Stand clear; drivel in small doses

Ever since my blogging has been less frequent, I've unconsiously felt that almost every post I write has to be substantial. This is mainly why you're not getting details, little anecdotes, and so on, because One Anecdote Does Not A Blog Post Make. Well, it can, of course, it can - just not here, not with the state that bbt's in right now. So I have a load of nonsensical snippets which I'll just comment on briefly, and lay them out below, exposed.

• As I said last week, I've been fiddling with redesigns and looking at other people's, and I've started wondering: if hacks in the markup of a document are so bad and evil and wrong, why aren't hacks in the stylesheet considered equally bad? I've settled into the purists' camp with regards to markup, but I'm still unsure about CSS. If I shudder when I have to insert a <div> just so I can apply CSS to it (ie. for purely presentational purposes), why is it all right to do nasty hacky things with CSS that, for example, would make no sense to a beginner who's just read the whole CSS spec, but which would have to be explained in the context of specific browser (mis)implementations? In both cases the hack would be required for presentational purposes, and wouldn't be seen by anyone who wasn't looking for it. By the by, I'm less opposed to container divs when they're actually grouping some elements together; although they're not actually adding structure to the document, they do look as though they are, and so make the source HTML clearer to read. Bah, I'm screwy. Anyway, I'm now leaning towards not liking CSS hacks, which is a real problem because you can't author CSS straight from the W3C spec and expect it to work for the majority of users. You need hacks if you want control over your page.

  And on the subject of CSS, before we wander over to more diverse realms, one little effect that seems to be becoming fairly popular is a:visited {text-decoration: line-through;}. I really, really don't like this, particularly where I've seen it applied to blogrolls and the like. Surely the line-through implies that you've already visited that link, and therefore you don't need to click on it? It just doesn't seem appropriate when you're linking to an entire website, especially one that changes as often as most blogs do, as opposed to a specific article or webpage.

  For a linklog, though, I think it's spot on.

• Work, work, work... I've been commuting for the first time, four trains a day, one hour each way, for eight weeks now. What's unexpected isn't that the trains run late. Of course the trains run late. What's unexpected is the way some people get really shocked and annoyed about the trains being late. It's not that I can't understand that it's annoying in itself, but I can't understand why people often seem surprised by the fact that trains are ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes late or cancelled. It's the UK rail network - doesn't everyone expect trains to be delayed, and find themselves pleasantly surprised when they're not?

  I work about twenty miles from home, apart from two days a week when I work seventy miles from home. On these days, I get to drive another hour from my twenty-mile-away-workplace to my seventy-mile-away-workplace, in a nice company hire car. The roads tend to be pretty clear since a) I'm heading away from London in the mornings, b) by that time I've missed all the rush-hour traffic, and c) it's motorway and nice wide A-roads all the way.

  It's really fun driving all these nice new cars (and incidentally, I'm quite lucky in that the company's hire car contract was altered, just a few months before I arrived, to allow under-21s to hire cars. I'd have been quite stuck, otherwise), even though I keep being given bigger and bigger cars than I've asked for. I ask for the smallest car they have, every time (example car in this group is a Vauxhall Corsa), and I've been given Fiestas, Ford Fusions, Vauxhall Astras and a Vectra. And the Vectra was horrible because you can't control the indicators - they decide for themselves exactly how long you wanted them to flash for, and don't allow you to turn them off. When I was moving out a lane on the motorway, I must have looked like an absolute nutter: right indicator, move out, take off right indicator... no, it's flashing left! Take off left indicator... flashing right! Damn it...

  And repeat as above, until I remember the correct way to deal with the indicator, which is to leave it alone, cross your fingers (well, not while you're driving...), and just hope it goes off eventually. Nasty car. The other bad thing about all the Vauxhalls I've driven is their suspension - not a problem in itself as such, but when I have a CD on and I'm singing at the top of my voice, sustaining a note, the car bumps continually on the road surface and makes my voice wobble.

