Another week, another blog

So, another (3-day) week back at work and I'm suddenly realising that I have only 10 weeks left on my contract. Due to my surfeit of annual leave, I'll only be working three (or possibly two) more 5-day weeks before I go. Ahh, the benefits of having worked zealously up until now :-)

Last week I took a couple of days off work to drive Kevin to Oxfordshire so that he could have some fun driving Ferraris and suchlike. I did the driving there and back firstly so that I wasn't just sitting/standing around all day, secondly so that Kevin wouldn't be over-tired by the time we got home, and thirdly because asking him to drive sanely and sensibly on public roads might have been a slight challenge after doing 100mph+ in big expensive sports cars. Also, his own car might have got jealous while it was there.

I of course got to be the official photographer of the day - which is why, incidentally, many of the photos and movies aren't terribly good - you should have seen the ones that were rejected for the webpage! The funniest display of my incompetance was when I tried to take a movie of Kevin driving off in the first Ferrari (355). The instructor climbed in and shut the door, so I hurriedly whipped my (Dad's) digital camera and started the movie playing in order to capture the Moment.

(As background information, this camera allows you to take movies that are precisely 16 seconds in length. There is a way of stopping it earlier, I know, since during the day I inadvertantly took a few that were less than 3 seconds long, but I didn't actually know how to do this. Back to anecdote.)

The camera's rolling. The car's sitting there. The camera continues to roll. The car continues to sit there. When it gets up to about nine seconds and the car hasn't yet moved, I decide to stop the movie: take my finger off the button, find out that I can't stop it, and hastily point the camera back up again in case Kevin drives off photogenically in the next five seconds.

Five... (the car doesn't move)... four... (the car doesn't move)... three... (the car doesn't move)... two... (the car doesn't move)... one... (the car doesn't move)... Zero. Okay, no worries, I'll just start recording again—

It shot off! In the two available seconds between the movie finishing and my being able to press the button again.

What made it slightly more galling was that I managed to do exactly the same thing again when Kevin got in the F348, so I have two videos of him sitting stationary on tarmac in two different Ferraris. Um, I meant to do that, honestly.

The camera has quite a few different settings for dummies (so I used them, naturally), including one "Sports" setting intended for photographing fast things as they whizz by. I'd been advised to use this and, reasoning that a Ferrari came under the category of "fast things", used this setting to get shots of Kevin as he whizzed past. The only thing is that it's too good - the camera set the shutter speed so fast that it sometimes looks as if the car is sitting on the tarmac while there are slightly blurry trees in the background. Still, take it from me that the car was actually going quite fast at the time :-)

I spent the weekend in Essex, and we rented Shrek since Kevin hadn't seen it. Luckily it was still just as good as I remembered from seeing it in the cinema - bring on Shrek 2!

I've finally been shamed into redoing the markup for my books page, since I complained at Kevin yesterday that it was throwing silly errors that seemed to be different on each reload. He checked the page against the W3C Validator and found that it had about a hundred or so errors. It didn't surprise me really; I expect a lot of my pages have similar issues since I created them using the little knowledge I'd gleaned about HMTL, and didn't really have a concept of validation, or specs, or what I was doing. Since then, it's just been laziness preventing me from doing anything about it.

However, it's finally done. It even has nice sortable tables, courtesy of Stuart Langridge.

The thing that's happened today is that I was fiddling with the key to my lockable cabinet at work, locked it, idly pulled the key out, tried to put it back in and found that it doesn't fit. It just came out of there! Right now the cabinet's still locked, and my thumb is red from trying to push the key back. This is so stupid...