radiac.net

I think I have surpassed myself this year...

My pathetic excuse for a diary has not been updated properly for nearly a month now! I've been busy and writing diary entries while I have work to do seems like a waste of time, but that's not a very good excuse. Must try harder. So, in the spirit of things, here is a summary of what I've been up to recently:

Work:

• Registered as self-employed (at last, just in time)
• Finished the first interactive CD for the publishing company
• Spent far too long trying to get an odd 3 column css layout working, so gave up and used tables. I feel dirty, but I don't think what I was trying to do is possible - feel free to prove me wrong...
• Hacking at nasty 4-year old scripts to try to crowbar in more functionality rather than rewriting, and then figuring it would have been faster to start again
• Working some more 10am to 4am days, although to be fair I do have nice long breaks for meals, and sometimes have to go out and do things in the real world (which although is sometimes work-related, it is frequently more like going to Tescos)
• Using Unison to keep all my work up to date between my servers and laptop, I can't say how handy this thing is
• Had meetings, updated websites, got annoyed by domain squatters, and other miscellanea.

Play:

• Visited Leela in Cornwall, it was good. We went to Truro, helped prepare/eat/clean a dinner party and met people, and saw the Eden Project which was extremely cool. When I grow up, I want to live in a biodome.
• Playing the same hotel level Hitman Contracts, can now complete it in well under 5 minutes without cheating!
• Watched 'Crimson Tide' last night, first film I have allowed myself to watch alone at home since well before Christmas! Yes I may waste 2 hours a day, but saying 'Right, for the next 2 hours I will not do any work' is a different matter and makes me feel guilty. Bit silly really...
• Decided to get a new car. Well, new to me. Still looking, but I know roughly what I want.

So as you can see, I keep busy! Am off to Bath later today so must get on with things - tata.

This is why I'm tempted to vote for Howards Way, bring on the 80mph limit!

Seriously, it's the only policy any of the main parties have put forward that makes me think 'Yay'. Take this latest story for example, how they're putting mobile cameras on the M4. For those of you who don't know, that's the road from Bath to the M25, and I must average about 150-200 miles on it a week. It's almost all straight road from junction 14 to junction 18, and almost every time that stretch is empty - I frequently find myself doing top speed in the left lane with nothing in front and nothing behind, save the odd truck I overtake or a more powerful car that sails past me doing well over 100. But are either of us going to cause an accident with our speed? No. The cause of an accident in a situation like that would be falling asleep or mechanical error, either of which will arguably be just as dangerous at 70.

So I ask you, where is the point in enforcing the 70 mph limit on a road like that? Yes, if it's busy you should reduce your speed, but more often than not traffic volume naturally affects that most of the time. Anyway, if you crash at 70 rather than 80 you're still going to die, and if you can't drive properly on a straight empty road then I'm afraid it just comes down to natural selection.

If they want to cut accidents on motorways, they should invest in patrols and technology to detect dangerous driving; watch lane changes and blatent undertaking, have cameras to check stopping distances - in my albeit limited experience, that's far more dangerous than an extra 10-20 mph. Speed doesn't necessarily equal danger, stupid driving does. But then stupid driving wouldn't bring in as much revenue as catching people edging 80 on a straight empty motorway.

Ahh, armchair politics are great. Maybe I'm way off on all of this - after all, I don't have any facts and figures to base it on. But I'd still put money on the conclusions of a comparison between accidents on UK motorways and on German autobahns...

It was my gran's 99th birthday today, so I've been quite busy organising a small party and chauffeuring people over and making lots of cups of tea and stuff. It went quite well and was very nice, a good number of people came and there was a birthday cake and it was quite enjoyable.

It was also the party for a lot of other peoples birthdays on Saturday, which was a lot of fun. Good to see people I hadn't seen for ages! Happy birthday everyone!

So this has been a fun and action packed week. Amongst other things, I have test driven two cars, and decided to keep one of them in exchange for much of my cash. It is silver and goes faster than my current one, and has electric windows and air conditioning and remote central locking and wheels and everything. Everything apart from a standard-facia radio player, so I'll no doubt have lots of fun attempting to get my mp3 CD player working with the steering wheel controls and in-dash display. I'll be swapping my money for the car on Tuesday, go me.

I've not had enough time to do my work recently, despite being up for 20 hour days most of this week, so having this morning off I decided to start the redesign of this website rather than getting on with the work. There's something to look forward to - should be finished later in the year. How's that for a deadline... My self-imposed deadline for CAPMS before the end of the month is rolling ever closer; I think it's going to have to be pushed back another couple of months now, because I haven't caught up with the tonbschl stuff, and I've now been instructed to start work on the second interactive cd, and unfortunately paid work must come before fun work.

I have my new shiny car. I picked it up yesterday - it had been held up because they hadn't given it an MOT. All sorted now though.


For those of you interested in details, it is a 2002 5-door 1.4 vauxhall corsa comfort. For those of you interested in more details, it has 16 valves, power steering, electric windows and wing mirrors, air conditioning, and remote central locking. Compared to my previous car, which has... wheels. Incidentally, anyone after a cheapish-yet-functional mk4 '96 Fiesta should enquire within - it's only done 45,000 miles and in 5 years it's never let me down, and it would be a perfect first car. I also have a Kenwood minidisk head unit and an Aiwa MP3 CD head unit for sale if anyone's interested, again, price is negotiable.

I figured out the css/table problem I mentioned a while back by replacing the tables with divs and uls. Still works semantically, so bonus. I've now started working on the second flash CD - at least in spirit. I'm finding myself a bit busy IRL to get much work done at the moment, so CAPMS has made absolutely 0% progress, which sucks. Maybe next month :)

In addition to my 7000+ e-mail spams a day, I have now started collecting comment spam. They only ever seem to spam the one diary entry though. Guess I should sort out some kind of anti-spam thing, but I'm only on a couple a day at the moment. I'll sort something out when I get up to triple figures.

Damnit, why didn't anyone tell me about this M4 protest in time for me to join in?