Loads of snow!!!!!!!

This morning I woke up about 6.15am, it was a bit more snowy outside.


After I'd had my shower and wash it was even more snowy. I woke up Ben and Mac up about 7.00am, then we had breakfast, and then went out to play in the snow about 7.30am and it was even more snowy. There was probably 6 inches of snow!


We rolled some big snowballs then I made them into a snowman while Ben, his mate Matthew, Mac and Clare tried to roll some snowballs down the road, and then went sledging somewhere.


At about 8.30am I came in, then went on Animal Crossing. First of all Nook's was closed as it was only about 8.45am, and it only opens at 9.00am. So I ran around looking for fossils and snowballs. I found Sahara by the museum, so then I also looked for animals and asked them if they had any carpets. Unfortunately Groucho and Deena weren't in, and I didn't see them walking around anywhere either. Maybe they were in but were still in bed?


Luckily bud gave me a carpet.


But Lolly was ill, and when I spoke to her she'd just moan about how ill she was. So I ran home and got my medicine in the hope that then she'd talk to me about carpets. However, after I gave her the medicine she still wouldn't talk to me about carpets, and just said she needed to rest and recover. This, despite doing a flip on the spot after taking the medicine!

I finished going on Animal about 9.20am, then went on my comp. It stopped snowing.


I looked outside and it looked like the snow was melting already. The weather forecast is for sleet or rain later, so I'm glad we got out and enjoyed it before it's all gone. Mac went to work as well, so it was good for him to enjoy the snow early since when he finishes work the snow might be gone (or just slush).

I checked my email, and that took until 11.45am!!! It started snowing again.

I checked the websqueeze, and did some more trying to fix a float problem in IE, then it was lunch time. After lunch I played on Animal Crossing again. I asked Rolf, Deena, and Groucho (the only animals I hadn't already asked apart from Lolly) if they had any old carpets, but none of them did.


I played hide and seek and then built a big snowman.


I don't know why making snowmen isn't so easy in real life? In real life Mac came home from work about 1pm as well.

Then I checked the websqueeze a bit more and watched this video: Nicole Sullivan: "Design Fast Websites". In the video it suggests using PNG8 rather than PNG24/32, and that using the IE Alpha Image loader can be very bad for performance. So I had a look at PNG8, and read this article: PNG8 - The Clear Winner, which is about how you can have multiple transparent values with variable opacity in PNG8, which displays properly in modern browsers and IE7, and will display using 1-bit alpha, a la GIF.

I also noticed one of the comments said that PNGGauntlet gave them better compression than PNGCrush.

I did a bit more work on my website. First trying to get image rollover in CSS working in IE6. After much trial and error and googling I found that I needed to use an anchor <a> element AND give it a href for the CSS :hover pseudo class to work. I also needed to have an empty text node inside the anchor element for IE6 to display the background image with the correct image position.

After that I tried to find the CSS pseudo-class that's activated on the mousedown event. Unfortunately it seems the CSS pseudo class is :active, and this doesn't work in IE, it seems to use active as the default (or maybe it thinks the link is always active?), so no good. So I looked into doing a mousedown event with javascript, but unfortunately when you attach an event in IE, the this keyword doesn't refer to the element the event is attached to. So I looked into how to fix this. There's an article about it here: Fixing IE's .attachEvent(..) failures, but I haven't had time to digest it properly yet.

After dinner I watched Lost with Mac and Ben. The first part was quite boring, then the second part was great. It was totally gokos to see that Jin was still alive (I'd always hoped he wasn't really dead since you don't see him die and it wasn't obvious that he was dead since he was on the part of the boat that didn't explode). Having Rousseau's team on it and also some random people who don't know who they are was great as well.

Then me, Ben and Mac went in the backgarden to make another snowman. We made a snow Totoro, but that Macanae Moc went in before we'd finished, and he took ages before he came out as well!


We used big stones for eyes and a nose, small pebbles to outline his teeth, bamboo canes for his whiskers, and drinking straws for his claws.

I came in and copied the pics of the snow Totoro to my comp and processed them, then uploaded one to Flickr. After that I tried to copy the pic to Clare's laptop as she wanted to send pics to Uncle Gez. But although her laptop recognised the (micro) SD card, there was no way to access it. When I first put it in it came up with a box asking if I wanted to tag all the images on the card or copy them across, so I pressed 'cancel', thinking I could just copy the 2 pics I wanted through windows explorer. But on My Computer it wasn't listed. I checked My Network places, it wasn't there. I checked device manager, and it had an SD card adapter or sumat similar listed, but you could just change the settings/driver, not actually access the SD card. I tried taking the card out and re-inserting it, but it still didn't appear anywhere so you could access it.

So I just put the SD card in a usb SD card reader rather than using the laptop's built in SD card reader, and it worked fine. Seems a bit weird for acer to go to the trouble of putting an SD card slot in their laptops if it doesn't even work properly.

I was quite sleepy (well, I always am), so I went to bed about 10.30pm.

Food
Breakfast: Lemon marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Mature cheddar cheese sandwich; white grapes; slice of jam swiss roll; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Shepherds pie; grated cheese; carrots; green beans; tomato ketchup. Pudding was Cherry Piiiiiiiiie with cream. Coffee.