I’m in!

My GP has signed me as fit to participate so on the 6th-9th June 2008 I will be cycling from London to Amsterdam and onto Brussels. That’s about 320 miles, approximately 100 miles a day 3 days running.

Starting at St Pancras in North London, we move straight onto Harwich, Essex (East coast, East of Colchester) where we will jump on an overnight ferry to Hoek Van Holland. Once in the land of windmills and clogs, the 59 miles to Amsterdam are tackled. Since that is only given 4 hours to be completed in, I think the 3 hours spare in Amsterdam will probably be a little rest for my body. But once 3pm hits we are straight back to the business of 60 miles on to Kinderdijk, near Rotterdam. Now by this point I expect my legs to either be the size of tree trunks or ready to fall off, so naturally the longest stint of the weekend is welcomed. 120 miles from Kinderdijk to Brussels where I assume there will be a huge party and I will be allowed to get extremely drunk and not move my legs for 21 hours until the 1556 Eurostar to St Pancras.

Here’s a rough map of the route to give you an idea of the scale of the task (click to enlarge):

Then I’ll probably have to cycle home.

So that’s the itinerary, which I hope I will be able to keep up with – training better start now, but of course there is also the matter of the sponsorship of £1350 I have to raise by then for The Mines Advisory Group. So keep your eyes peeled for the fund raising site and blogs demanding your money that will be starting very very soon.

Please send me any possible fund raising ideas you might have as soon as possible!

So quite a bit has been going on lately, I just haven’t been any good at updating this blog. Must do better.

Contents:

1. Fallen windows
2. Christmas parties
3. Sunday league
4. Chas n Dave

Fallen windows

Probably the most exciting, most inconvenient and most boring thing to happen lately was when our bedroom window fell off its hinges, smashing through Warren and Kathy (our downstairs neighbours) garden furniture on the way! Not only was it in the middle of the night, but it was also bloody cold and windy! So a nice cold night with my bike cover trying to keep out the elements was endured before a visit from a glazer – who couldn’t do anything, despite me suggesting to the landlord that a glazer wouldn’t fix the split frame. So next we had the carpenter round (not Karen) who very kindly gave us a warm plywood window. It has not improved the view unfortunately – but if only we had one in Leytonstone – it might have made that house quieter!

We are still waiting for a new frame, we do have our fingers crossed for a few double glazed windows, but I doubt that is on the cards.

Christmas parties

A couple of Christmas parties have already come and gone, both events organised through work. There was first the Virgin Atlantic client/Gyro party including (but not limited to) rubbish dancing (me), good dancing (everyone else), gin, cocktails, Pete Doherty’s hat, tiaras, Iron Maiden, Mercedes, loss of memory and a hangover. Excellent.

The Gyro staff party was even better than that. Starting with a meet in Balham where I looked a little strange as an English country gent at 2pm, half the digital team slowly arrived. Griff saving my embarrassment by being superbly worse (or better?) dressed as a Morris dancer, alone until the rest joined him at the main party. Next we had the Gryo digital meeting where a few things in the pipeline were revealed, which sound both promising and daunting. Only time will tell on that one.

I have to admit that from then on, memory lapses were all too common, although I remember Pangaea champagne, double decker bus ride, excellent meat, deserved awards (I’ll get one one day!), another bus ride, gin and tonic, karaoke (Snooker Loopy as standard), not liking George better, hotel room gathering, mini bar gin, tube home (7am), grab footy kit and straight to Sunday league with a small amount of alcohol in my system. By small amount, I mean I was completely hammered. The cold weather sorted me out though, and I got through the game, not even playing badly (we won 4-2, by the way).

Sunday League

We lost to Hightstone, bastards. Beat Wenlock though (as mentioned above!). This essentially still leaves it in our hands, since Highstone lost to Hoxton a few weeks ago. We know it’ll be hard and we will probably have to play like never before to win every remaining game and guarantee the title, but hopefully one or two results will go our way and we can keep the momentum going and finish the league in a promotion spot. Second will do, but Champions sounds so much better.

Chas n Dave

**13-01-2008

100 Club

Oxford St, London**

Chas n Dave live in concert.

Ticket bought, friends attending, braces yet to be purchased. But they will be.

Chas n Dave. I can’t bloody wait! I’m honestly more excited about this gig than I was for the Foo Fighters, or Cut Chemist n DJ Shadow (not quite got the same ring to it as Chas n Dave) in March. Rockney here I come.

