Lord d'Eath's Stuff

As you must have noticed - unless you're reading this from the RSS feed - I have just finished implementing a new site design. It didn't take as long as I had expected, actually. I started it when I got home yesterday about 5pm, worked on it til about 1am, then spend another three hours or so this morning fixing up all the blog entries to be valid.

I have loosely based the theme on the new MS Office style, or more specifically the "Outlook 2003 Blue" theme for Firefox, and am rather proud of the results. I also took the opportunity to update the whole site to be valid XHTML 1.1 which I have always said to be for masochists only. I do still maintain that it's a pig for certain things (the lack of the "target" attribute of <a> tags, for one, making opening links in new windows somewhat difficult and requiring the use of a JavaScript hack: onclick="window.open(this.href); return false;" onkeypress="window.open(this.href); return false;"), but I now realise that it is actually possible to do things in it. This is also my first successful attempt at designing a website without using tables at all. You can scour this site's code all you like and you will find not a single table. CSS all the way! It's also using valid CSS without even any warnings!

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Warning: Long post! (Then again, which of my posts aren't?)

As I write this I am on a train coming back from London.  It is ten past eleven at night and it is so dark that it is often difficult to tell if the train is even moving.  The reason that I am coming back from London, of course, is that I have just been to a Windows Live Session at Microsoft's London building (their central London building, that is, they have another one in Reading, I believe).  I was one of about thirty people from the UK (mainly) who were invited to this thing and ever since I received my invite I have spent a considerable amount of time (well, at least a few minutes) attempting to explain to people what'd be going on.  Now that I've actually been I have a much better idea of what happened there, obviously.  All we were told beforehand was that it was to demo and experience the new Windows Live products. Windows Live, for those of you that don't know, is effectively the new name of all MSN products.  Where something may have been MSN *X* before it's now Windows Live *X*.  The main way that this affects me is that MSN Messenger is now Windows Live Messenger, as to be frank I don't really use any other MSN/Windows Live products.  I am now, however, tempted to at least have a look at Windows Live Local (Microsoft's answer to Google Maps/Google Local) thanks to a few comments made about it at tonight's event.

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Someone asked on the Mess.be forum for someone with an Xbox 360 to post their opinions of it. I obliged. Since it's a fairly substantial post I'm duplicating it here. Enjoy.

It's very easy to use, in my opinion. Most things in the GUI (the Dashboard, specifically) are very easy to find and the options are pretty self-explanatory. You can even manually specify a MAC address, which was required for me to get it to access the Internet in my room at all.

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Well today sucked right up until about 7pm. It started sucking at around 2am with me being unable to sleep and feeling very ill - an experience which was only made worse by having my flat mates making a hell of a racket in the kitchen. Eventually I got to sleep, though, and woke up around 9am and promptly had a woman from Accommodation Services banging on my door with the usual "can I see you in the kitchen please?" crap. Turns out my lovely flatmates had left the kitchen in its usual state and the cleaners were less than impressed. Since I was the only one awake at 9am - the others all being awake 'til about 5am so not waking up again until midday I was charged with the task of cleaning the kitchen before she returned in an hour. She really didn't care that none of it was my stuff - I did repeatedly point that fact out to her - all she could say was that if I didn't clean it then she'd get a cleaner in and bill us all. Since I refuse to clear up stuff that isn't mine I just made doubly sure that all of my stuff was out of the kitchen and left it for whomever woke up later on. Apparently part of the problem was my two Tesco Home Shopping trays that were under a work surface in the kitchen totally out of everyone's way. They are such a "problem", apparently, that they're going to stop Tesco delivering to halls so I'm just supposed to not eat or something. Whatever. I've since written a 480-word notice to my flatmates that I will pin in the kitchen later which basically says "tidy your shit or you can pay my end of the cleaning bill".

The rest of the day was taken up feeling sorry for myself with this hellish cold I appear to have gained. I can't breath, talk or think properly which has kinda stunted my ability to do stuff - not too helpful when I have three pieces of coursework to do in the next month.

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Well wtbw has been pestering me to update again. Pahhh! Of course the whole reason why I haven't been updating is that I haven't really had anything to post about. Nothing of the scale of "Access Sucks" like my last post, at least

Anyway, I've made a couple of changes to this site since I last posted. They're all in the Comments page, namely that the name you enter will now be remembered with a little cookie for 365 days and clicking a 'reply' link will populate the "Title" field with "Re: <title of post you're replying to>". I was getting fed up with typing it all the time so as usual the only reason for me coding something is pure laziness on my part.

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