Tom's Bits

My websites – a potted history

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I started writing websites in 1996 or 7. These started as basic static sites, all with the standard format (about / more info / pictures / contact). The first was written in the DOS editor, wasn’t tested, probably had no real formatting other than some Hx/B/I/P tags. It was either about myself or my Morris side, I don’t remember which, and was never published/hosted. After that there were:

  • My own personal set of pages
  • Lardnet
  • An iteration of a company website (1998). This was in the days of IE3, IE4, and Netscape 4, so I had a whole load of strange non-compliance going on. I used browser detection to deliver the right html page, and had to basically code two separate sites – one vanilla, and one with nice collapsing menus.
  • PHP/MySQL intranet pages (1999?). Part was for (internal) software ordering and accounting, I’d styled it to look somewhat like the company’s software product.
  • Some funky CSS based documentation site (2000?). This was for its time rather cool as it was possibly the first site I’d seen with tabs (at the top of the page). There was also a version with collapsing menus (using Windows Explorer look and feel) on the left. I remember showing a friend, who castigated me for making a site that stopped the back button from working properly.
  • My handover documentation when I left my job (2003). I’ve a feeling this had some form of word->html conversion script going on which I enhanced with a load of sed. I think I may even have made this (or another similar project) into a .chm file.
  • Wedding site (2001). A very simple site (in English and Italian) giving information about my wedding. Aahhh…
  • Baby site (2003). Information about the birth of my lovely daughter, with a birth story (really!), the beginning of a blog, pictures.
  • My mother’s weaving website (2009?). Very simple and (IMHO) pleasing. Not a table in sight!

Also, a swathe of wiki based sites, but I didn’t create them, merely populated them – much the same as here.

Reasons to buy an Apple computer

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Right now I can think of only three reasons to buy an Apple computer.

  1. It’s what you use already – so there’s some investment in skill, ecosystem, software and so on. While this might seem little more than inertia or laziness, the change required in moving to a different platform really is significant.
  2. It’s doesn’t run Windows 10. Wow, this is really sad, and yet it’s one of the reasons I’ve considered using the old iMac I inherited. The problem for me is that OSX is also pretty terrible, and there are a whole load of issues I’d have to overcome for this to be even the merest possibility.
  3. Design. There’s no hope here.

One of the really big reasons *not* to buy Apple is value. Honestly, for the price you’re not getting an awful lot. PC systems at both laptop and desktop level offer considerably better value for money if performance is a criterion. The one big thing Apple hardware’s had for me is a decent screen, and it seems that even these aren’t as good as they had been.

Back again… but what is this magic?

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So I’m back again…. but now there’s a whizzy wysiwyg editor to confuse me.

Why am I back (for now)? Possibly because I’m off Facebook for the nonce. And why’s that, and is it long term? Well, the why is because it was becoming an issue for me, and I really have better things to do with my time.

How long is unknown. It’s not like I’ve announced a month or year off, and I *do* intend to keep posting on instagram (and so feed the evil FB empire).

I guess we’ll see – both how long (or even if) I keep posting here, and whether I manage to resist the lure of apparently social media.

Self-Censoring

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I post some information about myself here, and elsewhere online, but there’s an awful lot I don’t say. The problems are:

  1. I do want to… confess? That’s not it, I’m not committing grievous sins. I want to release some of the pent-up stuff (experiences, thoughts, opinions), and writing is a way to do this.
  2. This is a public place. Okay, so no-one reads it, but they may – and this could be bad personally (in that it might worry or hurt people), or in terms of employment (if a potential employer read this they may be put off).

Even if I take steps to obfuscate my identity, this site can easy be traced back to me. If I use a different blog site, there will still be footprints, and I even have an unease about posts I’ve made on Reddit.

What to do?

Problem of Justice

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Hard to know what’s Just.

A recent event is a video coming out of a driver behaving very dangerously toward cyclists. No actual harm done, but he mounted the pavement toward cyclists, threatened, threw cans at them. Not just one but a number of cyclists, and when the police arrived he reversed away at quite some speed, also hardly safe.

I’d expect (hope) he’s tracked down and prosecuted, but what would be an appropriate measure of censure?

Clearly he needs to understand this isn’t acceptable and that he cannot behave this way again, and other drivers have to be shown that society doesn’t tolerate such behaviour and actions. Naturally, any punishment needs to follow the sentencing guidelines, but as I don’t know these I have the luxury of formulating my own.

