Snakes on a Plane
I feel glad that I seem to have been completely oblivious to the apparent fever over the recently released movie Snakes on a Plane. It took me quite a while before I believed that the whole thing wasn’t just a very big snake joke.
The hollywood execs really worked overtime on this one. I mean, there are snakes, and they’re on a plane. Brilliant.
At least people aren’t taking it seriously.
Thanks to Jason Kottke for the badge.
Jazz on 4 from 74
Tonight, BBC4 aired a recording of Oscar Peterson along with Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen and Joe Pass, performing at Ronnie Scott’s back in 1974. I’ve been an Oscar Peterson fan a long time, but I must admit that I’m only really familiar with his stuff from the 60s with Ed Thigpen and Ray Brown. For me he represents one of the finest jazz pianists of all time and the live session from Ronnie Scott’s was truely astonishing. If you’re not familiar with his music, I highly recommend you take a look.
Cleartype in IE7
I’ve been testing out IE7 in Vista for the past week or so to see how it measures up against Firefox. Most of my usual web haunts seemed to look and work fine, although I’m not a big fan of the interface layout. The positioning of the stop and refresh buttons still catches me out - I guess I just have to get used to it. One thing that was definately strange was the font rendering. I couldn’t really put my finger on it until I switched back to Firefox: suddenly everything was much easier to read and less fuzzy. It turns out that IE7 in Vista uses Cleartype font rendering even if you have disabled it for Windows in general. The offending option is found in the browsers options dialog. I find Cleartype rendering horrific to read at best. I can’t understand why IE needs an independant control for this…
Fixing the filling
I’ve been working on the site for the past few days trying to get used to Textpattern. I’ve updated the look of the site a bit which I will no doubt continue to tweak. For the moment, anyone viewing this in IE6 will see a lot of wierdness due to its lack of support for transparency in PNG files. I will fix this sometime… maybe. Meanwhile, why not try something better?
I’ve added a new code section where I will be releasing several bits and pieces that I’ve written over the past few years, mostly Python stuff. Hopefully someone will find it useful.
Update: Fixed IE problems. Things should look pretty okay now.
Filling the void
So I have decided to take the time (oh I have so much of it you know) to put together a decent website where I can put the many things that I write, code, read, listen to, etc. Unlike it’s many predecessors I will try to use this one frequently and keep it up to date with new things.
The site is running Textpattern and is using a modifed version of the lovely Serene template. You know, just in case you cared.
Speaking of a void, have you checked out neilturner.com?
