Not a lot

Not been doing a lot lately - a bit of php, watching Prison break season 2 and taking some photos.

This morning I sorted out some pics of Ben dropping pennies I took yesterday, and then I tried taking some more penny photos. I wanted to get a close-up with black background so I got a cardboard box down from the loft and cut holes out both ends, then put black cloth under the bottom hole and put glass from a picture frame over the top hole and put the penny on top of the glass.

The first shot I did came out okay, but taking a photo of the other side of the penny, it kept looking out of focus. So I decided to try and take the photo from a tripod. Trying to get my tripod over the box so the lens could focus on the penny was very difficult though. Eventually I did it, but even though it looked like the penny was in focus in the viewfinder, the pics still looked slightly OOF.

After doing this, I submitted an application to join stockxpert, so we'll see how that goes. Then I ate lunch. After lunch I tided up my room a bit and put all my photography stuff away. I went on the pinternet for a bit, then got Ben home from school. After that I went to bed until Dinner time as I had a headache.

After dinner I watched Mac P and Ben play snooker on Maccy's new snooker table which arrived today. After that I tried to set up virtual hosts in Apache on my PC.


Food
Breakfast: Coco pops; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Chicken Tikka sandwich spread sandwich; smokey bacon crisps; grapes; satsuma; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Spag bol. Pudding was neapolitan ice cream; American style chocolate brownie; kit kat. Coffee.

Photographing dead leaf and php

Had a bit of a lie-in today and got about 9am. After having shower etc. ate my breakfast. Moohar asked me take some boxes from the garage to the loft, so I did that for about half an hour.

Went on my comp and went on MSN, looked at some skilk adverts and read some stuff. Had a bit of a headache so after that had an ibuprofen, went in the garden and took some photos of mating ladybirds. Then went on my comp again and checked my spleen-mail. Did a bit more work on a spreadsheet of click thrus and went on deviant art while I was waiting for the spreadsheet to load/sort stuff. After that ate lunch.

After lunch I worked more on the registration script for the new milkcap mania. At 3.10pm I went off to get Ben from school. When we got home I started taking photos of a dead leaf, then Moohar asked me to dig out some compost from the bottom of the compost bin, so I did that for a while. After digging that out Ben got in the compost bin and jumped up and down to make the compost go down to the bottom, and it smelt like granny. Then I went inside and took some more dead leaf pics.

After dinner me, Mac P and Ben played Mario kart wii for a bit and then I copied and sorted my dead leaf/mating ladybird pics onto my comp. After doing quite a bit of editing on the dead leaf photos and taking a few more, I noticed that a 100% crop I made of one of the images was slightly noisy - although not very, only quite subtle and remembered that I had set the ISO to 640 a couple of days ago to take some photos of birds in the garden. Doh! At least most of the pics look good even at that ISO. It explains why I needed to have the flashes on such low power, most of the time the SB800s were set at 1/128 power, even though I was at f/16.

Food
Breakfast: Maple & Pecan crisp cereal; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Carberry Irish Mature Cheddar Cheese with salad sandwich; grapes; cup o' tea.
Dinner: ½ Chicago Town spicy meatfeast pizza pie; slice ham & pineapple pizza; chips; salad. Pudding was Müller corner - I had a strawberry crisp one which was quite rubbish. Was just like natural yoghurt with the end of a packet of strawberry crisp. Posh double chocolate cookie. Coffee.

Mario Kart Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

Last week I was working on the lightbox script for my pog website, things kept breaking so it took me ages to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it. Anyway, I think it works reasonably well now. I also had some work to do last week. At the spleenkend Shaz came to stay and me and Ben played Mario Kart Wii a lot, and since the Spleenkend I have just been playing on that and going on t' pinternet.

I went on the skilk103.2 website and you cannae listen online! They have weird pics of all their presenters where if you hover over the pic, the presenter does a wierd expression. Also, I saw on there that there was a new Argos and also a JJB Fitness studio (gym) or sumat. They also had something about ladybrook, but it was just a pub or sumat called Ladybrook, not ladybrook estate. I wonder if brownlow road is still alive?

