I’ve just got myself a lovely new 22″ high resolution monitor. First thing I did was fire up my browser to see the difference between the super sleek piece of kit and my lolloping old non-widescreen dinosaur.
Then I decided – out of pure vanity – to see what my site would look like in this new hi-res glory and got a horrible shock: everything was out of alignment. The background image wasn’t in-line with the text, so it looked crap.
Which lead me onto the next thought, which made my heart sink…
For the last few months I’ve been using this website theme, people with screens not identical to mine would’ve been enduring this wafty layout. Oh the shame!
Now, although I build decent landing pages day-in, day-out for clients, I’m pretty lost when it comes to WordPress (which is what my site is built with). But being desperate, I dived into the “styles.css” file on the server and started messing around. Luckily, I fixed the problem relatively easily – changing one value from “relative” to “absolute” and adding a margin. Phew!
It’s a relief to get that problem fixed, but painful to realise the idiocy I’m capable of and a timely reminder that stupidity is indeed infinite.
And if you’ve visited LaneConsultancy.com in the last few months, sorry if the site looked weird to you. It’s all fixed now.
What IS interesting are the things that scare American readers enough to move them to "challenge" these books. (Please don't think I'm having a pop at Americans, we're similar here the in UK – it's just the list is US specific).
These are:
Political viewpoint,
Religious viewpoint,
Violence,
Homosexuality,
Unsuited to age group.
Funny how differences in opinion on points 1 & 2 tend to create large amounts of number 3.
Anyway, these objections from the public are the "usual suspects" in art & literature – and frankly, if it didn't scare or offend some groups of people, we'd have a very dull culture indeed.
I am, however, pleasantly surprised to see an absence of science books here in the "challenge" list – which appears to me as a good thing. Either that, or no-one gives a shit. Let's hope not…
I’ve just ordered a rather hard-to-get-hold of book by a chap called Ian Rowland on the subject of Cold Reading. I first heard about him years ago from one of Derren Brown’s books, and always meant to get it, but never did until now (apparently, Derren Brown learned quite a bit from this book).
For the uninitiated, Cold Reading is a psychological technique to appear to be psychic (amongst other things). And no, before you ask, I’m not planning on setting up as a clairvoyant – the outfit wouldn’t suit me.
So why buy a book on Cold Reading? My interest is two-fold:
First off, it seems the psychology behind cold reading can be effectively applied to sales, marketing and general business situations – such as quickly building rapport, which is always handy in my profession, as well as for my clients.
Secondly, I’ve always been fascinated by “non-local” phenomena in the scientific sense. I’ve studied the work of Russel Targ, Dean Radin & co – as well as diving into quantumphysics (and even understanding bits of it) and ancient mysticism to work out if/how some people appear to receive non-local information. So studying cold reading should make an interesting read for the materialist skeptic in me.
Anyway, when I’ve read it, I’ll post my thoughts (if I understand it!).
Well, my last post was about a nifty little gadget called Dragon Naturally Speaking, so I thought I’d continue the theme with another handy little service I’ve discovered.
It’s a wonderfully simple service called Posterous. It’s hard to describe the service unless you use it, but I’ll give it a go…
It allows you to share and create stuff over different areas of the web – for example: your blog(s), twitter, friendfeed, youtube, flickr etc. just by sending an email. The rest is taken care of at their end, which is great.
For me, it’s made blogging a little easier, but the main thing I’ve got from Posterous so far is speed. I can share something, put a few paragraphs of my thoughts next to it, and it appears as a blog post, on twitter and friendfeed as soon as I hit send. Marvellous stuff.
I’m dictating this blog post (the first dictated post ever on this blog) using a piece of software called Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
It’s not exactly perfect yet, but I think in time it will get more and more used to my voice… and it should make my life a hell of a lot easier.
In fact I’ve only set the system up and “written” about three emails, and it’s already getting really fast at typing – and I’m talking at a nearly natural pace.
Being utterly hopeless at typing, I truly hope that this piece of software will work out for me and I’ll be able to blog and get much more done.
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