Archive for December, 2005:

Today I finished the last of my Christmas shopping…

I’ve spent about £10-15 per person, which sounds cheap, but when you’re buying for two families it all adds up. Plus, it’s a lot more fun trying to squeeze in as many presents as you can with the limited budget.

Wrapping them didn’t take too long either, though sellotape annoys me at times.

I went into Windsor around 11am to pick up the last few things and soon met a traffic jam heading up the high-street. I initially thought it was Elton John’s wedding, though that took place yesterday. Apparently he had a huge marquee the size of an aircraft hanger somewhere in Windsor, though I didn’t see it.

The traffic jam turned out to be the changing of the guard, which if I was a resident still, I should have realised.

Speaking of Elton John, I’m glad I missed seeing any of the wedding when travelling back to Windsor yesterday afternoon - not that I’m against gays marrying or anything. But it would have no doubt been over the top, like many mincers.

You may notice that this blog’s header has changed…

If you’re very observent, you may have also noticed that it’s random. After some searching, I found a .php script that grabs a random image from a number of images stored on the server, within the same directory (thanks to Taylor).

What does this mean in ‘normal’ speak?

Each time you visit a sub-section of this blog; if you refresh the page, or each time that you visit the blog, the header image will change. At the time of writing there are currently 6 different images, but this number will soon increase, as I find more and more images to shove into the header.

I’ll be using this same technique on my next site development - it should allow for a ‘fresh’ looking site each time you visit…

OK, so I’m getting un-original on my post titles, but hey.

It’s not long until Christmas! Not that I’m excited or anything…

Tomorrow is my final day at work this year - I’ll be returning on the 3rd of January 2006. Last night was my first ‘office party’ seeing as previous years I’ve never worked in an office.

I’m off out Friday evening - £1 Vodbulls (vodka/redbull) @ Scream. Then packing on Saturday morning, travelling to Tamworth Saturday afternoon. Then travelling down to Windsor on the following Wednesday. Then back to Lincoln for New Year’s.

Think that’s about it, at least the government will be happy with all my petrol buying!

What’s everyone else up to this holiday?

I’ve been creating web pages in my spare time since A-Level IT, which was ooooooh back in ‘99, maybe earlier. But until now, I’ve never ensured that they meet standards…

I originally used the wonderful (hah!) Microsoft Word to create pages upon pages of nonsense. I then switched to Macromedia Dreamweaver, with a hint of Flash. Today I still use Dreamweaver, but I take note of the code it produces too, often editing pages in pure a code format.

Some of you may be aware of the W3C, or World Wide Web Consortium. Amongst all their offerings, is the Markup Validation Service, located here. It validates a webpage’s markup basically.

Now, before you start checking slickhouse.com and all it’s sections, I am aware that most pages don’t validate for many reasons. Most.

My latest creation for slickhouse.com is both this blog and the archive. You’ll notice to the right I’ve added a little logo just below the menu - this shows that the blog validates, i.e. there are no errors with the code and it meets standards blah blah blah. Which is nice, seeing as this is a messy hack of the default word press.

The index page of the NEW archive also validates: archive.slickhouse.com. This was a nice surprise, as I’d created it from scratch.

My next task is to ensure that all pages within archive.slickhouse.com validate… and then I’ll begin on the rest of slickhouse.com! The index page alone has many errors…

Once you’ve read this, I recommend a short trip to the archive, as it documents both the history of slickhouse and all past projects.

Whilst posting away on a forum I regularly visit, answering a question someone asked about how to disable CPU throttling (geeky I know…), I stumbled across the following:

It’s a screenshot of the Battery Optimizer Wizard on my IBM Thinkpad Laptop. Now, to most readers, it wont make any sense…

But I’m 90% sure that’s Martyn Ashton, aboard a Cannondale Trials Bike. If you’re not sure who Martyn is, then a quick google search produces this.

I just found it odd, and amusing at the same time. Why there’s a picture of a bike on a menu for battery management is beyond me.