Practical Notes on Product, Data & Systems

If you want a really strong relationship - I recommend moving abroad.   It needs to be a country where neither partner can a) speak the language b) has lived before. This, in my experience, will be a little crazy – for example if will make even the simplest task; like talking to a plumber fraught with possibilities to get the wrong end of the stick, you won’t have a family or friends network to rely on, and everything will be an uphill struggle. But.. you will probably have a rock solid relationship with your wife.   After a few years you will be able to guarantee they can take just about anything in their stride.   Travelling to other parts of the world will be a breeze – and going back to your home town will bring a smile to your face when you have to sort something mildly problematic there.

Sometimes one wakes up in the morning, or takes a long leisurely bath - and "Archimedes-like" you get a brainwave .  Lots of people do, I even heard about a CEO who out a bath suite next to his corporate office to capitalise on this phenomenon. I get of lot of these "brainwaves".  Most business ideas (to their owners), seem "genius", at least initially.   After a day or two, the shine normally comes off them.  Bitter experience has taught me that peer reviewing your new business concept is the best way to get some honest feedback on whether it's a go-er or not. So I'm going to try the biggest "peer" review of them all - posting these ideas on the internet!  Of course the idea will have lost it's element of "surprise" - but maybe a reader will fancy using it a the seed of their business empire.  Or just having a good laugh if the idea it too "hare-brained". Ideas are important, but they are more or less free,...

So I'm finally.. after maybe 17 years... getting round to looking at CSS in a bit more detail. Sadly CSS has moved on a bit in the last 17 years... I'm going to have to go ALL OUT. Doing it via an Udemy course - so far so good.  Just had a pretty mental lecture on how the browser finally calculates the actual "end result" pixel values; and I'm certain I'm going to need to refer to it again. The main new point here for me, em settings are measured relative to their parent font-size, if used to specify font-size, whereas em settings are measured relative to the current font-size, if used to specify lengths. em - is a multiplication factor, so 2em could be 2x the parent's font size for a font-size definition. Mind blown.

I came across an article in the Nottingham Evening Post. https://web.archive.org/web/20180724022708/https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/history/nottingham-nightclubs-you-went-80s-173196 Brings back some memories.  No a lot of memories actually...which is a shame because I spend a large amount of my life during my 20s in these places.  

I last posted about this in 2013 !  It is now 2019! Lot of exclamation marks!! yes!!  Very very frustrating! Just trying to add a company twitter account to my mobile. And I'm still getting "This appears to be an invalid phone number. Please enter a valid phone number." message. My phone number entered is perfectly valid. Hey twitters..  How about fixing this. This appears to be an invalid phone number. Please enter a valid phone number. This appears to be an invalid phone number. Please enter a valid phone number.This appears to be an invalid phone number. Please enter a valid phone number. This appears to be an invalid phone number. Please enter a valid phone number.

How will Brexit play out? Theresa May has just survived her leadership challenge.  The meaningful vote on her deal has been kicked into the long grass and is now scheduled for early next year (2019). I've been thinking about what the possible eventualities could be.   And I must as a Remainer I'm pleased with what my crystal ball is telling me. As a "hard-remainer" I'm actually tempted not even to bother pushing for a #peoplesvote.  I'll tell you why:  Living in Spain and Andorra for the last 13 years I can tell you the Euro and Schengen are the two BEST parts of the EU that you can appreciate on a daily or weekly basis. The ability to travel across borders without any passport control, and then being able to spend the money that is already in your pocket without visiting any bureaux de change and losing a % in the process is wonderful. As a programmer I like logical flows, so I've knocked up a little flow chart to see what will happen dependin...

I woke up this morning to receive something I have been expecting for some time. The "death knell" of changedetection.com I've made a video walkthrough of the site in case someone wants to duplicate it's functionality.   Please plan on making it ad-supported - in most cases private users like me will not stand for a paid for product - certainly not one that costs as much as I pay for groceries for the family on any particular day! There were a couple of pages (from the top navigation), that I missed on the demo. The Webmasters link This must have been useful for self-generating marketing for changedetection.com over the years. Webmaster's were able to get some generated HTML code to paste into their site. The Directory Link This page gives some indication of the scope and capacity of ChangeDetection.com Today it is monitoring over 2 million pages.  I was monitoring 50 pages (but am probably quite a heavy user).   If we guesstimate avera...