Author: Rory

I pity the fools that didn’t get to see Dirk Benedict on Tuesday. As part of LawSoc‘s 80s Day the Face acted as chairperson for a “debate” on the merits of the 80s as opposed to other decades. The debate lasted all of 10 minutes before the Lord of the Flies-like rabble got their demands met. There followed a near three hour long Q & A session. Many (most?) of the questions were about Dirk’s sexual experiences, despite his valiant attempts at every point to distinguish himself from his most famous character. Despite the sex questions and constant interruptions he had long enough in the three hours to tell a few anecdotes about the A-Team, particularly praise for Mr T and Dwight Schultz, though not much on George Peppard.

After Nancy Cartwright last week and Dirk Benedict this week, at this rate I’ll be driving a Delorean by March.

The Lack of Post™ on Tuesday wasn’t actually due to visiting celebrities though. The network was down again, denying me internet access. This pretty much sucked on a day when I was in here (UCD) longer than usual waiting for said celebrity to appear. So instead I went shopping. By chance I saw season two of Futurama and season two of Family Guy, both of which I’ve ordered from Amazon already, and to my delight they’re much more expensive in the real world, and they both have more episodes than their season one counterparts. Yay!

I bought two books, the names of neither of which I can remember. One is about mathematics and patterns in nature and was written by Ian Stewart, one of Terry Pratchett’s co-writers on the Science of Discworld books. (As an aside: When I went to look up his name I looked for the Science of Discworld on Amazon. My search term “science of discworld” didn’t find the book but going via a roundabout way found me The Science of Discworld II: The Globe. Listed as authors were Terry Pratchett, Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen. A look at the picture of the jacket cover gave me Ian Stewart’s name. I can’t help but think this could have been easier.) The other book is an introduction to PHP, which contains easy and accurate instructions for setting up PHP, Apache and MySQL on my Windows machine at home. I already had the first two and probably could have figured out the third (I didn’t try), but I feel that this sort of direct instruction is still valuable even when some searching can find the information online.

I also bought the leather pants I’ve been promising myself for so long. Some people seem to find this amusing. (It should be noted that I’m refering to trousers, rather than underpants. This ambiguity is introduced by British and Irish people (and maybe others) who misuse the word ‘pants’.)

According to BBSpot, via Aquarion, I’m Windows 95!

You look better than your older brother but your communication skills are still lacking. You start well but often zone out.

Going merely on the descriptions given for the various OSes/Personalities, I would say I’m one of the Linuxes, probably Debian or Slackware.

After an unpleasant experience on Friday, I’d like to offer my own summary for any Windows XPers (my OS at home, but only because it’s not technically my computer, it’s a family one): You are prone to forget your friends at random times when nothing of note has happened to you. You keep your old friend’s stuff, but wont let him have it back without much trickery, because you now think he’s a stranger. It’s just as well he never trusted you enough to keep his stuff locked away, otherwse he’d never get it back.

Let’s have a game of Spot the Difference, shall we? I want you to tell me the difference between my blog, and virtually every other blog out there. Go on.

Most of the rest have some decent amount of content that’s worth reading.

Apart from that.

Any of the others I’ve seen have more than just their author reading them, so don’t have to resort to making up feedback.

Well it’s true, but that’s not what I’m looking for.

The horrendous design.

They’re not all that bad…

Your horrendous design

I’m sorry you feel that way, but that’s not it either. Maybe I’ll just tell you what I’m on about. The difference is static vs dynamic content. I spend five or 10 minutes per day typing out HTML by hand, copying and pasting <tags>, and fitting in my new content. Every week I have to edit every page to include links to newer material. This both sucks and blows. This is static web-design. Every other blog I know of is dynamic, with pages generated on the fly with PHP. This is my goal. This is why I downloaded Apache, PHP and Perl for learning and experimentation. I can only hope that when I feel confident enough to apply these new (to me) technologies netsoc will let me run scripts on their servers.

I want to seeThe Matrix: Reloaded, particularly after seeing that trailer. I want to see The Hulk, now even more so since discovering that Ang Lee is directing. I want more immediately to see the Hulk trailer which I’ve been trying to download for several hours. I want to see Terminator III, and I want not to regret it afterwards, though I’m not all that optimistic. I want also to see Daredevil, The Matrix: Revolutions and X2.

I want broadband.

I also want to be able to put all this para-legal music I’ve just downloaded onto a zip-disk before I miss the bus, which is why I’m leaving for Daedalus (main computer building) now, and consequently writing no more. On the point of zip-disks, I’ve taken to naming mine after scientists. Today I will be transporting Pearl Jam and Pink Floyd among others, on Paul Dirac.

I am so smart, I am so smart S-M-R-T, I mean S-M-A-R-T. The lack of post yesterday was a result of having oh-so-much-better things to do. Specifically, winning the L&H Simpsons Quiz. It’s about time we won one of these things, having come second in two of them last year. In one case our team of two lost to a team of six on a tie-break question. Anywho, that’s all past, and we can finally claim our rightful places as kings of all Simpsons knowledge. All hail Emperor Clobbersaurus!

But that’s not the best part. Oh, gather round my children and I shall tell you a tale. The prize was four front row tickets to see Nancy Cartwright. This was, of course, the main event of the evening. There were about five hundred people in the main auditorium, and the same again in another lecture hall who were watching by video uplink. Walking past the length of the queue was entertainment enough in itself. She spoke for about two hours, covering all the expected areas: how she got into voice acting, how the Simpsons started, how it’s made, and what other cartoons she’s worked on. I was surprised to find out she did the voice of Mindy in Animaniacs.

