Archive for October, 2006

As we’re all blogging for history, here’s a bit about my day.


Alarm went off at 7:00. Lettice got up. I didn’t. Whoops. Staggered out of bed at 8:00 and between checking e-mail, showering, eating breakfast and faffing about managed to get into work around about 9:45. No meetings this morning so not a problem. Check work e-mail and calendar and tell the project manager that I love her because she’s worked out that in our incredibly tight schedule for the site (www.visitlondon.com) redesign I actually have no tasks allocated to me between the end of November and the sometim in February so I can take some holiday after all. But then I groan as I realise that Friday is booked up with meetings from 10-12 and then 12:30-16:00. Ouch.

Spent most of the day working on a project for our kids’ site (www.kidslovelondon.com). Nothing terribly exciting – a bit of CSS, bit of XSLT, bit of JavaScript (enforcing my own recently written coding standards to avoid document.write and use appendChild() etc.). Minor panic regarding the half term edition of the kids’ newsletter but it got sent out on time and everyone seems very happy with the new style.

Went to lunch with Lettice – she’s working at VL for a few weeks. And after that it was time for today’s round of meetings about the redesign project. Time and money versus ambition. Same as every project I’ve ever worked on. We actually have a very good team (and soon to be a much bigger team, an ad will be appear in this week’s New Media Age for six positions within the web team at VL) and doing most of the work in house will cut down on some of the headaches.

Ended up working until 18:30 which makes up for the late start, though a fair chunk of the last hour was spent playing Bang! Howdy (www.banghowdy.com) whilst waiting for other people to go through the designs of the Christmas pages with me. We need to have some pages up very soon in order to cover the switching on of the Christmas Lights.

London Bridge was busy and I just missed the 18:39. I bought this week’s New Scientist (suckered in by the ‘what would happen to Earth if humans vanished cover story) and this month’s .net (a couple of articles that I can quote mine for a brainstorm in one of Friday’s endless meetings). Ran into Séverine and we caught the 18:51 to Tulse Hill and then walked up to West Norwood together.

Home, sausages for dinner, then watched CSI: Miami with Lettice before sitting down to write this.


So there you are, not my usual sort of post and probably not of any great historical interest.


On Saturday I bought a song from iTunes by Drill Queen, one of whose members I know in real life.

On Monday a package from Amazon arrived for me, I didn’t remember ordering anything but thought that I might have done when I set up work as a delivery address (Amazon’s courier company is totally incapable of delivering to home). Today I checked the delivery note and discovered that someone else had bought it for me off my wishlist.

I didn’t recognise the name and so checked my Gmail archive to see if it was anyone who had ever spoken to me. It was, a little while ago he had sent me this e-mail:

Hi there, you responded to one of my messages on Usenet, full details here.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets/msg/…

I was wondering if you could please remove it from Google’s archives (you can do this by creating a Google Groups Account, looging in, finding the message and pressing remove).

I’m just not keen on having that URL on the Internet now that it’s used for something different.

Thank in advance,

Used for something different means not used for an escort site anymore. (I’d answered a technical question about the site coding not anything related to the content.) Anyway, today I sent back the message

Bribery worked.

Nice to know that after all these years of giving free advice on Usenet I’m finally getting some reward.