This is still going well, and I am hooked into the action scenes. Banks does write well, especially in his early books. Mind you, this is going to have stiff competition as I am going to treat myself to a copy of John Naughton’s book about the internet later today, which I have been after for a while.
New Site
www.davebriggs.net has been registered and a basic template put in place. Not sure about the colours yet, they might be a bit too dark. I did loads of work on the plan last night so hopefully tonight I will be able to sit down at Dreamweaver and bash most of it out.
Still not sure what I am going to do about this blog. I would like to be able to have different topics that I could assign to posts on here, and those post then feed onto the relevant page of my main site, but that might be a bit ambitious for my limited abilities. I will put a post onto the PCPlus forum and see if anyone has anything suitable. Otherwise I may as well stick to Blogger, though I have been looking at www.livejournal.com as another possible system.
Web plans
My grip on the URL whelp.net is shortly to be ended, and rather than hang onto it I have decided to let it go. It was always my intention that whelp would act as a site for me to do my web design stuff through, but it never really happened.
As I have got plenty of other stuff going on at the moment and I could do with a new site for me personally, I think I am going to register either briggs.net (if it is free) or davebriggs.net. The best thing about the former is that I could offer email addresses to my family! The latter might be better for me long term though. We’ll see which is available, that will probably make the decision for me. I haven’t been able to check because of the IT difficulties mentioned below.
Anyway, I have loads of plans for the new site and what will go onto it. Basically I am going to cover all the bases of the stuff I am into: reading, writing, computing, web design etc. I thought about changing the hosting of this blog to the new site too, which I think I can do from within Blogger. If it doesn’t look right, though, I can always just link to it and maybe have a feed of some of the more recent stuff on my site.
Anyhow, it will be an interesting project, and one that I am going to get cracking with this evening, almost as soon as I get home!
Internet hell
I am starting to suffer big time from cacky internet connections. For some reason Gmail is running appallingly slowly, and it hasn’t been possible to check my emails all day. It is only a beta, I guess, and of course it might be a problem on the office server. Annoying, though.
I’m suffering a bit at home as well, last night Matthew was trying to access the internet to do a bit of research for his RE homework and it just didn’t want to play ball. We are on AOL at home, largely because it is easy for him and my gf to use, though it is a pain as I have to be in Windows to use the broadband – from linux I have to use dial-up.
I am thinking about wiping my PC and starting again, as it is pretty slow on all counts. It’s just the thought of copying all my files across onto CDs is too much to bear… but it will be worth it. I have installed and uninstalled so much on the Windows side that the whole thing must be clogged, and despite having AntiVir, a firewall and Spyware monitoring software installed and running, I am not convinced that something nasty isn’t at work somewhere.
By running the system restore CD, I could simply install SP2, AOL 9, some drivers, Dreamweaver, MS Office, OpenOffice.org, Webstyle and some games and I would be done. Then just install Linux in a small partition for my use, and leave it at that. But where am I going to find the time?!
Current Reading
I am currently reading Consider Phlebas, by Iain ‘M’ Banks. It is the first Science Fiction novel I have read since I was a kid, and I have to say it took quite a long time to get into. The problem, I am only slightly ashamed to admit, was the funny names.
Still, now I have got used to daft things like having apostrophes in the middle of names and stuff, I am starting to enjoy it. It’s fairly fast paced, and Banks keeps the action coming. One of the slight problems I have is that I believe Banks uses several standard SF motifs and ideas, but never bothers explaining them. Fine for most fans of the genre, but they tend to fly over my head. Still there are plenty of political parallels in this which I can pick up, and Banks doesn’t shy away from the serious stuff in favour of making it all about zapping aliens.
Palimpsest have an informative ‘M’ Banks page http://www.palimpsest.org.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=641.