The lesser mabinogion

I had George over for the night on Thursday, as Emma was having an inspection.

As usual, he spent a good portion of the night yowling. But whilst previous times he seemed to just want attention, this time when I got up to see, he was crouched in his carry box, looking out, yowling “Take me hoooome, take me hooome!”.
I’m not sure why he reacted that way this time – usually he seems pretty happy here. Maybe it’s because when they were still at the flat my place was somewhere big an interesting to explore, but now they have the house my place just isn’t big enough any more…I dunno. Maybe he was just in a mood.

Anyway, I picked him up and dumped him in my room, then went back to bed. He wandered out and went back to yowling for a bit, but eventually came back in and hopped up on the bed and slept right through till my alarm went off in the morning (which he did NOT like…heh).

I’m drowning in HTML again, trying to get the initial Conflux 3 website done. I am so not a web designer, but I’ll get there, like I always do.

Sometimes I wonder why I don’t just give up and use tables for layout. It’d be simpler – but I guess the more times I go through the semantic HTML + CSS routine, the more I’ll know how to do it properly, and what the issues are.

I’ve advanced from using absolute positioning, through a disastrous experimentation with centering via position:relative, to using floats.
I think that’s probably the best solution anyway, as it will allow the page to be viewable on small screens without horizontal scrolling.
Now I’ve just got to figure out what to do with the banner – I’m not happy with it at the moment, and may have to ask for a new one.

hmm, and figuring out what colour scheme to use is always a pain too.

As for the actual look, the conflux 2 site is nearly perfect (with the exception of the fixed page width), so It’s based heavily on that – no point in throwing away good work.

I also need to finish my slush wrangling helper app by next week, if I don’t want to have to juggle everything by hand. Hopefully I’ll get enough time over the weekend, it shouldn’t take much more than a few hours extra effort, as I’m keeping the scope _very_ simple. If it works out, I’ll look at expanding it for any future wrangling efforts.

On a side note This is a useful site when you want to see what your layout will look like with some content. Just tell it how many paragraphs you want, and it’ll generate some random text based on the Lorem Ipsum dummy text used in the type setting industry for hundreds of years.

We had a few drinks at Emma’s place on Friday night to celebrate my birthday (emphasis on the few, which is out of character for such evenings, but we started fairly late), and her housemate gave me a bag of coffee beans as a birthday present.
That was rather nice, but I didn’t have a grinder. I had been meaning to get one for a while, so the next day, while they were grocery shopping, I figured I look for one – so Caitlin and I wandered into House to see what I could find while they continued doing the supermarket thing.

House had a couple – both hand and electric, but I figured I go look in Myer first, so off we went.

In one of my usual progressions of purchase rationalisation, I discovered that the best grinder to get was about $50 – but for $80, I could get an espresso machine (I’d always thought they started well over $100). So I had a weak moment and decided to buy one. Of course, I still needed a grinder, so receiving a $5 present resulted in me spending $130 – heh. But I figured it could be my present to myself.

It seems to work fairly well – but unfortunately the milk jug is a little small, so it makes it difficult to froth the milk long enough to actually get it very hot. So I’ll have to get a decent sized jug at some point – and a shaker for chocolate ;)

But even having luke-warm cappuccinos any time I want is well worth the price – though I suspect my body’s probably not going to like the sudden increase of strong coffee I’ll be consuming – but it can just deal with it!

Well, I seem to be good at getting myself into things lately – aside from the ongoing maintenance of the CSFG site, I’ve also volunteered to manage the Conflux 3 website, and committed to being the Slush Wrangler for the next CSFG Anthology – The Outcast.

I’ll be responsible for making sure submissions meet the guidelines, ensuring that the readers are kept busy, forwarding the appropriate submissions on to the editor, and sending the rejection emails.
I also need to have something setup for the Conflux 3 site as soon as possible, and then come up with the permanant site to last through till the con.
Add to that the idea I’m working on for letting others promote the CSFG through their own sites, and I’m looking at a busy couple months.
Fortunately my involvement in the Project From Hell is more or less wrapping up at work, so I should be able to return to 40 hours a week again.

yes, still here….not much longer to go on this project and then I actually start to have some free time again (hopefully).