Okay folks, here it is for One Day Only (actually a bit less than one day - see below) - the Red Nose Day design!

posted by Cathy at 3:11 PM :

 
Ah. It appears that the ftp server is "currently offline for maintenance", as posted on their site five minutes ago (despite it having been offline for at least fourteen hours, with no message).

Gah. I shouldn't be bitching really, Portland have been really good so far in the three months that I've been with them. I'm just annoyed because, what with not being able to upload anything, Aquarion beat me to it with the Red Nose Day design :P

posted by Cathy at 8:50 AM :

 
To balance the beautiful weather we've had this week - [oh hang on, look at that five day forecast! Sun, sun, sun, sun, sun!] - I've had a really bad technical day. Blogger wasn't working on and off during the day, then my whole site went down for an unknown amount of time, but at least 2 hours, and then the FTP server for my host was down for 24 hours from Thursday afternoon until Friday (today). And I was going to change the site design to bright red and have a big Red Nose background image just for Friday, for Comic Relief's Red Nose Day 2003.

[The following was written during ftp server downtime]

"Only connect" says EM Forster. Which is exactly what I can't bloody well do at the moment. It's unbelievably frustrating to be sitting here, wanting to upload things and publish new entries and not even being able to connect to the ftp server - every time I try I get a response of ftp: connect:10061, if that means anything to you techies out there.

It wouldn't be so bad if it was just Blogger being dysfunctional - at least I would be able to edit my blog index and upload the page manually, and I'd still have access to the rest of my site. I've just added a new Search function as well, but didn't quite manage to add it to the side menu before losing access.

God, I hope this doesn't happen again - although to be fair, this is the first time I've ever got that error in three months of using Portland. But I really don't want to change web hosts, because as far as I know Portland is the only company who do free subdomains with no adverts. And they also allow full CGI access and support PHP4 and Perl, which is great. And they are based about 10 minutes' drive from my house, which is nice :)

Speaking of PHP, I decided to start learning it today. Didn't get terribly far - in about half an hour, I got up to Defining Functions. And I couldn't even test a "Hello world!" script, because the server was down.

posted by Cathy at 9:45 PM :

 
In addition to the list already started [you know you've been using the computer too much when:] there is now:

4. You start subconsciously transcribing common typing errors when you write longhand. Yesterday I wrote "unfornutately" (and had to stare at it for at least ten seconds before figuring out what was wrong) and today - twice - writing "than" instead of "that".

Worrying?

Y'all heard about the renaming of French fries to "Freedom fries" in America:

The cafeteria menus in the three House office buildings changed the name of "french fries" to "freedom fries," in a culinary rebuke of France stemming from anger over the country's refusal to support the U.S. position on Iraq. Ditto for "french toast," which will be known as "freedom toast." Across the country, some private restaurants have done the same.

In addition to that - this is Bill H.R.1072.IH, which states that no funds under the control of any United States official that are expended for post-conflict assistance for Iraq may be provided, through grant, contract, or other means, to any French firm. Via Aquarion.

posted by Cathy at 12:23 PM :

 
*big sigh of relief*

After about half an hour of effort, finally this page looks like it did this morning, before I did anything to it. Yay. But this means there's no changeable sized fonts coming for a while yet.

posted by Cathy at 6:17 PM :

 
Gaaaah!

If you can read this, well done. If the page looks particularly blank or just wrong, that's because I appear to be very talented - whilst trying to write something into my stylesheet that would display fonts the right size in different browsers using font size keywords (eg small) I seem to have broken every browser except for IE (and you didn't think it could be done, did you?) Of course, I didn't know this since at school I only have access to IE.

So when I got home and witnessed the devastation, I downloaded the new stylesheet that I'd uploaded at school (inadvertently overwriting the old version on my computer, but that's another story), rewrote it to be the same as the previous version, and, stunningly (you'll love this part) managed to break IE but no other browsers. And then I altered the width of my Reading content box by 20px, and then all the browsers broke.

Ahem.

So, we're going back to fixed font sizes for the time being, until I can figure out how to change it without breaking something. This could take a while.

posted by Cathy at 5:37 PM :

 
Having been a Good Girl^TM last week and changed to using relative instead of absolute font sizes in my stylesheet, I discovered that while the text looked fine in IE5, IE6 and Opera 6, the font was absolutely tiny in Opera7 and Mozilla. Hopefully I've fixed it now, although I can't tell because I'm at school at the moment and only have IE5 accessible.

So, apologies if it all looks peculiar in other browsers - I'll check when I get home.

