One of my 10 month old kittens, brought her first mouse home this morning! I heard her mieowing in the kitchen, so went to investigate - expecting to see our old friend Mr Frog (Mr Frog has been brought home several time already). En route to the kitchen, the aforementioned kitty dashes past me with something in her mouth and drops it at the foot of the the curtains in the lounge. Our newest house guest then proceeds (fairly sensibly in my opinion) to climb the curtain, away from the immediate danger of salivating feline jaws (by this time sister kitty has woken and come to see what all the fuss is about). Of course, it is then left to me to catch the poor little blighter and remove him. Here, I'm left with the small dilemma of whether to throw our 'Daniel' back into the proverbial lion's den, or to show mercy and transport him to relative safety in the garden! I switch, briefly, between memory recall of some quote from the cat encyclopeadia, discussing the con's of depriving animals of their prey, and a visual inspection of my new rodent companion...

...It's at this moment that the mouse blinks at me! Such a small, involuntary (or was it?) reflex but it is loaded with so much humanity, I'm left with no doubt of what my course of action must be. No longer is this tiny mouse just another rodent prey - no! Suddenly he has become Mr Tiny-Mouse, my friend.

I'm such a fake!

I watched my latest dvd purchase, Thirteen Days last night. I've been looking forward to getting this disc for a few months, having heard good things about it in reviews and unfortunately missing it's theatrical release in the UK. On the whole I thought this was a very good movie, intelligently told with strong performances from all members of the cast. It was interesting to watch a movie about the JFK administration, told from a perspective other than Kennedy himself. Kevin O'Donnell (played by Costner) is the president's close political advisor and it is through his eyes that we see the terrifying events of the Cuban Missle Crisis unfold. Obviously, this is a Hollywood production and therefore the facts have almost certainly been glossed over and characters softened (or made more heroic) than their real life counterparts. OK, so you have to forgive the film that much. But still, they managed to bring the human element of the story through very clearly.

Following my gripes about PayPal's signup process, here's a site devoted to informing you of some disturbing truths behind PayPal. I can't believe BlogSpot is still using this outfit to process payments to rid sites of ads. Surely there has to be better, more reputable companies propviding similar services out there...? (here's a few examples!)

And just when you thought that site was enough - here's another!

I've been doing another trawl of notable blogs again this evening - more links to the best of them coming soon. One site that I did come across and could not wait to add a link to here was paypalsucks.com. This page explains "the evil behind the PayPal system", which made me feel a whole lot better about my previous moanings! I've been motivated to close down my account with them forthwith.

I've added a search tool (thanks to Atomz) and permenant article linking today. I added the comments system yesterday. Thanks to YACCS for that.

Yay! Be gone, evil banner ads.

Finally got rid of the banner ad (at least, I hope it disappears as I publish this post!). It was an almighty palaver getting signed up to PayPal, and the verifcation code took 6 days to appear in my VISA online statement. Sorry, but there's no excuse for that! The thing that really got my goat was this "warning" from PayPal at the bottom of the verification email:

Note: PayPal strongly discourages users from calling their credit card companies in order to obtain their PayPal Member Confirmation Number
before receiving their monthly statements in the mail. If PayPal receives a complaint from Visa, MasterCard, or your card issuer regarding your account, your PayPal account may be permanently closed.

Excuse me? Hello? Is that the sort of friendly customer service tone you want to hear after signing up to a new service?

I hate the fact that I'm skeptical of this anouncement by Bland but, at the same time, I like to remain eternally hopeful...

Guardian Unlimited Sir Christopher Bland, the chairman of BT, yesterday admitted to MPs that the take-up of high speed internet services has been low. He undertook to provide details of a cut in the price of broadband access to boost demand "within weeks rather than months".

Noticed that Guardian Unlimited's Neil McIntosh (deputy online editor) will be hosting his final discussion on weblogs later today (2pm).

Living with sleazy tabloid journalism is just part of being English I guess. But The Sun's recent headline pun ("Crem de la crem") and accompanying article covering the funeral arrangements of Princess Margaret filled me with more than the usual amount of despair. The following footnote of the article pertinently sums up the amount of professional journalism going on here:

The Sun Newspaper Online IF you are saying goodbye to a relatives at Slough Crematorium on Friday call us on...

