It was, I suppose, inevitable.

Fatty has done his bit for Blogging cross-promotion by linking back to here. He has however discovered that this clever trackback/pingback business doesn’t work. This little post should test to see whether it’s all just lies.

Those who know me will know that this is far from being my first homepage. In fact, at the last count this is the third. For sake of posterity (and an interesting history of my [x]HTML coding abilities), Versions 1 and 2 of this site have been uploaded to the following locations:

While forever far from being the man’s greatest admirer, 4 years in GWB has still not lost his quotability.

Some time ago in my Students’ Social column I raved about spell checker extension for Firefox. When the 0.9 FX update came the spell checker lost compatibility and my spelling went to pot.

It appears that in my eagerness to jump on XHTML, I’d completely overlooked the meaning of mark-up.

Ben Goodger has released details of Mozilla Firefox not a beta release prior to 1.0. Firefox 0.10 should be out mid-August and see the bug list shrinking dramatically. It’s promising news, having personally been a keen follower of the project for probably going a year now (and longer, if you include Mozilla’s Suite product as well).

… I highly recommend you Prepare for an Emergency!.

The side affect of my new job is that I now have less debt. In a month or two, I will back in the black for the first time in about 14 months. It’s a really nice feeling, tarnished only by my unquenchable thirst to spend it all.

My geek-enduring girlfriend, Jo has updated her Blog with some cutting comments about a section of the Firefox community. And she’s right about it all. Not just because she has an automatic “I’m right” veto, but because it’s actually all true.

Last night I adapted a Blogroll for use with this shiny new blog o’ mine. It was very nice, got the latest update list from blog.gs and it worked.

The blogroll is fixed! Not really sure what was wrong, but today has been one of those days for senseless bugs, another occurred when I managed to inexplicably lose 4,500 navigation links somewhere in the depths of the Fujitsu-Siemens dev database.

The rather lovely Aqua Soft.org has been relaunched this week with a new B2Evo powered front end and a selection of gorgeous Tiger influenced skins.

I’ve recently got into listening to Last FM via this t’internet of ours. It’s online radio and a sister site of the fantastically cool AudioScrobbler.

For ages I’ve been a total, complete and utter wuss. It’s a well known and rarely denied fact about me.

Firefox, my web browser of choice and reserve gravestone engraving is evolving nicely as it approaches the end of it’s long and much respected test phase.

I’ve been quiet for a little while of late. Firstly because projects at work are getting big and eating any chance of a ‘quick blog at lunchtime’ like I’d get in the first month. I’m also spending my evenings working on a new website project, and the first which will make its way into my forthcoming portfolio. The hope being that I’ll have a portfolio of around 5 finished sites by next summer that will make someone want to pay me to do some freelance work before Uni starts up again.

I’m on holiday for two weeks! Woohoo!

It has been, frankly, a while since I last wrote anything here. There are a huge number of things I could write about, since I’ve been on holiday, starting working on a new programming project, figured out some clever little ideas for my forthcoming blog redesign and generally had a decent amount go on in my life. But that’s a lot of entries. So here’s one big one.

From Tom McRae‘s weblog. Without a doubt my favourite ’wintertime’ artist (his songs don’t seem quite right in summer). For a man who writes such dark lyrics, he has a black but quite hilarious sense of humour. Since he’s not got a new album out yet (though he is touring this autumn), I figured I’d offer him some promotion based on his humour talents instead.

I’ve spent 4 days reinstalling my system. Only now, after much swapping of PCI cards, hardware conflicts, crackling sound and the eventual (and unwilling) disabling of my RAID controller do I have a system that resembles stable.

Well, I finally started using my Gmail account. It took a while as I’m a long term lover of standalone email apps. I’ve used Outlook mostly but gave Mozilla’s Thunderbird a run out for a couple of weeks.

On mentioning my current habit of writing NME bashing song lyrics, Sarah just recited me this poem.

… into the month of October and I’ve blogged something on 4 of those days. Sure this is some kind of important record? Heck, the two I missed were only void due to me leaving the house to have a real life. Now if only I had something useful to say.

