Month: January 2004

bookmark_borderWetter than a wet thing

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Still raining. Drip has vanished though.

We’ve cancelled plans for a double header at the cinema as it’s not the kinda day where you want to venture out, so it’s a TV day, just finished Gosford Park (which was excellent) and tonight it’ll probably be Tomb Raider 2. Both were borrowed and we are notoriously bad at watching these things in a timely manner. We’ve had Gosford Park for about 4 months now, amd I’m determined to watch Tomb Raider 2 as I only got it from my mate on Friday (does it matter that we’ve not seen the first one? I’m thinking not, in a ‘bit like Bond movies’ kinda way…)

Ohh and now we have hailstones. Just after Louise has nipped down to the supermarket… lovely..

Hot chocolate anyone?

bookmark_borderYawn 2

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Did I say it was sunny yesterday at some point? I forget. Especially as I’ve been woken by wind lashing the rain against the window and the return of my favourite sound, the drip in the ceiling.

I last experienced that sound about eight years ago when we last lived somewhere that had a roof (obviously everywhere we’ve stayed had a roof but we’ve normally been ground or first floor).

Glasgow Road in Dumbarton, top floor flat, our first mortgage. It was one-bedroom, galley style kitchen with a nice size bedroom and living room in an old style tenement building which was constructed around 1910 if memory serves me correctly (there was a stone plaque embedded near the eves, I obviously don’t remember them being built).

I awoke on a night very similar to this one, the wind whipping up the Clyde Estuary slamming rain and debris against our leaky bedroom window. I got up to go to the loo, and as I walked to the foot of the bed I leapt back. Why is there a wet patch on the floor? I wondered.

Anyway, long story short, I ended up in the loft at 4 am, patching up a hole in the roof. It was a temporary botch job designed to get us through the night until we could get someone to come and replace the slates that had been dislodged (not something I fancied trying on the roof of a four floor tenement – I’m not the best with heights).

About a week later I was told I was to be made redundant from my first job. We still hadn’t gotten the roof seen to, and it slipped our minds. We remembered about it one day watching a thunder storm from our living room window in Aylesbury*.

I wonder if the new owners ever got that hole fixed? Or is my black bin bag funnel still in place**?

* Having lived near the coast all of our lives, Louise and I were amazed when our first big summer storm took place. So little wind! Where was the horizontal lashing rain? Fascinating.

** Ingenious this. Two bits of cord tied at sloping angles between the tightly spaced rafters. A black bin bag taped over them so that the drip was caught, then trickled down the bin bag into the water tank (handily right next to the drip).

bookmark_borderYawn

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For some reason, without fail, I wake at around 7am at the weekend.

BING!

Wide awake.

Can someone explain why?

I should point out that I don’t actually get up at that time, I usual doze off again after about 10 minutes but it’s getting a little tiresome. Particularly when I struggle to get up at 7am for work (But I think I know why that happens…).

Anyway, spent most of last night re-installing software and generally tidying out old files and stuff. Still got bits and bobs to do mind you but all in good time. XP seems to be behaving a lot better now, and I think I solved the screen saver/power mode issue – thanks to everyone who commented and emailed offering suggestions and help, it was much appreciated!

And finally, I decide to move the miniblog a little further up the page to ensure those of you with lower resolutions can see it better. Thanks to Hg for the suggestion, if there is anything you would like changed here let me know, I may write and post for me, but I kinda hope my dear readers enjoy the experience too.

Right, off to burn some CDs, grab a shower then head off to sunny Dumbarton, which for a change is actually sunny today (unless my Mum was lying to me to get us to go through to visit… Mum?).

bookmark_borderXP Pro woe

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[non-geeks look away now]

I’ve had nothing but hassles since I upgraded to XP Pro late last year. So last week I decided to bite the bullet and reformat my main hard drive and try a clean installation.

Easier said than done.

