When I was round at Ellie’s last night she was complaining that her computer was being silly and not working. I had a look at it in situe but couldn’t really do much with it. Unfortunately, as is the case with PCs, after several years of just sitting there minding its own business it had managed to get itself tied up in so many knots that everything was grinding to a halt. There had been the odd virus attack for it to deal with, the installation of random useless programs that did very little other than slow everything down, and generally it was in need of some TLC. So this morning she brought it round to my house and I reinstalled Windows. And while I was at it I decided to install Ubuntu Linux on my PC, just to make things even more interesting.

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Right, before we go any further, let me warn you that the first part of this post will be mostly a rant, so if you’re not in the mood for reading about today’s frustrations feel free to skip down to something a little more positive.

Now, on with the rant.  I have spent the last few days preparing the Diocese of Chelmsford web site for its switch to the new design layout I have been working on.  Everything was set and ready to go, and this morning I hit the appropriate keys and sent the marvellous new design into the big global playground called the WWW.  And then I was told it wasn’t working.

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This week has been exceptionally busy, helping out at the kids’ holiday club at church. This year we were doing a pirate-themed week, with material from a pack called “Landlubbers”. It’s been a lot of fun, though quite tiring, especially given my normal week usually involves me sitting at a computer all day - quite different to the running around and being active and everything that’s involved in looking after a group of kids for a morning! I know a morning on its own isn’t much, especially if you have to look after kids 24-7, but it was still quite a challenge and most of us who have been involved have ended up shattered by lunchtime!

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Version 0.5 BETA of my MiniGallery script is now available to download from www.matthewdawkins.co.uk/minigallery. This latest release brings in stand-alone themes and a much-improved method of integrating the script into your web pages. There are also some bug-fixes, such as solving the problem of the gallery not showing at all in Safari. The bundled theme, DarkSatin, has been tweaked slightly to cater for the new release, and a new theme, TwoBlue, is also now available to download from the MiniGallery site.

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The space next to my desk has had to be rearranged to make space for yet another new instrument. At least, new to me. In an act of crazed excitement I ended up winning an eBay auction for a Yamaha DGX-305 keyboard! I was particularly pleased with it because I got it for a lot less than it should originally have been sold for, which I guess is the biggest attraction of eBay. Instead of paying £350-400 for this Portable Grand, I paid only £180, which was a bargain.

Packed with features, a nice big LCD display, good quality speakers, piano keys, USB connection to computer, and some awesome sounds, this is a very nice keyboard. The keys aren’t weighted, but the block shape of the keys does give it a much nicer feel than your ordinary cheap keyboard.

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This morning I awoke to find the world beyond my window was covered in whiteness. Nowhere near the 6 inches that had been forecast, but that was no surprise - I’ve never seen 6 inches of snow outside of Dartmoor. Nevertheless, the 1 inch of snow we had was enough to brighten up my morning. In fact, so great was my excitement that I felt compelled to get Neddy out of the garage and go for a spin in the snow-covered roads!

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Yes, my blog has yet another new face!  It’s still not quite finished, at the time of writing, but I’m hoping to have some of the problems ironed out by the end of this evening.  This is the final product of the idea I demonstrated the other day, this time with all the appropriate graphics in place.

There are a few differences though, some through choice and others through necessity.  As hard as I tried, I just couldn’t get everything to work as I wanted, but I think that’s mainly due to my resistance to using Javascript to make certain visual things happen - as a stalwart CSS user I like to make as much happen as possible without resorting to external scripts.

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No, I’m not referring to the slogan of a large supermarket chain.

Some of you loyal blog readers may well have noticed a reasonable regularity with which I update my blog template, i.e. the way the site looks.  This is partly because I get bored with it, but mainly because I see my blog more as a showcase for my latest ideas and designs.  The theory is that if my blog looks good, I can transfer that experience into my work and be confident that the web sites I design will be at least as good as my blog.  The blog is, in effect, an advert for me.

As such, I have a new blog design that I’d like to share with you.

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On Thursday I went with some friends to London to see Wicked, the musical based on the book that was inspired by the film and book The Wizard of Oz.  Ellie has been raving about it for ages, she knows the script and songs almost inside out, and I can see why!  It was absolutely superb!!

Although the show has been out since 2003 (in America anyway) there shouldn’t be a problem with me dilvulging some of the plot, but on the other hand some people still haven’t seen it, so if you don’t want to find out what happens, don’t read any further!

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