So we had an interesting view from our offices today, about 12:10 we saw a massive plume of smoke coming from East London, as you can see below it was quite large:

This is taken from Chelsea Harbour, about 12 miles away from the site of the fire. I used to cycle past that road on my way to work from Leytonstone. I don’t think anyone will be injured as the area – disused warehouses right next to the A11 (and very close to Hackney Marshes and the old Eastway Cycle circuit) – is pretty much deserted ready to build the Olympic park. Google maps shows where exactly:

View Larger Map

It looks like the BBC and police don’t think it’s anything but a large warehouse which is a good thing!

Read the BBC report on the fire.

No, is of course the answer but the gear problems I’ve had are starting to get on my nerves a little! I lost the ability to change into a lower gear about 3 weeks ago and this doesn’t help when Wimbledon Hill is between me and work.

Now since I’ve had this problem the former bike mechanic at work was very doubtful it was the shifter (Shimano Sora STI) – but I could see no other problems, the cassette and chain work verifying this. I was going to buy a shifter straight away, but thought I would wait until after I fit my cassette and chain and checked the dérailleur was moving freely.

Having replaced the chain, cassette, cables and cable housing the problem was slightly improved in that I found it was only changing from the very high gears that wouldn’t work. Now this is fine, I have some gears, and know how to fix the rest, so went back to cycling to work quite happily.

However as I joined the A3 at Tibbets Corner, a heard a load crunch and my rear shifter seized. So after wedging a tyre leaver into the dérailleur so that I could get up a hill I got to and from work.

Shiny new cassette and tyre lever keeping me in a friendly gear.

The Sora Shifter is definitely the problem, so now I just need to find £67.99 for a new set (unfortunately they only come in sets, although I have only tried Evans cycles so far, definitely not the cheapest…) so there’s another job for when I get back form working on my mini.

After watching SiCKO by Michael Moore I feel very lucky to be British and have the NHS. Should I have been American, 4 major operations wouldn’t have been cheap and after this who even knows if I would be accepted for insurance followowing my pneumothorax in 2005. Obviously I don’t know all the facts, but based on what I saw and read lately this is what I think.

People often complain about the NHS and , and I know people have, even those I know criticise the treatment I received after getting an infection at a chest drain site, but I think it’s excellent from first hand knowledge. I found a cockroach in hospital after my leg break – so maybe that’s worth criticising – but at least I didn’t have to pay for the priviledge!

Now I know there will be elements of bias and fights for both sides of the story, as Moorewatch.com points out – but I think that I have grasped the fundamentals.

Both systems may need work – but I think that I am better off for being ill in England. You shouldn’t have to pay for healthcare in my opinion, nor insurance in case of illness, nor should the decision of allowing treatment be based on money or decided by anyone that isn’t the doctor treating you.

I am sorry, but when I read in the Evening Standard that The Science Museum are in going to be short of funding following their elimination from the ITV show Big Lottery Fund’s People’s Millions I was absolutely fuming. The problems I have with this are that firstly, the Science Museum should not be in danger of being short of funding. It is an amazing place and needs somewhere to keep additional exhibits. More should be done by the government to support them if they are that short of public and private funding. How about starting by not claiming £9 million in expenses?

Secondly, what kind of idiot decides that the type of people that watch a teatime phone in vote show (especially following recent phone in revelations) are educated enough to decide which projects deserve funding. I would put money on a Simon Cowell fund for retired karaoke singers getting more votes that a project with a genuine ability to help educate and inspire future (and current) generations.

I have to say I think it is a ridiculous idea, already proved to fail at the most basic level. I can only hope that the claims for cash that resulting in this source of funding to the Science Museum being a failure are absolutely worthwhile. Somehow I doubt it.

Lately work we have had to build numerous email newsletters (e-zines, and sometimes even “eFlyers”?!) with a huge amount of content and very image heavy. The number and frequency of these emails mean a challenging turnaround time and the use of templates of previous email wherever possible.

However the client dropped a massive bomb shell when it was revealed that they (as a large corporate company) use Lotus Notes 5 as their primary email client. This is bad.

Not only does this mean we have to output a huge amount of work but it also means that this work must be absolutely indestructible, unbreakable code.

If you look at the following examples of emails displayed between Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook, you can see how perfectly valid and working emails can be slaughtered left, right and center by the Lotus Notes HTML rendering engine.

Sony email which uses styles quite heavily. While this means that the email will not display as designed in email clients that do not support CSS (Gmail, Notes amongst others) at least it will degrade gracefully.

This Hugo Boss email doesn’t use any style for any layout or formatting byut still breaks quite badly.

My preferred method would be that of Sony, or even plain text emails – which a recent .net podcast (episode 19) said most people surveyed would prefer to receive. Unfortunately the limited technical experience of marketing staff that have to sign off these emails mean that we have to make the emails work in Notes if possible, even if the actual recipients receiving the email in Notes is minimal.

