Sorry it’s been a bit quiet here lately: we head off to Australia on Tuesday afternoon, and I write this surrounded by things that will have to try and fit into our suitcase.
I have also been unfaithful to poor old iloyv: I’ve been blogging somewhere else for the last couple of weeks. We’ve started up a group blog among the web people at work to share links, ideas and acronyms. I dont’t know if anyone’s interested, but you can find it here.
I’ll probably update the site again sometime during the coming week from the front room of my parent’s house in Geelong, Australia (that’s a mere 10 000km away at the moment…).
A Miss K.P. Wilson of Melbourne, Australia, writes:
What should we call our dog??? It’s a black labrador cross pointer, astute, gentle, big, two years old. What have dogs been called through time? We pick him up on monday. well my flat mate that is, she gets to pay for it and feed it and I just get to play with it!
so, an entry on the history of dogs names in the ancient era perhaps?
Phew. Erm, O.K. I know William Hogarth (18th century painter) had several dogs, one of which was called ‘Trump’. The Spanish for dog is perro. The German for dog is hund.
As for ancient dog names, er, I think the Egyptians preferred cats (they’d shave their eyebrows if their cat died), the Greeks painted dogs on their lovely red-figure pottery and the Romans seem to me like dog-people par excellence (there’s that famous plaster cast of a dog from Pompeii).
Hang on, a quick google and we get a list of Greek and Latin-derived dog names (male) and some other stuff, including the revelation that the Romans apparently enjoyed dog stew. Nice.
Until I’d corrected a typo in the networking panel of my work Mac, I’d not been able to spend my money in Apple’s UK iTunes store (it doesn’t work on my PC because it runs (shudder) NT).
Once I’d typed in the right port number for the secure HTTP protocol, everything sprang into life. It is scarily easy to spend a lot of money in the store: you can even turn off the one warning you get before another 79p is debited from your creaking bank account… best to be logged out of the music store until you feel the need.
What did I buy with my hard-earned multiple of 79p’s? Well, being a cheapskate, and realising that there are some musical forms where the idea of a track is a bit more diffuse than a three minute pop song, I bought the four sections that comprise John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Four tracks = £3.16p, but 32 minutes of music. Hey, that’s 10p a minute.
I’ve made a little page over here that tries to explain exactly what’s going on with your unordered list’s CSS: particularly their padding and margins, live on your browser window.
Now you have a scientific insight into how each browser you use is munging your code.
I’ve got blogblock. My brain is made of cheese. All that’s in there is the theme music to the Mighty Boosh, over and over…
So, please help: leave me a topic or question you’d like me to answer in the comments, and I promise I’ll devote an entry to replying to them.
What’s going on in our garden? Well, ironically enough, with Laura doing a floristry course, and talking about flowers / gardens / plants / Monty Don (I’m not jealous) all the time, it’s been a little bit neglected this year.
We’ve not bothered with the beans or the tomatoes we had last year (the beans were a success, the tomatoes never got enough light, and never ripened enough to eat); our only edible plants are some thyme (bought) and some basils from seed. All the basil’s coming on well, and will need potting on soon. I wouldn’t be putting in an order for pesto just yet, though.
Our alliums have come up nicely, big purple balls of spiky little flowers on top of study green stems, except for one white allium that snakes along the ground with only the flower ball making the effort to rise much above the soil.
A dahlia from last year seems possessed – we’ve already cut it back once, removing the whippy new growth, and it’s making big, bronze stems and lots of leaves. The yellow and orange flowers should be out by the time we get back from Australia in July.
Regular readers will know about the slugs: our Hostas are still hanging in there (though they aren’t my favourite plants), but I think another cull might be needed. Wandering around the garden last night (it only takes a minute or two, really) I noticed the ferns had suddenly grown big, curved fronds from nowhere.
One plant that is missed in our garden is the massive foxglove that grew (probably by accident) last year. I did like it, though it had claimed a spot right at the front of a border where it would leer over you, triffid fashion. Even though our foxglove is gone, in the last few days on the train I’ve noticed the familiar big stalks of bright purple bells are starting to decorate the side of the railway line.
It’s Big Brother time again in the UK, and my favourite bit of the website that goes along with it is the flash-widgeted graph of the popularity of each housemate. I don’t think it’s that open to fiddling, as each site visitor is limited to one vote per browser per day (unless they can be bothered to wipe their cookies). I’d like to see a graph of the popularity plotted against the screen time given to each housemate in the daily shows…
I do watch these reality TV shows – I’ve been following Hell’s Kitchen as well – but in a detached way. I don’t care for these people, as they might as well be characters in a play; edited stereotypes. I watch, thinking about how these characters are being constructed (and are constructing themselves: the housemates are well aware of their task to provide thirty minutes’ of highlights every day, and are guessing at how they are being portrayed (to a certain extent) on TV and in the tabloid press).