  The Fiestas have been really nice, though. I approve. Lots and lots. The only problem is that my standards regarding cars are far too high now, and when I try driving our car I suddenly start moaning about the clutch being stiff, or the brakes being slightly dodgy, or any one of a few dozen little niggling points that really don't matter in the slightest.

• It has been noted that it's been Britain's driest autumn since records began, and I've been perpetually amazed by it. We've had an incredible dry spell, glorious colours on the trees, bright sunshine and clear blue skies throughout last month. The weather has been truly stunning - I mean, this is Britain in October - and I keep wondering just what's going to happen to even things up. Prepare yourself for winter...

• I moved office last week, within the building I work in, and so far it's definitely an improvement. I am now the proud possessor of my own bin, an absolutely huge desk (which is admittedly, as yet, utterly clear), a window at my back (really - a window! I now have natural sunlight, obscured only by the open blinds which seem to stay drawn, and the building three feet from the window... I can just about see clouds, though, which is progress), not to mention that the new office is right next to the library (which doesn't contain many interesting things, but does have a whole back-catalogue of New Scientists)

  It's the little things that matter the most. The only problem that I can see is that I'm now ten feet away from a Catherine, which is bound to cause confusion (and, indeed, already has).

• Just a note - Southend pier shuts at 8pm. Really shuts. And they clear off pretty quickly, leaving you locked and potentially stranded there unless you hang around until the security guard comes back up in the lift a few minutes later, and you bang on the locked glass doors and ask if he can let you in, and he makes you feel about five inches tall for being so silly and only reaching the start of the pier at 8:05pm which is well after closing time, and he shuffles off to get the keys and eventually returns, and it takes him a while to let you back in and then out the doors one floor down onto the seafront, and you feel quite embarrassed for causing so much hassle.

  So I've heard, anyway.

Ship ship ship shop shop shop

Yesterday I braved the shopping centre in what was my first day's shopping since I started work over two months ago - well, apart from on my birthday, which also happened to be a Saturday.

Yes, I took time out on my birthday to go shopping. With my parents in tow. This is actually not quite as bad as it sounds since my parents are quite patient on the rare occasions when this happens, and are happy to hang around at the entrance of shops whilst I fly around looking at all the clothes/books/cheap videos on offer.

The reason this happened on my birthday - well, actually, there are a number of reasons. Firstly, I needed to buy things. (Not in the compulsive shopping way, but because I was running short of a few items. Well, okay, I can't quite make the claim that I was running out of books, but I was feeling in the mood to have a good browse around in good bookshops.)

Secondly, my weekends have all been really busy since I started working - no connection except insofar as the weekend's the only time I have free, and therefore the only time when I'm likely to be able to do things. All through the week leading up to my birthday I was thinking at the back of my mind, "Ooh, I have Saturday free, I can go shopping then!"

The event of my birthday didn't really make much of a wave in the water sea pond lake swimming pool ocean of my mind.

When realisation dawned I said, "Sod it," (or an approximation thereof) and decided to go anyway. So yeah, I did the dull, oppressive, fighting-your-way-through-crowds and parting-with-hard-earned-money thing on my birthday. What a day to remember, huh?

I do beg your pardon, I've tangented myself quite a long way off my original, intended, subject (so far that I've had to change the entry title to accommodate it). Going back, then, yesterday I shopped.

The thing that irked me the most, apart from the almost-forgotten Saturday crowds, was the Christmas theme that had pervaded just about every single shop in sight. Not just that they're selling Christmassy things - calendars, wrapping paper, "Christmas gifts" and the like - which they've been doing for a couple of months. Not just the Christmas decorations which are up everywhere.

The worst aspect, by far, is that they've started playing Christmas music. Already! It's not even mid-November, and already we're hearing strains of "Winter Wonderland" and other, more traditional, Christmas songs. I feel deep down, in my heart of hearts, that the first of December is the very earliest time that it's decent to play such stuff. Shops pushing their festive merchandise I can just about cope with starting from about October - I can always look the other way. But Christmas carols a full seven weeks before the actual day? No. No, no, no, no, no.

