You are currently browsing the The English Guy's Personal Blog weblog archives for August, 2009.

Posted at 4:55 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in life

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Aug 30
2009

Posted by richard

It’s just one of those things to expect I suppose, but settling in for an afternoon’s racing, I didn’t expect to see our Champ going out on the 5th corner. And it wasn’t his fault, so I can’t really blame him, Spa-Francorchamps is a tough circuit.

Not a bad race so far though, poor old Alonso had problems with a wheel spinner, and Webber got a bit robbed with his drive-through penalty.

Good race from Fisichella though, Force India will be pleased as punch. Better luck next race Hamilton, maybe you’ll finish.

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Posted at 11:22 pm • Trackback Trackback

Posted in themes

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Aug 27
2009

Posted by richard

I’ve had the week off, so I have had the time to finish up some work that I’ve really been meaning to get to.

I expanded the News Print v2 WordPress Theme, adding a second sidebar in to it, and fixing up some issues that had been bugging me for a while. The featured post now works as it should, and I added a lot of extras to the theme options in the backend.

I released the Victoriana WordPress Theme yesterday, a two column theme with theme options in the backend, such as colours, sidebar position and so on (that link has screenshots). I’ve actually had this going for months but never really got my teeth into it. Yesterday was the day and it’s now released.

I’ve done some work in the Expression series too, currently there’s Blue and Red, but today I’m released Yellow and Green. These are simple themes, but quite easy on the eyes, good for a newbie starting out.

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Posted at 12:54 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in life

2 comments - Latest by:
  • richard
    Insane. The picture in that link showed them next to wind generators along a motorway. Of course that'll never happen, ...
  • mel
    Fake Trees??? That is so crazy.
 

Aug 27
2009

Posted by richard

There’s been this surge of articles in the past day or two about carbon sequestering, new power-generating systems (some of them are quite interesting) and most bafflingly, fake trees.

Fake trees, the phrase makes me think of plastic Christmas trees, you know the ones with weird strips of green plastic that are supposed to emulate pine tree leaves. You can’t fool anyone with them, unless they’ve just been born.

But these things, the fake trees they’re talking about, are machines built to react a substance with CO2 to make another substance which they’ll then do something with. You have to refill these fake trees with the original substance over and over to get more CO2 from the atmosphere. Crazy isn’t it?

So. Why don’t they just plant more *gasp* real trees? Startling idea I know, and call me a radical, but I bet most of us would prefer that.

The reason I say we should plant real trees is this. We have lots of land we don’t do anything with. Moors, grasslands, prairies, steppes, tundra. All of these places could support trees (with the exception of tundra, although you see enough wildlife films to see trees in siberia, which shows you it’s possible). Why aren’t we using this land?

The moorlands of the UK for example. We can build a prison in one, why not reforest it all? After all, it once was forested back in the bronze age, but our forebears chopped them down for fuel. What’s the problem with building massive nurseries and reforesting the UK?

So come on governments, put some real trees in, not these machines that really, honestly, aren’t going to solve our CO2 problem.

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Posted at 4:35 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in humour

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  • macbros
    I'll admit that I wasn't a fan except for this season. OK, well not a FAN, I just watch it ...
 

Aug 26
2009

Posted by richard

I know I may be one of those few people (the intelligent, sophisticated, discerning ones) that don’t like Big Brother, but I am thanking God that they have finally seen the light (and by they I mean the viewing public) and the TV bosses are going to be ending it.

The End of Big Brother. Sounds like an Orwellian celebration, and I will certainly buy a bottle of champagne to celebrate it.

What lunacy made people want to see ten or twelve mad people locked in a house together showing off the worst traits imaginable, is beyond me. But the end should have come sooner. It never was reality in any sense of the word, since the majority of us are sane, have jobs, and treat other people with some decency.

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Posted at 5:12 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in humour

2 comments - Latest by:
  • richard
    ROTFL HootersSuite, now there would be a site!
  • macbros
    OK, the title got me thinking of something completely different. Somet5hing to do with Hooters, if ya' know what I ...
 

Aug 25
2009

Posted by richard

Having the week off I’m getting lots of work finished up and projects wrapped up for the autumn, mostly because I have new projects coming up and also because I want to refine a few things that I already have going.

After starting the Thesis Themes site I noticed a url pop up in the stats from Hootsuite, which I’d never heard of. I went there, got an account, upgraded, and voila I’m exploring the finely-tuned world of advanced twittering. What a wonderful website! Well put together, and way more information than you’d probably need, but useful nonetheless, kinda like Twitter in a way…

So I just wanted to say what a great site, keep up the good work Hootsuite!

Posted at 3:25 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in javascript

2 comments - Latest by:
  • richard
    Yeah there's two sides though.
  • macbros
    I might be wrong, but isn't 10+1+1=12? Unless you're subtracting the 10,1, and 1 from something. I really don't see ...
 

