h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm all ready for Crimble now, the shopping's done and the house is clean.
Clean enough anyway, no use in washing the windows before the sun returns. I'll try to look at the Goose-chase later, now I got to go on an exchange-gifts-and-greetings-round.
Merry Yuleblot and Happy Holidays everyone!

I'm hoping they let us leave w*rk early today...

I woke up late because it was so quiet, and when I looked out the window there was 4 inches of snow on the ground and it's still coming down hard. I got a load of pics of the cats' reactions when they went out, and I'll put those up later if my connection holds, which it may not. I've had trouble getting my email already.

Should that be "there were four inches..."?

Anyway, I have all the groceries I need, there's gas in the grill in case the electricity goes, and there's a cord of good firewood in the garage. If you don't hear from me again you'll know that either the snow has brought the lines down or else someone has skidded into a pole and brought the lines down.

*throws some coated pine cones on the fire and settles down with a cup of tea to watch the green and blue flames*

My name is in lights (kind of) today - my first image for the guide is up.

And a very splendid image it is, Sporky, as I have said elsewhere before.



Amy

Ooooh! Great artwork, you two! Cracking stuff.
I've joined the audience, because I don't have time for anything else.

I'm afraid I haven't made it to Oxford. I got a letter this morning telling me they couldn't offer me a place. Ho hum.
Mind you, I've had offers from the other five universities I applied to. There was some confusion about this here the other day. Some people thought I'd got into Merton: no, I hadn't (and haven't), but I had (and have) been successful with the other unis.

There should be lots of cooking happening in the next couple of days. Our new kitchen is now in full operation, and very nice it is too. Great oven (we've been using the microwave's oven functions for almost two years), fridge with a freezer compartment (icecubes at last!), dishwasher that does a better job than anyone in this household, and loads of storage and working space.
The roof should be finished by tomorrow (I'll go out and check the progress in a few minutes - I've really got the hang of the scaffolding now), and the downstairs is finished apart from the garage and, obviously, the decorating.

I'm working on a little something for you all on the Space Station. I should pop by on Wednesday to drop it off and wish you a Merry Christmas.

*Wishes it now just in case.*

That is what I miss about not getting snow, that wonderful silence that even traffic noise doesn't disturb and the bright, white light around the edges of the curtains.

After the 3 days of frost at the beginning of last week, it has become very mild again, the overnight temperature last night didn't fall below 9C and all the birds seem to think its spring and are chirruping away.

At least the Crimble looks snowy not I've iced it.

'Not' is a corruption of 'now that'

It might catch on Caerwynn.

Professor, I'm sorry about the news. It's Oxford's loss but their Physics department isn't good enough for you anyway.

[MTG home and feeling lazy]

Nice Graphic Sporky


Lil & Amy thats a great intro to the Panto....

No doubt I'll be lurking in the audience (as usual)

[BB]

Lil & Amy - excellent work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I will definitely be in the audience, however, still trying to figure out how best to enter the panto ..... if I do ..... which I might .... but I might not

Courtesy

Wishing everyone all the joy and happiness of the season, Merry Xmas, Happy New Year.

It's STILL snowing, but with the temperature hovering around the freezing point it's been settling. Eight inches have fallen, but it looks like 5. I took some pictures, and when I'm sure my website is working ok, I'll put up the URL. Right now I'm getting DNS errors trying to get to asterlil. I wish Texas would stop getting in the way.

The Mother Goose pages that are on asterlil (the first half) are currently not available. I hope it will clear soon.

If anyone has a chance drop by my new homepage and give me a crituque.

http://marvthegrate.afraid.org
Let me know what you think of the colour schema and I am open for ideas for somethign to do with this. If I am going to run a website I want it to have something. At the moment it is stupid links.

My view on colour schemes for website is that fun sites should go for contrasting colours but 'professional' sites look best if everything harmonizes. So, for this sort of site, with a goo background, I would go for pale blue or violet links, or possibly green, with the visited link being a shade or two darker than the unvisited but the same colour. Blue is a colour of trust. Green is fairly neutral.

Looking at the code, it shouldn't be necessary to define the font colour for every paragraph because you've already defined it as white in the tag.

I don't know where you should go with your site, Marv. Do you want it to make money?

More snow on the ground this morning. Vinnie caught a bird, which fact I didn't realise till I let him in. I managed to pick him up and throw him out again, and he never let go of the bird the whole time.

I'm working all day while Cherie (the regular postmistress) helps with setting up the luminarios. See you later!

Better yet, go with style sheets -- A729885 It really doesn't make much difference when you only have one page, but if you ever have 50 pages and then decide you don't like the background color after all, having a single external stylesheet to fix them all at once is a mighty handy thing.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Amy, thanks for the advice. I will hand edit the code this time and not use the formatting that dreamweaver uses. I would like to learn hard html, but I have not the time to read up on it properly.

I guess that I intend for this to either become a blog (shudder) or just a random site doing little. More or less it is a place for me to test html stuff.

I thought that style sheets were IE-centric? Am I wrong? I want something that works in every browser. I intend to keep the site simple and not have much in the way of flashy shiny bits that make it take longer to download.

Marv, d'Elaphant is right. Stylesheets are the way to go although they are not supported by older browsers. The HTML standards recommend that stylesheets, not mark up language, are what you should use for positioning elements and controlling how they look on a page. The newer browsers (v.5) of all varieties support CSS.

However, it's probably best to learn more about HTML first. Even using Dreamweaver there are occasions when directly editing the code is the only way forward. Pressing f10 in Dreamweaver brings up the html code. But I often drag everything into a mac text editor called BBEdit. I find the Wrox series of books the most useful as references.


Lil's tale of Vinnie reminds me of an incident when my twin were little. I'd rescued them in quite a poorly state from a cottage in remote Staffordshire (not unlike a certain gingerbread construction).

They were part of a colony of over twenty cats and so had grown up quite quickly but I was following my vets advice and not letting them out until they were well and had had their jabs. So, three months down the line I let them out. The bigger of the two took no time at all to learn how to use cat flap (the smaller one took a lifetime to get the hang of them).

Big cat leapt outside, caught a young blackbird almost immediately, came back in with his prize and raced upstairs to the spare bedroom where he let it go. I chased after him, caught the bird and let it out of the window. Big cat watched me going towards the window, dashed downstairs, out of the cat flap, caught the bird again as it tried to gain airspeed... and the charade repeated itself. I locked the cat flap the second time.