It's about time I wrote something..??
Hi all,
Long time no see. As the title suggests, it really is about time I put finger to keyboard.. but I'm not sure what I'm going to write yet. I figure that I ought to mention the snow we've had. Bracknell has a freebie paper called the Midweek News. The front page had a full page spread (minus the ads of course) piece about the snow here in Bracknell. I'm paraphrasing, as the paper is at work.. but the lead sentence went something along the lines of..
"Bracknell was brought to a standstill, with traffic gridlocked and several accidents, when a centimetre (about 0.4 inches for those that prefer to deal in proper money) of snow fell on Bracknell."
A centimetre.. I've been to Norway, and Austria several times. How come they can manage to run as smoothly as ever, when an overnight snowfall could lay down a metre or two of the white stuff. There were complaints from angry residents of Bracknell, unable to attend work.. and reports of twenty odd schools closed.. that's almost half the schools in the Borough! I, and my two fellow couriers somehow managed to weave through the carnage that was the muppet show on wheels, and alight at work without being late, and two colleagues also made it in, and they travel in some distance of a morning.
It's amazing what a bit of foresight can do. The forecast says snow; you look out of the window before going to bed and the ground has snow on it; you might just think to yourself.. hmm, there may be snow on the ground in the morning, plus some to clear off the car. You have two options, wake up as normal, leave the house for your ten minute drive to work, and look down in utter despair and realise it wasn't a draem afterall.. and then turn up an hour or two late. On the other hand, you could take into account the facts that you've accumulated over the previous evening, get out of your pit a bit earlier, and look out of the window. The worst that can happen is that it's melted overnight and you get an extra twenty minutes of breakfast telly, and a second cup of tea before you go out.
The driving skills of some, making the treacherous journey to their place of work that morning, were of a standard not seen outside of the city streets of Rome before. I went thirty yards from my house to find some poor sod straddling a chicane bollard. If you stick your brakes on going round a tight corner, with snow or ice between your wheels and the ground, you effectively switch off your steering. That's the theory, and it was nice for some kind person to give a live demonstration for all to see. A bit further up the road, I drove cautiously past a TVR, proving to all around that 400 horses pounding under the bonnet doesn't get you up a hill any quicker. On the roundabout, another unfortunate had managed to accessorise the front of his '54 reg BMW estate with an eye-catching decorative trim in the shape of a traffic light. Yes, it's the first time I'd seen an orange flashing light on a beemer as well.. :)
Sadly, all the roads were clear of both snow and muppets by about 10 o'clock, but we've still got a small chance of some more in the next day or so.
I've also been playing around with the website a lot recently, hence the [relative] lack of posts here. Thanks to loads of advice from Renegade over at Min-Data, it's looking pretty good at the moment. I do have a bit of a problem with the content filling at the moment. Like this place, I seem to spend at least as much time buggering about with the mechanics and appearance of the site as I do in actually adding any useful stuff to read and digest. With the blog, it's probably not quite as fatal as the site, as quiet a few of you (thankyou all) link here, so I'm still getting new visitors popping in. The site though, needs to be kept fresh, dynamic and engaging in order to attract a regular supply of readers to it.
I want it to be all those things, but I also want it to be as good technically as I can make it, and as I only have so much time in any one day, the content does seem to come second to me playing around with display settings; that.. and the fact that I've only been a webmaster for the better part of 5 weeks, and what would take an accomplished site builder a matter of minutes to do, could realistically take me an day or more, especially if I have a great thought on improving the layout, and not the faintest flippin' idea on how to actually accomplish it.