Highlights:

• Her introduction, “I’m Bart Simpson. Who the hell are you?”
• Seeing her walk past as we were waiting to get in, and realising that no-one else knew that it was her.
• An unexpected rendition of Bartman.
• Her selection of quotes done in the various voices she does for the show (Bart, Nelson, Rod and Todd, Ralph), including a whole scene where Bart pretends to be God speaking through Rod and Todd’s radio.

I can now die happy.

I’ve magically changed this weblog into… a slightly different looking weblog! I took my final thought from yesterday and chose a colour scheme for the site. I remain pathetically nameless, but that can change. I’ll think about it over the weekend, in that florescent tomb (S)hell. For those who don’t know and can’t guess I work part-time in a service station. I sell petrol to perpetually angry people and cigarettes to idiots. It long ago lost its anthropological appeal, so now I just die a little every week. It could get me down if I wasn’t so distinctly apathetic. Sorry, didn’t mean to rant about work. It’s just that it’s going to screw up my Saturday this week and I’d really rather it didn’t.

On another note, IE doesn’t screw up my design as much as I’d thought it would. Which is nice. Unless you don’t like the design. But you do, don’t you? It’s only the bones of the final look at this stage. Picture more links for one thing, probably a blog-roll of some sort, and maybe a very transparent image background.

I’ve just started to type without knowing what I’m going to write about. All I know is that I’ll probably end up editing later, simply because that’s not what I intend to do. I don’t have a title for this entry yet; I’ll think of one once I know what it’s about. And that leads me nicely to: I don’t have a title for my blog yet. Nor do I have a pleasing style (writing or design), or any logo, pictures or cohesive theme. Looks like a big job ahead, except that I only usually spend about half an hour a day writing this, and I only know of one person who reads it. So I want a good name. Of the blogs I read (there aren’t many yet; I’m new to this) Tom Coates has the fantastically titled PlasticBag.org, I’m quite fond of the name Aquarionics, and some of the Bloggie award nominees have great names. The name should define the site, give both an indication of the content or intent and a decent inspiration for the overall style. That’s why I want a name first, so I can build a style around it.

Of course, once I have a name and a style, I’ll have nothing else to blame when I fail utterly in representing myself properly here. Now I can just fall back on “It’s not really me“, but with the effort of design behind it I don’t think I could claim that anymore.

The fact that I have no well-defined, or even slightly coherent, personal writing style means that there’s no problem with interrupting myself with this quote from National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon:

Give me a name.

Weren’t your parents supposed to do that?

So anyway, short story shorter, I have no online identity and my offline one isn’t even worth bringing online with me. So I need to find one. Maybe I’ll start with finding a nice colour…

Today marks the first instance of my first successful self-Googling. The page in question is (currently) the fourth ranked page for the search term "Rory Parle" on Google (the rest are directory listings of this site), a page of recent e-mails to a Parle genealogy website. The e-mail that mentions me is from my aunt. I have yet to find reference to any other Rory Parles, on Google or otherwise.

Okay, yesterday’s post seems to have been written in TML (Text Markup Language). That’s right, I forgot to put in the links (since corrected). The web is nothing without links. They are it’s lifeforce, its purpose, its H. So instead of being a node in a fantastic interweaving tapestry of human insight, yesterday’s post was a chunk of lonely muttering, standing on the sidelines. As a further illustration of my seeming inability to write for the web, I had to correct the markup <h2>Accessibility</h3>. How’s that for accessibility?

You may have noticed the lack of links in the above text. I’m aware of the irony.

Accessibility on the web is important. That’s been said before. A lot. Even I’ve said it before. But I haven’t devoted an entire blog entry to it yet, and I feel it deserves one. Let me start by saying that I have recently altered the some pages on this site considerably. Except you won’t notice unless you’re using a text-only browser or a screen-reading program. The reason for this is simple: this HTML document has nothing in it specifying layout or color or any other such style issues. If you’re using Mozilla, you can see the basic page, without style, by selecting View > Use Style > Basic Page Style. The style is added by use of a stylesheet, which tells visual browsers (like Internet Explorer and Netscape) how to display the page content. As it was before today, the navigation links appeared in the HTML document before the content, and the stylesheet put them on the left of the screen in visual browsers. In non-visual browsers, or in CSS-unaware browsers the links were presented first, because they were first in the HTML. You can imagine that this was annoying for the blind person who had to listen to a list of links before reaching the content, and the person with an old browser who had to scroll through the link list on every page. Now it’s different. With no change to the appearance on mainstream browsers, I’ve shifted the navigation to the bottom of the page.

There are, of course, more issues than this regarding accessibility on the web. Another that I have plans to address more fully is the issue of colour. That is colour-blindness and low- or mono-colour displays. Prompted by an occasion on which I was forced to use one of the older computers here in UCD, the issue of contrast became apparent (ironically…) The computer in question had a faulty monitor that made it virtually, and indeed in some cases actually, impossible to distinguish my link-text colour from the black background on the navigation bar. I promptly threw together a high-contrast stylesheet to offer as an alternative. Mozilla users can see it in action be selecting View > Use Style > High Contrast. I plan to research the area further, as there is no guarantee that the alternative stylesheet is sufficient for all colour-related accessibility issues to be resolved.

More information on the importance and implementation of accessibility aids is readily available. To begin with try:

• Dive into Accessibility
• The Web Accessibility Initiative