Two things:

• Why isn't washable blue ink washable? My fountain pen's been leaking and I just spent more than five minutes with hot water and Carex and still there are stains on my fingers. Grr.

• Why, on my drive to/from school, are there so many 30mph speed limit zones where I am the only person driving at 30mph? It really annoys me when all I see in front of me are cars zooming off into the distance (some of them having just overtaken me) and all I see behind me is a car about 2 feet away from my bumper, doing the driving equivalent of glowering at me. I swear my speedometer must be wrong, or the council has changed the speed limit without changing the signs, or... grr. (What a useful word that is.) It's always on the same stretches of road; the wide ones (unsurprisingly) of which at least one definitely used to be a 40mph zone. Last week I was overtaken on three different mornings by the same car, which overtook me again this morning, on pretty much the same stretch of road. You know who you are, Mister P### PGO, in the, uh, silver car. (I'm a girl, alright?) Actually, it's a Rover [picture]. But all last week I thought it was a Peugeot 206 [picture]. Oh, stop laughing, they don't look that different!

This morning, I was stuck in a large traffic jam trying to get over Hampton Bridge. It didn't affect me that much really - 20 minutes added to my journey, and good exercise for my left knee with the clutch pedal - except I had to change cassettes from frenetic, thumpy music to calm Silverman music which left me in a strange serene cocoon-like state whereby I didn't mind the traffic jam at all, thanks to one particular song which I had on repeat. [Note: having songs on repeat is more difficult with cassettes than with CDs. I want a car with a CD player.]

I've just checked Silverman's website and unfortunately the song in question isn't one of the ones you can download. However, for future reference (should you ever buy their album, if they become more well-known) the track is called Nothing I Do, Nothing I Say. Caaaalm. There's a beautiful harmony to sing with the chorus as well (you can hear it in the instrumentation).

I was feeling particularly de-stressed when I finally arrived at school - almost makes me wish there were traffic jams more often :)

posted by Cathy at 10:41 PM :

 
Due to receiving a couple of complaints via comments (which isn't a good percentage out of 14 comments ever received) about the 400 character limit imposed by my now-previous comments system, I have changed to comments via Enetation, who I don't believe have a character limit. The only major feature I've lost is the ability to send private comments, but hey, what's email for?

The downside to this (well, you knew there had to be one) is that all previous comments have been lost. Oh well. Sorry about that.

posted by Cathy at 10:04 PM :

 
Firstly, in reply to a comment from my last entry:

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

"'Because it can produce a few notes, though they are VERY flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!' This, however, is merely an after-thought; the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all."
  -- Lewis Carroll, in the preface to the 1896 edition of AAIW.

Let me say (in a knowing tone of voice): "Aaaah." Thanks, Daniel :) - it's good to know that Lewis Carroll did write an answer to the riddle himself. Even if I do prefer the answer that I found :P

Last week the Internet Book List was launched:

The Internet Book List (IBList) is a hobby project started by Patrik Roos in early 2003. Its purpose is to provide a comprehensive and easily accessible database of books, since Patrik considers the Book to be humanity's greatest creation.

In other words, the book equivalent of IMDB, which is a great idea. It seems to rely solely on user submissions though, so it may take them a while to build a truly comprehensive database - they're up to just over 2500 book titles at time of writing.

Their front page, showing the 'Most Popular' searches/submissions is very heavily skewed towards SF/fantasy, and Neil Gaiman currently is 3rd most popular author, with two books in the top 5 titles. Finding this, and bearing in mind that I think IBList needs some publicity, I submitted a little message to him:

Neil,
I thought you might like to know that the Internet Book List (http://www.iblist.com/) has been set up, which is the equivalent of IMDB for books. Of the 1300 book titles so far databased, American Gods and Coraline are both in the top 5 most popular books, and you are third most popular author ;)
Hopefully you can plug this site in your journal, because I think they need a few more submissions at the moment!

Oh, and my blog as well if you like! (http://cyoung85.port5.com/blog/) Sorry, just being cheeky ;)

And he quoted, uh, the whole message in his online journal, which I didn't expect him to! That's why the last sentence was separated from the rest of the message by a new paragraph, for ease of snippability. Anyway, I'll extend a thankyou in that general direction :)

Regarding Dune (which I'm reading for the first time) I'm only 100 pages in at the moment, but definitely enjoying it. Unlike the first book of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series - dammit, I've forgotten the name of it! - of which I read about 130 pages before abandoning it last year. I will return to it at some point, honestly (I've been assured it's worth the effort)... maybe when I've ploughed my way through all these?

posted by Cathy at 3:36 PM :

 
I was very excited yesterday, because I finally, after twelve years, found out the answer to the riddle: "Why is a raven like a writing desk?", which is from Alice In Wonderland. The answer isn't revealed and actually I think Lewis Carroll probably had no answer in mind when he wrote it. However, a completely feasible answer is that Edgar Allan Poe wrote on both.

