I used to write

I have a strong suspicion that this will be a short revival. I used to write, and it did have some useful benefits of the kind that, had I kept it up, I’d be more easily able to explain now. Something to do with presenting a coherent case, or keeping your mind sharp, or…

Anyway, whilst this may be short-lived, I shall give it another go. Only this time, somewhat less pompous, more eclectic, random with more spelling mistakes and some questionable grammar. What I’m trying to say is it’ll probably be a bit sh*t.

There's always a bigger fish

A silly amount of time spent trying to size three hyperlinked images of the same dimensions into a mosaic collage that would fit the width of a blog post; that's easy for me to say, easy enough until I added in consistent spacing between the images. I cheated; I hard-coded the sizes and the two smaller images were stretched slightly, but I think with a proper use of divs acting as columns, 100% widths and the overflow property, it should be possible to write something slightly more dynamic. Only, not today; I’m chewing up too many evenings working on minor side-projects that can be filed under “how” rather than “where”; not always a bad thing, I’m sure I’ll find a suitable use for “where” at some point.

In the 1,056th redesign of this blog the search box has a (CSS3) transition in width, which looks good where supported (Chrome, Firefox etc) and jerky where not (IE). It’s a bit of a gimmick either way since it requires screen real-estate to expand into; perhaps this is the reason Twitter recently changed their search box to fixed width? On the other hand, the on-focus transition in background colour looks good and has an acceptable degradation on IE. But let’s face it, who uses the search box on a blog? I might occasionally search within a niche blog but mostly I rely on The Google; why restrict myself to one source when I can search them all? And I have no niche, no idea from one week to the next what I might write about, so it’s even more difficult to imagine a reader having read a post on minimum priced alcohol, then wondering what I have to say on that masterpiece of modern cinema, Shoot 'Em Up. I love a good film...

I love a good film... and Shoot 'Em Up isn’t one of them. Yet despite this love of film, I’ve been thinking of cancelling my Lovefilm subscription. I’ve signed up to Netflix, using the free trial to watch season five of The Office, but there’s enough to keep me interested, for a few months at least. The picture quality - through the Wii - is adequate, not as good as that provided by BT Vision; use the iPlayer on both devices and the Wii appears a little fuzzy in comparison. Netflix does however have an easy interface; I’m not keen on the large sideways scrolling tiles, but there are other views and I like features such as automatically lining up the next episode in a series. It’s the convenience of streaming versus the better picture and newer releases afforded by DVD. Only my last three rentals on Lovefilm have been a mixed bag. Rise of the Planet of the Apes was as good as I’d heard but Captain America hugely disappointing, and Bad Teacher so bad I’d almost call it evil; I got what I deserved. Not like In the Mood for Love, my first film on Netflix, moving and understated, it suffered an unscheduled pause an hour into the film and - entirely unrelated - from a cruel suspicion the subtitle font was in Comic Sans; it wasn’t, but it was close. I mean, what kind of person notices things like that?

Meta full circle

Which annoys me most; the hack to get something out there or the tunnel vision developed when I return? I changed the search box on this blog a while back to use an input prompt but - wanting something that would work across the three main browsers, and aware of the need to avoid searching on the prompt text - settled for a short term fix of a background image which I could remove/add with JavaScript when the search box got/lost focus. An age later I got around to using two elements; a prompt label and a text input with transparent background, believing that a correct z-index would ensure the input overlaid the prompt and thus, when the input received/lost focus I could remove/restore the prompt showing underneath. However, whilst this worked for Chrome and Firefox it (almost predictably) didn’t for IE. Even the latest version appears to have issues with z-index, but then a Google search will tell you there’s a problem with everything so I should have known better; time spent trying to bend the stack order to my will might have been more profitably spent simply hiding the prompt when clicked upon.

Which I did; only by this time I was rather taken with CSS3 transitions and of a mind to re-vamp the search box again. And since in addition to the placeholder attribute, transitions are something else that IE still doesn’t support, this was the point at which I bit the bullet. Graceful degradation for the Microsoft browser; it doesn’t need a smooth transition in width, and I reasoned (though I’m not convinced) I could also get away without the prompt, so excised the previous work and saved it for later, when I’ll undoubtedly change my mind. If I can fix the position of the input text on earlier versions - it’s currently aligning along the top - I’ll be happy enough; I’ve learnt to live without rounded corners after all.

An infinite number of redesigns

Today was my last day at work, for the year. Not quite sure when my actual last day at work is but judging by the state of various economies, you do wonder. Is it my imagination or have shops been quieter than usual? I loathe shopping during the festive season though the last three trips haven’t been too bad; not too much traffic and easy to park, that can’t be good. Despite all this, and a few other things besides, I shall do what I can to enjoy because, when it comes down to it, why worry about that which you can’t influence? Christmas will soon be upon us, my daughter is becoming more and more uncontrollable as the day nears; and I’m becoming more and more nervous because I haven’t bought any presents.

