Month: February 2005

One word … W.O.W

I have seen the light! (No! Not God or the oncoming train)

       CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

What a wonderful design tool. I have just downloaded a new theme for my blog.
My blog runs on WordPress 1.5. WordPress uses a mix of PHP, HTML and CSS to display the page you are now reading.
With the update to the 1.5 version, there is a themes folder where you can ‘drop’ new themes into, select them and instant redesign of your website.

Very impressive and very easy. For someone like me who does not understand PHP or CSS (that will change) it was suprisingly easy to change the basics of the design.

So in the future, I expect you will see special themes for my website on special occassions, Christmas, Halloween, etc

Oh yeah, nearly forgot, the theme I use is Arzel XT2

Today I got up at Noon. Went to McDonalds for Breakfast and then spent a quiet half hour finnishing reading the last fourty pages of Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone.

Very enjoyable. The first non work related book I have read in Korea!

When I got back home I started reading the second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

I am really enjoying getting back to reading. A little sad really, as when I was my students ages (16,17) I was reading two hundred plus books per year.

This year I intend to read much more widely.

Testing a new progam for blogging – w.bloggar, v4 It is a WYSIWYG editor
http://wbloggar.com/

As you may or may not be aware this blog is run on WordPress, a PHP based system.

The current, stable version is 1.2.2 but I have decided to upgrade to 1.5 gamma

What does gamma mean?

Well if a program is still testing, but all the features are there and it is basically a sold product with just a few bugs then it is a beta

A Gamma version is one where the feature set is frozen. That is all the features for that version of the programs are in the program. But there migh be serious problems with the release. Once those problems are ironed out, then it becomes a beta, and then after a certain period of time, it is officially released.

The new look (aka ‘theme’) I am using is a little ugly, but it has the advantage of working in Both Internet Explorer and Firefox.
All the better themes seem to break in Internet Explorer. At this stage I am not sure why because my knowledge of CSS is virtually non exisistent.

Second day of vacation:

Got up at 11 am and decided to cycle to Carrefour (a French department store). So wasting no time 🙂 I am on my bike and off a mere three hours later.
Wanting to continue this breakneck pace I decide to take a shortcut through the hills around song-an.
Result:
Numerous scatches from wading through frozen rice paddies which are infested with long brown grass and wigs as well as frozen water.
The realization that the ‘shortcut’ is in fact not a shortcut. My goal, the main road is close, but in which direction I do not know.
Finally reason, makes me backtrace my route and go back to my start point. All this in 5 KM and one hour of travel through the ‘sticks’ of Ulsan.
Then when I get to Carrefour the bicycle racks are the usual poor design in which you can not lock your bike properly. This is not a criticism of Korea. We have the same poor design back in Australia.
So I lock my bike to a tree, problem solved 🙂
Walking into Carrefour the lady at the main entrance takes my backpack off me, I suppose in case I should be inclined to steal something. I hate that attitutude. Home Plus (A British department store) lets my walk right in, as does Wal-Mart.