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Month: June 2003

Personal: Oooh, all excited.

Oooh, following up on a comment (well, two comments) that someone left on my blog I’ve got something slightly exciting (and potentially embarrassing for myself and someone) in the next few weeks. But I’ve “got to keep it under my hat” for at least a month – possibly until September.

I’m really looking forward to it as it’ll help me get something off my chest that I’ve been worrying about for around a year but been too afraid to do anything about it, but this will give me a chance to sort it all out one way or another (I think the saying is “trial by fire”). And it’s amazing how much “true gumph” I can come out with if people ask me about certain topics and the way it makes me feel (watching “Bruce Almighty” before responding to that person’s email made it even worse/better).

Anyway, whilst I know this is called “Richy’s Random Ramblings” (see, see – at the top it does say that!), I’m rambling a bit too much now even for my level of ramblingness. But enough said – more details will follow in the future I’m sure, but now we return you to your regularly random ramblings.

Pa-pa-pah-pahha-pa-pa-pah-paaaa! (Cue Pearl+Dean advertisements)

Poll: Which Sci-Fi Character Are You?

Which Sci-Fi Character Are You?According to the Which Sci-Fi Character Are You? poll, I am “Gandalf – A wandering spirit caring for a multitude of just concerns, you are an instrumental power in many of the causes around you. And so am I, very dangerous: more dangerous than anything you will ever meet, unless you are brought alive before the seat of the Dark Lord.“.

Confession time: I’ve never read a single Tolkien book or seen any of the LOTR series (I have, however, played “The Hobbit” computer game and been subjected to Leonard Nimroy’s funny “Bilbo Baggins” music video).

(Poll via Neil’s World)

Blog: Squash, Squish That Blog

SquashYou may have noticed a very slight change in the look of Richy’s Random Ramblings today: that’s because I’ve been doing some “behind the scenes tinkering” to get the page to load a bit faster (all the graphics, CSS and Javascript now come down to a total of 40Kb: down from nearly 48Kb).

How did I do the file size reduction? Well, apart from removing the calendar (as Neil noticed, it does add a hefty lump to the HTML mark up and doesn’t really add anything to the page), I’ve also dumped Overlib (which I was using before) and decided to go using the “W3C” recommended “acronym tag”. I hadn’t really thought about using it before as I was worried about “how will people know that they can mouse-over to get details” – but then I came across this entry and it reminded me of the magic of CSS… So I’m using that instead and may even add a few more acronym explanations as I go on (once I stop typing acronymn instead of acronym). That alone allowed me to dump a large portion of my Javascript file!

Why the reduction? Hmm – I just felt pity for “narrowband” (modem) users, that’s all. It’s nowt to do with disc space (I’ve got 20Gb) or bandwidth (I’ve currently got 40Gb/month allocation and I’m seriously considering going for a 700Gb/month option as it’s cheaper(!)), but just fancied a little bit of “play code editing” instead of the serious code editing stuff.

Guess That Movie: LXI: Fled

Guess That Movie 61Congratulations new contestant Niall for correctly guessing that Guess That Movie 60 was from the film Aliens – yep, sorry Antgrad, it’s from the sequel…

Ok – now on to round 61 (that’s not my age Jay btw!), it’s a screenshot of a screenshot of a movie I’ve never heard of before, but has got a “quite famous and popular at the moment” Actor in one of the lead roles. I’ll even through in a “Wheel of Fortune” style clue: The name of the movie is also a word and it has a single vowel within its title (yes, there are consonants in the title as well).

The rules: Just leave a comment with your name/alias, email address (for the prize givings) and the name of the movie you think this screen shot is taken from. If you guess that movie correctly, I’ll award you some points. Points start at 100 per image and decline over time (after the first 12 hours it goes down by 10 points, then down a further 10 points every 24hours after posting) – oh and wrong guesses have a 5 point penalty. But what good are points? Well, get 500 points and you can claim a £5 Amazon gift voucher/certificate for the Amazon store of your choice (£5 will be converted into the appropriate currency at the exchange rates displayed on xe.net at the time of claim) – so you can get free books, movies and music just by playing a simple FREE guessing game!
A: Fled. Correctly guessed by Kymberlie R. McGuire

General: Hot Day, Bank Holidays

Hot Day, Bank HolidaysSince it’s a hot day today (and also my birthday), I decided to see when the next “bank holiday” (read: “public holiday” for non-UK readers) is and it’s not until August 🙁 Looks like I’ll have to book some time off work if I want to have a break by the beach (my GESF called me at 5pm until 5.30pm from the beach and we had a talk).

For future reference, here’s the forthcoming holidays for the UK taken from the DTI’s Bank Holiday list:

  • 25 Aug: Summer Bank Holiday
  • 25+26 Dec: Christmas Day and Boxing Day
  • 1 Jan 04: New Years Day
  • 9 Apr 04: Good Friday
  • 12 Apr 04: Easter Monday
  • 3 May 04: “May Day” Bank Holiday (subject to Royal Proclamation)
  • 31 May 04: Spring Bank Holiday