February 2006 in the Life of Ben (Blog)
Away this Weekend (24th February 2006)
I am going to be at Flissy’s house from Saturday evening until Monday evening. I thought I should mention this somewhere as there are a few projects I’m working on at the moment.
Grandmother’s Final Chapter (24th February 2006)
I’ve visited her a few times over the past month, the last time being yesterday. She is very weak but still recognised me, although she seems aware that these are her final days. Today, she got moved to a hospice so she can have depart more peacefully than being in a hospital ward.
Lack of Updates (24th February 2006)
Same old story: too busy actually doing stuff to write about what I’ve done! I might put a projects list in my next entry so that when I look back at this news in the future I’ll be able to see how busy the start of 2006 was. c{:¬)
Myriad Islands Railway 3D Draft v2 (8th February 2006)
A few of hours ago I made the railway draft available. There is now a continuous route from Necrosis clockwise around illCOM all the way to the start of the Black Mesa Tunnel. The route then exits from the tunnel and curves slightly as it slopes down to the tunnel through the illRES crater tunnel. After exiting from this tunnel there is a gentle chicane which brings the railway to the location of the bridge which joins it to the other end of Necrosis.
Hopefully this rough draft will allow everyone to get a much better idea of how the railway route will be. Illspirit has said he will make the sections across illRES and illURB while JasonB will make the sections from Necrosis clockwise to illURB. It should not be too long before the route is finalised. c{:-)
Jot Updated (8th February 2006)
Now using the proper Windows format for its INI file and storing document history, my Jot demonstration program is now available. Newcomers to Visual Basic 6 might find it useful to understand the basics of working with text files using simple controls.
Weekend with Felicity (7th February 2006)
Felicity lives in Farnborough went to the same sixth form college as me but we didn’t know each other back then. We met again during the Job Seeker training course I met Emma on a year and some months ago. We e-mailed each other in Spring 2005 and I stayed at her house a few times, mainly playing computer games with her and chatting.
Well, we e-mailed each other for a while and lost contact while sorting out our domestic and employment situations. We resumed contact a few weeks ago since she had now moved out of home and was renting a room in a shared house. I stayed over at her house last weekend (2006-02-03 to 2006-02-05) and the previous weekend (2006-01-28 to 2006-01-30). We watched movies and talked at great length about all manner of subjects. It’s a great pleasure to spend time with her.
Calthorpe Park School Website Release Date (7th February 2006)
Warren (Head of ICT at the school) and I have pencilled in 2006-02-20 as the release date for the new website we have been building together. We have also talked money, which is great news since I have been really worried that my dreams of becoming a professional with a career and stuff weren’t going to come true!
There is a lot of work to be done to get the site up and ready for the wild, wild web.
Started Subcribing to XML Feeds (7th February 2006)
After upgrading to Firefox 1.5 I decided to browse for some new extensions to try out. I noticed that there was a shortlist of contestants for the best Firefox extension, so I had a look through to see if any seemed useful. I noticed a lightweight feed reader called Sage and decided I may as well give it a go to see what all this fuss about feeds has been about.
Wow, it was well worth the small 137kB download. Sage downloads the XML feed using its own discovery method or by using the inbuilt Live Bookmarks feature of Firefox. It uses a sidebar to let you navigate between the feeds you have bookmarked and displays the feed contents as a simply styled web page in the current tab. It even lets you create your own stylesheet for it and since the default two-column display was a bit cramped for my liking I linearised it.
It’s a great little extension and I’ve now realised that the hype about feeds is justified. I’d recommend it to anyone who has Firefox but hasn’t gotten tried out feeds yet.