Aug 25
2009

Posted by richard

I was porting the Expression Blue WordPress Theme over to the Thesis framework (released on Thesis Themes here) and started work on the #multimedia_box which controls pieces of multimedia content above the sidebars.

I noticed that if you changed the size of the #multimedia_box itself, the image still came through as large as it wanted. Bit of an issue that though, especially if you style the #multimedia_box and subsequent #custom_box, #image_box, #video_box inside it (and subsequently content further inside that, such as an image). So in my case the image was sticking out the side rightways because I had added margin to #multimedia_box and padding to #image_box.

The solution to this is a bit of jquery inside the header, which of course you have to put in the custom_functions.php and use a hook to access the wp_head(), like so:

<script src=”http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/files/jquery-1.3.2.min.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
$(document).ready(function() {
  $(“div#multimedia_box”).ready(function() {
    var imageBoxWidth = $(“div#multimedia_box > div”).width();
    $(“div#multimedia_box > div”).css(‘padding’,'10px’);
    $(“div#multimedia_box > div img”).width(imageBoxWidth – 24);
  });
});
//–>
</script>

In my case I had added 10px padding, then there’s 1px padding and 1px border on the image itself giving you the 24 that you see in the code snippet above.

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Posted at 3:16 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in life

2 comments - Latest by:
  • MrCorey
    Come and join the cool kids at http://identi.ca
  • macbros
    It's been iffy lately. I think it might have something to do with the massive amount of spam from spammers ...
 

Aug 25
2009

Posted by richard

I’ve noticed that Twitter is being a little odd today. On my main business site I have my Twitter feed posting my last tweet on there, but the file_get_contents() php call times out on it. Not too lovely on the front page of course, and I hope that it’s just a temporary network slowdown, but I wondered if anyone else had noticed this?

Of course, this would happen on the one day that I launch a new site (http://www.thesis-themes.com/) and tweet about the new Thesis themes I’m offering on it. Great. Nevermind, I expect it’s just an anomaly.

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Posted at 8:12 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in life

2 comments - Latest by:
  • richard
    I know! £500 million down the drains, and IMHO, much better spent on policemen with a policing presence on the ...
  • macbros
    HA! Hardly seem worth it at all does it? Just picture that ONE poor dumb ass that got caught while all ...
 

Aug 24
2009

Posted by richard

…then isn’t it the duty of the leaders/rulers/politicians to end the surveillance?

The Independent reports:

Just one crime is solved a year by every 1,000 CCTV cameras in Britain’s largest force area, it was claimed today.

Just one! Considering you’re photographed over 30 times every single day in London (there are more than a million CCTV cameras in London alone!), that’s a lot of surveillance, storage of surveillance, all for 1 in 1,000 crimes to be solved.

These things were introduced on the premise that they would help solves crimes (a lot more than 1 in 1,000) and help prevent it as well. That last one though, IMHO, works in the same manner that the death penalty works, as a “deterrent”, which we can see from US crime statistics, doesn’t work so well.

So if they’re not working, our government, our police forces, or whoever is controlling this, should fix it, or remove them.

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Posted at 7:30 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in work

2 comments - Latest by:
  • richard
    Nah I don't really use it much anymore. Not much point, although perhaps I cherry pick ones if they're useful.
  • mel
    Rich! I forgot all about CJ, and all ad servers. I forgot all about all that crap. ...
 

Aug 22
2009

Posted by richard

For the longest time I just could not access the Commission Junction website, then one day all of a sudden I could get to it. I re-upped my account and everything seemed fine.

Now it appears that it’s happening again. I cannot reach www.cj.com or the uk equivalent, uk.cj.com. Is anyone else having this problem with Commission Junction?

I hope that it’s not a long-lasting thing otherwise I’ll just have to head off to another ad-server like Silvertap etc.,

Posted at 11:43 pm • Trackback Trackback

Posted in life

4 comments - Latest by:
  • richard
    Thanks for the clarification there Mac ;) I did wonder when I saw that the first time. Mike, good to know.
  • Mike
    "Labour government has devolved power to the local assemblies for certain functions. So for example Scotland has control over it’s ...
 

Aug 21
2009

Posted by richard

This entire Al Megrahi thing has just got out of hand. First off, Scotland is not Britain, Britain is not Scotland. Our touchy-feely Labour government has devolved power to the local assemblies for certain functions. So for example Scotland has control over it’s own Justice department.

This means that Scotland had the decision making power for releasing Al Megrahi, not the government in Westminster (and that’s the UK, what is commonly called ‘Britain’). We, the UK, did not decide to release him. The Scots did. So CNN, please learn that difference when reporting.

I think if you took a poll of the people in the whole UK and not just one part of it, you’d find most of us would let him rot in prison. Trade be damned – if he blew apart a plane full of passengers, he deserved to die in a small cell, and that would have been generous.

To make this worse of course, Gaddafi has now been seen meeting Al Megrahi on television. I certainly empathize with our American cousins over this, it was a disgrace that he was released and now we’re having our faces rubbed in it over oil and gas.

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