…so time for some Extreme Pumpkins.

Off to London for a long weekend, cheerio…

I’ve updated some of the code here and there, visibly there’s not a lot of change, but I’ve been busy making the documents fully XHTML-Strict compliant. I’ve done away with tables completely and now use divisions which are positioned via CSS. This represents a further divorce of content and style, which has become a interest of mine of late (the philosophy of separating the two, allowing users to dictate presentation, making data more portable and easier to process automatically, is quite cool, and gives online media enormous potential), although there is still some style dictated inside the markup, especially the blog, but I’ll be making improvements to those later.

To test the new markup, I’ve also added in a few extra stylesheets, which experiment with different layouts and colours, and now show how configurable the site has become. You can change the style with the drop-down on the left (and the site should remember your choice as well…). Apologies to NTK for my ‘homage’. Let me know what you think of them, and of any new bugs you see.

[Update: Sorry, I’ve just re-read that first paragraph and it veers dangerously close to talking bollocks…]

Given that Michael Howard is set to become new leader of the Tory Party, it’s perhaps appropriate at this point to remind ourselves of the infamous 1997 interview where Jeremy Paxman asked him the same question 14 times over, without getting a straight answer. [RealVideo stream, the funny bit is about 4 minutes in]

As a footnote, Paxo spookily goes on to ask Howard about his then bid for leadership of the party…

With Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership looking like it’s over, there is only one man who can save the Tories now. Step forward, Boris Johnson.

New York artist Spencer Tunick has done his latest installation - 450 naked women at New York’s Grand Central station. It looks kinda cool, all those bodies radiating out in a geometric fashion, perhaps like something out of The Matrix. Only more naked.

Only someone immensely puerile would try to come up with captions for these pictures. So I have. Though I’m not feeling very inspired today, the best I could come up with was “What does it take to get a ticket round here?” and “Steven Norris named new railways supremo”.

Who wouldn’t?

Wow. Amazon have got a new feature - you can now search inside books as well as their titles.

Apart from the bog-standard geek fascination as to how they pulled this off, this also offers an intriguing new way of, for example, tracking obscure references or quotes or checking for plagiarism, as well as the potential for doing all the silly things you did with Google - searching for yourself/friends/family, for example. We could even come up with the sport of “AmazonWhacking”…

…I was going to link to a BBC article about how he refused to perform unless disabled people were moved away from the front of the auditorium, but why give the fucker more publicity? Regardless of this latest story, it goes without saying he’s a complete twat.