Suffice to say that despite having checked that my Dell PC can boot from a CD and that the XP Pro CD was, indeed, bootable I ended up having to create a set of XP Pro Boot disks (floppy disks no less – remember them!).

I finally managed the reformatting of my main drive and the re-installation of XP Pro last night. Tonight (or the weekend) I’ll re-install all the old applications (well not all of them, I won’t bother with the ones I tried, didn’t like and never removed).

Anyway, all this ties in nicely with this news story about Dell. What ARE they thinking? And what’s the bets it’s been removed by Monday morning!

Ohh and if any of you clever techy people know why my Dell desktop blue-screens when the screensaver kicks in, please let me know.. I think it’s something to do with the power save mode but can’t figure it out (and yes, at the moment I have no screensaver configured – I’m not THAT daft…).

So that’s my ‘fun’ weekend outlined – what about yours?

bookmark_borderWant

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Friday is cake day at work. A hapless victim Someone volunteers to go along to Greggs and bring back about £20 worth of cakes, doughnuts and the like. There’s always plenty to go round and towards the end of last year I was sneaking in a mid-afternoon yum-yum to go with my morning fudge doughnut.

Alas this is 2004, the year of weight-loss.

Which means no cake.

Maybe.

Thing is, I’ve already started the justification of why I can eat a sugared doughnut. It’s a little discussion in my head, you know the one, you do the same (don’t deny it…). The one where you say things like:

“I’ll have a doughnut as we are going out for a long walk at the weekend, and anyway, I’ll be really good at the weekend and really, what difference will one little doughnut make?”

You then progress to stronger reasoning:

“All the experts say that moderation is the key and you don’t have to deny yourself anything, just cut back. Last year I had two cakes on a Friday, this year I’ll have one, in fact I’ll only have one every two weeks… that’s much better”

And:

“Balancing your diet is essential, so I actual NEED a sugared doughnut to ensure I am getting the required sugar intake for the day….”

It really is amazing how a person’s mind works, although it is difficult to capture the full extent of an internal dialogue in words.

Mainly because my fingers are covered in sugar coating.

bookmark_borderReading feeds

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Lockergnome’s RSS Resource is chock full of information. So much so that I’ve not really taken much time to get to grips with both the site, and RSS in general. Yes I have an XML feed but as a Blogger Pro user, that’s really just a few clicks and and a filename to handle.

If you are like me, a bit bemused by all this, I urge you to Get a grip on Rss in 3 easy steps! (does exactly what it says on the tin).

However if you ARE like me, you’ll end up visiting the websites themselves most of the time anyway. You see, I’ve tried using RSS feeds for sites on my blogroll, but it’s a very…. I dunno… dry experience. For me, reading personal sites is an encompassing experience where the content is as important as the design. I know that holds true for news sites, shopping sites etc, but only if you are browsing through them. All I really want from a news site is news. RSS is an excellent solution for that.

The other downside to RSS is that a lot of feeds aren’t ‘full’. That is, they give you a summary of the posting, the first three lines or so.. again this may be useful for news sites where you can use that information to decide whether or not to read on. For most personal sites the first three lines may be an indication of the posting but frequently the core message doesn’t arrive until later. Take, for example, this very posting where the first three lines are:

“Lockergnome’s RSS Resource is chock full of information. So much so that I’ve not really taken much time to get to grips with both the site, and RSS in general. Yes I have an XML feed but as a Blogger Pro user, that’s really just a few clicks and and a filename to handle.”

From that you can gather that I will be posting about RSS but that’s about the limit of it’s usefulness. (Although the ‘usefulness’ of a lot of posting on personal sites is probably questionable, mine included).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking RSS and I do believe that it will become increasingly useful, but it I believe we are still missing that killer RSS application. Think of the way Blogger transformed personal publishing, or the way Google grabbed the search engine crown. We are still waiting for the RSS application will make that leap, forcing RSS out into the wild. Until then RSS will remain useful, but limited to the hands of the technorati.