I’ve been too busy redesigning the blog, the ultimate exercise for pleasing myself - perhaps I should rephrase that? Based on my own ratio of items read to items subscribed, I estimate I have 0.2 regular readers; New Year’s resolution - let’s see if we can boost that up to half of one before the arrival of summer! Not so much the content; I have been swayed by the “menu bar” approach of Twitter, Facebook and Google. It’s clear they influence each other - I often mistake the (currently) black Google bar adorning so many of their products, for the Twitter bar - and I’m pretty sure Facebook fixed their blue bar (rather than have it scroll with the page) not long after Google+ was released. So now I have my own grey (appropriately enough) menu bar, fixed at the top with a lovely shadow effect when you scroll the content “underneath” - my 0.2 regular readers are going to love that.

I really like it, but then I really liked the last look - right up to the point where I was sick of it. It’s minimal and promotes the content, though at the expense of a “visual identity” - the large image occupying so much screen space at the top of many a blog. It’s interesting therefore to find the new Facebook timeline design - for which you can sign up early - merges the two; underneath the menu bar is the user selected cover image. It’s the visual element distinguishing one profile from another, and it’s huge. I’m not sure I’d go that far but it’s enough to make me think again.

No borders

There’s so much happening, so much I could write about or get “off my chest”, yet by the time I find myself at a keyboard the moment has escaped and I can’t quite remember what, only that I was, excited by something or other. Am I mellowing in my golden years or is this senility; I think we know the answer. I feel I should write it down before anything else slips away.

Liam Fox spent last week hogging the headlines, resigns, and lingers on. The opposition saw a chance to stick in the boot - I grant, it is their job - and suggested amongst other things a mandatory register for lobbyists. This would be the register that Ed Miliband and his friends voted against whilst in power, never mind the dubious assertion that a lobbyist is a clearly identifiable entity. I saw one over the top comment demanding a ban, but at what point does a constituent asking for help become an evil lobbyist asking for the same? The difference between help and lobbying for favourable treatment is entirely subjective. One suspects a continuation of the bad business meme warping so many minds.

Writing of which, how are my Occupy chums doing in London? I shall afford them the honour of capitalisation. I commented on their counterparts - the inspiration for across the world “life isn’t fair” protests - in Wall Street not so long ago. This lot seem equally cluttered in thought, though I should credit them for a limited nine-point statement. Mercifully brief, unsurprisingly vague, it’s full of the usual anti-capitalist nonsense neatly tying in various other complaints - well you might as well let it all out. There are those on the left who want banks to fail, and those on the right, strict free market capitalists who want the same; albeit for different reasons, unlikely bedfellows, neither persuaded by the lessons of Lehmans.

You’d have thought all this would be enough to occupy my mind - see what I did there - but no; the end of capitalism as we know it has been eclipsed by something far more exciting. I removed the border on images, this after a brief flirtation with shadows - though I haven’t entirely forsaken that guilty pleasure. I’m all grown up, the blog feels more mature, except for the content, but you can’t have everything.

Perfection

More tinkering with my blog on the weekend and for a short while I hit something approaching euphoria, helped along by a large slice of vanilla cheesecake, before later concluding that actually the header still looks a bit shit, I don’t really like the Georgia font and reaching the shocking conclusion that maybe a grey colour scheme isn’t terribly exciting; I am no nearer to layout nirvana. I really must get out more.

Instead I stayed in and watched Sherlock, a modern re-working of Sherlock Holmes. I’ve never warmed to the Baker Street detective but it was a terrific opener from Steven Moffat. It’ll be interesting to see whether the remaining two episodes maintain the standard but given that one is written by Mark Gatiss, who along with Moffat created this series for the BBC, I will be holding my breath and hoping for the best. Gatiss was unfortunately responsible for the duff episode in the recent and otherwise excellent series of Doctor Who, which coincidentally in a separate episode dredged up one of my least favourite quotes:

When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
-- Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle must have rather liked this quote as he seems to have used it or a variation thereof a number of times and, judging from how often it makes an appearance elsewhere, his fans are rather fond of it too. Holmes, I’ll assume but I could easily be wrong, makes his statement to illustrate a point rather than pronounce; it’s a shame therefore that his following have taken it so literally. In Doctor Who it is a child but it didn’t stop me from rolling my eyes and adding “or there’s something you haven’t thought of”. For such a statement excludes the possibility of error, that fallibility that makes us human and against which perfection is so boring.

So you want to be starting something?

Well I’ve blogged for a while, but not very well and not here. I created this blog a few years ago but immediately ran into the problem of having nothing meaningful to say. I still don’t have anything useful to offer but as I reasoned before, I’m not going to let this stop me… although I did. Instead I posted the occasional iffy poem before finally taking the plunge last week and… customising my page.

Now customising pages is something else I can’t do particularly well. After many hours tweaking the CSS, I finally came up with something I really liked which, after randomly browsing some other pages, became something I could just about live with. Tomorrow it’ll be something I wish had never happened.

But all I’ve really done is duck the issue – if you have a blog you have to… blog. I can’t vouch for the quality but one advantage of having a blog that no-one reads is that it doesn’t really matter. And if I write often enough who knows… maybe I’ll manage something passable once in a while. Of course one of the drawbacks of having a blog that no-one reads is that no-one will ever know.