Sci-Fi sale

Every now and again I like to divest myself of any unnecessary bits and pieces that are cluttering up my life, have a spring-clean, if you will.

When I moved into my new flat I had a reduced amount of shelf space, so never got round to putting my large collection of sci-fi paperbacks out. Or rather I got as far as taking them out of their box and piling them up on top of the shelves, but they never got as far as the shelves themselves. And then I decided they looked a mess and put them back in their box, and then I realised that they were just taking up space, I was unlikely to ever read them again, and I should consider getting rid of them.

I initially considered giving them to the Cats Protection shop, which is where most of my worldly goods end up. But then I had a bit of a selfish moment and decided to see if I could realise some of the money invested in them.

<digression>

This also gave me the chance to try out Delicious Library, which appeals to the collector/completist in me (a very male thing, yes?). It’s very easy to get completely obsessive with it. After entering all the books (130 or so) which was the original reason to use it, I’m now about two-thirds of the way through cataloguing my CD collection (181 so far!). What would be good is if it enabled you to upload some kind of web-page with your collection displayed (in a similar way to the way the application shows it?) – after all, half the fun is showing off to other people about how many CDs or books you’ve got, or the quality of your collection.

</digression>

I offered the 130 books out to any of my friends who I thought might be interested, at £1 a book or £50 the lot. Quite a bargain, I thought. And I now have a taker, so the weekend after next I’ll be making the journey to London to divest myself of these unneeded items. I hope it won’t be too traumatic.

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Data Retention in the EU

I don’t consider myself to be particularly political – I’ve only recently begun voting and my short attention span means I find it difficult to keep up with political arguments. But the proposed Directive on mandatory data retention really strikes me as a worrying development.

Here’s a good article on the issues surrounding the directive that the UK, France, Ireland and Sweden are proposing. I agree with the conclusions of the piece. I think that this directive is an illegal and unworkable overreaction to the present perceived terrorist threats. I would go so far as to say it’s morally wrong. I’ve signed the petition and hope that it will influence those involved in debating it.

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yes! we are now xhtml strict!!

Well that kind of said it all, really.

I decided to make the move over to strict xhtml, from transitional. In the process I removed the del.icio.us bookmark link that I’d added a while back and was causing the page to fail the validation. I probably could have fixed it, but I wasn’t in the mood, and it was pretty useless for my site anyway. If you used del.icio.us you’d more than likely have the bookmark to hand anyway.

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horizontal calendar

I’ve spent the evening hacking the hell out of the the WordPress get_calendar() function to give me a horizontal calendar in the header to replace the tabular version in the sidebar.

I’ve converted it from a table into an unordered list (to match the rest of the rows in the header) and rearranged things so that you have the previous and next months at either end. Stylistically, each day with a post is bold and days without posts are faded out; today’s date is highlighted in the yellow; hovering over the post days gives you a short piece of text giving the full date and the titles of the posts made on that day.

While it was certainly not as difficult to put together as I had thought — the bulk of the work has come from the get_calendar() function — I went through many, many tweaks to get it to this stage, but as always I spend a lot of time over the tiniest, most inconsequential details.

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