A blog entry by my friend Gareth prompted me to blog about this useful bookmarklet.

So you have the web developer toolbar, have solved all issues in Firefox, only to find IE doesn’t do the same.

What if you could click a bookmarked site, load a piece of javascript, then you simply click on any element on a page to display the element, id, class, hierarchy, positioning, border, margin and padding values in a pretty interface? Well sonny, with X-Ray (from http://westciv.com) you can!

The best bit is that it even works in IE, so you can troubleshoot any box model or double margin problems easily! It’s an excellent idea, and if I hadn’t already voted for jQuery, I would have voted for it in the innovation category of the .net magazine awards. Maybe you could vote in my stead!

So after a few days in work, not very long (but long enough!) I was off away again to Ruf Y Anun’s wedding in Palma, Mallorca. The flight was fine (easyjet aren’t that bad) and waiting for Jen in the hotel was great as I managed to squeeze in four pints.

Standard Mallorca holiday malarkey until the wedding on Saturday 1st September, 5pm local time. The Church was amazing (see above and below). Anunciada went to school there apparently, which is a bit nicer than the brick building in Hamsterley that taught me to read!

The service, in a mix of Spanish and English was lovely, with readings from both sides and the priest even doing his best in English.

Rufous is clearly impressed with the whole marriage lark.

Afterwards we got a few buses to the Hotel Delta Beach Club, on the coast with a great view, great food (the beef was EXCELLENT, as was the sorbet!). I think being seated at the Bride and Groom’s table was a bonus – it meant Hufty could entertain us! Free wine flowed freely and the dancing was inspired (I cleared the floor at least twice!). I just wish someone had told me the Spanish were going on to a club when the bus home dropped us off in El Arenal about 5am, since I definitely could have partied on into the day – at least I think so!

Anyway, a few more days of beach, burning, pool and Tapas later we all went home and back to daily life. This may be a little short, but then again, I was drunk most of the time and memories fade when intoxicated!

Ole!

Photo courtesy of Kneller!

So holiday time has come and gone, and I have been far too lazy to blog in the slightest.

Cornwall was excellent as normal, however the highlights include:

• Much Risk, and not coming last in one game!
• 2 barbeques
• Pubbage
• FInally meeting Del 😉
• Wii
• Boat exploits
• Tintagel, legendary birthplace of King Arthur
• St Michael’s Mount

The best part of the whole holiday (apart from the sentimental “time with friends” rubbish) was surfing. It was excellent, and I even caught one wave, stood up and rode it all of 25m to the beach. I am definitely going to try and do it more often, either by getting down to Brighton and hiring a board and wet suit or seeing if Seaham is a possibility if I go back up North – followed by a full week next year dedicated to surfing. 2 hours is nowhere near long enough!

For the record that alcohol consumed that week include (but is not limited to):

• 1 x 18 pack Fosters
• 7 x red wine (bottle)
• 1 x Sierra Tequila bottle
• 1/4 x Tesco value vodka (aka meths)
• 1 x 18 pack John Smiths Smooth
• 1 x 24 pack John Smiths Bitter
• 10+ pints Tribute Cornish Ale

Please be aware the above list is what I consumed in full! Just me. No help (except a little on the Tequila from Claire Levison!) Good, eh!

Photos are up! Gallery, Flickr and <a href=”http://www.zooomr.com/photos/mattbee/” cl;ass=”external”>Zooomr</a>

Tarra for now!!

My friend and colleague sent me a link to this PC Mag article…

Oh dear! What I hope this does not mean is that I will keep working hard at developing my favascript, Flash, PHP ekcetera skills only to find that the job market is saturated with people fallen from grace in respective bust companies or that the purchasers and users of such online things are put off completely.

Personally I think that there will always be failures in any kind of business environment and t’internet is no different, however the current trend of jumping on the latest band wagon is dangerous and will add to “Bubble 2.0”. Creating the next social networking site, or the next video streaming site and investing everything into it is always going to be a big mistake – I just think that there would be less of an impact if the burst does happen if some people sat back and went “Actually they did it well enough and I won’t be able to compete.”

Of course there are the services that should be removed and destroyed – things like mySpace that is a total waste of time, space and effort. Bad code breeding bad designs, thousands of bands you’ve never heard of spamming you, hundreds of friends (I don’t think I have 1,00 friends anyway – nevermind that use myspace!), bored people bombarding you with pointless things (can be applied to facebook as well!) and owned by an evil (alledgedly) corporate giant.

Rant over.

