Internet

Screen Select

I recently joined Screen Select, an online DVD rental store. I had previously been a member of Amazon’s effort, but I cancelled as I was bereft of a DVD player for a few months. I pay £12.99 a month for an unlimited number of DVDs, and I can have 2 at home at any one time. To be honest, I rarely have two at home, it’s more the case that one is, and that the other is being either returned or sent out to me. Means we manage to get through quite a few films, which is good given that TV is so rubbish these days.

Here’s what we have had so far:

  • Alien – Though the DVD was apparently the Director’s Cut, a studio release that Ridley Scott hated, it also featured the original version, which I watched. It’s visually stunning, claustrophobic and tense, and gripping from the very start. But it isn’t scary is it?
  • Supersize Me – Entertaining bit of corporate America bashing. The science is all a bit dubious though, isn’t it, and the message obvious, at least for sane people.
  • The Big Lebowski – Loved it. I am now tempted to change my Palimpname from Wavid to ‘The Dude’.
  • The End of the Affair – Found this strangely unlikeable.
  • Spiderman 2 – Even more stupid than the first one. Enjoyed it, but felt thoroughly ashamed of doing so.
  • Hitchiker’s Guide… – My other half liked this more than me – she thought this might be because she hasn’t read the book for 10 years, while I re-read it all the time. It was ok, I guess.

This has been ripped and edited slightly from my Film List on Palimpsest.

CSS and Standards

I have always been a self-taught bodge job type of web designer, and nothing I have ever designed has passed the w3c validator test.

So, I decided recently, just as a technical exercise, to try and create a site which was both reasonable to look at and standards compliant, using XHTML strict and a CSS style sheet. I also wanted to make the site as small as possible, so not using any graphics.

It took quite a bit of work, and most of this was my own fault in being lazy and reusing a CSS template that I had stuck on my hard disk for a couple of years.

Anyway, it was a useful exercise and the finished result looks alright, and is standards compliant, so I guess I reached my goal there.

In truth the whole stylesheet needs to be gone through and re-written to get rid of a lot of bloat, which I either left in because it didn’t break anything, or just commented out.

MyPimp

MyPimp

MyPimp is an online personal information manager, using the latest flashy ajax technology that many of the Web 2.0 apps are using, like Writely, for example.

Interestingly, when using it with IE, a big message in a red box appears at the top of the page:

The browser you are using is not currently supported by MyPIMP. All development and testing of the site has been done using Mozilla Firefox. Using any other browser may prevent some features of the site from working properly (some may not work at all). We will add support for other browsers in the future! It’s just easier to focus on one browser at a time, especially one that follows web standards. For more information and a free download of Mozilla Firefox please click here.

They aren’t supporting Internet Explorer! This would have been unthinkable less than a year ago.

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