Benj’s blog!

I used to keep a web journal on my old site. The journal was easy to update via some little ASP scripts I had written (back in the day when I thought ASP was great!). Recently I’ve noticed everyone and his dog is keeping a “blog” and so I thought it was about time I got back on the bandwagon.

I had a quick look around and found this package called Movable Type. It’s a whole lot more than I need, but it is based on XHTML 1.0 and CSS. I spent an hour this evening changing the CSS around to make it fit in with the main website (at least for the index page), and voila.

I wonder how often I’ll get around to updating it?

Today was pretty regular wednesday; get up late-ish, do some guitar, listen to some music, prep. for teaching, teach, come home, eat fish and chips (wednesday = “chip day”), some computing/surfing and sleep.

This morning, I tried to go and pick up some guitar strings from guitarnotes, but the traffic was pretty bad and I had to turn around. Apparently there had been some serious accident earlier in the day, which caused severe problems during rush hour and for hours after. One of my students gave a totally different version of events from that which was reported in the news:

He claims a guy on a motorbike tried to hijack/rob a securicor van, the driver of the van got out, produced a shotgun and fired it in the chest of the motorcyclist. This version of events seems more likely. I don’t see how a small accident can cause 5+ hours of delays, even here in England ! …

Anyway - good night!

Well I’ve spent around one third of my expected life on the planet now. I hope the next two thirds go as well !

Had a good evening at CentreParcs yesterday with John. There was a family from Liverpool who were really into guitar music. It’s always nice to have someone to play to!

The new strings I tried sounded OK, but they will improve with time (or so it says on the packet). D’Addario - Pro Arte Composites.

I’m waiting for Karl to give me a call now, to “check out” the Roland GR-33 (a synth unit for a guitar).

Oh - just a quick after update. I ordered a Ramón Jiménez CD from Flamenco World earlier in the week, received shipping notification yesterday and it’s in my CD player now. Madrid -> Nottingham in less than 24 hours …. not bad !
The CD is great … well … Track 1 is at least

Those of you who know me, will be aware that I often rant on about a game called Everquest (EQ). EQ has been part of my routine (life?) for nearly 3 years now, I’ve spent over 150days (yes … 150 x 24 hours) playing it.

The past few weeks I’ve been thinking about giving it up. The biggest problem being what would I do instead? Well I decided today to cancel my accounts and give notice to my guild that I will no longer be around. I feel now that I’ve “finished” the game, nothing I else I can do will give me any additional satisfaction.

So what will I do? Well I got my bike out of the garage for the first time in 5 months today and went for a ride … I guess there is lots more stuff that I used to do .. that I can still do.

In the short term, on the entertainment side, I guess I can try out some of the other games out there, Unreal2, Age of Mythology, C&C generals. However ultimately I’d like to find something as challenging and entertaining as EQ was. I think I may have to wait for Brad to announce what he is working on.

As for current/coming soon MMOGs, SWG looks interesting, I’ll certainly give it a try. AC2 lacks content (but has potential … ). DAoC .. not really sure, didn’t like it when I tried it before.

Well, Fairwell Norrath.

Oh - btw CD is great - what an excellent player. JC informs me that the Jiménez family have produced many great players. He said that ge will find me some LPs to listen too - cool :).

(hmm looks like i have to set a title ).

I had a pretty quiet weekend which mainly involved pottering around doing various bits and pieces of stuff(!). I kept promising to visit Dan and show him how to play Age of Mythology, for whatever reason I did not get around to do it.

This morning, after fixing a few things for Buzz, i got my haircut. I think the guy misunderstood and decided to give me a “number 1″ all over but it looks ok. I called in to see Dan on the way home, and subsequently showed him how to lose the various types of AoM battle :).

Gonna pop some new strings on my Flamenco guitar now …

After visiting Mark on Thursday, I decided to buy myself a new monitor. I went to buy the Apple 20″ Cinema Display from Jigsaw systems in Nottingham. Unfortunately the monitor was faulty and didn’t work correctly with my powerbook. I took it back for a refund, which finally appeared in my account today. ( 1 day for the money to come out … 3 for it to come back … !!)

I picked up another display from the AppleStore in Nottingham (this time after careful inspection in the shop). The first display was faulty, the 2nd was fine. When I say “fine”, I mean amazing!
So I’m now running my Powerbook as a “desktop” machine, running at the native resolution of 1680×1050. Sheer bliss !

BTW The display is also compatiable with my PC on the Radeon9700 (via the Apple ADC -> DVI convertor). Windows XP detected it and ran at the native resolution after a reboot, no problems !

I was playing around with some CSS to allow me to use an image in the banner of my main page. When i checked it out in a “hypothetical” Safari build I noticed the CSS logo had some text-decoration that wasn’t there before!

Example

It seems that if there is any white-space space between the anchor and the img you get the text-decoration. So that’s what you’ve fixed right Mr Hyatt?