Back in the real world once again

Yes, fact fans, the rumours are true — ve have ze broadband vunce more!

The second most surprising thing (the most surprising being that BT apparently did something right in the end) is how happy we are at an ADSL line that came five whole weeks later than we originally confirmed. Nonetheless, happy we are.

The downside, of course, is that we're now spending all our time glued to our respective computers, and only venturing outside every few days for food. At least our computers are in the same room though. We still get to spend time together.

(Incidentally, it seems that sometimes my sarcastic humour is rather dry and I come off sounding pretentious or peculiar, or sometimes both. Rest assured that the above was sarcasm.)

Kevin and I came back from what is fashionably known as a "short break" in south Devon, where we stayed in a tiny little town on the River Dart. Kevin's started uploading the photos to Flickr (none that I took, so far).

(I don't have a digital camera. Why would I buy one, when I can just steal Kevin's every chance I get?)

Getting to Dittisham in the first place proved to be rather a trial, not helped by the AA's directions. The first sign we had for worry was the instruction towards the end of the M5 saying "Branch left (signposted Plymouth, Okehampton, Torquay)" at the point where we were confronted with, it's true, a split in the motorway. Unfortunately though, the left branch was signposted to Okehampton, and the right-hand branch — the one we actually needed — to Plymouth and Torquay. High confusion at 75mph isn't great.

Apart from that we got hopelessly lost as soon as we left the last A-road and got entangled in a plethora of tiny, hilly, blind country lanes; the kind where you have to swing into the hedge and wrench your handbrake on at the first sign of a car coming the other way, shortly followed by a tyre-skiddingly steep hill-start. All good fun, in other words.

And now the start of next term is closing in on me and I'm regretting not having done more with my free time. £181 just went on a bus pass, and I still haven't worked out the best route to uni. (Five minutes in the car; about 40 minutes by bus, as best I can figure.)

I can't yet access my timetable, that tells me what to actually do and where to go on Monday, but I already have an email telling me I have exams in January, in subjects which I haven't yet deciphered what they are.

Such is uni life...

A baker's dozen of things that drive me up the wall

Anna has made a start on a series called "One girl and her cute little mild obsessive compulsive tendencies". When the initial response judged her tendencies as "a whole new kind of scary" rather than the "cute weird" she was aiming for, she asked what drove us crazy.

Here's what I can think of:

1. After washing up, the dishes, frying pans and saucepans should all be put back in their right place. Which is especially important given that we only have one cupboard for all these things, and when Kevin was laid up in bed with his injured back I unpacked the multitudinous pots, plates and pans, and worked out the neatest and most efficient way of keeping them in the cupboard.

   The fact that I let Kevin do most of the washing up and putting away means that I deserve to be constantly wincing at the current arrangement inside the cupboard, which is "whatever order they came off the draining board."

2. In my wallet I often have more than one banknote at a time. And when I do, they have to be neatly ordered from MostMoney to LeastMoney (obviously, since banknotes get physically bigger from £5 upwards), and they all must be the same way around, with the Queen facing outwards.

3. Obviously clothes should all face the same way in a wardrobe; that's beyond dispute. (Please don't tell me there are people in the world who don't practise this philosophy; I don't think I could bear it.) But in my world, they should all be pointing to the left.

4. I am a huge spelling/grammar pedant. At the age of ten I earned the somewhat dubious nickname of Britannica because of my propensity to go round correcting everyone's spelling. (Yes, I know it's an encyclopedia and not a dictionary. I don't know the reasoning either.)

   To my credit, I have tried to clamp down on the urge a lot in recent years and have developed a more relaxed attitude towards the whole thing — which you pretty much have to if you want to survive on the Internet and come out of the encounter with all your hair still intact, and not in piles around you on the floor — but where it still really gets to me is on advertisments, signs, posters; anything vaguely official. I've still never found a pub food sign that didn't contain some error. Greengrocers' apostrophes, feel my wrath.

   I noticed with interest that our local Sainsbury has the "10 items or less" sign, whilst Down South they managed "10 items or fewer". Two different markets, or had they just not got round to replacing the Coventry sign?

5. This item is quite possibly the one I find the most horrifying. Damage to books. *shudder*

   I mean, dog-eared books that get that way through re-reading, being carried around in your bag for days, and so on; that's okay. I have many such books myself that have never been treated with anything less than care and attention.

   But — people who place an open book down on a surface with the pages all bent; people who fold the page over so they can find their place again; people who, horror of horrors, bend the pages completely back just so they can hold the thing one-handed? Such people quite plainly deserve the ninth circle of Hell.

6. Colours clashing is a problem for me as well as for Anna. Luckily Kevin can dress himself, so there's no problems there, but I frequently encounter other clashing complications. For instance, in our bedroom we have, above the bed, a bright red abstracty painting (it's the landlord's, not ours). We also have, on the bed, a pinkish-terracotta-y duvet cover, with matching pillowcases. It took about three weeks until it didn't cause me discomfort to walk into the room. And then we changed the sheets.

