Monthly Archives: May 2003

Not Again!?

Thursday May 15th 2003

Yes, I note the howls of derision from the back. Yes, I went and changed it after only five minutes. No, I don’t know if it works in all the leading browsers. Yes, you’re right I couldn’t have spent long on it… because I didn’t.

What you see here is just a refined style sheet and a couple of new images. I’ve been doing some style sheet work at work this week, trying to optimise and refine at the same time. Decided to use my own site as a testbed because the intranet at work is a table based layout and it wouldn’t really make much difference if I refine the style sheet.

So I spent this afternoon messing around with this one, and I quite like it so I uploaded it. I have kept the old one just in case I go off it, but I’ve done that before and I have a directory full of style sheets and templates that time forgot.

However, this one is em based rather than pixel based. Which (drum roll) means the text can be transmogrified using your browser. Oh yes. Use the View / Text Size thing in IE, and the equivalent in any other browser, and you can scale the site to fit your sight. Which rhymes too, so everyone’s a winner here.

And as an extra special treat for the hard core usability dudes, the navigation is now a list like it should be. Apparently. Hey, I don’t make this stuff up, I just follow the rules and wait for the next time they move the goal posts.

Anyhoo, when I’m done with other work I’m going to move the links on the right back to their own page (or pseudo page, as it were) and think long and hard about something else to stick in the space. It’ll probably be a To Do list or something like that, since Fliss has inherited my Palm Pilot now I have the snazzy new phone.

Stay tuned :o)

Time to gush like a MacWhore!

Tuesday May 13th 2003

My Bluetooth dongle arrived in the space of 24 hours from the previously untrustworthy Scan Hardware. Kieran convinced me that they had cleaned up their act, and I have to say I am very impressed with the speed of the delivery.

Anyhoo – the bluetooth dongle plugs into the USB port and after a little bit of installing and twiddling it picks up my 3650 no problem at all. I copied up a new version of the video recorder software, so now I get sound recorded along with video… which is cool. I also copied a couple of games over, which are fairly tame, but you cant have too many games on the go. Oh, and I downloaded some pictures I had taken with the phone – all of which made the thin-air journey almost instantly.

What can I say, Bluetooth rocks!

I can remember reading about it three years back thinking “wow – so your PC can talk to your phone without any cables and you can exchange files through mid-air. Cool.”

And here it is – Sci-Fi technology right here in this dimension ready to use! It’s not a pipe-dream, it’s not financially prohibited (the dongle was only ?20) and it’s just exceptionally cool for a techno-geek like myself.

I can almost hear myself telling my grand-kids “When I was your age, we used to have to connect stuff with cables.” They’ll gasp and be amazed at the very concept, asking wide-eyed “Grandpa… what’s a cable?”

Connecting to people

Monday May 12th 2003

I’ve upgraded my mobile phone to a new Nokia 3650 handset, complete with digital camera and video capabilities. It’s a pretty swish little gadget and I’ve taken a few choice pics already, although the quirky keypad layout is taking some getting used to.

After five years of having a mobile, operations like typing a text message with the ubiquitous grid-layout keypad have become second nature. Now I feel totally handicapped by the dial style layout of the 3650 – a triumph of design over functionality, I’m afraid.

I imagine I’ll get used to it over time – it’s not as if I text too often and most of the other phone applications are handled by the directional & function keys. Hopefully when it’s time to upgrade again in a years time, Nokia will be able to furnish me with a handset that is both good to look at and functional into the bargain – I’d have settled for the functionality of my new phone wrapped in the fairly staid design of my old 6210 any day.