Short post today – I have just bought a new HP EliteBook 6930p laptop, and am thus in the process of upgrading, transferring and sorting my old HP Compaq nc6400.

Since I have a final day or so to spend with my old and faithful machine, and since my new laptop is running Windows 7, it is time for me to say goodbye to Windows XP. With my desktop also running 7, I now have no computers left on the 9 year old operating system.

The best way I could think to celebrate was to turn the system font on my XP machine to Comic Sans. And following a comment from my friend Peter, I decided to give Apple a much needed makeover as well.

Behold, I give you One Infinite Comic Loop Sans:

(For those of you who don’t get this, 1 Infinite Loop is is the headquarters of Apple in America, and I have updated the sign and the logo to have a more rounded and friendly feeling, as befits the moment)

From my post last week, I pointed out the many things I’m hoping to get done in the next few months. One tool I have found incredibly helpful for that is “Joe’s Goals”.

Joe’s Goals is an incredibly simple website that allows you set your goals, and fill in every day how well they are going.

In my case, I am able to keep track of stuff like exercising, blogging, work, eating, and many other things, and mildly incentivise myself – I’m much less likely to eat unhealthy food with a -3 point incentive!

Anyway, follow my current progress with the graph below, or get started yourself at http://www.joesgoals.com.

Update:

This was going well, and then I failed my finals. Meaning that I didn’t exactly have much time for all my projects, exercise and everything else. You can see what I’ve been up to with the new pages being created on MedRevise.co.uk.

Since I spend so much time in my little office, I thought it couldn’t hurt to take a few photos, and describe it a bit. Check them out on Flickr, or click each photo to see it larger.

Firstly, to set the scene, myself and my wife live in a terraced house, usually with two housemates, two dogs (and two chickens). This means there is a distinct lack of room. When I said to my wife, “I need an office”, I was given the cellar. Which I have to share with the washing machine. Coupled with little money, I couldn’t afford to convert the cellar into an airy and fresh new room. I put in a concrete floor, a little insulation in the ceiling, and a lot of yellow masonry paint.

Thus, in this photo, note the lumpy walls, utility meters, coal shute and general mankiness. Now, we’ve dealt with that, I apologise for it and now you can ignore it, and focus on the good stuff! Roll on the next photo…

Now to explain a little more about my setup. I use a custom built desktop PC, with a quad core Q9550 processor, 6 Gb of RAM, assorted hard disks, and a Radeon HD 4830 graphics card. I’m currently running Windows 7, with some variety of the Adobe Master Collection running.

The boss tuneage is thrown out by a fairly run-of-the-mill-but-sufficient 5.1 surround system, with my media player of choice being the inimitable Foobar 2000 – fast, tiny memory footprint and thus sexy indeed. The fluffy dog toy is a mascot. She’s called “Banger”.

The final thing to note in this photo is the landline. Guess if the cellar gets terrible network coverage for my mobile phone. You guessed right. Time for the next photo!

Well, the big thing to notice here is the screens, and what’s on them. My big ol’ graphics card has two DVI to VGA converters shoved in the back, giving me my two HP L1906 monitors, boasting a total of 1280×2048 screen space. I like the task separation that two separate screens give you, as opposed to one massive one. I also like the fact that trading my 14inch for two 19 inch screens cost me just £70!

The photo backdrop is one I took on my K10D at dawn a year or two back. It’s split across the two screens (and I have an extra taskbar) thanks to the genius that is Display Fusion Pro.

Your final treat is the “Vote for Chris” poster on the wall. This is a remnant of my comedy campaign for the union elections at Sheffield University. I lost, quite badly. Time to move on, I think…

From the side, there are three things I want you to notice:

Firstly, my excellent VisiBone cheat sheet, with hexadecimal colours, and a guide to colour blind appearance of the spectrum below. Get your own at www.visibone.com!

Secondly, the mirror I have wedged at 45 degrees in order to (ineffectually) reflect light from the coal shute into my office. Pity me, as you read this from a computer near a window.

Thirdly, have you noticed the dogs yet? More on that next…

The star of this particular photo is Pudding. She is a labrador. I’m guessing you worked that out on your own.

I’m not going to insult your intelligence by talking about her for twenty paragraphs, I’ll just say that if you want to find out more about her, check out her twitter page at www.twitter.com/dogpudd.

Let’s move on, although if you hated that one, you’ll love what’s coming…

And sleeping under the desk is Hezebelle, my collie. Quite why she chooses to sleep on such a horrifyingly mouldy duvet I’m not sure, but she hasn’t developed a cough, pneumonia or cerebral malaria yet, so I’m not too worried.

Yes, she is on twitter as well, sad as that is. Check her at www.twitter.com/dogheze.

The only other thing of note here is my chair. I did have a wonderfully comfortable, adjustable, ergonomic executive office chair, with arm rests and pneumatics and everything. Sadly, it gave me terrible RSI, and slightly depressingly, this old kitchen chair cured it instantly.

Nearly done now…

You have waited with me to the end, and I thank you for that. In this last photo, you can see me using the office, almost as I would if the camera wasn’t on a 12 second timer, and I hadn’t just vaulted over the washing machine to get into my chair in time.

You may note that I am, in a rather egocentric manner, looking at http://allaboutchris.co.uk, my personal website.

Feel free to do the same, but otherwise, thanks for taking a look at my office, and checking out the blog. See ya!

