We can all live in piss

Jerusalem - fountain of peaceThere was a bird at our door yesterday selling paintings. She was from Israel and pretty hot so I let her pitch them and have a chat. There was one painting called “the fountain of peace”

However she pronounced it –

“The fountain of piss” and then proceeded to say that “if we all work together we can all live in piss”.

I nearly wet myself. It took all my willpower to not burst out laughing.

I know english wasn’t her first language and I should give her a break but it was hilarious.

Listening to music

I’ve found I have a very weird way of listening to music. Since the relaunch of allofmp3.com as mp3sparks.com, I have bought over 300 songs. I listen to these on my commute and while coding or writing in work. What I’ve found is that every day or so I’ll find a song that I love and I will obsess over it and leave it on repeat for hours and hours on end. Over the last few weeks, the following have featured in repeat mode.

  • Soko – I’ll Kill her
  • Kate Nash – Nicest Thing
  • Guillemots – Love song 43
  • Josh Pyke – Middle of the hill
  • The View – Face for the radio
  • James Morrison – Wonderful world
  • Kate Nash – Dickhead
  • Willy Mason – Careless whisper
  • Kings of Leon – On Call
  • Plain White T’s – Hey there Delilah
  • Ray La Montagne – Burn
  • Ray La Montagne – Jolene
  • Editors – An end has a start
  • The Arcade Fire – Neighborhood #1(Tunnels)
  • My Chemical Romance – I Don’t Love you
  • Mundy – July
  • Jet – Shine On
  • The Magic Numbers – Love me like you
  • Jamie T – Back in the game
  • Paolo Nutini – New Shoes
  • Dirty Pretty Things – Bang Bang your dead
  • Arctic Monkeys – Despair in the departure lounge
  • Arctic Monkeys – No Buses
  • Nerina Pellot – Confide in me
  • Zero 7 – I go to sleep

Theres quite a few others but there the most recent. They’ve all clocked over 30 repeats in Itunes (and that’s only in work). Is it normal to listen to music like this.

Outlook is awesome

Outlook is awesomely crapOutlook is awesomely crap. I really do hate it. It hangs all the time. It’s rules are rubbish and not very intuitive to set up. I can’t “edit as new” and it’s tagging/flagging is not very good as the flagged state of an email is not very apparent. It also irks me that it insists on SHOUTING it’s process name to me in the task manager “OUTLOOK.EXE”. Where are thou oh loveliest of loveliest thunderbird :). Rant over

Learning CSS

I’ve been asked a couple of times over the last week on what the best approach to learning CSS would be.

The approach I took was a good one and it was the one I suggested. Learn it as you would any other technology …. Properly!!.

You wouldn’t stumble into trying to learn Java fumbling your way through without ever picking up a book and trying to learn the basics. Same with CSS and especially with HTML and yet nobody does (very few anyway).

I chose to read  Web Standards Solutions, Eric Meyer on CSS, Building Accessible Websites  and a few others. I read them cover to cover. I read the XHTML DTDs and understood the semantics of a document. I also read the CSS specs and as many articles and tutorials as I could (and still do).

Without doing it properly (and having a few people that can help every now again) you’re pissing in the wind and you’ll make a balls of it. Your nasty markup and dire CSS will take away from the perfect backend code you’ve written.

Don’t underestimate the importance of learning CSS and HTML properly. It’ll come back to bite you later.

Safari says – your links will be red

I’m doing alot of CSS at the moment and I recently came across a puzzler. We currently support IE7, IE6, Firefox and Safari (win and mac). In Safari for some reason on two of the pages all links were Red and Maroon.

It turns out the reason for this is that a non-existent CSS was being imported and the 404 page had CSS rules that take precedence over the linked ones. Our webserver is IIS and the 404 has embedded CSS :

A:link { color: red }  A:visited { color: maroon }

which I’m guessing is the culprit. A puzzler but thanks to the Adobe forums (a google search led me there)

Quotes from the Leaving Cert

A buddy of mine forwarded this to me – pure brilliance (or stupidity).

She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a tumble dryer

Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.

She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open
again.

The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

McMurphy fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a paper bag filled with vegetable soup.

Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the centre

The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium.

Her vocabulary was as bad as, kinda’ like, sorta, whatever.

He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease

Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Ballina at 6:36 pm travelling at 55 mph, the other from Claremorris 4:19pm at a speed of 35 mph.

The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the full stop after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

The thunder was ominous sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.

The red brick wall was the colour of a brick-red crayon.

Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.

Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

The plan was simple, like my brother Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for while.

“Oh, Jason, take me!” she panted, her breasts heaving like a student on 50cent-a-pint night.

He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine
or something.

Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” ad.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.

The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a lamppost.

The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a
formerly surcharge-free cashpoint.

It was a working class tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with their power tools.

He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a dustcart reversing.

She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature British beef.

Her voice had that tense, grating quality, like a first-generation thermal paper fax machine that needed a band tightened.

It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

Good work Daragh.

mp3 id3 tag whatsit

I bought a few mp3s from mp3sparks (formerly allofmp3) and was annoyed that the mp3s were not tagged with their track numbers but they were in the filename.

I had a quick look to see if I could fix this somehow. I found id3-py which I used to write a python script that fixes this and the artist,title and comment. One thing I noted was that you can only have a max of thirty characters in your track title. With a “Various Artists” album you want the artist in the title (Album artist is not in the id3 spec but it is supported by itunes and WMP). The concatenation of title and artist is quite often more than 30 characters – not good. Anyone found a way to write “Album Artist” to an mp3 using python?
mp3sparks is great but why in all things upside-down-monkey-drunk do I have to download each file individually and why do I have to right click (it is possible force a download guys).

I’ll upload an exe for installation that fixes your mp3sparks mp3s later.

1967 aching mammaries

Race number 1967I’ve been back in Ireland for about 4 months and I’ve been trying to get fit and in shape for about 2 and a half of those. I’ve been playing ball and gyming it up as much as I can. On my week off I ran (12km) quite a few times too.

I read last week that Derek Featherstone (and his wife) has set himself the goal of competing in an Iron Man competition. Needless to say I was very impressed. I was also somewhat inspired and figured I too need a goal instead of simply “getting fit”. So I did a quick Google search on “dublin marathon” and was presented with the adidasdublinmarathon.ie site , hmm end of October – that’s a bit soon. However there was a 10 mile race this weekend as training for those attempting to do the main event. So I arrived up on Saturday morning in Phoenix park (after hiding away on Friday night) and did it.

My race number was 1967. My official time was 1 hour 16 minutes and 50 seconds. I was 487th overall (the winner’s time was 50 minutes and 35 seconds (wow!) and from what I can find out there was over 2000 runners). I am very pleased as it’s the longest run I have ever done and I was able to keep and beat my planned pace. One problem though was the whole nipple situation, I didn’t know that distances like that tear the bejaysus out of your nipples if you don’t take precautions – I didn’t and it’s painful. I’ll know for next time.

I won’t be doing the main marathon as two months is not enough time to train but maybe next year.