On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

Short but sweet post this but BBC has redesigned its news site and you know what, great stuff. Very clean, slick, modern. Much easier on the eyes than before and I think it’s an ace. The reason for this is that I knew how to use the old site and I know how to use the new one. Rightly they realised their layout was good, but that 800×600 frame was just too small; and it is too small! Great work, I have great admiration for that work. I only hope a major design coming from my pipeline soon also finds such favour although organisationally I am having to change things but it is all for the best!

Go on and dance to the beat
Go swing and rejoice with those you meet
Go listen to hasty voices in the dim evening light
Go and feel the bouncing vibe of this night

All makes sense now, in this moment
Life set out on a plateau of sense and reason
This moment will soon be gone
But right now it all makes sense

Go watch her descend the stairs with slink and grace
Go talk to her and watch those wistful eyes
Go deep inside her mind and find the ocean behind
Go and touch those rouged lips full of promise and lies

This moment distilled to perfection
I’ve seen it all and know I’ll look back one day
And know exactly what I had then and wish,
Oh I’d wish I’d known what to really do

Go find her on the floor under striking strobes
Go see the stars shine in her eyes like bright diamonds
Go feel the velveteen touch of her by your side
Go breathe, go dance, go live. Just Go.

This moment with its dark beat
And eerie familiar chords you heard somewhere before
And all that had begun to make sense
Has left to find you in the years that have yet come…

Victoria J K Lamburn

In those hidden twisting Westways of your mind
Under the arches of your pure and shadowed passions
Are the calculated and optimised rational desires
Where lay the the fires of the lovers you’ve left behind

Grey clouds to oppress and depress tired city eyes
Locked in mindscapes peering out over the balustrade
And nothing over there is what you want to see
Nothing over there springs with youth’s verdant dreams

Your eyes write a song — a poem of your time past
Muddied by a sodium glare in a wet November night
Never sure whether you have won or have lost in your blues
All that is sure is a paean of loss you have tried to hide

In the sinister glare of red light and steaming fumes
It is never clear when you will ever get going
When that light will be green and you will be free
Trapped in a shadowed mania of concrete thunder

Bird trapped in the net flapping for its freedom right
Trying to dilute your emotions in your saline wells
But you can’t fake that love you once had and lost
You are dissolved and beaten behind destiny’s wheel

Inertia creeps all over and you wonder when passion left
Are you smothered or smoldering in this urban insanity?
When are you going to break from your hidden byways
And for love step off this recursion before you’re driven insane.

If you’d hear me out, I had one too many last night at the USSU bar, man it reminds me of my uni days… But it was better than that, a free bar all courtesy of Yahoo! Suffice to say this was too big a ‘thing’ to pass on, so I did my bit to bring down the balance…

My head this morning though, zoicks!

I’ll be heading over to the campus in a tick; didn’t quite want to get up at half 8 this morning.

Quick post this one as the web dev type will clearly poke around the code (I want you to!) — this evening I have created some very quick but potentially very usable code that progressively uses Javascript to create a ’sidebar’ element on a webpage for widgets that you could change the order of, and potentially close or add to depending on your preferences.

http://www.sunshinesista.plus.com/worthing_test/sortables.html

This code creates a page and if Javascript is enabled creates the sidebar and a cookie that is stored on your PC for 7 days. This notice will pop up just so that privacy with regard to my code is transparent.

The sortables are then set up in this floating side bar and then you can re-order the examples and exit the page, browse away, whatever. When you come back, the order you created will be restored neatly.

By all means use it yourself I know I will be… (I’ll add ‘remove/hide’ and ‘add’ code but that’s it)

Hope it’s useful. It uses jQuery, an absolutely superb Javascript library.

Well it’s here and it’s – looking interesting even though the standards mode seems to be doing peculiar things. Have we been doing our job wrong or is IE8 still teething in this department? My guess is a lot of the conditional code and CSS hacks used for IE are causing issues for some. I look forward to continued investigation with IE8.

I don’t really have a profound way of putting this, or even a half elegant manner of expressing it. But I had this thought of how quickly things change; even with ourselves. I was just thinking that four years ago near enough I went away to the USA for the summer and it was fantastic. But not, I’m earning more than I did then by far but I am pinned down with renting a flat and taxes and so forth and I can’t do it.

But I’m not even thinking — it’s not fair, that sucks. I think the difference is quite peversely wonderful.

Like I say there is something itching inside of me that is making me smile about all of this and yet I can’t express it in words, which is unusual for me. I suppose I feel lucky and priviledged.

Dare I say it, I feel settled and untroubled. I don’t feel a huge headlong rush to do everything now or have everything yesterday. I’ve got a good steady pace together with this whole thing, life. It’s not perfect, it’s not even close; but I’ll take it warts and all!

Woah nelly, hell has just dropped below zero (or 32F)!

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx

This is fantastic news and a brilliant example that Microsoft does listen when something makes sense. That’s right: it seems IE8’s default behaviour will now be IE8 (ACID2 compliant) standards mode, with IE 7 Standards (read IE6 interoperable) mode being switchable.

In one policy decision, in one line of code probably — Microsoft is effectively ‘fixing the web’ to borrow some of their parlance.

This is a fantastic bit of news and may even make me consider IE 8 as my main browser if its good enough on my Windows XP box/partition.

As a veteran web developer now, I am so happy. Microsoft deserves kudos for this; even though they should have been consistent with standards from day one. But I won’t hold a grudge, even when half of my working week is spent with my mind taunted with Internet Explorer 6 compatibility.

I am hoping to sit down at my computer and write about London today but I also have 90 other things I need to really also do so my apologies if I don’t get a chance to… Here are a few photos from Stephanie Dosen’s gig however that was at the Bush Hall in Shepherd’s Bush on Monday 28th February. (Today is a week ago since I went to London, gone so quickly!)

I will be uploading more but these were on the end of a roll of Delta 3200 and the next lot were snagged on Tri-X… Click on them to jump to Flickr and enlargements of them