I hate XHTML/CSS, although it does rock

For the last three years while I've been at uni, I've let my websites slip somewhat - i.e. I haven't updated them at all.

Now that I have free time thanks to my current lack of employment, I thought I would go through and redesign a few of them - not a wise move. In my 3 years of 'absence', CSS has gone from being a cool thing that makes it easier to change the colour of your hyperlinks to being pretty much the sole defining element of the website in terms of design.

Add to that the fact that XHTML has removed a whole bunch of tags and attributes that were really useful - like being able to align text & images whenever you want to - and it makes trawling through pages and pages of messy nested tables and depreciated attributes something of a chore.

On the plus side, it does make your pages one hell of a lot tidier and you can do some really cool stuff, once you've hacked the crap out of your style sheet so that it actually works with IE properly, that is.

Anway, I'm now very tired and hungry and need to look at something other than XHTML before I go insane.

Ctrl+Alt+Del

Ctrl+Alt+Del is an online comic strip - similar to Penny Arcade, PvP or whatever your particular favourite is - drawn by one Tim Buckley.

Difference being, it's great. That's not to say that others are piss-poor atempts, but simply that they may appear to be in light of CAD. I think I like it because it suits my attitude quite nicely.

The 3 strips that I've most associated with are shown below - not hotlinked, I might add, as I'd hate to piss the guy off by leeching his bandwidth.







So go visit http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/ and if you really like it, buy some merchandise - you know you want to.

****! ****! ****! - Additional

Goddammit - someone really doesn't want me to have this file.

It just decided to crash my browser at ~40% so now I have to queue for AN HOUR before I can start the download.

****! ****! ****!

I really, really, really hate Fileplanet. With a passion. We're talking 9th circle of Hell here. Arch nemesis. Satan incarnate. And soforth.

Them and their sodding queue system. I waited 20 minutes to download the Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War Beta client. I got to 600 out of 650Mb and then my connection decided to spasm and cut out. Can I resume the download? Of course not. Can I get straight back in the queue? Of course not.

I now have to wait another 40 minutes before I can even START the download which will take almost 2 hours because I can only get about 60k/s off their servers.

It's bad enough that I'm going to have to use Gamespy arcade to take part in the Multiplayer Beta without forcing me to wait ****ing ages to download the bloody client.

Bastards, bastards, bastards.

When I'm rich and famous, I'm going to buy Fileplanet and then fire everyone.

A pox on you nVidia, a pox!

Those fucking bastards at nVidia are going to pay for what they've just put me through.

In the naíve belief that it would be without incident, I decided to update my nForce platform drivers. Apparently, as with so much software these days, the nVidia uninstaller knew exactly what I wanted - namely for it to remove my graphics drivers along with the rest of the nForce drivers.

Not a problem in itself, you might think, however there is a problem - I'VE GOT A FUCKING ATI GRAPHICS CARD.

That's right, the nVidia uninstaller took it upon itself to remove my ATI graphics drivers. So I then had to go through an manually remove the last traces of the ATI drivers so I could restart, install the nForce drivers, restart again, install the ATI drivers, which I never wanted to change in the first place, restart again and then come here and bitch about it all.

I was half expecting a "Buy nVidia" advert to come up after I restarted, but thankfully I was spared that punishment.

Bastards, bastards, bastards.
You have been warned.

Spad.

Fun Stuff

I've just come across an excellent book extract on the Guardian Unlimited website titled "The Virtue of Idleness", which pretty much fits me current lifestyle perfectly - read all about it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1276787,00.html and then go out and buy the nice man's book - after all, he's gone to all that effort to help us justify being lazy bastards, that's got to be worth a tenner.

Secondly, for those of you a little behind the times, and I know there are a lot of you, check out http://www.preparingforemergencies.co.uk/ - The site so good the British government tried to have it taken down. Remember kids, it's a parody, so in the event of Zombie Attack, the following advice should not be taken seriously:

The assailants can be stopped by removing the head or destroying the brain. Suitable tools you may find in your shed inclue shovels, cricket bats, and similar items.

That is all.
Spad.

Still broke, still jobless, still bored

In other words, woo.

I'm several hundred pounds overdrawn, with bills to pay. I'm still unemployed, although I've made a few promising looking applications in the last couple of days. I'm still all alone in the house with nobody I know anywhere to be found apart from Robyn, and she's working a lot of the time.

So, I'm bored out of my mind, which means that I've actually started working on resurrecting the Pointless Stuff Archive. I was quite impressed, I've never really used PHP before - certainly not with MySQL - and yet I managed to write my own (albeit basic) content management system in the space of about 3 hours.

I'll also be trying to write here a little more frequently as I have the time - only problem of course is that I don't have much to write about at the moment. I'm sure if I try hard enough I can think of something anway.

I shall leave you with a lovely screenshot I took from Doom III of the end boss - the Cyberdemon. Enjoy.


Click for bigness

Spad.