Went downtown today
Posted by rae in family
at 1:31 am on Sunday, 27 February 2005
Ronnie, Michael and I went downtown this afternoon.
We left a bit late because we had a late lunch and planned on a late dinner.
What we hadn’t planned on, howver, was
Bakka
closing at 6pm!
We had wanted to start at the
Hairy Tarantula,
and then head up to Bakka before meeting up with Luisa for dinner somewhere.
Instead, Bakka closed and Luisa was feeling tired so she headed straight home.
So we hit Future Shop and HMV before having dinner at Popeye’s.
Ronnie had gone to Popeye’s with the Shaos recently and said he liked it.
But this time it was not a very good experience.
When he bit into the “biscuit”, he gagged and almost threw up.
I like the biscuit quite a bit, myself.
Oh well.
As a result of our travels, we have: a new Logitech keyboard for Ronnie, Logitech mouse for me, but no new headphones for Michael.
We also got
the new releases of
Nausicaa
and
The Cat Returns.
Almost got
Porco Rosso
too, but thought that was a bit too much Miyazaki at once!
Ronnie got Green Day’s “American Idiot”, and I finally got a copy of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”.
The Wall was part of a 2-for-$30 promotion, so I also ended up getting John Lennon’s “Legend”.
at 1:31 am on Sunday, 27 February 2005
UK net users leading TV downloads
Posted by rae in entertainment
at 12:18 pm on Tuesday, 22 February 2005
So it’s
not just me:
at 12:18 pm on Tuesday, 22 February 2005
Exact figures are difficult to pin down, but it is thought that about 80,000 to 100,000 people in the UK download TV programmes. [...] According to Jupiter Research 40% of homes with broadband say it helps them pick and choose the programmes they want to see or that friends have recommended.I guess that makes this a social phenomenon, not just a “hacker’s habit”.
“Hosting for Life” from the WordPress people
TextDrive is offering “hosting for life” for $US 400.
TextDrive is interesting, because it is made up of the Open Source people behind projects such as
WordPress and
Ruby on Rails.
The key parts of the deal are 1 Gig of disk space and 20 Gigs/month of bandwidth.
They say it will be there for as long as TextDrive exists.
Interesting.
Snow day
Posted by rae in family
at 12:17 pm on Monday, 21 February 2005
Well, not quite.
But still, a lot of shovelling.
Knew it was there though, so I made sure to get out early and start shovelling the driveway about 10 minutes before I had to get Ronnie to school.
Got enough of the driveway clear to avoid packing down the snow along the tire tracks.
Finished it off when I got back.
Michael is home sick today; bad cough.
at 12:17 pm on Monday, 21 February 2005
Working on Luisa’s PC
I moved Luisa’s hard drive over to hew new PC and proceeded to get errors on booting XP. I did something similar recently with Michael’s PC, and all it did was freak out over all the new hardware it was finding. However, Luisa is running WinXP while Michael is running WinMe, so maybe it is more PARTICULAR about what it’s running on. The specific errors I was getting were a series of lines prefixed with:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS\System32\
So my solution is to take the extra drive from the Media PC that has been giving me problems lately (I was going to reformat it in any case), and format it as Luisa’s new main hard drive.
This has the disadvantage of requiring re-installation of the apps Luisa uses.
However, she mostly uses MS Office and Eudora, so if those are there, everything should be fine, I think.
(Hon?)
Oh, P.S. One cool side effect of this new disk is that it’s a recent Seagate with liquid-something bearings, so it’s like ultra, ultra quiet.
When I booted the PC up for the first time using the disk, I had to double-check that the PC was in fact powering up!
And this was with the case being open, too.
Nice.
Now running WordPress 1.5
Posted by rae in web site
at 1:12 pm on Thursday, 17 February 2005
I just
upgraded my blog to WordPress 1.5
and it went pretty much without a hitch.
I had to go find a
new, 1.5-compatible version of the “recent comments” plugin,
which wasn’t hard, since there is now a
central location for them.
at 1:12 pm on Thursday, 17 February 2005
Working on Windows/IE now
Posted by rae in web site
at 1:33 pm on Tuesday, 15 February 2005
Yay, I finally fixed the problem with IE/Windows not displaying correctly because of my use of the “float: right” CSS property.
I found a page on
float layouts
at
The Autistic Cuckoo
which went on at some length about IE problems.
To quote:
at 1:33 pm on Tuesday, 15 February 2005
IE/Win has so many complicated float-related bugs that we can’t go into it here. The example in this article doesn’t work at all in IE/Win, but the article is too long anyway, without venturing into the jungle of bug fixing.
Fortunately, there is a simple solution that fixes many of the IE float bugs. We saw earlier that all floats become a block box. The standard says that the display property is to be ignored for floats, unless it’s specified as none. If we set display:inline for a floating element, some of the IE/Win bugs disappears as if by magic. No one knows exactly why. IE/Win doesn’t make the element into an inline box, but many of the bugs are fixed.
So I added
“display:inline”
to my “#menu” element and now all is well.
Sheesh!
I’m guessing I could have asked Peter and Laura about this, right? 
iAlert and Growl
Posted by rae in software
at 11:13 am on Tuesday, 15 February 2005
Two interesting Mac OS apps: iAlert
and
Growl.
Both are designed to present alerts from various apps (like iTunes and Mail) in a semi-transparent, momentary window that self-dsmisses after a preferences-specified length of time (I use 2 seconds).
at 11:13 am on Tuesday, 15 February 2005
iAlert window
iAlert telling me I have (a lot of) new mail
iAlert alternate colours
RSS Feed for ReidNews is available on LiveJournal as a “friend”
If you have a LiveJournal account and read your “friends” posts a lot, you can now add reid_feed as a friend to get new posts from this blog too. As well, there is techtok for a Tech Tok feed. many thanks to Chris for setting these up!Working late
Posted by rae in Reid
at 8:17 pm on Wednesday, 9 February 2005
Last night I got home after midnight.
Tonight looks like it will be similar.
It’s easy to put up with because I know I will be finished my contract very, very soon (like tomorrow maybe?).
But still, it’s long hours, and I don’t get to spend a lot of time at home.
Next week of course I will be home all day every day! at 8:17 pm on Wednesday, 9 February 2005
