Just spending the evening fiddling with the site and fixing a few bits and pieces on my other sites - Yash is out with the girls so I’m baby sitting.

I was just looking a Mark Rickets’ blog having had a comment from him following the mention of his plugin and I notice he has quite a few photos on there. I have thought about adding pictures to break up the monologue but so far that has just extended to the picture of Hot Fuzz. I guess the main reason is that I have my flickr account so all my photos get dumped there. I have had plenty of ideas of ‘themes’ of photos. Not least a collection of ‘design and function’ photos of which I have a number. That will come. I had thought I’d integrate them in to some sort of Flash viewer - make it all a bit more exciting. Flash is also a pretty good way of dynamically loading images too.

So the reason for the rambling is that the subject just reminded me that me and Yash are on the cover of a new book! It is published by her company and is on the subject of yoga through pregnancy and once your baby is born. Here is the cover:

You can buy it from amazon too - Breathe Your Way Through Birth with Yoga

Things have been buzzing for me since saturday. I went down to the local running track and re-calibrated my Nike+ system. As mentioned before, I knew it was falling well short of the correct distance. As it turned out I was losing 700m over 10km! That is quite a difference. As I was recalibrating I could see it was short roughly 7m over 100. The process actually involves a minimum distance of 400m which is the same as one lap of the inside lane of the track. You have to run it once (I did twice to be sure) and then a walking version.

The result has been astounding, and inspiring too. Having got things set I left the track and did 11km over a fairly flat course. On that run I broke the 40 minute mark. I knew I could from my run in Battersea Park. That was good.

On Monday I went out at lunch and did a river circuit, holborn - temple - tower - westminster - temple and back to holborn. It worked out about 15.3km and I finished in 59min something. Wow! That was sweet. I was averageing under 4 minutes per km over 15km! Previously it was taking me that long to do about 12.5km.

So I went out at lunch today with the intention to just clock up some distance for one of my challenges but didn’t think I was up to a big or fast one. As it went I felt better and better although I didn’t think I was pushing it. This time I went out as far as Vauxhall Bridge and back. The distance when I got back to the office was (I think) 17.1km. The time was just over 1hr 5min! When I uploaded my run it clocked my 10km at 37′37″. Holy shit. That is unbelievable! I remember when I was happy to do a 10 minute mile, which seemed a long way at that! My 5km was 18′31″ too. If I can keep this up I’ll be well happy. The other thing was that I didn’t feel like I was pushing myself either so I hope there is room for development yet. If I can translate that time in to a triathlon I feel confident I could break the top 10.

Anyway, that’s enough of my bragging. Sorry. I am just buzzing about it. If you didn’t know, 15 years ago I weighed about 18 stone (252 pounds) and did no excercise to think of. I could just about muster the strength to run for a bus!

Here I am working away and, I have to admit, dancing at my desk. The people in the office must think I’m a muppet but there are some tunes that you just can’t help but move to.

I have a Powerbook along side my desktop which essentially acts as a tunes server (and testing machine). It has a 90gb harddrive which pretty much maxed out with music. Recently as I’ve been listening to albums I been dropping individual tunes in to seperate playlists to create favourites by genre. I’ve been sat here listening to the dance track list on shuffle. It is just one classic after another. I’m on track 9 now and it has played out as such:

1. As The Rush Comes - Motorcycle
2. Silence - Delerium
3. Lost Not Found - Dirty Vegas
4. My Love (oakenfold mix) - Justin Timberlake (how did that get in there? Actually pretty catchy)
5. With or Without You - U2 vs. Daft Punk
6. Little Fluffy Clouds - The Orb
7. Love U More - Sunscreen
8. One More Time - Daft Punk
9. Southern Sun - Paul Oakenfold

There’s 27 in the list - not one filler. Well. We’ll see…

I pity people who can’t listen to music while they work. Man, I feel like going clubbing!

Talking of clubbing. It has been a very long time since I saw a dancefloor. That’s what happens when you turn 30 and become a father… Anyway, looks like I’ll be going to see John Digweed at Heaven on Good Friday with my friend Ade. I think the last time I saw him almost 10 years ago in San Fransisco along side Sasha. Quality night dancing on the podium in my tight white sailor boy bell bottoms, top off… Ha ha! That was the city to do it too.
So, I’ll have to report back on the night. Maybe get a few photos.

BTW, we’re on to Ture To Form by Hybrid now…

Have you noticed? I’ve now got my Nike+ stats appearing in the right-hand column. Sweet! Thanks go to Mark Rickett for the creation of the plugin.