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry jam toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheddar cheese with salad sandwich; clementine; slice of farmhouse fruit cake.
Afternoon snack: Milk chocolate digestive; malted milk; orange juice; coffee.
Dinner: Stir fry; chicken nuggets. Pudding was Jamaica Ginger cake with golden syrup and custard. Coffee. Galaxy caramel.

MS Virtual PC 2007

I spent most of today watching a Bob Dylan documentary and a pink panther film. The Dylan documentary was quite good, although it only covered a few years of his life, something like 1960-1966. Would have been more interesting if it had covered all his life up to now. It had some clips of performances by other good artists that me and yumpt had nae heard of, so we wrote them down as we watched the film:

• Gene Vincent and the blue caps
• Muddy Waters
• Woody Guthrie
• The new lost City Ramblers
• Howlin' Wolf

I also downloaded Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 as using VMWare I have been unable to connect to my PC's localhost. After downloading it I found I already had it installed, so I installed win XP on it, and then found that MS actually provide virtual hard disk images pre-loaded with Win XP SP2 and IE6/7/8 that you can download for free from their website.

So I downloaded Windows XP SP2 with IE6 and Windows XP SP2 with IE8 images. Then I loaded them up, loads quicker than installing Win XP myself took. Also now means that I don't have to use the illegal version of Win XP I was using previously to test stuff on IE6.

To get internet and be able to connect to my localhost in the virtual PC I had to go on the settings for the virtual machine and change the networking adapter to 'Shared networking (NAT)'. Then to access localhost from the virtual machine I just had to type in the i.p. address of my actual PC.

After getting this working I deleted the old win XP virtual machine I had made, VMWare and a few other old programs I found in the add/remove programs section of control panel.

Food
Breakfast: Frosties; cup o' tea.
Morning snack: Crinkle crunch cream; milk chocolate digestive; cup o' tea.
Lunch: ½ Peppered ham sandwich; cheese on toast; satsuma; kitkat; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken; parsnips; broccoli; potatoes; gravy. Pudding was apple pies with cream. Coffee. Chocolate truffle mix; easter egg.

Annoying javascript/css

Well, after finishing my php book I decided I should get some practice and put what I (should of) learnt into practice. So I started work on a new version of my pog website where the menu is produced from the site directory structure and the site only has on page, with the content decided by $_GETting info from the URL string.

I managed to write the menu in PHP okay, and so started work on the lightbox (java)script to display the 300dpi images. Then I spent about 3 days trying to work out how to get the transparent background (to 'dim' the rest of the page) to cover the whole of the page. Unfortunately different browsers give different info for the same property, and there are quite a few properties to do with page/window size that you can query. A couple of hours ago I added the following to the script and then had to run it in each browser quite a few times to try and get the info I needed:

alert('window.innerHeight' + window.innerHeight + '\n'
+ 'document.body.clientHeight' + document.body.clientHeight + '\n'
+ 'document.documentElement.clientHeight' + document.documentElement.clientHeight + '\n'
+ 'window.scrollMaxY' + window.scrollMaxY + '\n'
+ 'document.body.scrollHeight' + document.body.scrollHeight + '\n'
+ 'document.body.offsetHeight' + document.body.offsetHeight + '\n'
+ 'document.documentElement.offsetHeight' + document.documentElement.offsetHeight);

Obviously I also did lots of searching on the pinternet about this issue, and it seems that I was getting different values returned by properties in some browsers than functions posted on the internet would lead you to think (e.g. getting window size rather document size).

Eventually I got the script working in all but IE6, then I found that by just putting

html, body{
height: 100%;
}

in the css and then setting the transparent background element to 100% height and width it would work in all browsers (well at least it does at the moment, hopefully will still work tomorow!) Wish I had known about that before, would have saved me 3 days of trouble.

Food
Breakfast: Frosties; cup o' tea.
Lunch: ½ beetroot sarnie; ½ cheese with iceberg lettuce sandwich; banana; normal rocky; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chilli con carne; rice; flavoured tortilla chips; grated cheese. Pudding was banana split. Coffee. Chocolate truffle mix.

