I'm frustrated!

I have a bunch of things (hobbies I suppose) that interest me but I never seem to be able to progress with any of them. I've finally decided that enough is enough and I have to organise myself, otherwise I will wake up in 10 years time and I will have done of them! This seems to be a fairly common danger when living in large cities like London, where you commute for 2-3 hours a day, work for for 9-10 hours and just collapse for the 2-3 waking hours you have at home each evening. Not terribly healthy!

My principle interests are:

1) Flying: I've done some gliding in the past but would like to start learning powered flight in a microlight.
2) Photography: I have a couple of cameras, a Canon EOS and a Panasonic digital and I want to improve.
3) Guitar: Acoustic. I've not played seriously for a few years, but would love to pick it back up again - maybe with some lessons.
4) Model heli's: Now, I bought myself one of these babies a few years back, built it from kit and have never flown it (it's a common story!). I recently met someone who can teach me to fly it.

I figure that I can't do all of these justice at the same time, so I have to decide which I'm going to focus on for the next little while. I'll be doing some thinking on this over the next couple of weeks I guess...

I had a hard disc failure a few weeks back. No effective backups of course, which meant I basically lost everything. The disc was only 18 months old too - ah well. You live and learn. I now have a 1/3 terrabyte of space over 2 DiamondMax 10 discs, some imaging softare and a backup schedule! I even bought myself a Sony dual layer DVD burner to store the disc images on.

I really like the DVD burner. They seem to be pretty much there with creating a drive that means you can stop worrying about the various +/- formats. This thing handles them all - and it's fast!

Time to start again.

In a small way.

At least start small. The thing is, I feel bad about abandoning this thing forever. I want my blog to live - not just because it's the thing to do these days, but because it's an expression of me. A way for me to organise a small proportion of the million things that fly through my head every day. I admire those who are able to maintain writing these things day afer day after day. I want to be a better writer, to be able to express myself better. I want to record my thoughts. I want improved self-awareness.

That sounds narcissistic, but it's not meant to be. I'd hate that. For me, self-awareness is about being able to improve my understanding of my own strengths and weaknesses - not to navel-gaze and contemplate the big "I am...".

So here it is. February 23rd 2005. A new start. Let's see how I do...

Oh dear - I've not been doing very well with my blog, have I?! Life's been dealing more than a fair share of "downs" lately, and Vernaular hasn't reached that stage where I feel compelled to write about every detailed emotion I experience. I remember many blogs falling silent in September last year and I guess I feel similar to the way they may have done - just not quite sure what or how to write.

I'll be back though. Someday soon. I've not finished with blogging by a long chalk.

I loved this from the Gardian Round-Up this morning:

In a box marked "Westminster Bond" and bearing a picture of the Houses of Parliament, researchers believe they have found the gunpowder that Guy Fawkes intended to use to blow up that very building in 1605. The box was found in the basement of the British Library while archivists were sorting though the possessions of John Evelyn, a 17th century diarist. Evelyn had left a note in the box: "Powder with which that villain Faux would have blown up the parliament."

Can you imagine rumaging around in the cellars of London and stumbling across boxes of Guy Fawkes' gunpowder?! Just think - people actually get paid for that kinda thing. I need a career change!!

Well, I'm back. Sort of. The last few weeks have been really hectic for me and, I'm sorry to say, I completely neglected my blog. I'll make a few posts this evening to bring myself up to date, and then hopefully I'll be back to my daily(ish) routine.

So, what's been going on? Well, I've started back to work in the last couple of weeks after almost 6 months off sick. I have two prolapsed discs in my lower spine. I had my first operation to correct the problem back in October - but that wasn't a success. I've been through 3 months of physiotherapy, but that didn't cure me either. The next step was a much more invassive operation to remove the problematic discs but I've decided not to go ahead with it. Too risky. My surgeon gave me the odds of nasty side affects (like permenant dunbness in the legs) and I reached for the door.

Anyway, the upshot is I'm working from home for the time being...easing my way back into things whilst I undergo further treatment. I can't believe how hard it is catching up. I've spent the last 6 weeks doing lots of work-type stuff in preparation of 'coming back', but it doesn't feel like it's really helped me a great deal. Great! :o/

More soon...

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.