Just a short one today, pointing out the beauty of humour from one of the world’s largest technology companies.

Google give you the option of putting your homepage into whatever language you want. On its own this isn’t very funny, since if you are French then having a homepage in French is just normal.

But what about Klingon? That’s pretty funny.

Or Pirate? Where “Search” because Searrrrch”, and “Logout” because “Catch th’ outgoing tide!”

Or Piglatin? Oogleinggay omethingsay ecomesbay aay otlay ongerlay.

Or Hacker? Funny, although understanding your PR3F3R3N(3Z is a lot harder.

Or, my personal favourite, Bork bork bork, a confusing and vaguely Englishesque language. I recommend checking out the languages list in the Bork preferences.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Check out the picture of my current homepage on the right (or bigger, at this link).

So, I have finished my exams. And that leaves me a few short weeks to tackle a variety of projects. Taking inspiration from Lifehacker, I am making a list on here of stuff I am aiming to achieve.

1. Get healthy: The next 7 weeks, my first hour of each day is exercise. Keep me accountable on this one please!
2. A new YesIts.Us website: The Lowry Family homepage, in full technicolor. Need to update this, and create a blog for my darling wife.
3. Install Windows 7 on my PC: I only bought it 5 months ago, and already I feel I should probably install it!
4. Make VictorandRachel.co.uk: A wedding site for my housemate.
5. Do some more work on Cutting Edge: my large corporate project has been put on hold, but that’s no excuse not to do anything on it.
6. Finish CrookesOnline.co.uk: Let’s get the Crookes homepage up and running for everyone!
7. A new NamesNotNumbers.info: Everyone’s favourite charity, soon getting a new website. Design by committee – the best way!
8. Get my server set up: It’s working fine, but its time to get that software running properly, with regular backups, and every PC in the house being served!
9. Redesign ChristianPunks.co.uk: This site is no longer an active portal, so let’s make it a little more fresh and helpful!
10. Start a peer reviewed journal: Coming soon – The Online Journal of Medicine (also known as OnJoM).
11. Get tagging: Put post tags on every post on my blog.
12. Sleep.
13. Walk the dogs.

Anyone else think this risks burnout? I will take regular breaks, don’t worry! And now I will leave you with what must be the world’s best CV – click the picture below to find out more…

we are in

Britaine.co.uk

united kingdom’s search engine

Man, I stayed up all night watching this. You can read about the hung parliament and all that yourself on the BBC election site.

Basically though, in summary, no one party can get a full majority, so there are two options: a coalition of two or more parties, or another election at some point.

My vote is on a Lib Dem and Labour coalition. It’s not looking good, as Nick Clegg has said that the party with the most MPs (Conservative) should get the first opportunity to attempt to form a government. I respect his integrity with sticking to PR ideals; but that is not the current law. Just as I don’t think he should be allowed to say “I got 23% of the vote, thus I deserve 23% of the MPs”. If there is a referendum, and our constitutional system changes, then that’s fine. Until then though, we need to respect the current law.

But yes, at the moment, with the only real statement we have to work with is Clegg’s support for the party with the largest mandate to try first, we don’t know if there is going to be a Lib Dem Conservative coalition. I think it would be a mess, since there would have to be so many compromises, that neither Tory nor LD voters and MPs would be satisfied with the resulting government.

The only real sensible merger is Lib Dem and Labour; they share a lot of common ground, especially with regard to reform, whereas LD and Tory are completely opposite on that one.

The questions are – can it work, and how will they get the extra few MPs they need for a majority? And will they ditch Brown? It would be reasonable for Clegg to say, I’ll only work with Labour if Brown is off the table. Anyway, this will unfold throughout the day, so keep watching below.

My favourite two things I have read on twitter over the evening (whole night) have to be:

and

Maybe more later, but for now I’ll just leave you with the latest stuff below:

I have long been a huge fan of the graphics program Adobe Fireworks, despite the lack of support it gets from its owner, and the bugs which plagued the last version. The new version has just been announced, so I just downloaded the trial of Fireworks CS5. I am considering purchasing it, despite the slightly ridiculous increase in price.

There are none of the new features I hoped for: especially custom brushes, or the ability to make tables, rather than lining up hundreds of text boxes, have not arrived. We have recieved a few tweaks here and there, but mostly we have been promised 900 bug fixes, stability improvements and better speed.

I can cope with that. Fireworks CS4 without the terrible text bugs will be fine thanks.

So I just started playing around, and decided to resize some text. I. Can. Not. BELIEVE that I just got the exact same bug that plagued CS4 – Ctrl+T resize of text, causing crazy distortions. Picture on the right.

This is on a brand new file, not imported from anywhere else, just a blank file, with two text boxes and Ctrl+T. Absolute fail.

Adobe, what the hell is going on?

Update:

Just to clarify to any Adobe tech people, this is on Fireworks CS5 installed on Windows XP, with 2gig ram (its having no trouble running it). The error is reproducible simply by creating a new file, creating a text box, and then resizing it using Free Transform (Ctrl+T), and dragging the corner arrow, which should be “scale with constrained proportions”.

Seriously, I absolutely demand a response to this. It just isn’t on! Us PC users still haven’t had the promised patch for CS4 yet, and now CS5 is causing the same problems! I have replicated the error in another file, visible below. You can also download the raw bug.PNG file here.