None

I was definitely glad that I made the effort to watch the football a> and rug
by yesterday as both were most entertaining games (helped by the fact that
ipswich and england won their respective matches).

The decorating is pretty much finished now and deliveries are going to start
coming within a couple of weeks. This is the problem with not being around
during the week, weekend deliveries take a lot longer, but all these new things
have to be paid for so shouldn’t complain too much. I still can’t find the
skirting board I need and have tried all but two stores, so not sure what I’ll
do now.

i am in the middle of re-decorating my lounge this weekend. i broke the back of
the painting last night and didn’t finish until 01:30 this morning. but it has
meant that there are just tidying up jobs to do today. i thought the easiest
bit would be to replace a bit of skirting board where the fireplace used to be
but i can’t find the style i need anywhere. i am sure it will turn up
though.

it was an early start this morning to try and get everything done so that i can
watch the football and then the rugby this afternoon so i was buying carpet and
furniture before 9am. the challenge now is to arrange delivery dates for
everything without missing too much work (although having worked at home
earlier in the week i would really like to do more of that).

if you watch channel 4 in england you’ll recognise this style of ad between programmes. here is one you’re unlikely to see on the box (not boss friendly!)

it’s my first week day working at home for ages today and it makes such a huge
difference. there are no interruptions, people standing behind you chatting
very loudly, coffee machines beeping or phones ringing. it’s
not even 8 o’clock and already i have had a productive couple of hours.

i am at home for distinctly boring reasons… the car is in for a service and a
plumber is coming round to fix a leaking radiator. a pity i can’t engineer more
reasons to stay at home but my normal work is increasingly sitting in meetings
which it’s difficult to do remotely.

a weekend of friends visiting, not much sleep but great fun. a lot of my friends from ipswich are from when i worked at willis almost four years ago now. because it’s so long ago most of them have moved away so i don’t get to see them enough. but when we do meet up that time seems to disappear. so a quiet afternoon awaits just catching up on chores and drinking lots of tea to try and re-hydrate myself!

i was trying to re-use some old sliding menu javascript today and for some
reason it just refused to work. can you guess why?

function DoMoveIt()
{
  document.all.leftmenubar.style.top = document.body.scrollTop +
100;
  setTimeout(“DoMoveIt()”,5);
}

well it foxed me for half an hour anyway. according to this page, when you define a
doctype in your html, ie6 will move a load of javascript properties from
document to document.documentElement. so the working function looks like
this…

function DoMoveIt()
{
  if (document.documentElement &&
document.documentElement.scrollTop)
    theTop = document.documentElement.scrollTop;
  else if (document.body)
    theTop = document.body.scrollTop;
  document.all.leftmenubar.style.top = theTop + 100;
  setTimeout(“DoMoveIt()”,5);
}

phil is running the london marathon this year and is
looking for donations to the charity he is running for. it’s a huge undertaking
so please be generous.

he is also keeping a blog of his running so that you can revel in his pain and
fully appreciate how much effort he’s making.

thanks to ben for the heads-up on the
safari tab colour issue. for a change it seems that mozilla allowed a bug in my
style sheet to slip through the net. i had set the hover color (don’t pick me
up on the spelling, colour in programming is spelt in the american format) to
transparent by mistake and both ie and firefox allowed it to pass. safari took
me at my word and made the text invisible when it was hovered over. a simple
fix as i just had to make it black instead and there is no difference in
display for ie or firefox.

apart from that minor issue i have now got search working properly for firefox
and safari and spent an hour or so playing with the meta-tags last night. i
hadn’t thought about search engines for a while and had assumed that meta tags are no
longer any use now that google owns the
world. however i found a good couple of sites to help set up the
tags properly, thinking that maybe in a few weeks i would get spidered. well in the 12
hours since i have been visited by most of the large search engines who have
completely spidered the (fairly limited) content on the site already.

an interesting side note that i am not sure about is that i had noticed in
domlog that some spider engines had already tried to visit the site last week
but had stopped when robots.txt was not returned to them as it does not exist by default on a domino server.
so to make sure there were no problems i put a blank file on the server. not
sure if it has made a difference but there is no overhead having it so it can’t
hurt.

the new site that i mentioned is finally live. 50wordreview.com has reviews of movies,
music and gadgets written by myself and various other people. fiona (my
sister-in-law) has put up a lot of movies which she had been maintaining in a
spreadsheet until now.

i am not sure what will happen with the site but it was fun to set up and i
quite enjoy the challenge of saying something in such a small number of words
(people who know me will be aware that i am not the most talkative at the best
of times).

the site itself is running on a 6.0.2 server and is spectacularly simple with
just a couple of forms and a few views. i started the whole project to get my
nd6 skills up to scratch so i have used as many of the new formulae etc behind
the scenes as possible but then you’ll never see that so why would you care?
the only challenging bit has been the css design which worked fine in ie but
was more difficult to get working in mozilla (i haven’t even looked at safari
yet). i will continue to add tweaks such as getting searching working in
firefox but we are pretty much there so i thought i would publicize it here.

please let me know what you think.