So this weekend I had a nice weekend picnic-ing, then watched Transformers at the cinema. Sunday was the usual Sunday League training then couple of pints. Excellent weather both days, but I did have a couple of Transformers opinions I need to get off ny chest.

Firstly Bumble Bee wasn’t a Beetle. And to wind us up he’s parked nest to a battered Beetle in the car showroom who he dents with his door! OK, so the new Camero is fine and Bumble Bee wasn’t always a Beetle (just the best one was!). But changing at will between old Camero and new wasn’t right! OK I wan’t the biggest fan originally or of the comic but surely if the Transformers could change to anything they scan or touch then they could have all been F16s! Same with that anoying little radio/mobile phone thing!!

Secondly why was Optimus Prime a big rig instead of a nice flat fronted truck as I remember him!! I wish they’d left it as was, however I must say the new Hasbro Optimus Prime toy looks pretty impressive.

But apart from that the film was awesome and I enjoyed it a lot. The moments I really enjoyed were most of the Autobot lines, Optimus Prime getting his sword out and the whole fight sequences. I’ll look forward to the second film!!

Work wise I’ve had an interesting week, something came up, made work interesting, I made what I hope will be the right decision and that I can help make some interesting changes. That’s about all I’ll say for the minute! This wek will mostly be spent working out ways to use jQuery to “add value” to upcoming jobs. And learning AJAX more so I don’t get stuck with combining 2 different ajaxy implementations on one page!

And finally – Luke Young, Jonathan Woodgate, Tuncay Sanli and Alan Smith (hopefully) aint a bad list of signings for Boro this summer. Let’s get back in Europe boys!!

So this morning was the Orange free bike giveaway in Covent Garden, where I decided to try and get a free mountain bike at 7:30 this morning. This is the information I got.

However I missed out by four people! That’s right, they got to four people in front of me and ran out of tickets that you exchange for the free bikes. I was a little gutted, more so for being so close, but a few other details add to the frustration – especially the fact that I meant to be 15 minutes earlier than I was, which would have made the difference, and secondly a few more than four people definitely pushed into the queue JUST ahead of me…

It’s annoying, but that’s the way it is. More free stuff tomorrow night though, when I attend the excellent sounding Chinwag Big Summer 07. This event has free beer and barbecue – much better than any bike!!

So I finally decided to upgrade my old SPV for a newer model. After some hold ups in the Orange shop on Oxford Street, I decided on a HTC SPV E650. With a nice slide out QWERTY keyboard, the latest Windows mobile (I think), Mobile office, Windows Media Player and random other programs it should do everything I need.

It seems really good so far – although I think it’ll be susceptible to breakage when I keep opening and closing the keyboard in my pocket (fidgeting I think it’s called).

Add it to the free (except for the repair cost) laptop I got from work, I’ll feel on the cutting edge of technology (yetstill be a few years behind).

Next thing to do is try and get a bigger micro SanDisk memory card for my phone, try the programs on my new phone, and find a power supply for my “new” laptop. Answers on a postcard if you know where to find a power supply for a HP Compaq Nx9010!

Today is a joyous day. A day to be remembered, celebrated, maybe make it a public holiday next year.

For today my world changed, as I now have 2 Len Price 3 albums to listen to. No more shall I be restricted to listening to Chinese Burn or demos acquired from Rufous. After ordering it on release day, the journey from amazon in America to my desk at work has been made successfully, with no signs of scurvy or abuse.

It is a great day.

Of course the new album is very very good. Buy it.

This blog entry is pretty pointless, unless you consider helping a mate win a bet pointless. So can we get Heather McNeil’s image up on the top ten Google image search results?

I think probably, no reason why not, especially if everyone helps.

(Update from the future, 2020 in fact - the image was here but has disappeared from the internet)

Good luck Rory!!

Read more about the bet at http://heathermcneil.blogspot.com/

Are the days of running about to unused Macs and using browsrcamp.com over? Apple yesterday released their browser Safari for the Windows platform and on first look it looks good! Obviously it will never surpass Firefox (mainly for the web developer toolbar) for everyday use, but I do love the interface. Smooth text, pretty forms and buttons as well as a host of other excellent features. It also means that hopefully testing how sites render on a Mac will be made much easier.

In other news I contacted the CCCS (www.cccs.co.uk) for a debt management plan and hopefully with their help I can freeze interest on my HSBC loan and get it paid off sooner whilst at the same time not have to deal with the horror company DLC (they really are a bunch of [insert expletive here]). So once I get that sorted out I should be much better off and debt free a lot sooner!