Month: June 2005

Ambushed

I quit smoking four years ago. I do still scam the odd fag off people when very hammered, but I haven’t bought a packet of cigarettes in over four years. And while I admit that yes, I’d love to start smoking again, because I absolutely refuse to become of these tedious ex-smokers who’re suddenly even more puritanical than non-smokers, and because the only reason I quit was for the sake of my health, not because I suddenly didn’t like it. If it there were a pill to sort out the health problems that smoking causes, I’d light up again just as soon as I could by a pack.

But still, it’s been four years. I’ve got it pretty well beaten now. I’m a non-smoker, and I can go whole weeks without ever thinking about how I’d like to smoke.

But tonight, sitting here at my computer, stone cold sober, I really, really want a cigarette. Really want one. I don’t think I’ve had a craving like this since about six months after I quit. It’s deeply fucking strange, to tell you the truth. But what it mostly is, is utterly bastard infuriating.

[Web Design] There’s a reason I don’t do the pretty bits…

I’m at home working on a Saturday night, and god, I fucking hate CSS. I could accomplish the layout I want in about ten minutes using tables, but can I make CSS do what I want in IE Firefox and Opera? Why, noooo…

Anyone out there want to tell my why the small square photos at the bottom of this layout aren’t centered on the page? They’re inside the DIV that’s supposed to centre everything, and as far as I know, the float that’s on them should only serve to make sure that they don’t linbreak between images, not to actaully align them in any way. (If that’s not the case, please explain what I need to do in order to have them centered and on the same line in all three browsers. For preference, I would like them to stay in the LI tags, as I’d like this site marked up as semantically as possible, since I want it to score well on Google.)

For bonus points, please explain why, in Firefox, the LI items at the top are not appearing inside the darker blue/purple area at the top (as they do in IE and Opera) despite the fact that it’s the fucking UL that contains them that has the styles for the darker blue area.

In the meantime, I’m off to do some PHP. At least I can understand that…

Whipcrack Thunder

I wasn’t in the best of moods when I left the office, and when I stepped outside to feel that close heat, that dead, still air, and looked up at the granite looking clouds, I knew I’d be bloody lucky to make it to the tube station dry. I put the headphones in, and with Garbage’s “Sex Is Not The Enemy” playing, zipped the Stupid Thing With The Pockets up, and started walking. Sure enough, before I’d gone 10 yards, I felt the first one hit. A big heavy raindrop, the sort that you can feel as it splashes against your skin.

I broke into a jog, as the pavement around me started to stain. I passed someone from the same building as me, hunched over and muttering, clearly extremely pissed off about this. I stretched my legs a bit more, picked the pace up slightly, as it got heavier. By the time I’d gone 200 yards, it was falling out of the sky in great sheets. Two coke cans danced passed me as I crossed the road, the wind whipping them, the sheer force of the gusts causing them to bounce waist-high, and slamming rain into me. I could already feel it running off my hair in rivulets.

I was at a dead run by the time I made it across the road, and someone was laughing. It wasn’t until I passed the garden with the group of kids in football shirts, all of them spinning round with outstretched arms that I realised it was me. Hammering the pavement, every footstep raising a splash, the rain pouring off me, clothes and hair plastered to me, and the thunder bouncing off the buildings, pounding down the space between me and the tube station, laughing like a maniac. I’m sure everyone I passed thought I was some kind of escaped lunatic.

Except those kids. They got it.

There are worse ways to start a weekend.