Oh yes, and I didn’t mention that I’ve chanted a few more CSS runes over the site. Nothing major, it was just bugging me that the text of the site was stuck at 800px wide flushed left. Anyway, now it (hopefully) resizes and is centered in the window. And I don’t mind saying it was a pain in the bottom getting it working with both IE and Mozilla, each of which choose their own special interpretation of CSS… It’s not even like there’s anything that clever either.
Phew busy time. Just been marking my third year’s exam papers (which I can’t comment on for obvious reasons), but one of them stopped by after the exam and told me that he’d read all of this garbage! I didn’t think anyone except me was interested in it, but there you go – I guess you go to any lengths to avoid revision!!
Just in case you hadn’t noticed, I did a mini site enhancement a week or so ago (which is what gave birth to the whole idea of a news section), to put “Eutony Computing” and “Eutony Music” under the auspices of “Eutony.Net”. These had previously resided at eutony.co.uk and eutony.com respectively, but I don’t really need 3 domain names! E.N has always been my favourite, so I’m going to stick with that. I was at one point thinking about being a freelance software engineer, and my company would then be Eutony Computing (and live at .co.uk) – life seems to be taking a more academic bent now…
Anyway, not much to see there – Computing has some links to tutorials and reference sites that I use a lot, someone may find them useful I guess… I’ve got some code and Perl scripts that I intend to make available too, when time allows.
One more before bed. It’s always been said that it’s great to be a grandparent or aunt/uncle because you can hand back kids when they start screaming. What I haven’t appreciated before is that the parent probably also wants you to hand them back when the start screaming. The chances are you weren’t the cause of the screaming, and if baby is upset he/she want’s familiar arms, and the chances are also that the parent will be a lot better at settling baby than you (and will probably just get wound up watching you try!). Certainly if Ben is getting into a tizzy than I want either Anna or I to have him!!
This was a bit of a revelation for me, as in my limited experiences of babies before Ben came along, I always felt very guilty handing it back as soon as it started crying! However, I have noticed several people who have several children will hand back babies to their mother or father when it starts crying, and perhaps this is the reason why.
I guess it might change as they get older, or if you have other children..
Abstract thought for the day – it’s actually really hard to do exactly 70 on the motorway. I think there are three main reasons for this:
Physically it seems hard to maintain exactly the right pressure on the throttle. I’m not sure why this should be, when I don’t have a problem nailing 30 without looking, perhaps it’s just the gear ratios of the car!
Practically, motorways often go up hill and down dale, and it’s easy to slip up or down 5mph before you’ve really realised. Then of course when you come across a slower vehicle, you often have to back off until you can pull out.
Psychologically, if you’re overtaking, especially with a car 6 inches from your boot, or rapidly bearing down, it’s oh so easy just to put on a little spurt to get past the other car more quickly.
But I did notice some interesting effects: Firstly, you get overtaken. A lot. And often pretty convincingly. You think the speed limit was nearer 80 if you didn’t know better. Secondly, you hardly ever overtake anyone else, and even they are normally lorries or coaches doing 65 or so. Oh yes, there’s the occasional driver who feel most comfortable down in the 50s, but they are a dying breed, I think. Finally, I often found myself in an empty patch of road – because I was never really catching anyone, and everyone passing me did so pretty quickly, there were several occasions where the nearest cars where a good 100m in front or behind me. This was often a large group of cars all moving together, but not a single one immediately around me.
For obvious reasons I am not going to talk about the speed I often travel on the motorways, but nailing the speedo at exactly 70 was quite an interesting experience.
Ben’s getting really good at sleeping now – he has only needed feeding in the middle of the night once in the last couple of weeks! He does tend to wake up and give a couple of squawks in the night, but then he gets himself back off to sleep, and we don’t even have to get out of bed. Hopefully as he gets older he’ll stop waking up at all overnight!
Must give a quick mention to The street bible by Rob Lacey. It’s a complete reworking/summary of the Holy Bible in modern (street) language for those who “have never read the Bible, or have read it too much“. I have personally found it quite inspiring, particularly how he works the four gospels into a single narrative (although the disciples being called “Drew”, “Jim”, “Jonno”, etc was a litle disconcerting at first!!)
