Via pink_weasel, but a lot of people have already done this one.

1. Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, and find line 4.
   “When Navigator 2 made its debut, it provided built-in client-side scripting with a new”
2. Stretch your left arm out as far as you can..
   I’d hit Nick…
3. What is the last thing you watched on TV?
   The Mighty Boosh
4. Without looking, guess what time it is:
   Half past three?
5. Now look at the clock. What is the actual time?
   15:26
6. With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?
   Nick coughing and sniffling, Severine’s clicky heels, general office noise.
7. When did you last step outside? What were you doing?
   This morning on the way to work.
8. Before you started this survey, what did you look at?
   A galaxy
9. What are you wearing?
   Jeans, hiking boots, rugby shirt.
10. Did you dream last night?
    Can’t remember.
11. When did you last laugh?
    Recently.
12. What is on the walls of the room you are in?
    White boards, fire alarm control box, surprising lack of posters.
13. Seen anything weird lately?
    Does Jeremy count?
14. What do you think of this quiz?
    Bit pants.
15. What is the last film you saw?
    Saw second half of Bright Young Things on Sunday. If you mean at the cinema, then Underworld Evolution.
16. If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy?
    A house.
17. Tell me something about you that I don’t know.
    Who are you? What do you know about me? Should I be worried?
18. If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?
    Create a world wide democracy.
19. Do you like to dance?
    No.
20. George Bush:
    Dangerous, simplistic, fanatical.
21. Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?
    Daughter.
22. Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?
    Son.
23. Would you ever consider living abroad?
    Yes.
24. What do you want God to say to you when you reach the pearly gates?
    “Sorry, my mistake…”

Very True Mood: complacent

Right? No talking about the rugby. Got that?

Very True Mood: distressed

Well, that was a bit of a surprise. No grand slam this year. And whoever wins tomorrow (and that will be Wales, won’t it?) is also in with a chance of winning the tournament.

Very True Mood: surprised

Happy Birthday pink_weasel, best weaving, knitting, weaseling wife in the universe.

Off to Brighton now to see the sea and then run away ‘cos it will be freezing.

Oh, I’ve been told to tell you all about my dream last night that featured, in no particular order, switching lights on and off, a herd of cows, a sixth form Geography field trip, and the Top Gear presenters.

The sixth formers seemed actually to be my work colleagues; I fell asleep with the light on - hence that bit makes sense; the Top Gear presenters were clearly intended for Lettice and only missed by a few inches. But where did the cows come from?

Very True Mood: happy

When I first set up Very True Things, I set the character encoding to ISO-8859-1 instead of the recommended UTF-8 because I wanted to include the French Revolutionary Calendar dates by simply linking to the existing JavaScript file, which had all the accented characters encoded in ISO-8859-1.

When I added the Scrobbles plugin it fetched my play list from Last.fm, encoded in UTF-8. Obviously I have a lot of bands on my list with röck döts…

So I bit the bullet and converted the JavaScript to UTF-8 and I’ve just done the same with all the pound signs on the dinosaurs page. But there are a load of pound signs scattered throughout lots of other posts and they’re showing up as those very pretty question mark in a diamond symbols that Opera uses (or ugly square boxes, etc. in other browsers).

Any Word Press/PHP/MySQL experts got a quick and easy way to search and replace across the whole posts database? I can think of a couple of ways to do it but don’t really fancy any of them.

Very True Mood: thirsty

I’ve just updated my 25/28mm Dinosaurs and other prehistoric miniatures (not snappy enough?) page with some lovely looking cavemen and ice age beasties from Fenryll.

Via the Cavewars group.

Very True Mood: chipper

I’ve added a couple of plugins to the blog to display music and books that I’m enjoying at the moment. Over there, on the sidebar, down a bit, below the categories and links. (Scrobbles and Now Reading plugins created by Rob Miller.)

Depending on which browser you use you may notice one of two things - FireFox users will notice that both of the new sections suffer from the random single-pixel transparent lines that crop up here and there on the sidebar. Still no clue what causes this. [Update] - FireFox 1.5 fixes this problem, I must update my home version.

And IE users won’t see any cover pics for the books. That’s ‘cos, even in IE7b2, the display was totally screwed up. Too late on a Sunday to dissect the CSS (and let’s face it with IE there’s not much chance of a happy ending anyway), so I gave up and applied an IE only stylesheet to hide the images. Blah. [Update] - Mac IE doesn’t use conditional comments and hence shows the images, incorrectly, but really, Mac IE?

[Update] - As Paul points out in the comments Safari is inserting a large chunk of empty space under each book. According to browser cam this happens in Safari 1.2, 1.3 and 2.0 but not in Konqueror 4.3.

A certain site checking service (who have managed to bamboozle a large number of public sector bodies into paying attention to their ‘league tables’) complains about Very True Things because it claims that -

Tag 'del' may not come under tags 'p' or 'div'
Tag 'ins' may not come under tags 'p' or 'div'

What’s more it claims that these problems make the page invalid and that its validity checks are carried out in accordance with the HTML 4.01 specification.

Very True Things is XHTML 1.0 not HTML 4.01. What’s more it did at the time of the test contain a deprecated attribute which whilst picked up by said checker was not listed as a validation fail, despite the fact that I use a Strict doctype. Any system that claims to report on validity should at least check the doctype and apply the appropriate rules.

More importantly, ins and del are very odd elements.
As the XHTML DTD says:

<!-- these can occur at block or inline level -->
<!ENTITY % misc.inline "ins | del | script">

The HTML DTD is a little more difficult to read as it relies on an SGMLism not much used in HTML:

<!ELEMENT BODY O O (%block;|SCRIPT)+ +(INS|DEL) -- document body -->

But in either case the validator will confirm that ins and del can appear just about anywhere in the document, and can certainly be used within a p and div elements.

So next time your client or boss gets hassled by a salesman from this company (fvgr zbefr) you can tell that they don’t know what they’re talking about and should be ignored.

Very True Mood: aggravated

Passed a minor milestone this week. My feedback rating on eBay reached 100. Which means a little turquoise star instead of a blue one. I must be really bored if I’m posting about this…

Very True Mood: confused

So last night we did the East Dulwich Comedy “celebrity” pub quiz. The “celebrity” in question was stand up comic Lewis Schaffer. He was deeply irratating when we last saw him hosting the same quiz some years ago and age and divorce havn’t improved him.

Anyway, Lettice has the full story. I’ll just point out that we won - getting just three questions (out of sixty) wrong in the whole quiz. Yay for us.