Rohan August 15th, 2007
In my most recent post, I mentioned my relief at discovering that what I feared was the complete disintegration of the inside half of a tooth was nothing more severe than a bad chip, which was duly filled to a nice smooth finish.
Well, less than a week later, the relief is gone and the fear has returned. Not because of the work done last week, which remains solid, but because now a large chunk of the outside of the same tooth has chipped away. And from my view on this side of the mirror, it’s not a pretty sight.
I guess I should be grateful that there’s no pain or discomfort (so far), just a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that the tooth will probably need to come out after all. C’est la vie.
Rohan August 9th, 2007
Well, it was off to the dentist for me today. Some weeks ago, I managed to ‘destroy’ a tooth while munching on a biscuit, and despite having suffered no pain or discomfort (other than a rough feeling where the shape of the tooth has changed) I thought I should have it seen to.
Expecting the worst, I was fully prepared to farewell my first permanent tooth (other than the four wisdom teeth that I had taken out some years ago) via the dentist’s pliers.
I respect dentists and the job they do, but for one reason or another (the dozen or so fillings I had as a kid most probably has a lot to do with it) dentistry and I don’t seem to get along. So I was pleasantly relieved to hear that my current dental woes were nothing more severe than a chipped tooth, which, after a quick jab in the mouth with some anaesthetic, 15 minutes or so of prodding and drilling and $90 from the hip pocket, enabled me to walk out a free man.
Well, until next month when I have to go back and have the cavity filled that the dentist found on the other side of my mouth…
Rohan July 16th, 2007
I’ve been enjoying SBS’s coverage of the Tour de France for the last few evenings – so much so that the telly is often still on well after 1am (well after bed time for this little black duck).
But to be honest, I have no idea why I am so compelled to watch, night after night, right to the end of each day’s riding. After all, I’m not normally a cycling fan at all. I don’t ride. I don’t know too much about the sport and its many nuances. I certainly don’t know many of the riders. I haven’t even owned my own bike since I got my driver’s licence 20 years ago!
So I got to thinking, just what is it that makes Le Tour such an interesting event…
- The skill and daring of the riders?
- Their physical and mental strength and endurance?
- Could it be the spectacular, but inevitable, crashes that occur from time to time? (As much as you don’t want to see anyone getting injured, it does make for interesting viewing.)
- Perhaps it’s the commentary team’s seemingly boundless knowledge of the race, the riders and the surroundings?
- The picture postcard scenery at every turn?
I’ve a feeling it’s a combination of all these things, which, when packaged into a single all-encompassing spectacle, presents viewers with a thoroughly engrossing and intriguing experience.
Highly recommended.
Rohan July 13th, 2007
While the majority of Seaspray proper was spared the disaster of the recent Gippsland floods, it seems not all was well in the sleepy little town, with much of the sand dunes along this stretch of the Ninety Mile Beach washed and blown away by a mixture of king tides and gale force easterly winds.
The major victim was the Seaspray Surf Life Saving Club, which sits atop the sand dunes overlooking the beach. The images below were taken last week and they clearly show the large volume of sand that has been eroded. Such is the threat of the building now collapsing that on Tuesday Bracksy took a detour from his inspection of flood damaged areas of Gippsland to visit Seaspray and announce a $700,000 pledge to assist with relocation of the building – not such a hard decision considering that relocation is already in the pipeworks.
Rohan June 14th, 2007
There’s often a need to include characters in web pages that are outside the normal range found on the standard keyboard, and HTML Entity Character Lookup is a great new web app that makes this task so much easier. It works by finding the entity based on how it looks. For example typing an asterisk (*) lists all entities that look like bullets (alternatively, you could type bullet to achieve a similar list of matching entities).
Even better is the ability to give characters your own keywords for easier lookup. For example, the tilde symbol (˜) can, obviously, be looked up using the keyword tilde, but I know some people who refer to this character as a squiggle. No problem; simply find the tilde in the list from the lookup, click the + symbol and add your own keyword (in this case squiggle), and voilà, you can now find the tilde entity by typing squiggle into the keyword lookup.
Nice.
Rohan June 8th, 2007
Well, as you can no doubt see, the first of the changes to the blog has occurred. The theme you’re looking at now is a modification of a theme called FallSeason, which replaced the original theme, Altitude. This is not, by any means, the way it will stay, but it’s a good starting point and has most of the base elements I will be working with.
I’ve got the random header images going with some of my own shots, thanks to the small piece of code referred to by David Davies. The header image changes at each page refresh - it’s not how I ultimately want the banner images to change, but it will do until I get some more time for tinkering.
Rohan June 6th, 2007
It’s been a distressing 48 hours in our household… more distressing than when Matilda smacked her head on the pavers in the courtyard after falling down the step; more distressing than when Sarah developed an allergic reaction to penicillin after we took her to the hospital; more distressing than when The Glass House got the flick from the ABC…
We lost the TV remote control!
Talk about turning the house upside down trying to find the thing; in cupboards, under couches, in bedrooms, in the fridge, dishwasher and microwave, in the bathroom. We even contemplated checking the rubbish bin (desperate times…). And so, here we were, 7 years into the 21 century AD (the Third millennium, no less!), and we are reduced to actually having to get off the couch and walk up to the TV and press the little buttons on the front to change channel and adjust the volume. Outrageous!
Where did we end up finding the remote? Under one of the couch cushions… yes, I did mention the we checked the couches, a number of times in fact, but for some reason the pesky little remote stayed hidden for a full two days. And was there one particular person to blame for the loss? Well, the jury’s out on that one. The girls are off the hook because they were in the bath when it went missing. Emma and I both agree that she was the last to actually use the remote, but (and this is purely circumstantial OK?) the remote was found under the cushion where I was sitting immediately after the remote went missing. I have no recollection of picking up the remote control after Emma had used it to turn on Mythbusters. Could be a case for the team at CSI:Melbourne.
So, all this begs the question: what tactics do you employ when you’ve lost something near and dear?
Rohan June 5th, 2007
It’s been more than a year since I first experimented with starting a blog, and after an initial burst of enthusiasm, these pages have lain dormant… I think the search for the “perfect theme” (I wanted the blog/website combination to be branded exactly the same, or as closely as possible) became all too much of a hassle. So I moved on to more urgent matters that required my attention at the time.
Well, I’m back… with some more advanced ideas for a redesign of my main site, which will encompass:
- all my work stuff, covering everything on my current site;
- pages advertising my hosting and domain registration services;
- a custom built CRM;
- a secured section for clients to log in and view their projects as ‘works in progress’;
- a link to my ’sister site’ targeting a specific niche market (don’t want to say too much now - all will be revealed in future posts);
- this blog (recently updated to the latest version, currently v2.2);
- a photo gallery.
The search is still on to pretty up the blog with a nice theme, but I’ve decided that this isn’t as critical as I was making it a year ago - in fact it is likely to chop and change a bit as I discover what this Wordpress software can and can’t do. In fact, the only requirement I have for the blog is that the banner image will change automatically, either on page refresh or after a given period of time (the reason being that I’d like to use photographs I take as banner images for the blog). This should be quite achievable, as I know there are scripts that will do what I’m after.
So, for now, it’s simply a case of start bloggin’ and worry about the details later. I have no precise timetable for when I’ll post; I guess it will depend on if/when I have something to say that I want to share with the world at large - could be hardly ever, could be every other day… I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see.
