Ever wondered what your icons got up to when you’re not looking.
Our daughter is missing!
It was one of those times you hear about on the news, but you never really think it’ll happen to you. Our daughter, who is 13 missed the school bus this morning and had to catch the regular bus from our village to her school in the next village along, a journey of about 2.5 miles. I was cycling to work along the same road and was overtaken by the bus she should have been on, but she wasn’t so I phone home and we agreed she’d probably be on the next bus and I continued on to work. As soon as I arrived my wife was on the phone really distressed that our daughter still hadn’t shown up at school. It would have taken me too long to cycle back home so a colleague kindly drove me there. At this point we were both very worried as our daughter doesn’t bunk off school or anything like that so we knew something had happened. I phoned 999 for the police and reported her missing, as soon as I’d hung up the school rang, she’d finally arrived having taken the wrong bus. We jumped in the car and picked her up, relieved that she was OK. Although she was only missing for a short time nevertheless the panic that hits you is horrible and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. We listened to her story and at least we can now laugh about it since she’ OK. She got on the bus and realised after a while it was going the wrong way, but assumed she must have taken the circular route bus. She eventually plucked up the nerve to ask the driver who confirmed she was on the wrong bus. He let her off and told her where to get the bus back, but some how she ended up on the wrong side of the road and the next bus she stopped was also going the wrong way. She walked to the next stop, sat down to read her book and waited, but as the shelter had been vandalised and the windows were no longer see through when the bus came the driver didn’t see her and didn’t stop, now she had to wait again for the next bus, which finally took her to school. To cap it all this had to be one of the few days when she didn’t have her mobile, so couldn’t call and let us know. Needless to say she feels a bit silly for getting on the wrong bus in the first place but everyone is relieved that nothing really bad happened.
Kubrick theme headers
A whole buch of images created to be used as headers in the kubrick theme.
Or you could use an image from Flickr as a kubrick header by using kubrickr
Or you could modify the header to load a random images of your choosing by :-
First add
< ?php
function header_graphic() {
echo "/images/";
$num=rand(0,9);
echo "seorasheader".$num.".jpg";
};
?>
to the header.php file which will randomly select an image from a bunch named seorasheader0.jpg –> seorasheader9.jpg.
Next, change the line in header.php
from:-
#header { background: url("< ?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/kubrickheader.jpg") no-repeat bottom center; }
to:-
#header { background: url("< ?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); header_graphic(); ?>") no-repeat bottom center; }
Flash image viewer in a flash
I like Flash, I like what can be achieved in Flash by those who know what they are doing, I’ve tinkered with a few things in Flash but never really had the time to get to grips with it. I tried to get a Flash based image gallery to work but eventually gave up. Now I’ve found a fantastic, simple and free utility called Simpleviewer from Airtight Interactive. You also need eitherPicasa or Porta. I use Picasa all you have to do is place Simpleviewer in the Picasa templates folder, choose a folder of images and save as a web page using the Simpleviewer template, voila! a cool Flash image gallery.
Playing with Linux
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been playing around with a few versions of Linux. So far I’ve tried SuSE, Novell SuSE, Debian and Ubuntu. I’ve been very impressed with all of them and I’m still using Ubuntu. Some of them are easier to set up than others and some, like Ubuntu had no problem at all in connecting my work network. Today though I changed monitors and booted Ubuntu only to get this message ..very helpful ! I realised this was something to do with the monitor refresh rate so I connected up the original, only to get a refresh rate message on the login screen just before the screen went blank and I had to type username and password blind, but the system did come back. I then ‘live’ swapped the monitors and the new one worked fine…but on reboot “out of range” again, so I’m back with the old monitor. I can’t see any way to get round this short of re-installing Ubuntu, but I’ll keep looking.
Park it here !
I cycle to work most days and the road just outside my work has a very steep long bend with no reduced speed limit. Many cars don’t make it……
Due either to drivers not knowing the road and being taken by surprise or simply thinking they can make it at higher speed because it’s late at night and quiet. The fact remains however that speed is the main reason, people simply drive too fast on this tricky bit of road. In the last 7 years I have seen 5 or 6 accidents, once I cycled up the hill to find a car on it’s roof wheels still spinning on my side of the road, if I’d been only a minute or so earlier…who knows? I’m surprised there hasn’t been a fatality yet (as far as I know). Along the edge for part of the bend there is a crash barrier in very poor condition and rarely stands up to collisions. In fact a car hit it last week and the bent it right across the foot path totally blocking it. The road runs at the bottom of the famous Wallace monument in Stirling and tourists regularly walk along here to and from the nearest campsite and B&Bs. The foot path has been blocked for nearly 2 weeks now and the car has been in the field for 2 days.
Skye
Spent a week on the Isle of Skye and as always the island gave us everything from beautiful stunning landscapes in glorious sunshine to non stop torrential rain and mist as thick as soup. We were based on the Ullinish peninsula with fantastic views of MacLeod’s tables across Loch Bracadale. We were able to explore the west of Skye from this location on daytrips, weather permitting…… On the good days we managed to get to Neist point, coral beach, Dunvegan, Portree and via causway to Oronsay.
Holiday!!!!!!!!
We’re off on holiday to the Isle of Skye on Saturday. We decided to go in our old beat up Peugeot 405, although it is getting a bit ‘ify’ these days. It developed a leek in the cooling system the other day, but I think I managed to fix it (I hope). We discussed hiring a car for the week but it was really too expensive for us. Any way I hope the old car makes it there and back without too many problems.
Really looking forward to going back to Skye, we love it there, If I could we’d live there.
Firefox 1.0.6 Released
Firefox 1.0.6 stability update released, but this time they recommend uninstalling previous versions of Firefox first.
1. Read the Firefox 1.0.6 Release Notes
2. Download the Firefox 1.0.6
3. Close all windows.
4. Uninstall previous versions of Firefox 1.0.x. Uninstalling previous versions doesn’t erase your Firefox profile.
5. Run the Firefox 1.0.6 setup executable.
6. After the install, some older Firefox extensions may need updating. Check for updates at the Firefox
Modifications to Kubrick Theme
The default them for WP 1.5 is excellent, but I wanted a few things that were not standard. First thing I changed was making the sidebar available on all pages, I know there is now a default_allsidebar theme, but I made the alterations before this was out. I won’t go into detail but in many cases it was just the addition of < ?php get_sidebar(); ?> that did the trick.
I then added a navbar to the header.php file using David Appleyard’s tabs style sheet. This is a chieved by adding the relevent code to the header.php file and the additional styles to the style.css file.
The final mod was the header image, at first I simply pointed to my own image using *#headerimg { background: url('< ?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/seorasheader.jpg') no-repeat top;}*/. Then I decide it would be nice to rotate the images. I was working on this when I came across Mike Cohen’s Random Image theme which was much better.
First add
< ?php
function header_graphic() {
echo "/images/";
$num=rand(0,9);
echo "seorasheader".$num.".jpg";
};
?>
to the header.php file which will randomly select an image from a bunch named seorasheader0.jpg –> seorasheader9.jpg.
Next, change the line in header.php
from:-
#header { background: url("< ?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/kubrickheader.jpg") no-repeat bottom center; }
to:-
#header { background: url("< ?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); header_graphic(); ?>") no-repeat bottom center; }