Yes, I know. *groan* And here's a copy of The Raven if you haven't read it.

I've been doing a little bit more behind-the-scenes stuff for bbt, as a result of which I am a Font-bitch no longer! Watch all the little letters change size as you View -> Text Size in IE!

Getting a bit too excited there, wasn't I? I'm just going through Dive Into Accessibility, which anyone who goes near HTML markup of any kind should be forced to read. The next thing I want to do is to add a site search, and then I think I'm done, except for getting in the habit of using title attributes in links (which I've previously refrained from doing since in Opera 6, hovering over the link displays the title in the status bar and masks the URL, which really annoys me).

According to voters of Radio 4's World Book Day Vote, the book that most "epitomises" England is George Orwell's 1984. Unfortunate choice of wording there, I feel.

Testing willpower - someone created a site called Don't Go There that was designed to shut down after 100 people had clicked on the link (after being warned what would happen). It was apparently an exercise in willpower, as the author wanted to see how long it would last while people abstained from clicking in an attempt to keep the site up. It lasted 57 minutes, a little bit less than his estimate of 24 hours.

And Google has done the first announced thing for Blogger - closing some security holes.

The hole Lamo demonstrated did not require him to take over an existing weblog. Instead, he bypassed the process BlogSpot used to prevent new customers from establishing weblogs with an address already in use.

After confirming that an address was available, the enrollment application stored it in the user's browser in a hidden form field. A hacker could simply change the name in the form field to the name of an existing weblog to create a new journal that would supercede the legitimate one. "I would characterize it as an outstandingly common problem," says Lamo.

I'm still thinking about moving to Movable Type, since you ask...

posted by Cathy at 12:25 PM :

 
This website (the sidebars, at least) is now being brought to you through the astounding technology that is SSI, Server Side Include. I just learned how to enable it this afternoon, and I'm feeling very pleased with myself, although it's really simple. The only techie bit is the .htaccess file which I had to create, but I got all the content of the file from my webhost's support pages, so it was just a copy&paste job really.

Look at that; I successfully managed to deflate my sense of pride in the space of half a sentence. Didn't know you could do that before.

I think this is the part where I say: "Anyway..."

Well, whaddy'a know, I managed to procrastinate enough this weekend to write the About page after all. And yes, it did turn out to be long - a little over 2000 words. I think I may have digressed from the subject a little in places...

Despite that, I did manage to finish my Physics coursework, having settled down in earnest to do it at 8.30 last night. Dribs and drabs of effort during the day, but it never really felt that urgent until after dinner. On which note, I'm kind of annoyed that I did manage to complete it, since I always fall into this trap - put it off, put it off, put it off, then a huge drive at the end and it's done. Well good, except that this is the reason why I only got four hours' sleep last night and also have had a vague guilty feeling at the back of my mind for the last two weeks. I mean, I really should have done it (or at least started it) during half-term, or even last week through the mocks, but nooo. My semi-valid excuse is that this is how I work most efficiently - long bouts of concentrated effort, even when I'm revising for exams. Contrary to all those revision guidelines that advise you to take a break every half an hour, I find it difficult to break off what I'm doing and so I revise for three or four hour stretches at a time. Except when I'm using my 'cramming for exam an hour before it starts' technique, which I employed last week. We'll see if it worked when I get my results back this week! Seems to have done the trick so far though - two physics papers, 28/40 (high B) and 54/60 (high A). Just another seven papers to get back now :)

Anyway, this is why I didn't apply to Oxbridge for uni - no self-discipline. I kept waiting for the guilt to kick in for leaving it all to the last minute, but it never did; the very last minute eventually being 2am, when I went to bed.

Oh, and I found out this morning that the final deadline had apparently been changed to next Monday. Gah.

It seems that with season 7 of Buffy being the last one, it'll have all finished by the time I catch up - I've got just less than two series of Angel and two series of Buffy left before I even start watching S7. Oh well, there's always Angel (and Ripper, and the possible Faith spin-off...)

And I leave you with news that, according to one of the biologists who discovered the structure of DNA, stupidity is a curable disease. Yay to that.

posted by Cathy at 3:50 PM :