Pond

This morning watched Fantastic Four 1994 version with Ben. After that I started researching on t' pinternet about how to get the full copy of the birth certificate. I found the county council websites had quite a bit of info on what you need to do and also had forms you can download, fill out and post to request a copy of your birth certificate. Filling out the cheques for payment was weird - you have to write loads of stuff on them, and Notts CC said on their website make the cheque payable to 'Superintendent Registrar' but on their form they say to make the cheque payable to Notts CC. Other CCs seem to say make the cheque payable to the CC so I just did that. I also had to phone Surrey CC to check the registry office I needed to send the form to.

After lunch I finished off sorting out mine and Ben's birth certificate requests, I left Yumpts so he could copy mine. I did a bit of vacuuming and then me and Ben helped Moohar with the pond she's been digging the last week or so. She had already dug it all out so we had to smooth all the mud out and get rid of all the water in the deep bit, which was all clay at the bottom. Smoothing all the mud (using they clayey water) took quite a while. After that we covered it all with newspaper then put the pond liner on top of that. We put some turf back over the end bit near the shallow end and then started filling it with water from the water butt. After a bit Moohar realised that the mud she was putting in the shallow end (which is meant to be a boggy area) would just mix with the water from the deep end.

So we all went back inside and Moohar looked at the book she was using and saw they had stones like a dam between the boggy area and the rest of the pond. I went on my comp for a bit and then watched some pixel perfect episodes with Ben while Moohar fixed the pond. She made the stone dam, and filled the boggy end with mud, and also put some pond plants she had bought in the pond. It still needs the turf replacing round the edge and the liner trimming. Also, Moohar said she needs to get some oxygenating plants for it and Ben said you should some goldfish.

After dinner me, Ben and Yumpt watched Trekkies, it was scare-chee how weird the people on it were, especially some bloke who said wore lipstick and said his character was the wife of a nasa astronaut from one of the episodes.

Food
Breakfast: Frosties; Cup o' tea.
Lunch: ½ beetroot sandwich; Genoa style ham with iceberg lettuce sandwich; grapes; satsuma; Montana; chocolate truffle mix crispie cake stooef.
Dinner: Toad in the hole; potatoes; Swede; Broccoli; gravy. Pudding was 2 x american style chocolate brownies.

Annoying passport heads

Yesterday me, Ben and Yumpt all got a letter to say our passports couldn't be processed because we didnae include our Birth certificates. On the letter it says that they need the FULL version of your birth certificate, and if you're born after 1982 it must include your parent's details.

So I got our birth certificates, and they don't have our parents names on. I had a look on the passports website and it doesn't tell you how to get a version with your parents names on. To find out this info you would have to phone the government, using an 0870 number (Companies using 0870 numbers normally make money on each call made to them).

Since its a Sunday and I didn't really want to phone their expensive phone number I did some googling and found out that there are 2 versions of birth certificates - a short version (which we all have) and a full version, which has the parents names on. The government has a website where you can request a copy of your birth certificate, so I registered for this, but when it comes to actually ordering your birth certificate, it doesn't let you choose whether you want the full or short version and I couldn't see anyway on their website that tells you what type of birth certificate they send you.

So rather than waste £10 per person on what may be just the same as what we already have, I did a bit more googling and found that you can request a copy of your birth certificate from the registration office where your birth was registered. It costs £7 for the full version, but I couldn't find any info about what the registration office actually requires to send you the copy. So tomorrow we will have to phone the registration offices to see what they need, and then post them the info they need and a cheque.

Another very annoying scheme by the government to get yet more money out of it's citizens.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Jam toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
After church snack: Wedding anniversary cake; coffee.
Dinner: Chicken curry; rice; puppodum. Pudding was fruit cocktail and ice cream. Coffee. Creme egg.
Tea: Genoa style ham sandwich; banana; grapes; slice of sultana and currant cake; cup o' tea.