Tom the Website Hermit

Having finally got rid of my cold virus and had a relatively productive week at work last week, I have become a hermit this weekend. I tend to do these things. In the planning stage it seems like a good idea to tackle large website related tasks in one go. I re-created www.kirkcaldybands.com over a weekend or so in April. Having used the most crap website creation tool in the world (Rapidweaver) to do so, I now find I have to re-create the site for the third time.

Having toyed with writing my own code, and having been quite proud of myself that I managed to do a page or two, I decided that life was too short to spend it manually typing out XHTML every time I needed to add a image, etc. It's especially laborious for images, you have to type out the exact pixels you want the image to be, etc. I therefore spent the $400 that I've been putting off spending and have bought a "state of the art" GUI web creation tool, Deamweaver.

It's really not the easiest thing to use in the world either, being pretty complex and most of CSS (cascading style sheets) are still a mystery to me. But I'm delighted to say that, as of 10.30pm local time, the re-born site is happily uploading to the remote server, the result of a weekend and a half's work. There will be some loose ends, but it has been worth it. I think the site looks better, and most importantly, I can update it again without all the aggravation of the mind numbing slowness of Rapidweaver (an inappropriate name if I ever heard one!) and the frequent crashes whilst saving, resulting in lost work.

It's great timing, as the site has uncovered some very interesting finds in the last weeks which I've been able to upload to the new version. Julie Watt of The Amused, who now works for Telstra in Brisbane Australia, was in touch and she e-mailed me some very cool pics of the band, one is above.

My favorite find though, is Davie Brown from the Ghost Train's audio tape, which Ian enhanced, edited and transfered to the above CD, which I got on Saturday. It contains some absolutely cracking material, I now see that it is not just nostalgia, the Ghost Train were a tremendous band - shame they split 17 years ago. There is even a radio interview with some of the Ghost Train members, talking about the local scene and their plans to make it big - amazing.

But, of course you can only sit with an iBook for so long and I'm now going slowly mad and am desperate to do something that does not involve computers for a bit. Not an easy task in 2007! It's almost 11pm now, so time to go to bed. Then I'll get up on Monday morning, get dressed, have a shower, something to eat, then - guess what? Go to the computer to begin work! At least it'll be a different computer.

Tom's Dinner - Why are onions so big in America?

I'm not a natural cook. I tend to think of it as a bit like reading novels, something I'm not a natural at, but it should be good for me, if I keep trying.

I'm off to the UK on Saturday, and I'm trying to finish up all my food that is in the fridge and is only past it's sell by date by a week or so, so I made Chinese with the noodles tonight that should have been used by last week.

American supermarkets are really different from the ones in the UK. All the packet sizes are different, all the brands are different, they don't do quiche (someone at work told me quiche was "very '80's" - well, so am I!), they have a whole row just for peanut butter, they don't have that handy green label that tells you what's vegetarian and what's not, and the check out people always say - "do you want help out today?". Most strange. "Did you find everything today" is an even stranger one. I never do. Where's the quiche?

I took me months, but I found out that there is a little corner of Safeways at Rivermark Plaza, just up the road from here, that will be forever Britain. There are two rows of Jaffa Cakes, chocolate digestives, brown sauce, and proper tea. They don't do the Sunday Post, but that would be too much to ask.

BTW I just remembered (it's funny how your mind works), I was dreaming about the Sunday Post last night. I had read most if it through, and just remembered that I still had the "Fun Section" to read. Well, "The Broons" was always about coincidence I suppose....

Anyway - as if I need an excuse not to cook with proper vegetables and all, for some reason you can only buy these gigantic onions in Safeway. So you either have to have a whole onion festival for tea, only use one half and put the other half back in the fridge to use in two weeks time, which'll be the next time I get round to cooking for myself, or you chuck the other half down the waste disposal. All rather unsatisfactory alternatives, in my opinion.

So there is another thing I don't understand about America.

I had another question today about driving in America, about rights of way and emerging into traffic, but it was so boring that I forgot to ask anyone about it.

I'm secretly scared of the waste disposal unit too - but that's another story.......

p.s. The spell checker wants to turn "Jaffa Cakes" into "Java Cakes", a nice open source spelling alternative there. After the CTO of Yahoo was nasty about Solaris (see my very first post to this blog), their spell checker is pro Java!