Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

dave doesn’t do digital recording, partly because he hasn’t got the equipment, partly because he prefers the earthy qualities of his trusty four-track (which uses C90 tapes, using the whole width of the tape to get four channels, and usually running at double speed to increase sound quality). I haven’t actually seen dave for years, but being an old skate buddy he stumbled across the too old to skate site and got in touch.

we’ve discussed doing some sort of musical collaboration before but it didn’t materialise, but now we are talking about it again - the plan is that dave will record some of his songs (he has a load waiting) with a vocal and guitar parts and post them to me on tape. Vocal will be panned fully left, guitar will be panned fully right (or vice versa). I can then play it into garageband via my old walkman and hopefully get it synced up as two seperate channels. I can then add my parts (more guitar, more vocal, bass, drums) and post it back - he can overdub more stuff if he wants - watch this space!!

i’m posting this in the hope that I can improve the google rating for this seemingly hidden page on the ss great britain site, which contains information for the timetable/ running times of the cross harbour ferry service, which runs across the floating harbour from the end of gas ferry road to the new development at the bottom of jacobs wells road.

UPDATE: July 2005 - it disappeared altogether - well done ss great britain PR person! let them guess

in case the page disappears - this is what it said at time of writing (don’t blame me if this is out of date):-

It operates a winter timetable from Monday to Friday between 8.00am and 9.30am and again from 4.30pm to 6.00pm and a summer timetable (March 25th- October 31st) from Monday to Friday between 8.00am and 9.30am and again from 11.15am to 6.15 pm. It goes back and forth between the banks on demand. In addition, a weekend service runs from 10.30am to 4.30pm (5.30pm in summer) on Saturday and Sunday. At the moment, it does not run on Public Bank Holidays. The Bristol Ferry Boat Company skipper the vessel, charging 25p for a single crossing and £5 for a monthly ticket which starts to save you money after 20 crossings.

I am going to track down whoever wrote the "big cook, little cook" theme tune and, after slapping them, am going to sue them for invasion of my mind. Every musical idea I have ever had has been blasted out my head by that infuriating ditty.

After I have done that i’m going to start stalking whoever wrote the "fimbles" theme tune…

Pintsized is being driven stir crazy by the crazy frog thing, but believe me James, you don’t know the meaning of crazy until you start watching several hours of cbeebies a day

Ok apparently this friday big brother starts again. This year i’m not going to get sucked in. I pledge that everytime big brother appears on TV at home I am going to do something life enhancing like skateboarding or DIY. I am not going to get to know the "contestants" - when they are opening supermarkets or appearing on the cover of FHM this time next year, i’m not going to know who they are.

You may notice that the teapot sticker accompanying this has little or nothing to do with the subject matter. I was going to come up with something philosophical about that, but I can’t think of anything. You may however see a bit more of that on here (random images, not necessarily teapots), as I think it just brightens things up, no?

last night it was netsight monday film night and we watched sprout.

The film and the soundtrack are simply beautiful - at one point I just wanted to burrow into the screen and float on the waves.

another little musical sketch, bought to you by a powerbook, garage band, a musicman stingray bass guitar, a squier telecaster guitar and a lead. Once again this isn’t a whole song, just an idea waiting for a chorus and lyrics (which i’m crap at incidentally if anyone fancies writing some for me).

Initially I was trying to come up with something quite lo-fi in a sonic youth kind of way, but by the time I dragged in some drum loops from the library and put on a second guitar part it got all upbeat and is probably more reminiscent of the smashing pumpkins now I reckon…

I’ve had probably my longest non-internet period since I went to france last year. Went down to cornwall with wife and son for a few days and stayed here. I have to admit that I did take my laptop with me and fired up macstumbler while I was there in case there was any free wifi going, but managed to restrain myself from caning the companies GPRS data allocation to do my daily tireless round of information scanning and blog reading, or checking email, in favour of sandcastle building and lounging. The powerbook did however prove very useful as a music and video jukebox.

Did a bit of surfing (as in water) and was really chuffed to stand up on my first wave, albeit on a big bouyant learner board. Like riding a bike - haven’t surfed for several years, and i’ve hardly surfed at all really - probably less than about 8 hours in total over about 18 years… I’d like to do some more of that, y’know get a longboard, live by the sea, that type of thing..

There seems to be a lot of hype about AJAX at the moment, even an AJAX summit recently.

I have been using a similar (but cruder) technique for loading in content to a page without a page reload for a few years using iframes, javascript and the Document Object Model. oh… don’t think i’m claiming I invented it by the way, but I did work out a way of doing it in isolation without seeing any examples. For me it was just for a problem I needed to solve for a content management system where I had a large form and wanted to load in content from a database without having to save the form first.

Below is an example - I have simplified what I did to make it look as simple as it really is. There is a “hidden” iframe (i.e. 0 height and width) into which you load an ordinary HTML page (or script) which as a few lines of javascript that copy the contents of a specified div in the hidden page to a specified div on the calling page. I have created an empty div below to load the content into.

if you are reading this on the website rather than via an RSS aggregator give it a go:-

load external content into empty div below

UPDATE: since I migrated this blog to wordpress, this example no longer works as the iframe is stripped out - I will set up a static page to demonstarte this when I get a sec

I stuck a message on the underscore mailing list to judge the interest in running a plone workshop here at netsight. The response was good, so later this summer (when we have finished kitting out our new boardroom) we will try to run a couple of sessions - a general plone demo for those interested in knowing more about it and a "how to skin a plone site" practical workshop for designers and developers. These workshops will be free and probably fall under the banner of a bristol skillswap.

a couple of days ago, our creative director told me I could help myself to anything from a pile of old hardware we were about to get rid of. I ran into the room excitedly, thinking about the possible booty of old hard drives, network cards and obsolete RAM to be extracted.

But I resisted. I even resisted the ancient laptop with no screen. I think I may have turned over a new leaf. Even though the idle daydream of building a mutant server farm in my shed for no obvious purpose pops into my head on a fairly frequently basis, I believe I may be getting over my affliction.