Driving is necessary for many jobs, and I don’t think it would be correct to ban him for this one action (or set of actions) if it means he’ll lose his livelihood. His driving history would be very relevant though – if his record is pretty mucky then losing his licence might be appropriate as he’d had enough warnings. Assuming for now he’s been an otherwise decent driver, I’d think about adding sufficient points to his licence to make any further infraction result in a ban. If possible, I’d want these points not to expire quickly, to force long term good behaviour. If possible, I’d have this balanced by something remedial – anger management or driver education? The problem with these things is that they can be a simple sop.

Other possibilities:

  • Prison? No. Serves no purpose and is entirely over-severe.
  • A fine? Possibly, but this has to be proportionate to his ability to pay. There’s a difference between causing pain and causing hardship.
  • Community service? Also possible, but can this be made appropriate?

The difficulty with all of this is that it becomes tailored to the person and their circumstances, and I’m not sure if this is Right. It feels like it should be, but there’s a niggling doubt that it’s a step away from the impartiality that Justice ought to have.

 

A Tick

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Yesterday I encountered a tick. It was wriggling as I touched it, but its mouth was firmly clamped to my skin. The panic rose a little, as I considered what to do. Could I leave it until sated, to avoid ripping off (and leaving behind) mouth parts? Should I attempt a removal?

The wonderful web suggested getting rid of it as soon as possible to reduce the risk of infection, and gave clues on the process. Tweezers in hand, I stretched the skin around it and pushed the tweezer tips into me skin a little, prepared to remove a little of myself to be rid of this nasty little beastie. A pinch and a pull and it was out, and from what I can see it was intact. I rubbed the area down with a cleaning wipe, and then… then the paranoia.

No, that’s not the word. Neurosis?

The idea that if a tick should be on me the day *after* camping, that perhaps there are more, similarly waiting. In my clothes, both washed and unwashed. In my bed. On my person. On my daughter, for whom I’m solely responsible with my wife away. Every itch, every scratch, every tickle, a tick. Inspecting parts of myself. Ironing this morning, clothes that were camping and those in the same wash, inspecting the seams, ironing heavily and slowly on full heat with full steam.

Not a fan of ticks.

Weening myself off Facebook?

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I doubt this will actually happen, but I’ve a feeling it’s time to ween myself off facebook. Hmm. Quote gratified to see that while “ween” is highlighted as an incorrect spelling, facebook is too, but not as a mere capitalisation error but as a non-existent word.

Anyway, it feels like the time. Why? Right now it’s because I want to rant about something without offending a particular person who appears popular within a group. I’m not even facebook friends with them, but I’m friends with someone who might be, and I don’t fancy it getting back I don’t fancy my wife (still not using names here) seeing what I’ve typed and having a go at me about it…

On this site I feel freer to say what I feel, although I still have a certain reserve. Why? Because this is my space, and while it’s public, it’s not advertised or open for general comment.

The downside of not using facebook remains – that it’s a nice and easy tool for feeling in touch, and for sending quick messages. It’s a convenient way of sending and receiving good strokes, so feeds my ego and helps me feel I’m in actual relationships with other pe0ple (which, honestly, I’m not).

Crafty Tom

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Planned, thought, devised… not done.

Had so many crafty ideas in the past, small ways of making money, doing something different. The largets, most developed on was making and selling cards, hand cut with tissue in the window. This goes back a fair few years, and the designs have refined over the years.

I still enjoy the card making, but the plans never ripened, and I highly doubt I’d ever make real money out of it. I say I enjoy it – but there’s always the need to try a new design to avoid the cards I give family being the same, again, and that’s taken a bit of the fun out of it.

A more recent idea is to design and sell t-shirts. All I need to do is get decent translations of a phrase into various languages (harder than it might seem, but there’s a good reason for this), create the art work (text plus some form of graphic), market, sell, make profit. Easy, if you do it, but will I?

Little things – Pulling faces at kids on coaches

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One of the little things that brings me (and perhaps others) pleasure is pulling faces at children on coaches, typically at school parties in London. It’s the amused surprise that works for me, with sometimes a face pulling in return, sometimes a “look at that!” to the other kids.

Harmless, I believe, but could this sort of thing ever be misconstrued?