Category: blogs

Burnt Orange

9/9/2005 /
Old Site Screenshot, Default Theme

It’s been a busy week, but I’ve finally managed to get my personal built theme finished. I’m calling it “Burnt Orange”. Finally I can bid goodbye to the default look…

The theme was based around a similar layout to the original default, however I have significantly rewritten the code to the main index page, and the stylesheet is completely new. The colours are based on my LCD flatscreen, so they might need fine tuning to look their best on a regular CRT monitor. Colours are usually brighter on a regular screen, which is why you won’t see graphics professionals on flat screens. Contrast ratio has a lot to do with it, since the difference between pure white and pure black on a flat screen is rarely as great as on a regular monitor.

Please let me know if you like it, or if you have any problems with the way it displays in your browser (it should be OK in Firefox and IE6). I’ve tried to test everything but I may have missed some things. One thing I think is missing is a nice image in the header or something, I’m still looking for inspiration.

New Design Nearly Finished

4/9/2005 /

I’ve had quite a productive weekend, in spite of the heat. We went to buy some parquet flooring for the baby’s room, and I’ll be taking some time off in the week to fit it with a friend. I managed to get most of the housework done Saturday, so today has been relaxed. Friends came over for lunch, they really liked the way the flat is decorated. My hard work and Yasmina’s good taste is beginning to pay off since the look of the place is finished (and looking good :-D) except for the flooring.

I’ve just fixed the main layout issues I was having with my new blog design, so I should be ready to get the new look up over the course of this week. I just need some images to make the page have some character. As a preview, you can see the “random wisdom” block already installed. It will look better when integrated into the new design.

The random wisdom quotes used to be added automatically into my email signature, back in the time when my email client was mutt – a linux text-based email client. I’m pretty much obliged – for convenience in communication mostly – to use Outlook now. 🙁

Have a good start to your week, everyone. As for the people in New Orleans – all their hard work on their homes is wrecked… there’s a sobering thought. My heart goes out to them.

Hey Bulldog

1/9/2005 /

Child-like — No one understands,
Jack knife — In your sweaty hands,
Some kind of innocence is measured out in years
You don’t know what it’s like to listen to your fears
Lennon/McCartney 1968

This relatively obscure track “Hey Bulldog” from the Beatles album “Yellow Submarine” is a cult classic. Perhaps this bulldog will become a cult classic too. In his own somewhat contradictory profile, the Bulldog is “slower than your average mutt” and just wants “[…] a peaceful home, something good to eat, an occasional hump (any leg will do!), and somebody to pay attention to us”. I think he wants a bit more than that, like a liberal and free America. The American Dream is moving further from liberty and economic freedom (land of the free indeed) with every cent added to the price of petrol (gas) at the pump. Judging by this recent post on the “great divide”, the division of wealth is getting worse in America. Well worth a read.

Like the quoted song verse suggests, being childlike and innocent is not easy as you grow up. Some people clearly don’t understand, and are hiding in their safe place. You know, that place where politicians are honest, work for the common man and towards a better world. Unfortunately they are much more likely to be pushing for increasing foreign exports and better sales for the businesses they ultimately are working for. The common man works for these businesses, but he’s getting less and less of a share of the profits. Shareholders benefit from your work, not you. Less Americans have health insurance. You’re more likely to be living with less buying power and more credit than ever before : US consumer credit is at $17,490 per household at present, with over 2 trillion US$ total consumer credit for the population as a whole.

Rising US consumer debt, July 2001 – July 2005

Graph showing rising US consumer debt both in absolute and per household terms

Maybe you should listen to your fears. Avoiding your fears doesn’t mean that people who are courageous enough to confront theirs are wrong. The statistics are plotted in my graph above – my sources are the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Census Bureau. The economy is firmly based on consumer credit. At least you can be thankful unemployment is stable at around 5%. However if it starts to rise again, what happens to all that credit left to pay off?

I’m a British guy living in France, a casual observer of world politics. Unemployment here is at 9.9% – original source (French). The social system is far from perfect. People cannot get jobs out of university mostly because the employee is over-protected by the state, and the unions are too strong to bring in much needed reform. Strikes are a big issue. But at least most people seem to be better addressing their fears and have a more natural tendency to criticise their leaders. Don’t be afraid to question the US administration.

Pondering Redesign

30/8/2005 /

I’ve been looking around at a number of blogs lately, and those which have the most impact invariably use custom built templates. Some political blogs get away with being successful whilst having standard templates, but in recent “Battle of the Blogs” contests at Blog Explosion I have lost badly. I fail to see how I could be losing so consistently except due to aesthetic considerations – especially since the observant amongst you would see that I have already done some content based customisation. WordPress doesn’t have a calendar archive, a random joke in the footer, or recent posts in the sidebar in the default out of the box configuration.