I had some trouble getting it to work initially. First I didn’t notice it was pointing to a different directory to the one it needed to. That fixed I then had to manually add the php in to the sidebar. No problem though. So now it is all working I just need to go in adjust the code out put to match my style sheet. It currently uses strong tags which I have set to Georgia and don’t use in that context. Hopefully that should take long. Beyond that I might even fiddle with the php to see if I can get the average pace of each individual run to show. Another great feature would be surfacing my challenges. You can show your goals but I don’t have any. I just have a bunch of challenges which I’ve got going with some friends.

I’ve also come across another Nike+ piece of php which pulls your info from the site and actually presents each run in the format of a graph. When I get a chance I thought I might create an actual Nike+ page to hold this too. If can remember where I got the script I will add a link.

So I finally got to see Hot Fuzz. Had the in-laws staying so me and Yash could slip off for the afternoon and check it out.

There has been a lot of buzz about the film and having seen it I’d say it is justified. It is full of laughs, the woman next to couldn’t stop all the way through. That’s good because atmosphere in the cinema was infectious and had me laughing out loud too. Not something I do often. Simon Pegg was good in his role but Nick Frost was the star of the show. Amazing to think he’s had no formal training and just got in to acting through Pegg.

I hadn’t read any reviews of the film so didn’t know anything about the story line. It is pretty ridiculous but then that all adds to the comedy value of the film in the same way as it does for Shaun of the Dead. I won’t go in to details of the story, that’s like seeing trailers (such as Die Hard 4) in which they clearly show you the climax of the film when the bad guys croak.

If you haven’t seen the film then I say go. It is one you could watch on dvd because the nature of the film doesn’t demand the big screen, but it is worth going for atmosphere. It has been along time since I went to the cinema and this was worth the wait.

About a year and a half ago I was building a style guide at LexisNexis. Well my job was really to write it but I like to get my hands dirty to took the opportunity to build the online guidelines too.

I decided to use a left-hand column for the navigation leaving the top of the page for titles. When it came to building the page structure I ran in to a problem in that I wanted the dividing line to run the height of the page regardless of the content.

The issue with this is that if you set a border to the left-hand column it only runs as long as the the column has content. This clearly leads to inconsistency. At the time I searched around online and was unable to find a solution, even discussing the problem with the webdev team but no one had a solution.

Then it came to me. An answer to a problem that I think most developers must have run in to but at the time had no documentation.
Andrea Hill at LexisNexis recently pointed me to a new article on AListApart which deals with pretty much the same issue. I never documented it at the time because I thought everyone else would have found the solution too but I guess not so here it is…

Assuming you have a 2 column layout, you simply need to give both columns a matching border value, say 1px solid #666. The left column has it on the right and floats left. The right column has it on the left and has the appropriate margin to push it out to the right of the left column so that the two borders over lap. Simple. Note that the left column has a defined width be it % or fixed. The right column has no width defined. This is basically to tackle IE 6 which will push the right column out of sync if width is set.

However, that is all good and well if you use the same background colour across the width of your site. If you don’t I suggest using a background image which is the exact width of the left column and 1px high. The last pixel of the image should be the colour of the column border. Set this as the background of the div containing both the left and right columns, and have it repeat vertically.
As a back up you can also think about doubling up with the technique previously suggested technique to cover depreciation/broken images.

Sample Code

#leftcolumn{
float: left;
width: 400px;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border-right: #ebebeb dashed 1px;
}
#rightcolumn{
margin: 0 0 0 400px;
padding: 0;
border-left: #ebebeb dashed 1px;
}

Coming next… How to remove the border below the selected tab using the sliding doors technique and IE.

Well it is day two. I think things are looking pretty good. Still plenty to do and areas of the blog interface I haven’t even looked at so excuse the mess. I hope it doesn’t turn out to be one of those projects that kicks off well but loses steam.

If you have any comments or suggestions I love to hear them.

Hopefully I might have time later today to do some more. Suposed to be seeing Hot Fuzz too so I’ll give it a review.

Well as you can see I have made some quick progress at styling the blog. I took the default template, downloaded it and started overwriting the elements one by one.

I ran in to a problem quickly which took a while to resolve - the #page div was appearing transparent. It turned out that there was a script in the header.php which was effecting it so I removed it. Hope that doesn’t have an impact somewhere down the line…

Still got plenty to do but at least it is taking shape and is a lot easier than I thought it would be. Wordpress is definitely better than the model I tried using last time.

I think my work time is about to come to an end as it is my daughter’s bath time and I’ve been sat at the computer all evening.

Wow. I can’t believe I’ve finally got of my ass and set a blog. Well I had one a couple of years ago but I never got round to posting anything. Well I’m determined to use this one. There’s loads of shit I want to shout about and get off my chest. For now though I need to look in to how to skin this interface.

B