From the Orient

Returning from the toilets, deep in the thought, automatic mode kicked in. I was in the kitchen before I knew it, pressing two little buttons on the machine, grabbing the resulting beverage and returning to my desk. It was an action purely instinctive and born of habit.

Only when I was about to put the cup of coffee to my lips, I realised what was happening. Oh no, you foul concoction. You don’t win that easily. My lips are sealed, thou shalt not pass, you will not collect £200. I shall not drink coffee again. I took the coffee back to the kitchen and poured it down the sink.

It is so tempting, but even more reason for me not to even have one. Headaches for two weeks, that was the result of “my coffee addiction”:http://www.dellah.com/orient/2003/02/25/coffee.shtml. Not much of a cold turkey, I admit, but my addition was a subtle affection.

I think this is the first CSS Rounded Corners example I’ve seen working in all browsers (bar one). Perhaps I haven’t looked very hard. Pointers to anymore?

“Feedster”:http://www.feedster.com/ could become a “must use” weblogging tool.

Consider you have a subject you want to talk about, and you want to find out what others are thinking about. A “google”:http://www.google.com search doesn’t usually give you this information. It gives you traditional websites, not current opinions. Feedster gives you this.

For example, “this is Feedster search for Farscape”:http://www.feedster.com/search.php?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=farscape&btnG=Search&sort= giving you an instant view from a multitude of RSS feeds. Note how you can get this as an “RSS feed”:http://www.feedster.com/rss.php?q=farscape and think how easy it could be to programmatically include this content in your weblog entry.

??Chris Thompson?? has a weblog powered by MovableType but with a twist. [via "Caveat Lector":http://www.yarinareth.net/caveatlector/archive/week_2003_03_23.html#e001447 ] MT generates XML that is then transformed into XHTML via XSLT. It has a clear advantage as he points out:-

bq. Even better, one of the downsides of MT is that every time you make a change to a template, you have to rebuild every page touched by that template. This can take time. By doing all markup outside MT entirely, I could get to a place where the only time I needed to do a rebuild from MT was when I changed the XML vocab. Something I hoped wouldn’t occur very often.

It is a clear advantage that I’d appreciate during my redesign. My redesign that I should actually finish.

“Example of CSS-driven tabs”:http://www.clagnut.com/writings/csstabs/ is a very pretty piece of CSS. I’m storing this for future use.

Dorothea examines how an introvert couple can “fall into a trap of separate introverted worlds”:http://www.yarinareth.net/caveatlector/archive/week_2003_03_23.html#e001440. It makes me glad that my partner is an extrovert who has the ability to drive me out of my shell once in a while. It forces me to participate more in the relationship than I otherwise would. If she didn’t, and she was like me, without being careful, I could easily see us leading separate lives completely.

One thing I’ve thought about in the past, and perhaps relates here is whether you’d preferred to be deaf or blind. This is a bit like my long term thinking about whether it would better to die in a fire, or freezing to death. I have an odd little mind, not that you’d know to look at me, because I’m not going to go and ask anyone they’re opinion on this. I’m an introvert, don’t you know.

Despite the loss of listening to my favourite music and bands, I’d much prefer to be deaf. No annoying noises to interrupt my thoughts, I could participate in the Internet easily, (my understanding is that text readers are a long way off being perfect), I could read books, watch TV with subtitles (which I have learnt to appreciate with a crying baby in the house). Plus, my wife already knows sign language. Perhaps an extrovert would prefer to be blind, so they could talk to people?

Speaking of this, my wife has been on the phone for the past half hour to someone or other. I never spend this amount of time on the phone during the whole day. I do have a mobile, and “like Jonathon never use it”:http://weblog.delacour.net/archives/000872.html. I got it when we were expecting our first child and needed to be contacted wherever I was when it was due. Unlike Jonathon I don’t spend an inordinate amount of money per month. In the UK you can have pay as you go. I stuck £10 on it some time last year, and still have over £8 left.