One thing that I find a little disappointing is that the default theme (Kubrick) is actually quite nice, and therefore the work required to do something at least as pleasing is not trivial. I had hoped the content would be the main criterion of judgement; but without a unique design I think this is not going to hold true. Especially since I’m not a political blogger who could earn points by slamming the current US government. Indeed, perhaps my content is still the problem :-D.

So I’ve started work on a new template for this blog. I came across an excellent guide to help quick start my work, saving me a lot of time I would otherwise have lost in dissecting the themes structure myself. I only have limited time to work on this, so I don’t expect it will be live too quickly. Just the initial issues with CSS compatibility between IE and Mozilla/Firefox means that you have a couple of hours work to get the different blocks of content structured just right. The main threat is the CSS box model which requires hacks since IE places the padding and margin inside the defined width of a block element, whereas Firefox correctly places it outside. For example, a <div> of width 200px – including padding of 4px – will have to be set to width:192px in Firefox and width:200px in IE. Put another way, in Firefox the CSS width defines the width of the actual content, whereas IE takes the width to be the entire element’s width including padding and margins.

Your comments about the content of this blog and whether or not the redesign is important would be most appreciated. Feel free to post just a few words – any feedback is better than none at all.

Meta Blogging : Five Interesting Places

21/8/2005 /

While surfing around for inspiration – which I do mostly on other blogs – I am more often than not tempted to post on those blogs, in context, rather than steal an idea and rehash it here. So, rather than write a post of my thoughts today, I thought I’d link to my thoughts in context i.e. on those other blogs. This list also serves a double purpose as it will allow you to follow the home link to some interesting articles to read; it’s well worth checking out the blogs that are linked here.

Five thought provoking blogs I’ve been to this week :

  1. First of all I was caught by an interesting discussion on how the distinction, or separation, of species has caused debate and philosophical difficulty since (at least) Aristotle at The Lyceum. This blog is worth following for its regular philosophical posts. This is (thankfully!) not a collection of personal two-cent philosophy – the blog author has clearly studied philosophy and philosophical enquiry and this shines through in the posts which are make interesting reading.
  2. Onto a blog with rather a different subject : mostly criticism of the current US administration, axed around the war in Iraq, and the economical situation surrounding it. You’ve probably been there before if you’re a Blog Explosion reader : The Martian Anthropologist. Here my reply got lost in a wash of other replies, perhaps because I was saying something that everyone already knows. In any case, a blog worth following whatever your political leanings.
  3. A post on Education, particularly the difficulty cashiers seem to have with giving change, elicited a response from me over at Avatar Briefs. This blog contains posts based around thoughts on varied subjects, a bit like my blog tries to do.
  4. Christopher and Christine pose somewhat rhetorical questions to which they reply from their perspective and these are followed by comments which tend to side with one or the other. I clearly side with Christine on the question of fidelity (I allude to “a contract of trust”) at Chris vs Chris. It’s a favourite of mine and already blogrolled.
  5. Finally, a blog worth a mention even though I haven’t commented there yet : it looks very nice, makes a good use of styles and colours, and is home to my personal “amusing post of the week” tying science with masturbation. Find 21 reasons for manual stimulation at Urban Semiotic. You’ll find a lot of intelligent thought provoking writing there: from what I have read, it’s not all jokes about wanking…

“Meta Blogging” – blogging about blogging, but also an abstraction of blogging.

Gran’s 5 Questions via a Knee

20/8/2005 /

I believe this game was invented by Gran’s on Bran. I found it on Knee. Usually a blog about having complex knee surgery, it’s also part of the Blog Explosion “community” and as such gets drawn into these blog trends as do I. But why not, it’s fun!

Rules

  • If you want to participate, leave a comment below saying “Interview me.â€Â? (â€Â?Tickle meâ€Â? or “Caress meâ€Â? are not acceptable substitutes.) You must leave your blog address so I can think of good questions for you!
  • I will respond by asking you five questions – each person’s will be different. I’ll post the questions in the comments section of this post.
  • You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
  • You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post.
  • When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Bentley92 asks, having prefaced his questions “Thankfully you gave me a lot to work with. I hope you enjoy the questions and it makes you think a bit (but not too much).” :

1. Why do you love cats or what made you a cat person (I’m personally a dog guy)?
I like dogs too, I just couldn’t keep a dog because my wife and I both work and it’s unfair to keep a mutt in an apartment all day. I grew up with cats and dogs, always loved having animal company.

