I had two days off last week to attend my Grandad’s funeral in Calverley, near Leeds. When I say funeral you’d expect a very staid and teary affair. But it was nothing like that. He was in no way a religious man (rather like myself) and had stipulated that he didn’t want a religious service. So, it was just his two sons; Peter (my Dad) and Tim speaking about their Dad to friends and family. Everything was very cheerful, we entered to In the Mood by Glenn Miller and exited to the Skye Boat Song. My Grandad was very respectful of his Scottish roots and loved holidaying in Scotland and doing proper Scottish country dancing. I’d like to think this rubbed off on me adds to why I feel so welcome in Edinburgh and Scotland in general.

This is a photo of him in the RAF (back row, 2nd from the left):

Blimey I look like him.

Afterwards we went back to my Grandma’s for tea and scones (or scoones if you’re from Yorkshire) to reminisce about times past. On the way back up north to Billingham we stopped at Thirsk for awesome fish and chips and watched two daft ducks sit in the middle of a road.

I have a laptop! A venerable IBM T23 with 512MB RAM clocked at a mighty 1133Mhz. I got it off ebay, something which lots of people have since said is usually a really, really bad idea. Apart from a crack on the back it does the job and is built like a tank. It came with an apparently legal install of Windows XP but I’ve installed ubuntu linux alongside it. So far I haven’t needed to boot into Windows for anything, all my hardware is supported in ubuntu. The install process was also incredibly smooth. You boot from a live CD and then the installer runs from inside the live CD version of linux. You can then muck around with the gnome default games (blackjack etc) whilst the installer is completing! I did have some strange issue with lilo not installing the first time, but I ran it again and it worked fine.

The PCMCIA wi-fi card that came with my laptop was pretty crappy and didn’t seem to be supported in linux. I shelled out a whole £10 for a new one that I knew was supported and it has been working fine. I also had to replace the battery as the charge only held for 20 mins, the seller freely admitted the battery wasn’t tested (ebay speak for broken) so it was to be expected. Ubuntu is the most user friendly linux distribution I’ve every installed. They obviously have actual people thinking about usability and being friendly to less experienced users. I’ve since ubuntu-orised my server box at home as well. It makes sense to just run one distribution.

Comedy commentary of someone playing a ridiculously hard custom mario level

OK, I admit it. I haven’t actually read any Vonnegut but he was on my todo list of books to read. On the way home from work last night I picked up Slaughter House 5 from our friendly local Oxfam bookshop where the emo-tastic girl who worked there greeted my purchase with “omg did you hear he just died!?”. Yes, yes I did.

In Soviet Russia, LED invents YOU!

I’m not getting into this JCG book as much as Pashazade. The plot is a little all over the place for my liking, the characters are still very good and the locations are great. Now I’m past half-way and stuff has ‘happened’ I’m getting into it more. We’ll see how it goes towards the end…

Google have just released a really useful (geeky) addition to the already excellent Google Maps. My Maps allows you to easily create custom maps with your own markers, points, polygons and notes placed wherever you want them. All of this was possible in the past but either required hacking about with Javascript or use of some third party tool. Here is a map I quickly knocked up to show my current and new work-places in relation to home. More help on creating your own maps is available in the Maps help section.

Well, the Highland Fling is over!

It was a great day with very interesting speakers covering a great range subjects but centred around Web Standards and “Progressive Enhancement”. Progressive Enhancement (as I understood it) is the opposite to “Graceful Degradation”. If you plan your project with the bling included and then go back and undo the bling to provide functionality to less advantaged users (Graceful Degradation) then 9 times out of 10 you won’t get the time/money to actually undo the bling. If, on the other hand you plan your project so that you get the core functionality working across the board and then add the bling, you’re much more likely to finish with a system accessible to all. This was the message I got from Norm from Yahoo’s talk. It’s a shame he had such a bad throat, he could barely talk!

Some other good speakers were:

The intro by Jeremy Keith – an excellent speaker and drew lots of parallels with literature such as Pattern Recogniton and Neuromancer. Props!

Andy Budd’s talk on the future of CSS was exciting but about the only thing widely supported in CSS3 currently seems to be the opacity elememt. Other interesting elements that will be supported eventually are border-radius for rounded corners and box-shadow for drop shadows. The Advanced Layout module looks like it will blow the current css layout methods out of the water with it’s grid system for layout and re-ordering of the content. Slightly dis-heartening was Andy’s complaints about the workings of the CSS Working Group: the snail-like pace it operates and the possible influence of Big Business on it’s decisions.

Drew McLellan’s talk on Microformats was a bit dry but still good to see them getting pimped.

James Edwards came across as the Grumpy Man of Web Standards with a talk about when to use Ajax (never, if he had his way). He had a point though, and hopefully people will take notice and not just do Ajax for the sake of it.

Andy Clarke ended the day with a nice chatty presentation about what exactly “Progressive” enhancement is, relating it to progressive in the music world. Some interesting anecdotes from the world of freelance designers including a snippet from this standard contract that explicitly lists the browsers a site will be compatible. Also very nicely designed slides, as you’d expect really. Andy also sits on the CSS Working Group as some kind of invited member, he talked of his frustrations with the slow process but also made good points that the working group has to consider not just CSS used for screen rendering and the can of worms that internationalisation is.

There are people I’ve missed and lots of stuff I’ve forgotten already but there are lots of others writing about the Fling. Where do I sign up for next year?