Lee Jordan .org.uk

Not nice at all, and although I don’t wish to draw big international attention to this, give it some thought next time you pass a street demonstration for Animal Rights. The threat of “suffer[ing] the consequences” was against Leapfrog Day Nurseries, I gather not against children but it rather reminded me of something that would come out of iRaq and it’ll only take one nutter to go out on a whim and actually be a threat to the children and staff of those Nurseries, either directly or indirectly.

The actual HQ of Leapfrog is in the Midlands and is quite close, infact very extreamly close to where a string of nasty connected events has been going on recently that has been splashed in the local press, if I can draw that conclusion then surely anyone else would be able to see that secuirty for Leapfrog is in the wrong place!

BBC News (typical bias to the south east of the country btw)
“Not only you but your family is a target” … Sick, twisted and never justifiable, happening in our country, totaly disgusting and in my view proper use of anti-terror laws are used in such cases, unlike at the Labour Party Confrence this week, where a heckler was arrested under such laws.

Two things I have come across in my recent musings on user experience of websites in relation to printing web pages and subscribing to RSS feeds, both bits of functionality have been around for a long time, both leave a lot to be desired on the usability front.

What do you mean subscribe? Does that cost money?
I’ve been reading discussion ranging from clicking the orange button and getting garbbled text right up to “you mean I need to download something to read these things?”. General gist of it is that a feed link should be something that a user clicks and the browser handles that as if it would a mailto: link. Using a combination of XSLT and CSS can catch users that click that orange icon and explian further why this techonlogy is of benefit.

Printable versions
Conclusions range from using a “print this page” button and switching the style sheet to show the print.css on screen before printing, or replacing the “print this page” link with a javascript call to the function Print(); which in any case is the same as selecting print from the file menu and thus not showing a user a print preview. It is lack of browser functionality again that has lead us to this situation and I personally can see the same fragmentation heading for mass take up of Syndication feeds such as RSS.

Click here for more on this subject that not too many people are worried about right now, but as these become more of an issue we hopefully should start seeing solutions to these most basic problems.

This Monday coming there will a solar eclipse viewable from Europe, best seats in town are in and around Madrid where a “ring of fire” could be witnessed, hopefully where the Corona, which is the suns atmoshpere will be visible. Other places may see the moon slightly covering the sun. Try reflecting the sun inside to the celing of a darkend room and thus view the event safely, even better get logged onto a few sites which may bring live web cam feeds from around the world.

The following link has a wonderful map showing what the eclipse may look like where you are, here’s hoping for a cloudless morning. Around 8:30am to 9:00am UTC (near GMT) would be a great time is when this may kick in where you are.

Snaevarr Gudmundsson, an airplane flying above Iceland (showing a ring of fire)

Spaceweather.com have a gallery of the last such solar eclipse to appear over land. I believe there was one this year but out in the Pacific Ocean away from land.

Ok have you got that Challenge Aneka theme tune ready, watch out for the hedgehog as we take a walk through the Bullring like you will have never see it, that is as it was being built around about 3 years ago. At times it looked as if it would never be finished on time. I was lucky enough to get a sneak peak of the inside of the Bullring while the redevelopment was occuring, these photos were taken a year before the Bullring opened. The concrete went, the area was totally changed and it now stands as a glass homage to the god of shopping, with more than a million square foot of retailing heaven … Welcome to Birmingham.

Midlevel of the Bullring before the shops were fully built, looking out towards what is currently Selfridges, even on this level the stores have two floors

There are more photos of this stunning feat of engineering here

I’m just about old enough to remember the Birmgham of past decades and even though much of the city is now tottaly different, I can recall childhood memories of what the huge area around the Bullring used to be like and now how it has on the surface changed for the better. One of the pub bombing sites near the Bullring has been replaced with a tourist centre, often there will be flowers left outside of the fashion store “Zara” in memory of those who were lost in 1974.

Last night was ace, myself Rich and Kel headed for the Glee club in Birmingham to see David play in the small room known as the studio. The Glee is such a nice venue. Anyway we took our seats as me and Rich were at the bar David came out instead of the support band, who couldn’t make it, and so the enchantment started.

We hung back at the end, I spoke to a few people I hadn’t seen since a set of Easyworld gigs a long time ago and we managed to meet Dav(id) have a chat and get the new single signed. The canvas, which Davids backing female vocalist painted while State of the Union was being performed, was offered to me, after I asked her what happens to them but I hadn’t drove into town, plus where would I have hung it?

Signed copy of the powerful debut single come protest song, “State Of The Union”

Clever men know all that and all this
And they will talk and they talk and they don’t fudging listen
It’s a shame, it’s a shame, it’s a shame
…

It’s no life but God, it’s a living
Come on Jesus Christ, come back all is forgiven
We are lost, we are lost, we are lost

I heard “State of The Union” this time last year, and by the time the 2004 US election was going on I was in hospital having some more surgery, delaying me getting back to work, The track is a protest to that government it was all timely, it’s a very powerful song and a year on the lyrics still hold true.

