July 2002 Archives

Well, okay it's still July, but I imagined that I wouldn't have time to update before the month turned over. It was a great holiday - my arms are now honey brown colour from all of the sun. We had 3 days where the weather wasn't so great, but the other days were all very hot and sunny - up to 41 degrees celcius at one point. Highlights included a return visit to Rocamadour, a very touristy but picturesque town built on the side of a canyon; Bordeaux, where I got a chance to do some real shopping :) ; Sarlat, with its quaint little streets and shops; Chateux des Millandes, where I had an eagle land on my head (I'll try to get you the photo); and stuffing myself silly on a 6 course meal at the local campsite. We managed to bring back about 60 litres of wine too - to put that into context, our car can take 60 litres of petrol on a full tank...

Tomorrow I'm off to Leeds for some retail therapy, and to buy a birthday present for my mate Tom, who turned 18 on Sunday. Happy B'day Tom!

Just to let you know that I've added an ICRA PICS tag (with mild explicitives marked as the only 'bad' thing on the site - I might be in a mood, and well, you know...)

Okay, I'm off now, see you in August!

The wedding went really well - I'm sure everyone enjoyed themselves. And for once, our side of the family didn't totally dominate, despite most of my auntie's side of the family turning up. The hotel, the Deanwater in Woodford, Cheshire, was great - not only did it have all of the necessary facilities but adequate accommodation for all of the guests attached, and very good customer service. And their breakfasts were great :)

Most of all, the bride and groom seemed happy too, despite the rain during the photo shoots.

Anyway, as you may have gathered from the message above, I'm on holiday, so I'll see you later. Bye!

Just popping in briefly since I haven't had much time today. Real kudos to Sennheiser - the cable arrived this morning (within 48 hours of my first email) so I've been listening to my headphones this afternoon. I'll certainly recommend their products in future - customer service like that deserves commendation.

Been to the Great Yorkshire Show, and "great" is a good word to use to describe it. I'll write something more when I have time, though that might not be tomorrow. I'm off to my cousin David's wedding to his fiancée Lisa, so I'll be out from mid-morning onwards. Looks like it could be a good day :)

Been into town today, and bought the song "Forever" by Dee Dee (another guise of Erik Verspauen and Christophe Chantzis, aka Ian Van Dahl). I also powered up the other PC and burned a CD ready to take with me on holiday - I managed to get 22 songs on a single 74 minute CD (which had been overburned to 75 mins). And yes, I used Nero - I actually updated it especially since a new version was released on July 3rd. It now includes Nero Express as standard!

I also updated the Ventures website, and got the XS WebMedia site almost complete. So, as you can imagine, I haven't had much time for web browsing ;).

While poking around the likes of BlogDex and Google Backwards Links, I realised something about BlogRolling.com. Don't get me wrong, it's a great service... but... it doesn't do much for the sites you link to.

The thing is that when BlogDex or the GoogleBot index your pages, they can only understand 'static' content - any code that is attached using JavaScript gets ignored. And, of course, this is what BlogRolling uses.

What this means is that these bots are not following the links that you include in your blogroll, simply because the bots cannot see the site links. That's why my BlogDex report is looking somewhat sparse, and why Chris' link to my blog doesn't show up when you look up my backwards links on Google. It also means that my PageRank could be higher than it actually is...

Of course, there are solutions here. Google could make their GoogleBot understand JavaScript (though it's unlikely), or BlogRolling could add support for SSI (server side includes). Maybe I need to drop a few hints over there?

Today has been a mildly interesting day, even though I've spent most of my time at home.

Firstly, some praise for Sennheiser. As I've probably mentioned numerous times, I've had problems with the cable that came with my Sennheiser HD210 headphones. I had been hoping to get the cable fixed at a local shop, but it would mean trying to find which section of the cable was faulty, since the shop couldn't provide a replacement cable. Anyway, this morning, I had a brainwave? Why not contact Sennheiser directly for a new one? So I did. And a couple of hours later, I received a polite reply from one of their spare parts reps, telling me to post the cable to them for a free replacement (the headphones came with a two year manufacturer's warranty). Good service, eh?

The cable is now in the post, and with a bit of luck, it'll arrive on Sennheiser UK's doormat tomorrow morning. And if their postal service is as a efficient as their emails, then it could be as soon as Thursday before I'm back in business :). Since I'm leaving the country on Monday for 2 weeks (more about that later), there's a good possibility that I'll be able to use these headphones on holiday :D.

I'm also happy about finding BoltBlue. Before going onto Broadband, we had Cable & Wireless (CWC) Internet Lite as our ISP, which then became NTL Internet Lite when CWC sold off their consumer division to NTL. Then NTL closed the Internet Lite service. What I didn't know was that BoltBlue picked it up, though I didn't care much because by this time I was on broadband anyway. Anyway, I finally found BoltBlue today, and reactivated the account, so I can finally update www.neilrt.cwc.net and the various other sites in that webspace, including the site for my venture unit.

Another site I've been using is The AA - their route planner and roadwatch services were very useful in planning what route to take for going on holiday, and as a result we're taking a slightly different route to avoid some major roadworks around Silverstone.

So yeah, this holiday I keep mentioning. On Monday, I'm going away with my parents to France for a week and a bit - specifically to a town called Le Bugue, near Perigeux in the Dordogne area of France. Should be good :)

Not done much today - mostly been reading up about Big Brother, which I seem to go on about incessantly at the moment. It's addictive, I tell you!

I also had a peek at this item that I found on Chris' weblog. Interesting how they use the Pingu theme tune...

