This page is archived from a static page – some links may not work

Sunset of life.
A more traditional Sunset can be found here

This page is archived from a static page – some links may not work

Found – A great little coffee shop
My favourite coffee shop serves a coffee called a Nitro. What you are looking at is three shots of coffee in a glass, which is just the thing to keep me awake at night ;)

This page is archived from a static page – some links may not work

I was supposed to go back to TAFE again today. New semester and the aims were to learn more about php and cgi, however when I got there the classroom designated on my enrolment form was locked up.

I had feared this would happen. When I enrolled they said that the numbers were rather lacking for the course, but it would have been nice if they had given me a phone call. I’m in rather a cranky mood now.

I’d actually gone to a different college for this block of modules which, while it’s closer to home than the one I have been going to, it’s downside is that it is in the city itself. It took me 15 minutes to drive there, 10 minutes stuffing around with waiting and having to go to the admin to find out it had indeed been cancelled. Of course I then had to drive from East Perth in peak hour traffic meaning it took me nearly half an hour to get home again.

This page is archived from a static page – some links may not work

OK, so far so good. It seems to be working ok.

There are a couple of things I wanted it to do that it just isn’t at the moment. Firstly though, this is what I have done -

Because I do not have database support, every page is manually written. To make updating a little easier I have been using Server Side Includes. Of course everything you can do in SSI you can also do in php, but as updating this site fully would require a lot of work I am not really looking forward to making major changes like that (just yet).
While SSI does make it a little easier to manage the archives, I am still modifying four files every time I want to make an entry. Five if you count the actual archive page itself (although I only update that one a couple of times a month)

With this small change I have done two things.
Firstly I have taken one of the files out of the loop all together, so instead of opening up archive/2004/filename.shtml which then reads the actual post you can access the blog post directly via blog/index.php?number

Secondly I have put a variable into each post to make the comments tracking automatic. I am currently looking at a way to make it more automatic by reading the filename, but I haven’t found out how to do that just yet.

The only thing that is bugging me is the box around this post via the archive section. For some reason it is expanding past the 800 pixels that I want it to be and I have no idea why. The div tag code is thus -
<div id=”body” style=”position:absolute; left:225px; top:100px; width:575px; z-index:1; height: auto;”>
which for all intensive purposes should make it stop at 800 pixels. The logic being that it starts at 225 (which it does) and is 575 wide.

This page is archived from a static page – some links may not work

I have been fiddling around in php in an effort to improve my rather lack lustre skills in this area, so this entry has been written to with some minor changes to the comments access as a “testing ground”

This page is archived from a static page – some links may not work

I’m a geek, I had to do this. You understand.. Right?

This page is archived from a static page – some links may not work

Ok, so allegedly I make things complicated. Probably so. The logo at the top of this page has changed (about a week ago), if it looks exactly the same as it did before it means it is cached on your computer. Hit refresh!

I did the writing on the sand because I lacked motivation to drive to the beach, so I thought I would play around in photoshop. It was probably more work that way but there are times when I just do not feel like driving anymore.

Readers Digest have started direct mailing me and I can’t for the life of me work out how. My telephone number is unlisted and my home address is generally not given out as I have a post office box at work that all my mail goes to. I’ll have the last laugh though, as I’m sending them back Return To Sender unopened so I get the satisfaction of ignoring the letters. I don’t actually need to open them to know that I was successful in the first two rounds of some bullshit competition they are holding and now all I have to do is send some information back to enter round three!

I picked up a new client this week so that is going to help ease my financial woes, however I am finding new ways of creating my own problems. I got so caught up in doing some research that I totally forgot to “pay” myself.
Normally I would do this on a Wednesday so it arrives in my personal bank account on Thursday. Unfortunately I didn’t realise I hadn’t done this until Thursday evening so it’s not going to even get looked at for processing by the bank until today.

I’m hoping I will have the money for Saturday

This page is archived from a static page – some links may not work

This was a hard subject to photograph. In the end I set up the tripod and thought about something depressing.

This page is archived from a static page – some links may not work

You may have noticed that there is a new logo on this site. While I was happy with the old one I felt it was time for a change, and my recent trip to the beach gave me the chance to take a photo specifically for the header image.

The old one was actually created in photoshop. I took a scanned photo of a beach portrait taken many years ago, took a small corner strip from it, duplicated it twice and reversed the duplicates pushing them up to the original image on either side. I then blended the 3 images together to make one long background.

The text was created using a mix of Photoshop’s airbrush tool and the rubberstamp tool to create a “writing in the sand effect”.

As the new image was taken specifically for updating the the logo the background it one image. The text, however was not as simple as it looks. I originally wrote out the new text selected a font, spaced it out and positioned it. I then wrote over the top of it using a single letter at a time in a new layer.
Once that was done I deleted the original text and then adjusted each letter so it was as close in colour to the background sand as possible. I then dropped shadow on each layer, flattened the image, colour and contrast adjusted it web optimised it and uploaded it.