Alan Coleman

How great is MySpace? I’m properly into it and have my own page and everything.

This surely, is what the Internet is all about, meeting people, listening to music and linking through to other stuff you might be interested in. I’ve tried to set up forums and message boards here on my own site in the past, with the vague idea of forming some sort of online community, but spam made it practically impossible so I just jacked it in.

I’ve only had my page on MySpace for 24 hours, and already I’ve got people who I havn’t seen for ages as my friends. I can admit to feeling a little chuffed when I went back on and saw that other MySpacers have answered my plea for some mates. And Jenna Jameson too, now there’s blast from the past, and no hard feelings either.

So now I have to think of a way of blinging it up a bit, I’m thinking maybe dark grey and green, but I’m not sure.

Anyway, who cares? It’s great to see old friends!

Someone in the orifice has just mailed round some ‘Hilarious’ pictures of peoples pets wearing a variety of different outfits. They’re not hilarious at all. In fact, the idea of a Gerbil wearing a tuxedo is about as amusing as ‘The lads’ playing with a packet of condoms in a student union bar.

Email is an extremely useful communication channel that should be treated like any other. Would you pick a number from your mobile at random, then simply ring it and start telling stupid jokes like Fat Colin? No, exactly. The person on the other end, quite rightly, is likely to say, “Jesus, f**king do one fatty”.

Besides, if dog owners spent a little less time dressing Walnut up in a clown suit, and a little more time clearing up his shit from the streets of south London, they’ll succeed in freeing up valuable bandwidth as well as making life a little more bearable for the rest of us.

You have been told.

It may sound like a bold claim, but in a small way this book changed my life for the better. Over the last year or so I’ve been trying to implement as much standardised CSS and XHTML code into my web development work as possible. This has been an enjoyable and enlightening experience that has been complemented by a gradual move to PHP / MySQL for my personal stuff. In the early days of the web it was like everyone was building their own car for the very first time, now people like me are waking up to standards compliant code as if we would the idea of tuning up the carburettor to make the machine cleaner and more efficient.

In Web Standards Solutions Dan Cederholm succeeds in bringing a sense of order to some of the paths towards standards compliant and lighter code that have been well documented over the past year or so. The book is broken down into 16 easily digestible chapters that each focus on a different aspect of design, there are workable approaches to each solution that are appraised and documented for their individual merits.

Personally I like the way that the chapters remain autonomous, many markup / scripting / code related books tend to revolve around a large project so you can’t turn to the bits you want to without having to relate back to the start. In that respect the examples can seem very simplistic, but that is where the power lies. Chapter 2 for instance, I’ve always used headings (h1, h2…) but have never really had their importance laid bare in a simple manner – now it all makes sense and I can implement accordingly. The same goes for lists, “Evil” tables and other elements.

Essentially what we’re dealing with here is a book that champions the merits of CSS, it does this by not trying to achieve to much and by leaving the real work to the reader, which I think is clever. It also demonstrates that there’s still life left in the book for this sort of thing, whilst all this information is available online this is a neat package that has a beginning and an end. And most importantly, you can put a bookmark in and read it on the train.

I’ve seen two great films this weekend. The first was Fargo by the Cohen brothers, a wicked black comedy superbly shot in Minnesota during the freezing winter. It’s stars Steve Buscemi, a superb actor with a great, and fantastically British set of teeth.

Best scene: The pregnant policewoman questioning the two local girls in the bar.

The second is my favourite World War 2 film, Where Eagles Dare. I first saw it when I was about nine and watched it over and over on video. The reasons I liked it so much came back to me this afternoon when I watched it whilst continuously drinking tea.

Let’s start with the Bavarian location. The film is set in and around a superb mountain top castle, the Schloss Adler, that is only accessible by cable car – how cool is that? Then there’s the German uniforms; camp yes, but also well cut with plenty of leather and cool insignia. Note the timeless reversible parkas as worn by Major Smith (Richard Burton) and Lieutenant Schaffer (Clint Eastwood) in the Schloss Adler scenes.

There are some really good suspense scenes in this film, the sort that seem to have disappeared with the advent of OTT Hollywood style special effects. Also it has an interesting storyline that follows closely the book by Alistair MacLean, a childhood favourite author of mine. I also had a crush on the character of Heidi, (Ingrid Pitt) which I was pleasantly reminded of this afternoon. At the time of this film she bared an uncanny resemblance to my girlfriend Mandy.

Best scene: “Broadsword calling Danny Boy!, Broadsword calling Danny Boy!”

A couple of Scandinavian guys have built a superb tribute website at www.whereeaglesdare.com, where they are selling reproduction reversible parkas and other assorted memorabilia.

I’ve just written some stuff about how 2004 has been a great year for us, but with recent world events in mind it all seemed a bit smug so I decided not to bother.

I hope that next year the rebuilding will not be hampered by selfish western bickering about who’s paying for what – and what they’ll get in return.

At the same time I hope also that the people of Iraq will experience something that resembles peace, and at least some sort of governmental stability.

Maybe also one morning the entire country will wake up and decide they want to give the Royal family 24hrs to leave the country.

I live in hope, you never know what’s round the corner.

Happy New Year everyone.