Cricalix.Net

I watch maybe 2 movies a year at the cinema – the rest I watch on the 4 available TV channels, or perhaps rent the DVD. I’ve found the first movie to watch this year – Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – featuring Alan Rickman as the voice of Marvin (perfect if you ask me!). I’m not sure on the round-head Marvin appearance, but that’s the problem with books – they leave way too much to the imagination.

The trailer is also quite brilliant as trailers go – it talks about itself as an entry in the Guide. Very amusing.

UberCon V is just 2 days away now, and I won’t be there. Granted, I didn’t make it to UberCon II either, but that doesn’t make me any happier. I suppose I can take solace in the fact that I won’t be spending 16+ hours in an airplane and working like an absolute maniac for 4 days. In the meantime, as CTO and chief electronic madness guru, I get to worry about whether everything is working, how we’re going to improve the online scheduler for the next con in October and how we can better integrate with Dave’s app server CONGO.
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Well, it’s now pretty much 2 months since I returned from my Christmas cruise through the Panama Canal. I carried my Canon A75 with me, Mum brought her A65, and Dad had the older Kodak DC3400. Mum also brought her Archos digital jukebox – I had bought it for her as an early birthday/Christmas gift several months before the trip (right before UberCon IV) – but forgot to bring the compact flash reader attachment.

By the end of the trip, I had managed to take 1164 photographs, totalling just over 1 gigabyte of images. This was after deleting numerous movies and images that didn’t make the grade on the camera’s display. I had only taken my 32, 64 and 128 MB cards with me (all that I owned!), banking on the fact that Mum was bring a 20 GB jukebox with a CF adapter – thank the $deities of digital photography that one of the ports we visited had a 512 MB CF card on sale for about 60 USD.

The cruise started in Florida, and ended in San Diego via Aruba, the Panama Canal, Huatulco, Acapulco and Cabo San Lucas. We were meant to go to Costa Rica as well, but a gentleman on board developed internal bleeding as we were sailing from Panama City to Punteranas, so the ship had to turn around to take him to hospital. The only option the captain had was to skip Costa Rica – so I’ll have to get back there one day to see what I missed.
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Growing up in the Caribbean has apparently given me a liking for various ‘ethnic’ foods, such as (what is colloquially called) Chinese, Thai, Indian and of course, Caribbean. I suppose I could also blame my parents for feeding me things like stir-fry, roti and curry as a child, but blame would be the wrong word – thank would be the right one. I ran out of anything that looked vaguely appetizing for lunch today. Fortunately, there was a menu for one of the local Thai restaurants, Art of Siam (ST5 1QL), on my fishtank and a quick glance before leaving the house confirmed it – Thai for lunch.

So, lunch was a phad thai, and what they advertise as a golden basket. I am now comfortably sated, and pondering the current British weather. For those not in the know, phad thai is fried rice noodles with prawns (decent sized ones too), bean sprouts, ground peanut, egg and spices; a truly wonderful dish, recommended by a mate at work a few months ago. A golden basket was just some deep fried prawns in tempura batter, and onion rings. The prawns would have been better if it hadn’t been a takeaway, as there was too much steam in the container. Oh, and they gave me reusable containers instead of the usual stiff card that the local Chinese restaurants are fond of. All for 7 quid, and I still have some chili sauce and prawn crackers for a snack tonight.

Dave, you’re an absolute scoundrel for posting about the HHGTTG game. I thought Nanaca-crash was addictive.

$dayjob involves writing web interfaces to databases. As such, I get to experience the wonderful world of browser rendering differences quite a bit. Those of you who do web work with CSS know all too well the pain that Internet Explorer can inflict on a developer. The one that suprised me today though, is how differently Firefox and Konqueror render the top part of this blog (let alone other parts).

Firefox

Konqueror

I think Firefox has done a better job on the rendering (ignore the underline on the 42, that’s just having always underline links enabled) – the Konqueror render looks very rough in comparison. So the background job today is to find out why Konqueror looks so horrible.

I must admit, I’ve meant to put together a personal website of some kind for years now. I’ve been using the ‘net since the mid-90s, when 9600 bps modems were über-fast, and über-expensive. I think I still had a 2400 at the time, but I can’t remember if it was a coupler or RJ-11 variant. Dial-up was into a VMS machine, run by Cable and Wireless (or Clueless and Witless, depending on who you ask). Once logged in, a simple menu came up – Telnet, FTP, E-Mail, Kermit. The e-mail client must have been from hell, as it required a keyboard with PF keys. I had one, but I could never work out just what keystrokes needed to be mapped.

Telnet and FTP were both metered services – but Kermit.. well, they had forgotten to disable the telnet capability of kermit, and it wasn’t metered! One ‘Internet Directory’ book later, and I was on the net, poking at freenets. An eco-oriented one became my home for a while, and from there I found talkers, lynx and MUDs. What a fun time it was.

Anyway.. personal homepage. I’ve never had a useful one, despite a desire to post book reviews, photos etc. Perhaps I’ll manage to do it for once. Then again, this might just be a passing fad for me – it’s only taken me 18+ months to decide to play with a blogger.