The most wonderful time of the year?

Academia rediscovered

As I mentioned a while ago, I'm doing a remote-learning maths course to keep up my maths skills while I'm on my gap year. You receive a CD containing workbooks for each of the eleven course sections - six compulsory, five optional - in PDF format, and both practice and final tests for each topic. The idea is to complete and submit eight tests altogether before the end of June, preferably at the rate of about one per month.

Now, given that the first two tests have to be completed by the end of November (or it's possible you'll be disqualified from the course) you'd think that, before yesterday, I'd have done more than flip idly through the first workbook.

As it happened I wasn't feeling too concerned about the amount of time I'd have to dedicate to the first two tests, since when I looked at the workbook what I was most struck by was the shallow and scarce coverage of the topic at hand (functions). Admittedly I do have an advantage having done Further maths at A-level as well, and therefore this particular topic is one that I covered quickly and easily about two years ago, but I still think that the level of difficulty aimed for was quite poor. Given that the course is specifically for Year In Industry students, who are all post-A-level, all took maths A-level within the last few months (YinI is focused on science and engineering students), and who all presumably achieved an A or B grade (you're recommended to have predicted A-level grades of AAB or higher before applying to YinI), I found it slightly shocking.

Worse were the tests themselves, the first of which I got around to doing last night. Question 1: "Given that f(x) = x + 1/x, find f(2x)." Not bad enough? Each and every question is multiple choice, presumably for ease of electronic marking. Plus there are only nine questions, and they're all as short as the above - the entire test took me a little over ten minutes. It hardly seems an adequate test of what you know and what you can do.

With all this in mind, and added to that the fact that the tests are untimed, you're allowed a calculator - you could even use a graphical calculator for the graphs questions ("Where are the asymptotes?") and no one would know - and you could easily have workbooks, notes, past exercises or textbooks open in front of you, I'm finding it less and less credible that the eventual certificate will be worth getting, and more and more annoying that I have to spend my precious time actually doing this.

Little things that wind Cathy up

After spending three hours yesterday afternoon/evening attending a YinI-organised "Induction day" in Westminster - the highlight of which was actually having enough confidence in my navigational skills to walk back from there to Waterloo on my own (I don't know central London very well and can rarely find anything) - I noticed a number of those little things in life that can really irritate me for no seemingly rational reason at all.

• People, young women in particular, who can't stop playing with their hair when they're attempting to sit still and instead keep running their hands through it, redoing clips and so on. Every thirty seconds. For two hours. Sitting directly in front of me...
• People who insist on walking around with an umbrella up, especially somewhere crowded such as central London, when it's not even drizzling and you can barely feel any rain at all. If it's not raining, you really don't need an umbrella.
• People who are sitting right next to their phone and, when it rings, hover their hand over the receiver until it's rung about two or three times, and then pick it up. (It's generally halfway through a ring, because if the phone was picked up after precisely two rings - or three rings - it would look like they'd been waiting for the phone to ring a few times before picking it up.)

Cathy was not in a bad mood yesterday. Honestly.

Five hours? I wish

So, we bought Windows XP to install on our computer. Very recently we also bought a new yet-to-be-installed hard disk, and so we thought that the sensible thing to do would be to swap the hard disks round and have the new, blank one be the primary disk, all ready for a clean install. Data from the other one could then be copied across once everything was set up properly.

The system was installed almost seamlessly - rather than thinking of fiddling with the BIOS so that it would boot from the CD, we for some reason decided to boot into DOS, find that XP setup cannot be run from DOS, install Windows Me and then install XP from within Me. Ahem. Anyway, it's mostly set up now, and we have slight, bare bones, functionality. No drivers as yet on top of the default - I believe the procedure went something like the following:

1. Boot into XP - whoo, multiple users. Novelty.
2. Open Internet Explorer.
3. Instinctively look for the Google search bar, of which there are none. Bah.
4. Open www.google.co.uk, search "firebird"
5. Yay, Firebird 0.7 (I never got around to upgrading my copy of FB since 0.6 which I downloaded in May or June). Install.
6. Open Firebird, Ctrl+K for the Google search bar, "firebird extensions"
7. Wow, many more extensions than when I last looked. Ten minutes looking through and exclaiming over new ones - there's now an extension that gives you the option in the right-click context menu of "View this page in Internet Explorer", and another one that allows you to edit the CSS of a page live (changes take place immediately - extremely useful for fiddling) - and installing all the relevant ones.
8. Find that there's something screwy with the Mouse Gestures extension whereby (a) default settings don't set any gestures; you have to set them manually, and (b) once you've set the mappings you want - or mapping, singular, since I only use one of them - and try to click OK, it won't click. You're forced to press Cancel instead. Result: I am now forced to open new tabs in the way that ordinary people have to. Make mental note to try reinstalling.
9. Google "mIRC".
10. Download. Connect. Whoo, we have chatting :-)
11. Ooh, yes, remember something very important. iTunes. Please note, I wish to emphatically deny that I bought Windows XP just so that I could install iTunes for Windows, which doesn't run on Windows Me.
12. Realise the slight flaw is that there's no music at all on the current hard disk, and the old one is still completely disconnected. Gah. Currently we have music by plugging my iPod directly into the speakers.
13. [Next day:] Google "Eudora". Download Eudora version 6 (6? I was still on version 5 - I really must check the programs that I run for newer releases).
14. The Eudora installation asks for Disk 1, and refuses to budge.
15. Poke around Eudora's website, find the "alternative download" which is a .zip file. Okay, that works.
16. Download. Extract. eudora.exe.
17. Version 5 again?
18. Set up suespammers.org account for receiving emails - all my other email accounts come through there until I get round to sorting this out.
19. New mail account. Display name: Cathy Young.
20. Email address: cyoung85@suespammers.org
21. Incoming server: um, pretty sure it's mail.suespammers.org. No need to check.
22. Login name: Um... was it just cyoung85? Ah, no, I can vaguely remember that it's something funny. Check at www.suespammers.org (which is actually www.spamcon.org.
23. Click through to Mailboxes, unfiltered, since I know there are instructions there for setting up your email account in an email client.
24. "SpamCon Foundation has temporarily stopped providing suespammers.org email addresses." Okay, fair enough. Instructions for old users who have mislaid their login information? Doesn't tell you. Anywhere.
25. Damn.
26. Ten or fifteen minutes of slightly panicky experimentation follow, after which I eventually hit upon the combination that works, namely cyoung85_suespammers.org. Whoohoo. We have incoming mail.
27. Set up outgoing email, I can remember details for that.
28. Hmm. Where does my @bentbacktulips.co.uk email go to? (I have set it all up, though I don't use it - by the time I had my own domain I thought I'd confuse people if I suddenly changed email addresses again.) Can't remember. Decide to send email to cathy@bentbacktulips.co.uk to check.
29. Turn off the damn US spelling checker. Leave the chili peppers, though, it's always fun when your software disapproves of you.
30. Wait...
31. Ah, received, goody. Must be suespammers as well.
32. Make mental note that I'm relying far too much on suespammers.org email.
33. Attempt to do cursory browsing and realise just how much you rely on Firebird's autocomplete. And bookmarks! My bookmarks have all vanished! (At this point the old hard drive is connected as the primary slave drive, and is recognised by the BIOS but not by Windows XP. Gah.)
34. Now, where are we... oh yes, blogs, the addiction. Thank goodness for Bloglines, online RSS aggregator.
35. Read a few, then realise that you should be blogging this.
36. Start writing your blog entry, and by the time you get down to here realise that you are quite seriously flawed to feel that you should definitely be blogging this. Although in my favour, I got through quite a lot of the installation process before this thought occurred.

So that's where we are at the moment - barely any programs (just the important ones you understand - browser, email, IRC client) and wondering if there's anything else we should have done before making the switch.