All in all a fantastic night in one of our favourite venues in the city. One of the lyrical highlights for me was certainly the last few lines in “A song for the road”. Seriously check this guy out at his website david-ford.com. Buy the single. Also if you like this guy and Badly Drawn Boy type bluesy-rock-alt-folkish-indie stuff check out The Vessels

My glands are randomly swollen right now and I have a thumping headache, they are happening at such random times now, so anyway I’m gonna stop typing, if you follow a link below you can read the lyrics that sent images rushing through my synapses plus more details of the gig including some spoilers. Truely a great night.

A full review and a few spoilers are seen in the main section of this article, click here to read more

Oh yes I have found the joy of RSS feeds on my mobile.
In other news Les Batersby got beaten up by Status Quo

RSS brings the web to you, in small easy to scan chunks of info.

Podcasting wouldn’t really have been as easy to interface with without RSS and the future of videocasting or the future of the movBlog (Lee Jordan 2005 .. I herby claim my stake on the term MovBlog) is gonna feature some form of RSS enabled push idea, hopefully in combination with BitTorrent and not in Opera, but rather in Firefox and IE as default.

As a sidenote, Google : “Results 21 - 30 of about 137 for MovBlog” … 137, most of them don’t work and yeah so I didn’t invent the term movBlog, I can easily see this being the next big thing in the blogosphere, if it doesn’t end up costing £4.76 to post a location based video taken on your mobile phone, geotaged and displayable on Google Maps of course,.

“Women told to spend more time in sun” Source

My fear is that young women take that as a licence to tan to stay healthy, when in fact this story at least points to the benefits of Vitamin D for older women to keep good bone strength. Such advice should always come with “15 minutes a day is enough sunshine”.

Vitamin D production effectivley slows down as we move into the Winter months. Hence it may be worth kicking up moleAware messages during the winter months to keep a sustained awarness throughout the year, summer goes away but skin cancer I assure you doesn’t take a winter break.

If you are concerned by a lack of Vitamin D do not seek it from winter holidays or tanning salons, the risk of one of the most malignant forms of cancer certainly doesn’t outweigh the benefit.

The article also talks of people who mainly stay indoors and it is this group that are more prone to intermitent sun exposure related to Melanoma. At the end of the day, do what works for you but please read such articles as being advice that may lead to an even higher risk of Melanoma if your risk factors are already sky high.

Huston we have a …. well no not a problem as such, more of an emergency I would say:

Rita is up to category four five four. Totally won’t be suprising in the US at least for pump prices to go back up. Urbansurvival.com have also called a nuclear power plant not to mention GWB’s Crawford ranch within the storm track, not that you will hear that officially of course until the headlines are written, but Texas could take quite a hamering from this one. NASA managed to weather Katrina, I think the space shuttle tanks escaped unharmed by Katrina but not much was made of that.

We’ve got the global warming crew out in force on this issue, noting that America’s view on Kyoto and atitude is causing these hurricanes *sigh*.

It’s one to watch, a few days after the geomagnetic storms subside, I’m begining to see paterns that major weather is effected by the extra energy from solar storms usually a few days or a week after the event, for example now.

As for the human cost, damm that is gonna cut right up through Texas with Tornados popping off here and there, flash flooding and the like wouldn’t be unexpected I guess.

As I read reports of climate change on Mars, can we not for one second consider that the sun maybe connected to all of this somehow?

“What further proof could I possibly provide th[a]n the “fact” that Mars, where not one single human exist is experiencing so-called “global warming”. So step up hot-shot global warming zealot. Tell us why “Mars” is experiencing a warming trend?” Mitch Battros, BBC Article

If global warming is happening elsewhere in the *solar* system, yes the solar system and assuming that our technology isn’t causing the release of Carbon Dioxide on Mars and assuming there are no roads, heavy industries, comercial air craft and gas powered power stations … how do you explain what is happening to Mars is it not the same thing we are seeing here …… nature in action?

How do you explain dust devils on Mars that occured at the same time as Tornados on Earth that occured at the same time that a massive flare was released from the sun. The Ozone layer is at record lows, as it was in January when a massive sunspot caused many flares. Facts are there, world opinion is focused on the fraud of Global Warming .. go figure!

A recent glance at the ZDNET news shows a disturbing yet hillarious slant on the pointless IE vs Firefox debate :

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show notes

Music :

• Illumination Audio - Music Podcasting
• David Ford - A Song For The Road
• Julia Harris - Silence

Building a website that caters for everyones needs is a little more tricky than you’d imagine. Making sure your code is easy to maintain is essential in any project, making sure your design degrades in any situation on any browser with as little imapct on the visual layout is another thing to bear in mind. Designing web layouts involves a certain element of magic, trickery and thought that isn’t very obvious to your end user, but makes all the difference.

Here’s a thought, wrapping a list of links in a ul li structure enables screen readers to read out aloud how many links are contained in a section of links!

Books:

• Bulletproof Web Design
• CSS Hacks and Filters
• Don’t Make Me Think