Failure is the Key to Success

While looking at a comment I received from jmb about the area of my blog entry, I mentioned increasing the text size to make it more viewable.

However, when I started to look at my style sheet, I could see a few changes that I wanted to make.

I have changed the blog so that the title of a post takes you to the entry page with any comments on. On the entry page the categories list has been moved from the right hand side of the screen to the left, leaving more space for the post and the post font size increased. On all pages, the post area is relative to the window size, not a fixed size.

I have increased the font size used for the comments, so a magnifying glass is no longer required.

If I have broken something or you think it has improved, let me know through the comments.

Tags: blog comments blog design

Tags:blog comments,Blog-design

The future is looking uncertain for our cable TV channels at the moment. We currently have our TV with VirginMedia (used to be NTL) who have been in negotiation with BSkyB for renewal of their contract of carriage for Sky’s basic channels including Sky One, Sky Two and Sky News.

However, it would appear that Sky are demanding a fee for these channels double the previous agreement. During the middle of the discussions, Sky chose to transmit a series of promotions claiming that the channels were about to disappear from Virgin Media’s network, so it doesn’t look like they were serious about any form of agreement.

This is happening at the same time as Sky are promoting how much cheaper they are than any other provider, launching their own broadband service at about a 1/3 of the cost of anything else in the market and withdrawing four channels from the Freeview network to be replaced by subscription channels available via a new set-top box.

It does look like Sky are determined to be the only media provider of any significance in the UK. The channel that will prove to be the decider for us will be Sky One which we watch regularly for programs such as Stargate SG-1, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate Atlantis and The Dresden Files.

If we have to move to Sky in order to keep Sky One, then we will have to consider things like getting a BT phone line put back in, changing our wireless network router, moving to the top Broadband package in order to retain the unlimited download that we currently have and changing everywhere that uses our NTL email accounts. All in all, an unnecessary disruption, which will mean that we are bound to loose out somewhere along the way.

Tags:bskyb,sky one,virginmedia

While reading some of the blogs that I follow through MyBlogLog today, I came across a post by Anatoly Lubarsky, MyBlogLog Service On Decline. There have been a few security and identity exploits in the past weeks and the recent one discovered by
ShoeMoney got him banned.

This got me thinking, if MyBlogLog disappeared, would I be able to find all the blogs that I have started to follow. So partly for that I have decided to list the blogs that I am currently watching.

Thanks to JMB, scan man, Sarabeth, David Airey and Jonathan-C. Phillips who have all left me comments on previous posts.

[Edit] Changed the link for ilker’s ‘The Thinking Blog‘

[Edit] Changed the link for David Airey’s ‘Creative Design‘

In today’s computer literate society, you get so used to some concepts like copy and paste that you start assuming everyone is familiar with the skills required. It becomes difficult to remember when it didn’t exist.

I think a post a few weeks ago by John Chow was a prime example of this. He was explaining about using a typewriter to write a letter and was asked “How do you copy and paste with that?”

So, for anyone how needs to know, here is a quick guide to copying text from a webpage and pasting it into a blog post. The details may vary slightly depending on the blogging software that you use, but the concept is the same. I will use my last post Book Meme as the example.

Find the text on the webpage that you want to use, in this case it was from sarabeth’s post Book Meme 2. Move your mouse to just before the text that you want to copy.

Press and hold the left mouse button, then drag the mouse pointer, which will have probably changed to look like a letter ‘I’, over the text that you want until it is all selected, then let go of the left mouse button.

At this point you either go to the Edit menu on your web-browser and select Copy or you can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL C (press and hold the CTRL key, then press the letter C, then let go of both). This copies the selection to the computer’s clipboard.

In your blogging software, choose the place in a post where you want to put the selected text and left click with your mouse in this place. Then either on the Edit menu choose Paste, or you can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL V (press and hold the CTRL key, then press the letter V, then release both).

This pastes the selection from the computer’s clipboard to the location that you selected.

After this you can reformat individual sections by selecting them and choosing Bold or Italic or changing the colour as required.

[Edited for spelling]

I was reading jmb’s post about why she blogs the other day and I followed a link in the comments to sarabeth’s blog where she had a post about a book meme of those books you have read, want to read, have got etc. Jmb followed this up yesterday with a post about books herself and suggested that I did sarabeth’s meme, so here it is:

• Bold means I’ve read it.
• Italics means I want to read it.
• An X means I don’t want to read, nor will you get me near it.
• A + means I have it on my shelf.
• An * means I haven’t heard of it.
• Regular text with nothing added means that I have heard of it, have
  not read it, and have not formed an opinion as to if I want to read it.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. X Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. X Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. + The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. + The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. + The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. * Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. * A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. + Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. + Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. * A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. + Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. * Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. X Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. + The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. * The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. * Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. X Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. * Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. + Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. * The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. + 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. * I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. * The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. * The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. * The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. * Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. * The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. + Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. * She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. * The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. * The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. + Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. * The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. + Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. * Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. * One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. * The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. * Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. + Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. * A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. * The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. * The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. X Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. * The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. * Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. * In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. * The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. * The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. * White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. + The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

I was quite surprised to see how few I had read, only 22 out of the 100; without JK Rowling and JRR Tolkien I’d have been in trouble. I think what surprised me more was that this was exceeded by those I hadn’t heard of before. I think it’s safe to say that my book interests are mainly scifi and fantasy with a small variety of others to broaden it a bit.

I’m not reading anything at the moment. I’ve got and want to read Shogun, so it looks like it had better be next.

I have been on a training course since Monday and will be for the rest of the week. I am looking to refresh my Microsoft MCSE certification that I achieved back in 1998 and am currently on Microsoft course 2277C, Implementing, Managing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure: Network Services. Today was spent looking at DNS, which is the name sevice that make the Internet work. This is a distributed database of all internet computers, that means when you type www.ijhedges.com into your browser, it knows where in the world to find the server and the website.