2. What brought you to France and how long do you plan on staying there?
I didn’t speak any French until I got to senior school (high school). I did well in French and went on to do a French degree at university. Part of the degree course was a year in France, and I lived there for 8 months. Then I went back to England, but ended up in Morocco (long story for another post). In Morocco I got married and my wife and I decided that we wanted to be in Europe, and France was a better for our employment chances. It’s also cheaper to live in France compared to the UK and house prices are much more reasonable, so we bought a flat here and intend staying pretty much indefinitely. I hope to expand on things about France (especially the idiosyncratic differences in daily life) from time to time on this blog.

3. Was it a hard decision to find out the sex of your child before the birth? I have twin boys, didn’t find out what they were till they were born.
At the scan where we were able to find out the sex, we both agreed that we wanted to know. It was a natural decision, I think that waiting for the surprise would have been difficult for us both, we are too curious.

4. As an Englishman, do the English follow the Tour de France as much as the French and who did you pull for?
I don’t think the English follow the tour like the French do, but it does get reasonable coverage on English TV. I am a fan of Vinokourov, but I like seeing Armstrong in the mountains and generally the battles between the top riders. Being in France allows me to follow the tour every day, and I take part in a fantasy cycling game with some friends which you can read in the Tour de France category. It keeps the interest going every day and encourages some friendly rivalry.

5. Where do you get your interest in science?
I’m interested in most things. Computers, sport, cars, movies, science, technology, music (I play keyboards and guitar) and I read a lot online and offline. I read a lot of history, philosophy and fiction in general. I’ve been keen on science fiction recently, see the post “reading for free”. I’ll probably review Accelerando in an upcoming post, I finished it a few days ago. Science is such a wide subject and with so many fascinating discoveries and advancements made all the time, I feel compelled to follow the science and IT news to keep up to date with it all.

Thanks for the interesting questions Bentley, I’m keen to see how the surgery goes so I’ll check in from time to time. Good luck!

Chain Answers

15/8/2005 /

I found this on Isn’t it a strange world we live in. It’s a list of things to write about someone who comments on your blog. Since Tina took the time to answer for me, I’m posting her answers (in italics) and the same challenge goes out to anyone else who comments on this post.

  1. I’ll respond with a random thought I have about you.
    I like the cat.
  2. I’ll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
    “Mr. Roboto” by Stix
  3. I’ll pick a flavor of jello to wrestle with you in.
    Chocolate
  4. I’ll say something that only makes sense to you and me (or so we think).
    I love shopping at Ikea.
  5. I’ll tell you my first memory of you.
    That cat picture.
  6. I’ll tell you what intoxicant you remind me of.
    Volka     [sic]
  7. I’ll ask you something that I’ve always wondered about you.
    Are you a cat person?
  8. If I do this for you, you must post this on your journal.

To answer the question, yes I’m a cat person. I have two cats that came over to France with me from Morocco, so they’re North African and trilingual (English, French and Moroccan Arabic). The pictured cat is Chico, a tomcat. Suzie is the other cat, a black puss. She’ll be appearing soon.

I had a scare with my hosting earlier today, my blog was down for a while. So I’m off to make a backup (again) since I’m paranoid about losing posts…

An Original Blog

10/8/2005 /

Auction Funk is a blog that I have just discovered via Blog Explosion, a site that allows you to surf other blogs in the network and earn credit for people to come to surf your blog. For each blog that you visit, you earn credit towards visits to your blog. Feel free to say hello if you have come in from Blog Explosion.

The concept is of Auction Funk is simple : find stuff that has sold in auctions for high prices, but that seems rather like junk. What is interesting about this particular blog is the work that goes into the research behind each selected item. The blog author reads up on the value of similar items and links to other sites. They don’t just find an interesting item that sold for a high price, but they find something to say about it, and say it well. I hope it keeps up a regular level of posting.

One item on the site is an Apple II computer board. Not the original Apple, but the one that followed soon afterwards. Home computing was rather a hobbyist’s pursuit at the time, and you had to buy separate components and build your own machine. That board was pretty much all you got from Apple. These items are very valuable because they’re rare and they represent part of history especially for Apple fans who form rather a cult group (at least the hardcore fans).

Part of the mystique of Apple is that they got beaten by Microsoft Windows even with a massive head start, shipping a decent GUI way before Microsoft did. Some sites however underplay the rôle of Xerox PARC – where a lot of the true innovation happened, and Apple copied from them as much as anyone else did. As for who brought the GUI to the masses, it’s between MS and Apple. Let’s say Apple got there first but MS followed swiftly behind and with rather more astute (and questionable) business practices. Rather than rehash an old story, read this page which seems to sum it up quite reasonably.