   One of the bus companies around here has recently repainted their double-decker buses a shocking bright pink all over. I'm talking actual Barbie pink. Luckily it's not my local bus service, otherwise I couldn't have worn a red top any time I travelled anywhere. Or bright orange. Some purples are out too.

   This was the same kind of problem I had last year when I dyed my hair red. Yes, it was kind of striking, and suited my hair, but my God I want to wear warm colours sometimes without clashing! Nowadays my hair is light brown, though, so I don't have that trouble any more.

7. When there's a television series that I happen to rather like, so much so that I've bought the DVDs, watched the series three or more times over and know it almost inside out — a series like Buffy, to pick a completely random example — one thing I cannot do is to pick a random favourite episode and watch it. Out of context, plucked from the middle of a season, with no thought for the thread of the whole thing? Unthinkable. What happens when I next want to watch that season, and there's this one episode that I saw more recently than the rest and stands out and will forever be marked in my mind as having been watched once more than the other episodes?

   You know, up until this point I didn't think I was that crazy.

8. Also in this vein is that when I'm following a series on television I mustn't miss any episodes at all. We missed last week's episode of "House" because of being on holiday, and then accidentally taping over the recorded episode before we managed to watch it. And it's really going to bug me. It's going to be The Missing Episode for a long, long time.

9. There are a few applications that I tend to have open all the time when I have my computer switched on. The three main ones are Browser, Email client, and Newsreader. And if they're not in that order on the taskbar then I will selectively close and reopen things until they are.

10. Matching underwear. Need I say more?

11. I also have the rather classic symptom of needing all picture frames in my presence to be perfectly straight on the wall. Once I know there's one in the room that's crooked I won't be able to keep my mind off it until someone does something about it.

    I could probably start my own firm: Picture Straighteners 'R Us. Slogan: No spirit levels required!

12. Clocks that are wrong. Because they're just wrong.

13. All CDs and DVDs have to be in their cases the right way up, writing all swivelled and pointing in the correct direction. The first thing I do after buying a DVD is to take off the plastic wrapping for no other reason than to open the case and correctly align the disc.

I think we can quite conclusively say, Anna, that you are not alone.

N.B. One of Anna's commenters mentioned "Things in the wrong boxes. CD's, DVD's, cassettes whatever." This was a thought so heinous that it never even occurred to me. It rates somewhere between the spelling thing and damage to books on the Cathy Scale.

Jumping onto the bandwagon

Like so many others, I have succumbed to Flickr. I don't take photos very often, so it remains to be seen how much use I'll get out of it, but for the moment it's led to me adding another panel to my sidebar so that I could display a random selection of my photos.

Now, Flickr lets you choose from an HTML "badge" or a Flash badge to put on your website. I ummed and aahed a bit, because the Flash badge is quite swishy, but reluctantly decided that it was too exclusionary for people who don't have Flash installed in their browser.

Kevin suggested something that I had overlooked; why not use the HTML object element? It is designed to allow different means of viewing the content of the element, depending on what media or technology is supported by the rendering browser.

As a basic example, future versions of XHTML will not include the img tag; we are to use object in its place. So to insert an image into your XHTML, you would have something like:

<object type="image/png" data="/photos/swan.png">
  A swan in the water
</object>

If the browser can't render the image (it's a screenreader, or the user has images turned off), then it renders the fallback content within the element instead, which acts in the same way as alt text currently does for images. But because it's so generic an element, the possibilities are endless! You can even have nested object elements, and therefore a potentially endless number of fallbacks...

In my case, I could use it to first try rendering a Flash Flickr badge, and then fall back to a plain HTML badge if Flash wasn't installed on the user's browser, like so:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="[Flickr url]">
  [script for HTML Flickr badge]
</object>

This is a nice example of a properly-degrading web page element, and would have been perfect for my purpose were it not for one thing: the Flash badge didn't render at all in either Internet Explorer or Firefox. Pasting the data URL directly into the address bar worked fine, but IE sat at 60% of the page loaded forever, whilst Firefox did nothing; not even rendering the fallback HTML badge. (Opera managed it spot-on (though I don't think it managed the standby attribute), but who uses Opera these days?)

In the end, then, I've gone with the plain HTML (plus Javascript) version. If only all browsers were standards-compliant (but then, we've heard that before!)

The roaring twenties

It seems that not only do I share my birthday today with Meatloaf, Avril Lavigne and Sara Racey-Tabrizi, but also with Google! Unfortunately though, there seems to be some confusion on this last part.

Google have their holiday logo up today, with birthday cake galore, and title telling you it's their 7th birthday today. (The logo hasn't made it into the holiday logo archive yet; maybe tomorrow.) Searching for an article to link to in my blog post however revealed that the internet at large thinks that Google's 7th birthday was weeks ago, on the 7th of September.

Personally, I'd be more inclined to believe Google on the matter, were it not for the fact that in 2004 they too celebrated their birthday on the 7th. And in 2003 as well.

So we can put this down to a simple error on someone's part for this year, thinking mistakenly that the Google birthday was the 27th instead of the 7th of September. Except for the fact that their fourth birthday was apparently also celebrated on the 27th.

So maybe I only share my birthday with Goo.