Somewhere in the cosmos, someone has it in for me.

Apologies to those few who try to read this blog regularly. The site has been down for a few days while my ever-helpful host (NeatHosting) tried to handle my site being spammed for all corners of the globe.

Being the geek that I am, I’ve been updating to the latest Firefox nightly every few days. Along with being able to enjoy the evolving fruits of Kevin Gerich’s Winstripe theme, I also get to prod at the new features.

I had my first weekend in Manchester for about 4 months last week. It’s been wonderful to be honest. I love the city, and seeing my housemates from the past two years was really, really nice. I know a lot of students spread themselves around and live with different sets of people in each of their years, but I’ve been lucky with the people I met and lived with Ack, Ric, Mike, Sean and Gary for two.
Visiting again was strange, in that I fitted straight in again, as if I’d never been away. I guess the saying is true: You don’t realise what you’ve got until it’s 300 miles away and you go visit. Or maybe I made that saying up. Regardless, it’s true though.

I’ve been slowly working through my iTunes music library adding album art to my MP3s this week. (Aside: damn them and their rather-too-soon-for-my-liking Colour Screen iPods). While Amazon generally provides good quality album art at an optimal size of 300x300 px I’ve hit situations where album art simply does not exist. Tonight was Radiohead night, revealing problems with live shows and bootleg albums which (unsurprisingly) Amazon do not stock.

I had the pleasure of visiting the Natural History Museum’s exhibition of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year finalists on Sunday.</p>

Oh bloody hell.

I initially wrote rather a long rant here. It was rather harsh on America and Bush voters. I still stand by everything I said, but it was ultimately purposeless in publication. Therefore I’m leaving just the following abridged paragraph, and a question. The question is “Why?”.

I’m still no nearer to reskinning and enhancing this Blog I’m afraid. Josh’s ResinTheBand.com site is still in need of having its content completed and my iTunes-related app is progressing a little each week too.

The regularity of stop-me-in-my-tracks IE bugs is starting to drag.

If you’re already familiar with MsgPlus – a feature packed MSN Messenger addin – you may or may not be aware of the fact that MsgPlus can itself install add-ons of its own.

Jeffrey Zeldman recently supplied keynote video for a Web Essentials conference in Australia. Unable to attend, he offers up a short, sweet and highly entertaining presentation on web standards and their influence on today’s internet.

One of my most desired features in Firefox is to have a “Split Window” view, like you can have in Microsoft Word (and probably others too). It displays the same document in two panes, one above the other and lets you scroll to a different position in each each. Immensely useful if you’re trying to keep track of a previous part of a document while reading further on.

Students’ Social – the somewhat desolate interweb community run by myself and David Thompson – is going to be down for a few days.

Following my recent work on the website for Resin, I came across Five Mistakes… about designing band sites. It’s an interesting read, makes some interesting points and confirms that I need to rethink the navigation. Jo raised concerns over whether the ‘popout’ style of the nav menus was really any good and I’ve been pondering the same before and since, especially in the light of having found other and worse implementations of ‘drop down’ navigation at work.

Something which has always bugged me about MP3 (or whatever compression format you’re using today) is the complete irrelevance of the <var>Genre</var> field in ID3 tags. It’s rubbish. Why media players continue to offer me the choice of browsing by genre is beyond me – what does a list that contains, for instance, “Rock & Punk”, “Punk”, “Alternative Rock”, “Alt.Rock”, “Soft Rock” actually mean? What is the difference between songs in each of those ‘catagories’.

I’m going through a little ‘collect my Blog’ phase, having got myself linked into Technorati and – with a bit of luck – the below image will sort out BlogShares. It’s nice to mark something as my own. ;)

This was posted to the CSS public mailing list (www-style) today.

This should traditionally probably go in the side-links section. However, having listened to it twice, this new recording by PTA (whose membership includes one-quarter former housemate) is so damn good it needs to be plugged right here, right now.

Wishing you well and that you may indulge the Christmas spirit (of your choice) in a way that doesn’t get you hurt.