Two weekends on the trot have been reunions. The first was when three families converged on my place for the tenth (!) anniversary of Stephanie, Bruce and me meeting in Bangkok to set up a language centre in Amnuay Silpa, a prestigious old school. It was one of those rare jobs when everyone worked as a team, the bosses (Petchuda and Graham Braddick) were supportive and trusted us, so didn’t breathe down our necks – and when I left four years later I genuinely felt proud of what we all achieved.
The following weekend found me in church, which is a rare event indeed; religious establishments generally prefer me not to attend, as they have to reconsecrate a building after I’ve been in them. However, I coudn’t resist the opportunity to go to the church where Nongyow and I were married, and hear Father Simon‘s last sermon before he moves to The Actor’s Church in Covent Garden, then back to the Vicarage for a beer or twelve and a fab Sundy lunch cooked by Lynne, another old friend. I’ve known Simon since before he was a vicar, and accompanied him on some great thespian events, such as when we did a medieval mummers’ play at the Ludlow festival and he played Saint George. I played the back end of a pantomime horse.
Funny how our future career paths were obvious, even then.
The first draft was written 6 months ago after a few pints. It’s been debated, and debated, and debated, and edited (and somehow the pseudo-word “leveraged” got in there), and committeed, and emerged more sensible for all that. The Web Standards Project’s Accessibility Task Force manifesto is published. Continue reading WaSP ATF manifesto launched
Now I’ve got some industrial hosting, I need to make good my promise to Nongyow to put up family albums so friends overseas can marvel at our glamorous lives. So I’m seeking recommendations for some gallery software that meets these criteria:
PHP/ MySQL, for free open-source goodness
easy-peasy to install. (I mean easy-peasy; bear in mind, I had to take a day off work to install WordPress.)
Doesn’t require some special process to upload the photos (so I can FTP all nine million straight to the server)
Standards-compliant, and doesn’t use tables to lay out the photos
Automatic thumbnail generation
Can set up albums
I’m not really bothered about comments (it would be nice, but the wankers who spam me give me enough moderation to do on my blog).
Anyone got any favourites to suggest – with a link to a gallery so I can check it out, if you feel really kind?
I haven’t used IE7 yet (because the now-defunct shop that sold me my computer also charged me for a pirated version of Windows, the bastards), but it seems to have some groovy enhancements to the (ahem) somewhat creaky support for css that we’d worked around in IE6. Continue reading Three cheers for Internet Explorer
Today, all the styling is gone from this site. Some unkind folk might say that you can hardly tell. There’s a reason behind this nakedness, as suggested by Dustin Diaz: it’s to show that a properly made website, with content in the markup and presentation in the css is completely comprehensible and usable without styles.
Happy birthday to the junior heir to the Lawson millions. Thomas the tank engine train tracks were unwrapped, lego was gratefully received, cakes were eaten and candles were blown out. After an exhausting day wrestling wrapping paper to the ground and consuming his own bodyweight of sugar, he threw a gigantic paddy when it was bedtime.
