29 Oct 2004
In a cruel twist of fate (or at least Orange’s network rollout and upgrade roadmap policy), reception in what used to be blackspots around my house has improved dramatically in the last 48 hours.
I’d been waiting to see whether this could last before posting, and now, as it seems that it has, I do so. Those who follow my life as published in this space will be aware of the plans to vacate the current place of residence to move elsewhere: naturally, as this has been confirmed, mobile coverage here improves!
There isn’t really all that much more to say, other than that my bedroom used to be a no-go area for making phone calls on my mobile, but now works fine… I hope the coverage wherever we move to is as good!
29 Oct 2004
“A word to the wise”
*stares distastefully at the state of United States “anti-terrorism” policy*
28 Oct 2004
This morning, when someone was unable to stop laughing:
Think about dead puppies!
– Lucy
This, of course, only further pushed people into hysterics.
Later today, when someone else was unable to stop laughing:
Think about dead puppies! … Works every time!
– Lucy
The first instance included a few more words, which made the second far more amusing than perhaps it should have been. Guess you had to be there?
28 Oct 2004
I just noticed what is (to me) a new feature over at the Dalegroup.net root website, which loads a random image for each request. It’s quite stylish; my personal favorite image is number 6, because dead trees are cool! Erm… yes.
What, you want details? The contrast between the tree and the sky is great, as is the degree of change in lighting (specifically shadow) evident on the tree itself. Perspective is a bit wonky, but as always, it’s a subjective thing! That, and the crop probably enhances any perspective evident in the original (which I have seen, but don’t recall all that well).
I’m tempted to steal this idea, although I have no idea how best to apply it here. Whenever I get around to working up a new style for this website (I’ve got a sketch, but no time to implement), we’ll see how best to plagiarise that concept — which is of course featured on other websites in turn, perhaps most notably Photo Matt.
One thing I’ll bear in mind, and would perhaps recommend Michael looks at, is keeping the filesize of the images right down, to the extent that load times aren’t consequential to any users — this is far more important when displaying images as CSS backgrounds, because there aren’t any placeholder graphics displayed in user agents by default, so users won’t wait for them to load! Another suggestion more immediately applicable and concrete is that instead of generating a new stylesheet from PHP, thus completely killing browser caching (half of the advantage of CSS), you have a single CSS file and use inline styles, or the style attribute with a specific tag, to specify your custom backgrounds.
Aside from that, it’s snazzy!
28 Oct 2004
Rinkworks Book-A-Minute Classics website is hilarious. Go there.
(Thanks Tori!)