I started building a hut in the garden. It’s really fun, but also quite hard as I am only using salvaged wood I have found in skips, so it’s a case of having to make do a lot of the time. Any advice gratefully recieved.
I wish I had a before picture. There are more here.
I have been working on little bits of hundreds of songs for ages, but riding always got in the way. Since I have not been riding for a while I have had a chance to finish some of them. They are on myspace and have 0 listens, which is mildly embarrasing.
Both of them are about 4 or 5 years old, but just never really got finished, so I am glad that they are done now, even if the recording quality is terrible. If you can bear my voice then you might like to listen, but I know it’s not good so I won’t hold it against you.
Today I have spent a lot of time investigating a bug in Internet Explorer (it still seems to be there even in IE8). Basically I have an image, part of which needs to be a link, and I can’t use an image map, so I thought I would position the link over the top of the image and set the width/height of the link to match the area that I want the link in. Something like this:
<a href=”http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/” style=”display:block;height:23px;position:absolute;right:88px;top:44px;width:164px;z-index:1;”><span style=”display: none;”>Click here to download the latest version of flash</span></a>
For accessibility reasons I put a span inside the image containing text to say what the link did, and then hid this with display: none. This should work fine. Indeed it did work fine in Firefox, but the problem was IE8 (and 7 and probably all of them). In fact this code works fine in IE when in isolation. However when on the page there was obviously some conflict with something else because for some reason IE was ignoring the display: block declaration on the link - if I allowed the text inside it to be displayed, then it worked like a link, but only as an inline one, not a block.
I fiddled around for a long time and was unable to find anyone else who has had this problem, or any good solution so in the end I resorted to setting a transparent background image on the link like this
<a href=”http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/” style=”background: url(transparent.gif);display:block;height:23px;position:absolute;right:88px;top:44px;width:164px;z-index:1;”><span style=”display: none;”>Click here to download the latest version of flash</span></a>
Not very pretty I know but it does the job. Hopefully this helps someone out. If you can explain this bug I would love to hear from you!
Can’t stop listening to this:
Started work on a brick BBQ this week. They are quite precariously balanced at the moment. I think I need some mortar. Hopefully I will be able to finish it this weekend - try and get some pictures too.
This seems like a fairly good starting point.
Been trying to do a sommersault on the trampoline for the last few days. I am landing in a squat sometimes but it’s hard. Probably need to go a bit higher. It’s really fun though. I usually fall over and then start laughing at myself. I expect the neighbours think I am crazy.
This girl cracks me up:
So the bike seems to be working out alright. One of the results of moving was that I sorted out all my CDs and put most of them onto iTunes. This week I rediscovered this little gem. Badly Drawn Boy is such a hit and miss artist, but this song is so good. I only found it because this single was really cheap. I wonder if he has any other good songs hidden away?
Here is a live version. Probably best to just listen 
I guess it’s been spring for a while but I’ve been too busy to notice. The weather is appalling though.
Had a BBQ at the weekend in semi-arctic conditions. Oh England! Didn’t remember to use the camera either.
Went to the Peak District a month or so ago, but only put the pictures up last week. You can see them on flickr.
When we found the new house we were actually looking at a different house, but it was a long walk to the station, so we decided to walk it to see how far it was. We ended up walking to the wrong station, and on the way we got a bit lost and I saw a bike abandoned in some bushes. Then we carried on looking for the station, and on the way we saw another house, which ended up being the house we went for.
This house is much better as it is right by the station. The only down side is that it’s a bit of a slow line, and there is a much fast line just a couple of miles away.
Last week I went to see if the bike was still there. It looked untouched, so i moved it to a slightly different position to see if anyone ever used it.
So last night I went back to see if the bike was still there. It was in a bit of a state, and looked like no-one had ridden it for a long time (handlebars all twisted, brakes locked up, flat tyres), but only took about an hour to sort out and now I have a bike to get to the fast station on. I might be home in under an hour tonight.
A free bike is a good bike. Some pictures…
