Fuddland
I can scarcely believe it myself, but I’ve fallen way behind on all things bloggy—writing, reading, commenting, erm … there must be a fourth … nope, that may well be it— due to being a little busy with fuddage.
There’s code to get working, which is hampered by it taking quite a while to run each time I want to test it; there’s an end-of-year report to write, which is hampered by me not really wanting to do it; and there’s a paper to finish off, which is hampered by not having really worked out all the maths that it’s supposed to contain.
I’ve also decided I’m going to completely distract myself from all of these important tasks by rewriting my academic webpage in pure CSS and XHTML instead of the ghastly table-based, kludged-together, inaccessible template they force us to use. Whoever designed it was of the “Why use normal text and background colours when an image will do? alt text? Pah! No need for that! Who cares that this way, the links become completely non-user-customisable and are utter nonsense to screen-readers?” school of web design. It’s rubbish and I’m refusing to be associated with it any longer. Semantic markup a go-go! As is usually the case, it took me about ten minutes to convert the markup [i.e. delete all the tables rubbish and stick in a few divs here and there] and get the bare-bones layout together. Now comes the fun of getting the CSS to work cross-browser.
So as you can see things are going very well. Miscellanea:
I got a refund from Central Trains for that gawdawful train journey. Well, I say refund—I’m loathe to call four measly pounds a decent refund for being over two hours late. Apparently their mandate states the customer is entitled to a 50% refund for the portion of the journey affected by the delay—i.e. 25% of the value of the return ticket. [The mathematically-minded can now work out how much my original ticket cost.] And it’s in the form of rail travel vouchers that I need to redeem in person—they can’t be used when booking online; I can’t even remember the last time I bought a ticket in person from a station.
The new albums from Badly Drawn Boy, Scissor Sisters and Mull Historical Society are all great. Me like.
I watch Big Brother. Bollocks to you all. Scorn, ridicule, laugh at me if you will. It’s compulsive. I am weak. Let’s move on.
