Just made it in time

According to /. I've just made it in time. Their article about an article in InfoWorld suggests that, at 37, I've only just made it in time in order to get a job in IT. Though what this has to do with Jenny Agutter getting her kit off is anyone's idea...? Now to find a region 2 copy of China 9, Liberty 37.

Anatomy of a link

So a client (Hi Mark) was asking how a link could point out of his site but open in a new window and this got me thinking about the nature of hypertext. I'm not 100% sure that we should be encouraging such branching. If you imagine a browse on the internet as a journey then each time a new page is opened in a new window (or tab) then the path forks and the site of that branching becomes something of a node allowing the journey to start afresh from when the forking occurred. Almost like a save-game in a platform'r - it allows the traveller to drop a fruitless avenue and start again, perhaps it isn't such a bad thing after all?

Anyway a link is structured like this:

<a href="http://drmsite.com" target="_blank">DRMSite</a>

The "href"attribute of the "a" element is the URI to which the link points, the "target" attribute tells the browser where the link should be opened (in the example above it will open in a new browser window, creating another strand of the journey).

It is possible to use a "a" element in another way. In documents where there is a lot of content then we can use the "a" element to navigate between the content using named anchors, funnily enough we do this using the "name" attribute.

<a href="#Section01">Jump to Section 1</a>

This refers to an internal link and so long as Section 1 is marked up thus:

<h2><a name="#Section01">Section 1</a></h2>

Then all will be fine and dandy.

Still feels a little like cheating though ;-)

p.s.

Balkanisation of everything...?

How cool is This?

Watch CBS News Videos Online

It does however represent an interesting dichotomy, data is becoming centralised in terms of access and diffuse in terms of storage but infrastructure is becoming fractured. It brings to mind the post I wrote about Sterling Engines and such-like a while ago as well as the this old post from HudLug about WLANs. Interesting times ehh?

Sacling factor, percentage and em values compared.

scaling factors	percentage (%)	em
xx-small	57.8%	0.58em
x-small	69%	0.69em
small	83.3%	0.83em
medium	100%	1em
large	120%	1.2em
x-large	150%	1.5em
xx-large	200%	2em

This time tomorrow...

... I will no longer be a nurse.

This may not seem like a big thing for many but I'll be losing a shed load of my identity, I can no longer call myself a smoker nor even a vegetarian (Damn you Pepperoni!), nor for that matter, a non-driver!

Sprog #2 reckons that this is par for the course, that when I change a small something I end up changing loads of things at once and my immediate reaction to this was that it just wasn't right but after thinking on it overnight I'm not so sure. When my beard gets too itchy I cut my hair as well as shaving... though that's the only example I can think of at the minute TBH ;-).

Nursing is bloody odd as a career, as a nurse you're little bits of all sorts, acting as all sorts of different things depending upon the needs of your patients/clients. Worth pondering this I reckon...

I will, however, be able to call myself a Cloud Developer. A job title which, if anything, is even cooler than being a nurse!

But I sure will miss the people I've worked with over the past 12 years, I'm even missing them now and I know I'll see a fair few of them tonight. My leaving do was Wednesday night and it was cracking good fun and I have to admit to tearing up at one or two points during the evening. I'm going to keep my card forever as I really don't want to forget any of the cool people I've met and become friends with over the years.

The cherubs even clubbed together and bought me a Wacom Bamboo Touch & Pen! This is so cool and I had been trying to get 'er indoors to get me one for a surprise but I guess the staff I've worked with forever are more able to pick up the hints that I drop than my wife ;-). Hardly surprising as 'er indoors has only know me for a few years where as I've spent more time with Jacky at work than any other person in my whole life, including my Mum!

Sad?

You bet.

Worried that I've made a terrible mistake?

Not a bleeding chance!

Word Version

So I've just submitted TMA M255 00 and I needed to check the version of Word that I was using... I guess that I really should have checked the version which I was suing but it was a weird thing from work which I wouldn't trust with a barge-pole (and I've got a barge-pole of my own so a bit the bullet and checked and it's Word 2003, the TMA needs to be submitted in Word 97 .doc format!). So after a little research I found this.