As an aside, and I've only had a quick google, and couldn't see anything; is there a js cross-browser compatabilty script anywhere. A thought occurred to me, as my site looks less than perfect in Firefox, and closer to rubbish in Opera (I downloaded it to test the site only.. and after seeing what it does, I won't be using it again) that if it's known what differences there are in each browser on actioning a line of code, it would be relatively simple for a script to be written that you can just add to the head of your page(s) that could adapt the various code parameters depending your browser. Perhaps I'll teach myself Java.. I have a book and the couple of CDs that came with it.. it can't be that difficult.. can it?? hahaha
I've just finished my first online form as well. This is for work, and was a case of me being asked for my views on the questions to be used and going off and building the whole form from scratch. It works as well.. surprisingly. I can get it to submit all the relevant info back to me, or anyone else for that matter, via email as a simple data string. What I'm going to be doing in the next day or two, is to [try to] get it to upload all the data into a spread sheet, or if it's more feasable, to an Access database. I've completed my obligatory half day course in basic Excel, so I'm obviously more than qualified to take that to the next level, and having just done a quick folder search whilst writing this, have found that I do indeed have Access installed on my machine. I now know more about the application than I did a minute a go. Should be fun. I picked up a book on Access today, so along with Google, and some luck, I'll be an expert in building databases come Friday or Saturday.
You see what I mean about being more interested in the mechanics of something, than in interesting monologue. This blog is a testament to this fact. I thought I'd say it before anybody else did. :)
Righty-ho, it's darts night tonight, and I should be half way through my first sweet sherry if there was a God, which must mean that He's keeping quiet, or Vardy et al. must be lying toerags. Well I had to put in some controversy, and it makes a change from Europe or Blair. With the elections probably happening in around nine and a half weeks (if I was better at this, I'm sure I could have put an hilarious coment in there, but I'm not so I won't) I'll be spleen venting with the best of 'em shortly.
As another aside, my local MP, Andrew McKay sent me a nice letter thanking me for my previous support of him in other elections. That was nice, but I thought my vote was secret, so how did he know that. I've never been on the payroll of the Conservative party, or even stuck the poster in my window before?? How strange, and yes I'm being a tad facaetious here.. :)
Where was I.. oh yes, darts..
Bye!!
Cheers
Liam
Long time no see. As the title suggests, it really is about time I put finger to keyboard.. but I'm not sure what I'm going to write yet. I figure that I ought to mention the snow we've had. Bracknell has a freebie paper called the Midweek News. The front page had a full page spread (minus the ads of course) piece about the snow here in Bracknell. I'm paraphrasing, as the paper is at work.. but the lead sentence went something along the lines of..
"Bracknell was brought to a standstill, with traffic gridlocked and several accidents, when a centimetre (about 0.4 inches for those that prefer to deal in proper money) of snow fell on Bracknell."
A centimetre.. I've been to Norway, and Austria several times. How come they can manage to run as smoothly as ever, when an overnight snowfall could lay down a metre or two of the white stuff. There were complaints from angry residents of Bracknell, unable to attend work.. and reports of twenty odd schools closed.. that's almost half the schools in the Borough! I, and my two fellow couriers somehow managed to weave through the carnage that was the muppet show on wheels, and alight at work without being late, and two colleagues also made it in, and they travel in some distance of a morning.
It's amazing what a bit of foresight can do. The forecast says snow; you look out of the window before going to bed and the ground has snow on it; you might just think to yourself.. hmm, there may be snow on the ground in the morning, plus some to clear off the car. You have two options, wake up as normal, leave the house for your ten minute drive to work, and look down in utter despair and realise it wasn't a draem afterall.. and then turn up an hour or two late. On the other hand, you could take into account the facts that you've accumulated over the previous evening, get out of your pit a bit earlier, and look out of the window. The worst that can happen is that it's melted overnight and you get an extra twenty minutes of breakfast telly, and a second cup of tea before you go out.
