There’s a meme going around that goes like this:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

These are my results (from Taking your Talent to the Web, Jeffrey Zeldman, 9780735710733):

You will hear this mathematical arrangement of web safe colors variously referred to as the Netscape Color Cube, the web-safe palette, and variations thereof, many of them unprintable in a family publication.

Just a brief note – I’m decomissioning my domain “matt-fletcher.co.uk”. I hardly use it and it’s due for renewal later this month – a bill I can do without.

Therefore if you happen to have me in your address with that domain in the email address, please note that I’m no longer using it.

If you don’t have my new address, it is simply the name of the town in which I live (think of the famous Ernie and Eric comedy duo, or look at the youtube video I posted recently), AT Google’s mail domain. If that’s a bit cryptic for you, add me on Facebook, where my address is clearly listed!

PS: This doesn’t affect my BB or Church email addresses – yet!

To help encourage me to blog a bit more often, I’m trying out some of the blogging clients that are out there. This post has been written in Windows Live Writer, which is written by Microsoft. My first impressions are really good. It’s very well featured, and the plugins available are simply awesome. There’s a website screenshot plugin, so rather than just talk about websites, I can SHOW you them.

There’s a Wikipedia plugin that lets me select a word/phrase and click a button to turn that word into a link to the relevant page. Here, look at the entry for Morecambe.

My house! The Insert map function (no plugin needed) lets you embed images from Microsoft virtual earth. Round where I live the aerial photography is nothing compared to Google Maps/Earth, but MS also go and provide their “Bird’s Eye View” imaging, which gives you a really high res image from all four compass points. I have to say, I’m pretty impressed.

This looks like a truly great blogging client. I’m just hoping that Ubuntu has something as good for my laptop!

Following my theme of lazy posts – here’s another video made by other people.

Yeah yeah, it might be silly, and the acting’s perhaps a bit off, but it’s good for a giggle at Morecambe’s expense!

Here’s some code I’ve used to backup my home directory to a remote FTP server. Have a look through the code to see where you need to replace things – you’re going to need to change the home directory name, and the FTP server details for a start. It’s pretty unpolished, but it’s working for me. Leave a comment if you’re stuck and I’ll try and help you.

nano ftpbackup

/usr/bin/lftp -f /home/matt/ftpbackup.settings

nano ftpbackup.settings

open ftp://username:password@ftp.server.address
mkdir /mattshomebackup/
mirror -Rc /home/matt/ /mattshomebackup/
exit

export EDITOR=nano
crontab -e

0 3 * * * /home/matt/ftpbackup >/dev/null 2>&1

I can never ever find this information on the web when I need it, so I’m recreating here to save my own time, and that of anyone else who stumbles upon it.

$datetime = date('Y-m-d H:i:s') ;

Non-geeks, you can keep on walking, thanks.

Meet my niece, Jodie-Ann Frances Lees. She was born at 9:51am on Sunday 30th March at the Royal Lancaster Infirmary. Congratulations Donna and Graeme.

Before we start, an apology. I know I said I’d aim for a post a day, but yesterday, not even a week in, I slipped up. My broadband is down at home right now, so I’ve been posting in my lunch hour, and yesterday I had to take the car in for its MOT, and plain forgot. I’ll try my best in future though I promise.

My next hobby is railways. Now don’t worry, my interest in railways is fairly casual. I don’t have a notebook listing engine numbers, and I’ve never checked the numebr of rivets on a model train. But from an early age, I’ve had a healthy interest in rail.

I never met my Great Grandad, but I’m sure that it was his miniature railway that circuited his garden that caused my Nana’s interest in trains. And through her I developed my own passion for them.

As a young boy I used to love visiting Steamtown, a railway museum just up the road from me which has sadly long since shut. When I was eight my Nana got a job working in the buffet carriage there, and I whiled away my summer clearing plates away. During the quiet times, I was allowed to wander round the museum, and it was during this time that I got to ride on the footplate of the Sir Nigel Gresley, pictured below.

My next influence was the Boys’ Brigade. For some unknown reason, there has always been a connection between the BB and trains. Up until recently there was even a locomotive named The Boys’ Brigade. At my local company, we had (and still have) a model railway. It is what you might call a work in progresss, but I used to love spending my free time on a Friday night laying track, wiring points, and seeing how far we could get the loco to run before it derailed itself.

Rob, the captain of my BB company, has a strong interest in the old railway lines, many of which we lost in the 60’s. He’s passed much of his knowledge on to me, and I now love to find out about forgotten lines and quietly mourn their loss.

Now, I’ve bought myself a little train and a few short lengths of track, and I’m hoping to build myself a layout once I have my own house. It will be a modern layout based on my local area. I’ve not planned it much more than that for now though.

Next on my list of hobbies is “computers”. Even a quick glance down the list will confirm that I am a geek, so I’ll not bother to apologise.

My interest in computers started pretty late on. All through primary school I ignored them, while the other kids played on “My World” and this trendy new “Windows” thing. It was only at high school that I started to become interested in computing. The big reason for that was (I’m sad to say) AOL. One PC in the School Library had AOL’s walled garden installed, on a patheticly slow modem, but I was hooked. I’d queue for hours, waste lunchtimes and stay late after school, just for a 15 minute slot on the Internet.

Slowly the school added more and more Internet connected PCs to its network. And by now, these weren’t AOL. And they weren’t dial-up either. The school had a radio link to Lancaster Uni’s “proper” connection. I began exploring the delights of TeenChat and Yahoo!

It was Yahoo! that introduced GeoCities to me, right at the end of my school life. At last, instead of just reading the Web, I could write it too. With friends, I created a handful of sites, from the Britney Spears Appreciation site, to the delightful www.eggybread.iskinky.com. Thankfully these, and other moments of madness, are lost to the sands of time.

At about the same time as Britney Spears entered my consciousness, so too did a little-known operating system called Linux. It was Rob I have to thank for showing me a disc of Caldera OpenLinux 2.3. He’d installed in on one of the Boys’ Brigade PCs and I was mesmerised. It was like Windows but different. Things looked the same, but to use them, I’d have to learn new things. It was this encounter with Linux that started my inquisitive nature about computers. I wasn’t happy using them anymore unless I had some sort of manual next to me, learning new things to do as I went.

Eventually my Dad bought me my first proper PC. It came with no operating system installed (it was one I’d picked from Ace Computers, our local hardware shop), which was perfect. I stuck in the disc from the back of one of the manuals I had picked up, and an hour later I was up and running.

Since then I’ve been using computers for more and more things. I’ve built a Media Center – a sort of Digital Video Recorder on steroids, I’ve built PBX’s – phone exchanges which can place calls across the internet. I’ve learnt new programming languages, I’ve forged a career in Website Development. But most importantly, I’ve made sure that I’m constantly learning something new. Thin Clients are my current big thing, so I’ll keep you up to speed on how that goes over the coming weeks.