I just did another small update to the images pages - Anna was asking why I couldn't have a "Previous" and "Next" button on each page.  Well, now I do.  Oh, and I found the originals of the trip to Houston Space Centre again, and uploaded them over the previous images.  They're worth checking out again, some of the detail is awesome :-)

We had a party last night for members of staff who have been there for five years or more.  Photos are up on the Photos page, I'll add captions later.

Interesting times at the moment.  Google has just launched its Maps and Local Search services for UK, Flickr has given us a free year and a couple of free pro accounts (let me know if you want one), and we're all going to a party on Friday.  I've done some awesome stuff in work lately, but I can't really tell you about it, and that sucks.

Ok, so that's done, and I think its fairly elegant too.  I've invented a new markup tag, called photo.  The format for using it is
<photo src="Path-To-Image" alt="Some Text" href="Path-To-Link" id="Number"/>
It looks at the src tag and builds an image around that, using the correct formatting for the CSS class I use for photos.  Then it looks for alt, and adds that if it exits.  If either href or id are present, then it renders the image inside a link tag for either the href to point to, or an image in the database.  The id tag takes precedence over the href tag, should the both exist.
So, the photo of the bread below, would be shortened to
<photo src="/photos/oail/IMG_3057.S.jpg" alt="Saturday Morning" id="519"/>
And that beats the hell out of the markup I had to build for the original Saturday Morning photo :-)

I've been wrestling with images for the last few days, trying to give them a slightly more engaging visual model.  I settled on a drop shadow generated dynamically, but in order to add this to the blog entry page I have to enter some code.  A lot of code actually, as it needs to be enclosed in a couple of different tags.  
So, I've come up with my own method for handling images, and it will work something like this :

<image id="519"/> or <image source="url of image" hyperlink="http://url"/>

The first method is interesting - if it is used then it will pull the image name from the image database, and apply all of the formatting, and also link it up to the imageviewer page as you can see in the photograph below.

Saturday morning chez White.  Sabine coming for German lessons... cafe latte... warm bread with ham from the Italian deli... sun coming through the windows...  I love that warm and fuzzy feeling.

I was just installing AOL, so I fired up Google.  Awesome.
Speaking of which, GMail rocks.  The mailbox size is still growing, and it looks like it will never stop.

What the hell do the lyrics for all of the Pink Floyd songs mean anyway?  I've never been a student of allegory, metaphor or simile, but it occurred to me this morning that I actually don't have a fucking clue what their songs mean, and I've been listening to them for about twenty years.  The irony of "For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals.  Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagation.  We learned to talk", delivered by Stephen Hawkings (who can't talk) isn't lost on me.  Nor is the fact that I'm asking this question.  Google and I have a date later it would seem.

Its too damn early here, and I'm up.  I had anticipated a nice lie-in this morning, but the builders called at 08:30 so I had to get up.  They're going to be here for the whole weekend, getting the room under the stairs waterproofed and converted into something we can use for storage.  I have to see if they can also fix the bathroom sink where Anna broke it, and if they have a new fireplace to go in the hole in the living room.  All that is going to have to wait until I finish my coffee though.
We're off to Germany later, for the weekend.  Its Anna's birthday on Tuesday you see, so we're going to hook up with her parents and friends for the party.  Not that we're actually having a party, but there will be celebrating.  And beer.

I've been playing around with GMail over the lsat few days, and its starting to really impress me.  I'm not sure what the trigger was, as I've had the account for a while now, but it suddenly clicked into "Play with me" mode.  I discovered that someone has built an app called "GMail Drive" that allows you to treat your GMail account as a virtual file store.  Now, its only 2GB in size, so not that much use for storing files, but... I have 50 accounts to play with.  That makes 100GB, which IS a useful amount of storage.