All of these reality shows allow the viewer a glimpse around the edge of the facade, and I think people who might have had no interest in the way television works – as a business, as an art form – see that there is a process of construction, revision and editing going on, and this must raise the level of literacy about the way the media works. With more and more channels to fill, there’s a need for more people behind and in front of the camera. And the original reason for reality TV, the economics of shows that needed no expensive scriptwriters and professional actors, is ironically turning everyone who watches TV into a scriptwriter or an actor.
But then I watch the ITV news, where agendas are just as obvious (news for white, middle class people who buy the things in the ads) and wonder if people watching reality TV realise that there isn’t that much of a difference in the process of making an episode of Big Brother and a nightly news bulletin?
I’m seeing more and more cars on the road sprout little England flags, and house windows from the train proudly sporting the white flag with the red cross as well.
That must mean it’s nearly time for a major sporting event, and this year it’s Euro 2004, the European football (not soccer) championships. This sort of public patriotism, especially when the English record at these sort of events is er, um, solid, is very different to what I remember growing up in Australia. There the rivalries weren’t between countries, but states. Victorians thought South Australians couldn’t play Australian Rules Football. Queenslanders and New South Welshpersons didn’t care about that because they played Rugby, but they also had a fruity and adjective-laden rivalry with all the other states. All very important, of course, but at least it was based on nothing more than an arbitrary location* rather than the sometimes off-colour references to national stereotypes you get in the UK.
During a big tournament, a World Cup or similar, English people do tend to soften up a bit. Bosses will let people watch the games. An air of expectation and excitement hangs in the streets. Pubs roar during the matches. It seems to be a feeling shared, and that’s also different to Australia, where any celebration takes place inside suburban houses, chilled with summer air conditioning.
Except, of course, for the day Australia II won the America’s Cup, and our Prime Minister, soaked in champagne, yelled ‘any boss who sacks his staff for being late for work tomorrow must be a bum’ (outburst of laughter). I remember that time because I was superstitiously hoping that if Australia won the Cup, I’d somehow not have to get the braces that the dentist was recommending. It didn’t work.
* South Australians will appeal to ‘history’ to prove they are better than other states, however. As I have done a few times, they’ll tell you that their state is the only one founded by free settlers, unlike the others who relied on convicts. Even though, in my case, my Mum’s descended from a German family who arrived in the late 19th century and my Dad came out from England in 1947.
Panic! It’s the same month as the one that we’re going to Australia in. We’ve checked the passports are still valid, got the slides sorted for our ‘look where we’ve been’ slide night, but there’s still a fair bit to get done (mostly trying to remember exactly how cold it is in the Australian winter, and what sort of clothes we’ll need).
We’re taking some UK DVDs to Australia (yes, multi-region player): does anyone know if Phoenix Nights has been on over there?
The really rather red realspanish.net is now open for business. Underneath the stylesheet, it’s a good example of how quickly you can re-use a site that has been built from the beginning with separation of content and presentation in mind.
The first thing I did was to collect all the bits of realfrench.net sitting on my hard drive’s webserver folder into one location, a folder called realfrench.
Copying and re-naming this folder ‘realspanish’, which took about ten seconds, started the process of building the new site.
Doing a dump of the realfrench_db database, setting up a realspanish_db one and changing the name of the tables from ‘rf_’ to ‘rs_’ and modifying the PHP database connection script include file began the process of giving me a working new site.
Converting the information given to me (in electronic form) by the Spanish staff at MMU and inserting it into the databases immediately changed the content – all the scripts worked pretty well straight away.
A global search and replace with Homesite to replace ‘French’ with ‘Spanish’ took care of a lot of the page titles and other content.
The top menu bar had changed slightly, so I changed the include file for that.
The new logos, photographs and headings were created in Illustrator and Photoshop.
I opened the CSS file, added some new bits (like the shaded background for the top area), searched and replaced for the colours and graphics, and the entire site’s appearance was transformed.
I uploaded the new site to the webserver, and there we are.
Am I stretching the truth here? Well, just a little bit. Most of the problems were my own fault. Some of the pages didn’t use the top menu bar include, as I’d had to bodge them for realfrench, so they needed changing by hand. French and Spanish have different accent codes, so they needed work, and I had to build a new hangman game to get around the problems the accent codes caused there.
My code would have been more portable if I’d called two rather important variables $original_word and $translated_word instead of $french and $english.
I did add a little bit more markup on some of the tables to hang my new CSS onto (the curved gradient backgrounds on the inner pages).
But in the main, it’s worked pretty well.