Is it terribly dismissive to say, "I'm sure we'll find out"?

A blunt, crass and ironic announcement

Kevin and I are not geeky.

Or cutesy.

We are not a geeky, cutesy couple who'd do things like having a joint weblog of any kind whatsoever. Despite any evidence to the contrary.

Okay, this is the deal. A couple of weeks ago idle thought and conversation, and me nagging encouraging Kevin to set up his own linklog, culminated in Kevin setting up his own linklog. What also happened was that he added me as an author, resulting in — lo and behold — a joint linklog, going by the name of Wibbling Tulips. It has an RSS feed and the most recent links are shown in sidebars. If nothing else, it saves us spending our IRC chats pushing links at one another :-)

Having to include a remote file on my front page resulted in the PHPification of bent back tulips, which of course promptly broke all my server side includes. If you were visiting between about 9pm and 10pm last night (GMT) you'll have probably noticed things being a little funky around here. The problems would have been solved much faster than this, but our internet connection yesterday decided to periodically stop responding, giving me intervals of about two or three minutes at a time before the connection died.

Disconnect, reconnect. About a thousand times, seemingly.

Not having an FTP client installed on the new, blank, XP hard drive - and not having enough continuous internet time to download one - I was using command line FTP. So every time the connection went, I had to type "open ftp.bentbacktulips.co.uk; [username]; [password]" and then change directory again to where I was before I could even resume what I'd been doing. On the plus side, I bet I'm now in the top 0.01% of the world for speed at typing "ftp.bentbacktulips.co.uk" without errors.

Given the above, and the fact that due to the above I had to quite literally stop myself from throwing things across the room, I decided not to bother changing the SSI to PHP includes for the rest of the site. So last night and today, everything that's not MT - namely, everything apart from the blog itself - was sans CSS and navigation. Apologies, but I couldn't quite bring myself to care enough in order to endure the further heartache of warring with my internet connection for another hour.

I don't use my mobile much, can you tell?

Continuing the theme of clueless with technology and too dumb to use an office phone, I can completely empathise with one or both of these. Well, technology in general I'm quite good with, providing it's slightly intelligent in nature. However, technology such as digital alarm clocks, digital watches (hm, a theme?), things with large remote controls, microwaves, fax machines - this list goes on and on, doesn't it? - and photocopiers, leave me feeling rather useless because how they work is never intuitive. (Strangely, I'm fine with video recorders.)

At the other end of the spectrum lie things which I feel should be simple, but which are intelligent beyond my expectations and which I therefore find insanely complicated. Good examples include expensive digital cameras, graphical calculators - honestly, how many functions does an A-level maths student need? - and mobile phones.

The problem of not being able to retrieve voicemail - I had the exact same problem about a month ago when I was waiting in London for Kevin to show up. My phone vibrated to tell me I had a new voicemail message, and started beeping as well. To shut it up I pressed the Cancel key, and then proceeded to stare blankly at the helpful text on the screen that said "1 new message".

In the next twenty minutes I went through every single option of every single menu, several times, and found to my disbelief that there is no option anywhere that allows you to call your voicemail inbox. Nowhere. You have to know how to do it, because it won't tell you.

Eventually I vaguely remembered that on my previous phone the way to call voicemail was to key in just one number and then press Dial. Could I remember which number? If I could, would that guarantee that the same method would work on this phone? (Different make, different service provider.)

No on both counts. Nevertheless, I went through and tried each number in turn, and got very fed up with "This number has not been recognised". Of course, it's "0" you have to dial for voicemail (oh of course! It's so obvious now! I've seen the light!), the last number I tried.

What this resulted in was - finally - my being able to listen to Kevin telling me he was going to be late, about thirty seconds before I spotted him on the other side of the road.

I have a problem with my office phone as well, which is that I recently noticed a teeny little light blinking red, with "Messages" written above it. Now, I don't know if that means that it's confidently assuring me that it's fully enabled and ready to take messages for me, or if there's a message there now waiting for me to listen to it.

Gah. I hate phones.