.
Sunday, September 7th 2003 at 8:19 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
Blogbear Powered
Well that’s the blog moved over to Blogbear. I wrote a quick script to import all my Blosxom files straight into the database, so all existing posts have been preserved.
Work continues apace on bringing the rest of the Blogbear features online. As you can see I do have permanent links and categories implemented like I had planned, but the archives are broken, I need comments, searching, the RSS feed… and so much more. It’s coming.
UPDATE: That’s the archive list on the left back up and running. Was simple enough.
Saturday, September 6th 2003 at 9:34 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
Gamesplayer, Blogbear etc
Gamesplayer is looking good at the moment, admin system is coming along nicely. Loads of issues with the data though, so much of it is incorrect that it really needs a good clean up. There’s a ton of stuff missing too, so while we may be listing the titles of all your forgotten Commodore 64 and MSX classics, we can’t tell you much more about them. Most of them don’t even have publishers. As for any PC games or games released over the last 5 years plus, forget about it. X-Box and Gamecube weren’t even recognised formats because I originally put this together before those platforms even existed. Still battling away towards a release date though, even if it’s grossly innadequate, I’d at least like to get it out there so people can start submitting updates. Thinking about making the whole database available via some kind of GPL license, which should hopefully help in getting updates into it.
Blogbear customisation works well now, as seen at sunburst, it’s all straightforward enough. I’m hoping to get fixed links to articles and categories in next, then I can at least move over to using it myself. It’ll be nice to get off using Blosxom to something that is easier to update. I’m no big fan of doing this via nano and having to deal with things like filenames and fixing times and dates on posts if I fix spelling mistakes (as personally I like the entry to stay with it’s original time and not the last modification time).
Gamesplayer admin is going to need a whole load of options for dealing with images (automatic thumbnail creation at differing sizes, adding captions and text over images…) so I’ll probably write all that for Blogbear first and then move it across. I keep taking photographs of things and would like to start putting them up here, but I want a nice web-interface for it all first.
Wednesday, September 3rd 2003 at 8:41 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
Recent Purchases