There are a number of methods that can be used to make sure you emails display as planned in Lotus Notes and hopefully the trials and tribulations I have endured for the past year can be kept to a minimum for others by following these rules.

1. NO BACKGROUND IMAGES

They just don’t work. This doesn’t just apply to Notes, but also includes other well know email clients. This should be a general rule for all HTML email builds.

1. ALWAYS SET OUT TABLE COLUMNS FIRST

No matter whether widths are set on the `</p>

` tags themselves, it has always helped me to have an empty row right at the start of every single table, with 1px in height spacer images defining the table cell widths. 3. #### NEVER EVER USE ROWSPAN Now I don’t know why this doesn’t work, but it proved to be a thorn in my design for a long time. I find that the only way to guarantee the reliable display or a table exactly as it should be is to ignore that rowspan even exists and insert tds in every row wherever required. 4. #### DON’T SPLIT IMAGES HORIZONTALLY If you have a wide image, don’t split it across a row. This often results in extra space for no apparent reason, stretching the table row containing the images. Even if you have distinctly separate images, if you can get away with just using one full row width image then do it. And fight to keep it that way. If you absolutely have to split images horizontally, each must be in its own table cell, because even with absolutely no whitespace in the code, Lotus adds a single character space between each image. 5. #### USE NO STYLES In my emails, I usually set text size at 11px or 12px using a style in my font tags to get around a link and copy size bug in hotmail. However Lotus Notes ignores this, and ALL other styles. So use no margins, padding font declarations, in fact use no styles at all. Go back to the early 90s, when CSS didn’t even exist! Since I still like to make sure the link and surrounding copy are the same size in hotmail, I still define font size, however use 13px with a `size="2"` back up in the font tag (or 10px and `size="1"`). 6. #### DO NOT USE P TAGS Lotus Notes doesn’t recognise the margins that should apply between p tags, so I find that declaring a font tag then using spacers to separate copy blocks, as follows: `
Copy paragraph 1.


Copy paragraph 2, and so on throughout.



` I’m sure there are more techniques and ways to make HTML emails work in all email clients, but I find that the above guidelines help me work more efficiently by decreasing the time spent on fixing Lotus Notes issues (especially when Notes development is a requirement), in fact most are so reliable that I have also started using the above rules in all emails. You never know, they might help when it comes to developing emails for Microsoft Outlook 2007, when Word is used for parsing HTML emails.

Just a quick blog to say that I’m a little confused.

Now I love the Len Price 3 and will go to as many gigs as I can, however I’m worried I’m getting a little too fanatic.

This is because I am seriously torn between going to either the Foo Fighters on 17th November at the O2 Arena in a box with my mate Smyth, or going to a gig in West London to see the Len Price 3. This is despite I saw the Len Price 3 a couple weeks back, and will be seeing them again on the 2nd November, and the fact that Dave Grohl used to be in Nirvana (my all time favourite artist, by far).

Could it be that the Len Price 3 are just a better band live with better songs? Very possibly.

But it’s gotta be the Foo Fighters for the experience. Bring on the music!

That is not a Mini Clubman.

This is a Mini Clubman:

And so is this:

It looks like some kind of futuristic concept car, not something that is going on sale on 10th November in Dublin. It is bad enough soiling the Mini name but to also ruin the Clubman image too is unforgivable!

It hasn’t had a bad review on the Auto Express website, however I think it will still bring the same reaction from Mini lovers as the original introduction of the BMW version. You’ll love it or hate it (and BMW to boot)!

I hate it.

So .Net are holding their netawards 2007.

Obviously they need a web site, and since they have done a recent article with a 3ev about the Chemical Brothers site, they seemed a good choice.

All is fine so far.

The voting/awards site that the agency built (thenetawards.com) uses an accordion style menu.

Now it starts to go wrong.

With the huge number of freely available javascript libraries and plug ins for menus like this, including mootools, jQuery and scriptaculous, they surely could have built one that is accessible and worked without javascript.

But oh no, even though the site is for .Net magazine, advocates of unobtrusive, accessible and usable design, and despite an article with 3ev bigging themselves up, they still produce this poor excuse for Web 2.0 functionality.

Please guys (I’m talking to you 3ev!), if you are going to produce a site for a high profile industry mag and promote yourselves in that mag, at least make some effort to abide by the beliefs the mag promotes and you yourselves claim to hold high.

And entering that random text is annoying, enough to stop me voting in all categories and only voting for jQuery in the innovation category.