Black to White!

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Found this handy little bookmarklet on a website, if you click it, or bookmark it and use it, it turns the web page you’re looking at to black text on a white background. Obviously, any images or heavily CSSed elements may still render in the original colours and vanish, but it’s handy if you truly can’t stand the colours a site has.

Transmogrify Website Colours
(Right click and choose Bookmark, works in Firefox, can’t promise it’ll work in other browsers, you can then either use it from your bookmarks menu, or whack it onto a button bar or something).

Envelope much?

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I got a new SIM card for my phone today (the work one), you know SIM cards? They’re small. They usually come attached to a credit card sized piece of plastic to keep them safe.

This is the envelope in which it arrived. Sorry about the shaky picture, low blood sugar at the time, the Sky+ remote is artfully placed so you get a sense of scale, and the SIM card is on top of the envelope.

Feel free to click the picture for a (large) version.

Good writing advice

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This is clearly good advice, which I ignore (obviously), written by Margaret H. Bonham.

Following up on loads of questions asked by folks here, one question lt260 asked was: Do you have a 12-step program for gaining good writing habits?

You know, with the amount of writing I do, you’d figure that I wouldn’t need this so-called 12 step program, but the reality is sometimes even the best authors don’t write as much as they should. But, of course, I don’t follow many rules, so these are my 15 step program for gaining good writing habits. So, here are my recommendations for gaining good writing habits.

1. Apply butt to chair; fingers to keyboard (or pen to paper). Seriously, most writers don’t write because they fail to just sit down and write. Sitting down and putting yourself if the position to write will at least get you to the medium you intend to write on. After that, the rest is up to you.

read the rest ….

Autumn so soon?

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Fun fun weather here in the UK (obviously, it’s just quaint weather, nothing on the scale of the rest of the world). Our summer ran out in June and July, August was pretty much a complete wash out and then September is having a surprise revival with a few days of sun so far.

But the trees can’t be fooled, and there’s an increasing amount of yellow and orange on the journey in to work. Summer is turning, as it invariably does, into Autumn which is my favourite time of year. I don’t really enjoy the heat (useful in the UK), and I don’t mind the cold. Autumn is always my favourite time of year.

My favourite type of day is a bright, dry, crisp and cool Autumn day where you can just see a hint of your own breath glowing in the sun.

We made spaghetti bolognaise over the weekend, and I intended to bring some to work for lunch today but I really didn’t fancy it, so I’m staring at a sandwich that I know is bad for me (in a general sense), and it’s only 11:30. At weekends I almost forget to eat until after 1pm, but something about being in work makes me crave lunch from around 11:30 onwards.

Half a second wind

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Made it into the lounge and woke up a little bit (need to digest some of this food before actually going to bed).

So anyway, to continue the theme of banging on about the Wii Fit. Did some gardening today. The Wii Fit didn’t make us do it, but knowing we could record the effort spent gardening in the tool certainly added a tiny amount of encouragement. You could do the same by running a spreadsheet and tracking it yourself, but the Wii FitPiggy is cuter.

Edit: Man that was a lame blog entry. I started strong, then got sidetracked by registering our Wii and getting Wii stars and then I got tired again. So anyway, Wii Fit = good, gardening = hard work, frogs = plentiful, ivy = mostly removed, huge hole in the ground between the fence and the path = mostly filled, had a second shower today because I was creeped out by the spiders and other bugs, snails = *huge*, cats = very excited by anything that moved. Grete weeded the border and sorted out the grass along the edge (big job, took about two hours).

I finally got some little things done like moving the remains of the wardrobe we broke up when we moved in (like 5 years ago), and moving some broken paving stones (used them to fill The Hole). Also, spread the last bag of wood chip we bought about 2 years ago to sort the border. I assumed plastic bags would be water proof but obviously not, the wood chip was soaked, stuck together and clumpy. Hopefully it’ll look more like wood when it dries out (sometime in 2011 it looks like).

I’m always torn when it comes to gardens. I love the idea of a garden providing somewhere for wildlife to thrive (frogs, snails, newts, dragonflies, everything) but I also appreciate that kind of garden can look a mess to the neighbours and eventually can risk things like fences and sheds.

I did finally work out why I don’t like gardening, or the main reason. I don’t like being in a war you can’t win. And basically, you can not win against nature, you can just slow her down – life has a way of getting under the path and into the house no matter how hard you try.

I’m knackered

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Up since 5:30am, pretty tired now. Had our roast dinner at 1:30pm’ish, which was much better than having it later (in theory). Went out into the garden with Grete and got some tidying up done (an hour or two), was going to blog about how the Wii encourages that because you can put time into Wii Fit but I’m honestly too tired, maybe tomorrow.

Ended up eating too much for tea because I was starving after the gardening so probably blew all the good we did by having our dinner early.

Oh well. Tomorrow is just another day.

Sunday indeed

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So, you can tell it’s Sunday around here. There’s me (awake) and then there’s the girls.

Who are all clearly very tired.

The post that never was

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I was going to blog about my Wii Fit high scores, except I can’t find a way of seeing the high scores without doing each of the events.

And I’m not doing 3.5 hours of exercise just so I can write down all my scores :p

Writing

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Yesterday I used the ‘snowflake method’ to write a single sentence description of a novel, and then expand that into a paragraph providing more detail. I actually quite like the idea I wrote, it’s something that’s been knocking around in my head for a few weeks. But I can’t help the feeling that ‘I am not worthy’ and that I should leave writing to the people who know what they’re doing.

I guess that’s the internal critic people talk about, telling me I’m not able to do it, and that I should learn how to tune it out and just get on with the writing and see what develops. Maybe I will. The next stage in the method is to write up some information on each of the characters, quite a lot of information and that will prove to be a challenge. Although I think I’m up to it. There are some technical difficulties with elements of the plot and I wonder how much attention I should pay to those at the beginning and if I should just ignore them and work them out as I go along. It’s possible that I’m getting hung-up on those issues due to some sekrit internal critic plot to stop me doing anything (this is main theory #1) so I’m going to try and not worry about them. They’ll either work out or not, and if they don’t I can try different things.

Still early, only just gone 8:08. Played a little Resident Evil 4 on the Wii, I like the control system. It’s pleasing that they managed to use the Wii features and not just rely on the standard controller. Playing it on easy, I suck at computer games in general, and got to an early section where some Evil Dudes[tm] were lobbing what looked like sticks of dynamite[1] at me, and inevitably I stumbled and went the wrong way and didn’t shoot the right guy and got blown up, maybe I’ll have another go later.

[1] is it dynamite these days? Does anyone still use that? I guess they do, a quick check reveals it’s considered to be a high explosive. Ooh I learned a new thing, the difference between low explosives and high explosives. Low explosives undergo deflagration (i.e. propagates through burning) where-as high explosives detonate rather than deflagrate.