Matthew Walton’s Blog

Otherwise known as dinner.

Why are they called memes? Is it this cultural genes thing? If so, what has it got to do with the blogosphere? Anyway, saw this on Planet GNOME, so I’m going to do it because I need to write a new entry.

Not that this is going to be a real entry — an update on actual happenings might follow at some point when I know what’s going on myself.

So here we go:

Four jobs I’ve had in my life:
* Seed packer
* Shop assistant
* Office dogsbody
* Software engineer

Four films I can watch over and over:
* The Slipper And The Rose
* Monty Python And The Holy Grail
* Lola Rennt
* Contact

Four TV programmes I love to watch:
* Futurama
* The Simpsons
* Firefly
* Doctor Who

Four places I’ve been on holiday:
* Berchtesgarden, Germany
* Lidköping, Sweden
* Cumbria, England
* Blair Atholl, Scotland

Four websites I visit daily:
* PoliceSpecials.com
* Giant in the Playground Games (the home of the Order of the Stick)
* BBC News
* Wikipedia (English version)

Four places I would rather be right now:
* On a beach in Norfolk
* Somewhere with an ADSL line that isn’t a hall of residence
* The passenger seat of a police car
* In the bath

Okay so I missed off the last bit, because I’m not trying to pass this on to anybody. I’m just bored!

Some of you may know I’ve become rather fond of the D&D-based webcomic The Order of the Stick which uses stick figures drawn in Adobe Illustrator. There’s a thriving community full of artists who draw various figures in the OotS style for avatars and the like, and some tutorials for Illustrator and Sodipodi — which is the program Inkscape forked from.

So I had a go in Inkscape, and it turns out that it’s not hugely difficult to do simple pictures. So here we are: Thog finally gets some ice cream with sprinkles. And a Flake!

Well here’s the tweaked look. It’s tested only in Safari 2.0 and Firefox 1.5, both on Mac OS X, so please let me know if something breaks horribly in another browser. If that other browser is Internet Explorer, don’t expect me to care very much. Many sites can’t afford to alienate Internet Explorer users, but I can and will if I have to. That said though, it should still all work, it just might not look right.

The drop caps in entries should degrade gracefully to normal letters in Internet Explorer, as it doesn’t support the :first-child and :first-letter selectors. I had to make some compromises there to support Safari, rather disappointingly: the font sizes are specified in absolute values (points) rather than in ems, because if you specify them in ems, Safari reserves the space for the drop cap correctly, but draws it one box height too low.

Needless to say, that looks like a big stinking bug to me.

I am, I think, the most pleased with this iteration of the blog template. Hopefully that will stave off the compulsion to fiddle for a while.

The best bit is, virtually all of the modifications were done with CSS – the markup changes are minimal.

It’s quite the fashion to post a brief or not-so-brief overview of 2005 on blogs at the moment. An arbitrary dividing line between years might not be the most sensible of things to have, but since it’s loosely related to midwinter, it might be of some minor celestial significance.

The television coverage from London last night shows that even if it didn’t have such significance, we’d give it all the necessary significance ourselves. New Year is probably better than Christmas, I would say, but I won’t go into the reasons here because that’s mostly just an ill-defined opinion that I have little real justification for at the present time.

So to my retrospective on 2005. What did I do? Well, I:

• started a PhD
• started playing the recorder again (and got a teacher)
• won my third National Novel Writing Month
• met some brilliant people
• went to GUADEC
• missed a number of social engagements due to apathy and/or schedule conflicts

There’s probably more than that, but that’s what stands out. Next year I hope to:

• visit Germany (again) and the south of France
• do an ABRSM exam for the recorder (and pass, but preferably something a bit higher than grade one)
• play the recorder in a concert where I don’t finish a piece a beat ahead of everyone else and where the harpsichord doesn’t go wrong halfway through
• make my own lunches instead of buying them, thus saving lots of money
• join the Special Constabulary (not going to happen, just like last year)
• get some accomodation I don’t hate

Hmm. How dull.