The driving skills of some, making the treacherous journey to their place of work that morning, were of a standard not seen outside of the city streets of Rome before. I went thirty yards from my house to find some poor sod straddling a chicane bollard. If you stick your brakes on going round a tight corner, with snow or ice between your wheels and the ground, you effectively switch off your steering. That's the theory, and it was nice for some kind person to give a live demonstration for all to see. A bit further up the road, I drove cautiously past a TVR, proving to all around that 400 horses pounding under the bonnet doesn't get you up a hill any quicker. On the roundabout, another unfortunate had managed to accessorise the front of his '54 reg BMW estate with an eye-catching decorative trim in the shape of a traffic light. Yes, it's the first time I'd seen an orange flashing light on a beemer as well.. :)
Sadly, all the roads were clear of both snow and muppets by about 10 o'clock, but we've still got a small chance of some more in the next day or so.
I've also been playing around with the website a lot recently, hence the [relative] lack of posts here. Thanks to loads of advice from Renegade over at Min-Data, it's looking pretty good at the moment. I do have a bit of a problem with the content filling at the moment. Like this place, I seem to spend at least as much time buggering about with the mechanics and appearance of the site as I do in actually adding any useful stuff to read and digest. With the blog, it's probably not quite as fatal as the site, as quiet a few of you (thankyou all) link here, so I'm still getting new visitors popping in. The site though, needs to be kept fresh, dynamic and engaging in order to attract a regular supply of readers to it.
I want it to be all those things, but I also want it to be as good technically as I can make it, and as I only have so much time in any one day, the content does seem to come second to me playing around with display settings; that.. and the fact that I've only been a webmaster for the better part of 5 weeks, and what would take an accomplished site builder a matter of minutes to do, could realistically take me an day or more, especially if I have a great thought on improving the layout, and not the faintest flippin' idea on how to actually accomplish it.
As an aside, and I've only had a quick google, and couldn't see anything; is there a js cross-browser compatabilty script anywhere. A thought occurred to me, as my site looks less than perfect in Firefox, and closer to rubbish in Opera (I downloaded it to test the site only.. and after seeing what it does, I won't be using it again) that if it's known what differences there are in each browser on actioning a line of code, it would be relatively simple for a script to be written that you can just add to the head of your page(s) that could adapt the various code parameters depending your browser. Perhaps I'll teach myself Java.. I have a book and the couple of CDs that came with it.. it can't be that difficult.. can it?? hahaha
I've just finished my first online form as well. This is for work, and was a case of me being asked for my views on the questions to be used and going off and building the whole form from scratch. It works as well.. surprisingly. I can get it to submit all the relevant info back to me, or anyone else for that matter, via email as a simple data string. What I'm going to be doing in the next day or two, is to [try to] get it to upload all the data into a spread sheet, or if it's more feasable, to an Access database. I've completed my obligatory half day course in basic Excel, so I'm obviously more than qualified to take that to the next level, and having just done a quick folder search whilst writing this, have found that I do indeed have Access installed on my machine. I now know more about the application than I did a minute a go. Should be fun. I picked up a book on Access today, so along with Google, and some luck, I'll be an expert in building databases come Friday or Saturday.
You see what I mean about being more interested in the mechanics of something, than in interesting monologue. This blog is a testament to this fact. I thought I'd say it before anybody else did. :)
Righty-ho, it's darts night tonight, and I should be half way through my first sweet sherry if there was a God, which must mean that He's keeping quiet, or Vardy et al. must be lying toerags. Well I had to put in some controversy, and it makes a change from Europe or Blair. With the elections probably happening in around nine and a half weeks (if I was better at this, I'm sure I could have put an hilarious coment in there, but I'm not so I won't) I'll be spleen venting with the best of 'em shortly.
As another aside, my local MP, Andrew McKay sent me a nice letter thanking me for my previous support of him in other elections. That was nice, but I thought my vote was secret, so how did he know that. I've never been on the payroll of the Conservative party, or even stuck the poster in my window before?? How strange, and yes I'm being a tad facaetious here.. :)
Where was I.. oh yes, darts..
Bye!!
Cheers
Liam
posted by Liam | 6:38 PM
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