The divide is down - woohoo! It's now Kate vs PJ - and like with Johnny vs Sophie I want Kate to stay in, but I don't want PJ to leave. Though this time PJ is odds-on to leave on Friday, and while I still don't like Jade, it would be unfair for her to be alone with four other guys.

I'm also somewhat annoyed with Microsoft. Well, okay who isn't... but anyway, I discovered today that there is no way that you can import a Microsoft Works 3.0 or 4.x spreadsheet file into Excel, without having MS Works installed to convert the file to MS Works 2.0 format (or CSV). Great. So now all of those spreadsheets created in MS Works that we still have lying around are practically worthless.

Of course, we could install MS Works - it did come with the computer after all. But since we have Office 97, why bother? Interestingly, you can import Microsoft Works 3/4 Word Processing documents into Word (with an additional import converter download), but I think that has more to do with the fact that recent versions of the Works Suite have seen the word processing component removed in favour of Word.

I have to say, OpenOffice.org rocks! It's on a par with Office 97, in my opinion, but without the hefty price tag and the security vunerabilities. MS can stick the £110 they want for Office XP Student Edition somewhere where the sun don't shine...

You know, I forgot all about the fact I was mentioned in this article: http://www.3dspotlight.com/reviews/software/xsetup6/. It's one of the articles linked from The X-Setup Awards page, which, I will warn you, is quite lengthy. It includes a link to the actual trophy we got from ZDNet just before I joined, and the ZDNet Download Deathmatch article which shows an actual screenshot of my PC (but then again most of the screenshots used in the help file are from my computer anyway). Perhaps I'm more famous that I first thought?

Oh yeah - I'd better mention that C|Net Download.com and most of ZDNet is offline this weekend for server upgrades.

I've been thinking about my personality lately. If I was to describe myself for something, I'd definitely state that I was 'open-minded' and able to see both sides of an argument (which is why I rarely have absolute opinions on anything). Why am I talking about this? Well, while reading through a few blogs today, it came to me that I have two opinions about people who don't update their blogs much.

As you can probably tell, I try hard to update this at least once every day, even if I don't have much to say. Most other bloggers do the same. But I've noticed that some aren't so quick off the mark - take Lori Lookwood's and Randy Nieland's blogs as an example. Lori does update from time to time (though she seems to be having problems with Movable Type - half the time the site isn't working), but Randy goes through weeks without updating. The last update to his was June 10th - nearly a month ago.

Now hold on a minute. You gotta remember that people are busy - Randy has to write a daily newsletter, maintain a couple of websites and look after his computers / ferrets / Diana as well. I'm sure blogging is much lower on his priorities in life. And it's his blog after all - as the saying goes, if you have nothing good to say, don't say anything. Maybe he just doesn't like updating.

But I do find it frustrating that every time I visit, the same old stuff is up there. I want to be able to find out what he's been doing, or what he's found on the web. I don't want to read the same old stuff over again.

So I'm in two minds here. Part of me gets annoyed at this, but the other half tries to be more understanding. Guess it's like in those cartoons, where you have the angel and devil representing the two sides of your conscience. I suppose I'llhave to go with the angel - I mean, you can't expect everyone to update. And to write an email saying "Oi, sort your site out!" would be rude, wouldn't it? But still... I wish they did.

It also appears that Enetation is having problems, which is why you may be receiving JavaScript errors and no Commenting links...

So, Adele was evicted. It's a pity - although her two-facedness was showing through, I certainly preferred her to Jade, who basically does my nut in. I certainly feel sorry for Alex - he seemed visibily dejected after the announcement was made.

What's worse is that if Jade gets evicted next week, it'll make Kate the only girl left, along with four men. I guess that's the problem with having a pro-dominantly female audiance watching the show - they tend to like the men better. I do hope that Kate goes on to win (however unlikely it is), it'd be nice to have a girl winning it.

Hmm... appears Blogger is having a few problems at the moment...

One thing I have done this week is make some progress with the site for XS WebMedia, my forthcoming web design business. The latest incarnation of the site is at http://totalxs.dbpoweramp.com/xswebmedia/, though currently only the home and company profile pages are working at present. The design, which has changed quite a bit since the last attempt, is now staying, and the two pages use totally valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS (yes, I've checked). Which, unfortunately, is more than can be said for this site, due to the wat Blogger works. I'll have to use less paragraphs or something...

So, what have I been doing since Sunday? Well, erm... not much. Mostly been doing ODP editing, such as fixing problematic Tripod UK URLs and removing spam from Business (I got rid of nearly 500 submissions in one swoop).

Wednesday was Ventures, as usual, where we were painting the cupboards, and, well, not much else. Though I did hear a piece of news that day.

Sue, a friend of my mum's who organised the French course that I took part in back in March. Her car, a red Ford Fiesta, had been stolen, then later found smashed up in the nearby village of Copmanthorpe. If that wasn't bad enough, it turns out that the people who did it were friends of her daughter (who is in the year below me at college), so she is devestated about it.

I know one of the boys who did it (and I have to say I'm very disappointed in him), but I hope they realise just what they have done. They have commited several offences here: theft of a vehicle, driving under age, driving without a license, driving without insurance, driving under the influence of alcohol and driving without due care and attention. To be able to claim on the insurance, Sue has to press charges on some of these.

While the boys have admitted it, the parents have tried to wriggle them out of it. Maybe when you consider that the sentence for theft of a vehicle alone usually consists of a fine and several hours community service, these boys are really in the **** - although they are not old enough to go to prison, a visit to a young offenders' institute certainly looks on the cards.