A meme I picked up here today:
Go to the address bar in your favorite browser and type one letter.
As I have three favourite browsers I use on a daily basis, a simple list won’t do. So, here are mine in a table per browser:
3 March 2010
CSS Mini-Me
A few days ago I was trying to find my “body colours”. I took a photo of my face and colour-picked the most representative bits of my skin, hair, lips and eyes. While the results in themselves (#dcc09b, #3a2810, #b0625e, #3b453d) were nice but also completely unimportant, I wondered what else I could do with that information.
I first thought about personalising my online CV to match these colours (with hair colour at the top, lip colour at the bottom and eye colour for links, etc). But somehow my body colours don’t make good website colours.
me
Instead I played around with those colours and created a pure HTML and CSS “image” of myself (the core code consists of just five divs). Et voilà , here it is.
You will only see the full beauty of it if you use a modern browser (and can see). It’s funny how IE6 still shows something which is recognisable as a face, but turns it into some kind of a monster:
Beauty is in the eyes of the browser
29 December 2009
South Ealing Cemetery
Last month I have been to one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to in London: The South Ealing Cemetery.
The cemetery has an extremely atmospheric older part and a quite boring younger part. The western older part seems rather rural with cats, crows and a lot of squirrels roaming the place — and I have even seen a fox! (But unfortunately I was not quick enough with my camera.) Many of the graves are so old, they are often overgrown and either askew and lopsided or half sunken into the ground or completely gone with a few fragments of broken stones as the only remainder of a life long gone.
I often felt like I could be in the middle of the graveyard in Godric’s Hollow …
If I wanted to be buried (which I don’t) then I would love to be buried in a similar place. And seeing all those kitschy angelic statures, I would love to have a stature with a sappy angel (with wings and innocent look and all) as the upper half and a Manneken Pis as the lower half. 😀
Enjoy a selection of the photos I took:
5 December 2009
Best and Worst Hot Chocolate ever
While I was in Oxford a few weeks ago I had the best and worst Hot Chocolate I ever drank in my life so far. (No, I do not drink coffee.)
I had the Worst Hot Chocolate right at Oxford Railway Station at VitaBurst. Their specialty is “Fresh juice and smoothies” and they really looked tasty and healthy (but I did not try them). I am afraid Hot Chocolate does not belong to their strengths. I got a cup mainly for keeping me warm that day on my way to the hotel. I threw it away after having drunken only about a third of it. I normally hate throwing food away, but it was really that awful.
If you need a Hot Chocolate at Oxford Railway Station, get one from AMT instead. It’s not the best, but decent.
I drank the Best Hot Chocolate ever of my life at Pret on Cornmarket Street!
I sometimes drink Hot Chocolate at Pret in Hammersmith Station, which is quite good. But this one in Oxford was nothing like it. It was so much better than any I have ever tasted, I asked them what was their “secret”. They told me, not every Pret uses the same Chocolate. They use a special kind of molten chocolate (in a machine which keeps it constantly molten)!
And maybe the great location (in a 16th century building with a great interior) is doing its bit as well …
27 June 2009
Silent Twittering
I am not a ‘Twitter person’. Watching Hugh Laurie a few weeks ago on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross saying he is none as well was a joy. But when he uttered the following joke, he gave away a splendid idea for a sensational new micro blogging site:
I’m not a ‘Twitter person’ … I’m more of a ‘Shh person’. I subscribed to this ‘Shh network’, where you write something down, but don’t send it anywhere.
I thought someone might have picked this idea up or had the same idea before, but my short search for such an (obviously hoax) service was unsuccessful. So, I created one myself:
Apart from the fun of “cloning” Twitter, writing a better front-end code and having the satisfying feeling of implementing a small project all in one day, I also had the idea of twittering silence on twitter itself. You can follow my as interesting as everybody else’s tweets on:
By the way, I needed the underscore because a twitter user called ‘shh’ already existed … as did ‘shhh’ … and ‘shhhh’ … and ‘shhhhh’ … I could have taken ‘shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh’, but maybe that wouldn’t have been such a good idea. Seems a bit desperate, doesn’t it?
These two projects are really a bit unrelated. They serve the purpose of linking to each other. (Yeah, my middle name is “PR”. Or was it “SEO”? Where is your birth certificate when you need it?)
And, of course, they share the same philosophy: “Silent twittering” for fun and more privacy awareness.