Basically I opened the Word document in Boxer and checked all the odd binary data until I found a string which was nearly English ("Word.Document.8"), then used that as the basis for my search.

Anyway, the information in table form is:

String	Version
Word.Document.6	Word 6
Word.Document.7	Word 95
Word.Document.8	Word 97
Word.Document.8.5	Word 98
Word.Document.9	Word 2000
Word.Document.10	Word 2002
Word.Document.11	Word 2003
Word.Document.12	Word 2007

AWS

Went to London yesterday to see a presentation on "Amazon Web Services: Cloud Computing in Action" organised by the BCS London West Branch and given by Simone Brunozzi, who's a technology evangelist (Cool title, reminds me of Manfred Macx in Charles Stross's Accelerando, except he called himself a venture altruist).

On the whole pretty good though I was slightly disappointed at the lack of technical details. Then again, the audience was pretty evenly split between people who commission code and those that write the code (What would you call these two often distinct groups?), so it must be hard to judge the content correctly; you'll always end up disappointing or baffling one or the other group.

He talked about the main services offered but also said that there were many, many more and there seems to be more and more being developed and released all the time.

Happiness is...

I was thinking about this and the sort of things that make me smile when I'm asleep and I came up with the following.

So we live on a boat, a narrowboat, as such the boat is 6'10" wide at it's widest, what with having to have a galley-way the length of the boat, we're limited to something like a Queen sized bed. Neither of us is particularly small so we spoon when we sleep to save one of us falling out.

Enough to make me smile, you might think?

This has been a particularly cold winter so we've a thick quilt on the bed with a cracking second-hand flannelette cover from a mate, which is warm on it's own, let alone around a million-tog quilt. Then another mate offered a candlewick bedspread which was a lovely deep red and reminded me of one my Gran used to have and which had fond memories for me from Xmases when I was small. Needless to say we're very warm.

Enough to make me smile, you might think?

So we're very warm but being not particularly small we generate quite a quantity of heat on our own so, when I'm getting too hot, I stick a leg out from under the heat of the quilt but still under the candlewick bedspread. Best of both worlds.

Enough to make me smile, you might think?

Now the thing is that the candlewick bedspread is heavy, thick and pretty, but it isn't quite up to the job of keeping me toasty warm - after a while my leg will start to feel distinctly chilly and the warmest thing in the bed is her indoors so, spooning as we are, I stick my cool leg against the back of her lovely warm leg and she shivers in her sleep.

That's enough to make me smile in my sleep!

Sometimes I worry about that, but not often.

Leaving do

So nursing is seeing another one leave the fold?

After 15 years of nursing (12 within the NHS) and a further 3 of training I'm off! I was looking for images of male nurses and accidentally came across this post by Xavier, at least I guess that that is his name. I guess that the UK is less biased towards male nurses. Then again we've had Casualty for nigh on 25 years, I'm not sure if there is an equivalent show in the USA which shows manly men as nurses...?

Charlie Fairhead is a god!

Though perhaps it's to do with being a psychiatric nurse? We were always seen as the hard-case men-in-white-coats (or lazy ne'er-do-wells) rather than anything else.

Whatever the reason, I'm off!

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Working on learning Python. Seems nice enough. More soon but I thought I’d put this down here as it made me laugh:

“I think that it must be a good investment to do research into elephants belly buttons, If they do get belly button fluff "the Americans call it lint whew, lint is banned in hospitals, but fluff abounds, check your ward drying machine ?. anyway elephant fluff could be used as dusters, like loofhas, or even depilatory swabs dependening on the roughness.Or even sanitary accessories for the dicerning lady. Forget Tenna Lady, "Enter Elephant GIRL" FOR THE LARGER APPENDAGE". and its green friendly, you could advertise or write a jingle "PROTECT YOUR MUFF WITH ELEPHANTS FLUFF".

do you think its a good idea to approach Dragons Den

Ray”