For some time now, I've presumed that this display quirk was being caused by my combination of hardware/browser/connection speed. Imagine how relieved I was to discover that others are experiencing it too! I was even more pleasantly surprised to read that it even may not be a Microsoft bug...I kid you not!

Flash of Unstyled Content (FOUC): Some pages that use the CSS @import rule experience a curious display quirk in the Windows version of MS Internet Explorer: a momentary flash of unstyled page content. The unimaginative creature that I am, I call this phenomenon Flash of Unstyled Content or FOUC for short

I'm thinking of converting these blog pages to a full CSS implementation. I used one of the standard Blogger templates just to get myself up and running at the start - slightly customised to my own preference - but if I'm going to make the move, I'd better to do it sooner rather than later.

I'm currently swapping to CSS on my local development server and, as previously mentioned, I'm working on some CSS improvements for sites at work, so I guess now's a good a time as any. If anyone reading this is interested in finding out more about the brave new world of page design 'sans table', then this is a good place to start.

I watched my new Redux DVD edition of Apocalypse Now yesterday afternoon - all 207 sweet minutes of it :) It's easily in my top 5 films of all time. The new redux is very good, but if I'm honest I found it a little too long for 'perfection' (it started to drag everso slightly at around the 2hr 20mins marker for me, but picked up toward the end). If you are lucky enough (like me) to have the benefits of a full home cinema system, then expect to give your sub a good work out! The scenes at the surf beach put a BIG smile across my face.

Saw this on glish.com. I'm playing around with CSS on some sites for work - we have lots of compatability issues on intranet pages viewed by users with different standards of browser in different countries throughout the corporation - so I wanted to add it here (mostly for my own benefit).

Chris Casciano, who criticized the lack of innovative and interesting CSS design in Your CSS Bores Me, has decided to take matters into his own hands with Daily CSS Fun.

I just followed a link to Blue Marble. Wow -- these are amazing pictures.

I was wondering whether I should write more about myself...some sort of summary of who I am and what I do, just for the record. I'm hesitating because I'm still debating (with myself) about what direction I want this blog to go in. I've been reading lots of other peoples blogs over the past couple of days and there's a huge variety out there. Some folk are happy just to write about the mundane whilst others discuss matters of greater depth. I kinda like a mixture of the two, but would that make a good blog?

Maybe I should start a separate blog for my technical/professional musings, and keep Vernacular more lighthearted. Problem is, I'm concious of how much time I can give to 'blogging' on a daily basis. Right now, it's not a problem as I have time every day to write - but that's not going to last for very much longer. Maybe I'm doing my usual thing of trying to run before I can walk with my latest toy... :)

Mental note - try to stop using so many exclamation marks...this isn't "instant messaging"...

!!....Doh

I've been getting familar with Blogger software/site.. It's a nice tool - I like it. There's an annoying bug with the session time-out process that's not reading my auto-login cookie, causing me to lose a couple of posts, but that's about the only prob so far. I'm going to get rid of this banner ad pretty soon. It's a reasonable charge for a year's hosting "ad free" ($12) and you kinda get that nice feeling of supporting the Blogging "world domination programme". I took a look at Blogger Pro this morning too. It's got some nice extra features, but I'm not sure it's worth the $35 price tag right now. If Vernacular proves successful, I'll reconsider in a few months.

The thing that annoyed me today was the signup process for killing the banner ad. Blogspot uses PayPal. OMG - what kinda torturous user verification system have they implemented there? Talk about security gone mad! In order to pay the $12 charge you first need a PayPal account. Part of the PayPal signup involves them charging you a dummy $1.95, which appears on your statement with a reference including a 3 digit code. You have to pass this back to PayPal for verifications before you can use your account! Obviously you can't get the reference code until your next statement arrives (4 more weeks for me), unless you have online access. Even then, looks like I have to wait 24 hours until the transaction is processed and it appears on my online statement. Hello? Doesn't this whole thing kinda destroy the adantages of 'instant' online transactions? I dunno - maybe I just hate banner ad's too much!

Here it is! I finally managed to start a blog...and about time too. Bear with me during the learning curve period, whilst I get familiar with the Blogger software - it all seems pretty straight forward though. I'm going to have a brief look around (this site is fairly new to me) and I'll be back to post more soon.