Category: Journal

I don’t think I’ve ever been cool. Even when I’ve done something that might have looked like a one way ticket to Coolsville, I knew that pretty soon I would wake up back in Uncoolsville for reasons beyond my understanding.

I know for a fact that Cool isn’t a figment of my imagination. Tony Hawk is cool. Sting is cool. Toms Cruise & Hanks are cool in different ways. Skateboarding is cool, except when I do it, and for two weeks of the year at the end of June tennis is pretty cool too.

So cool exists, and it’s a nice place to be, except that I’ve discovered that trying to be cool is very counter-productive.

An example:

A couple of years ago this May, myself and Fliss took a weeks holiday in LA. During the week we went to visit Universal Studios there. Now that place is cool. And, for me, the coolest thing about it is the Back to the Future ride, complete with a replica of the DeLorean sitting outside the building.

Since the day in 1985 when I’d first heard of the movie, I wanted to be near that car. I wanted to sit in it, to look around inside, to examine the time circuits and the Flux Capacitor ’til my heart was content. Of course, over time (ironically) my desire had waned slightly, but upon seeing that car on that beautiful day in California I done the worst thing I possibly could have done.

I tried to be cool.

I pretended it didn’t really matter to me. I acted as if the yearning I’d felt to be near that car (or at least a replica of it) wasn’t important, and it would be better for me to just quickly stand beside the car, for Fliss to reel off a quick shot on our fairly average digital camera, before we swept off to enjoy other parts of the massive site that Universal Studios occupies.

A week or so later, half way round the world back in London, there was no sign of the one picture of me beside that car. Somehow it had been deleted from the floppy disks which the camera stores its digital pictures on.

After the debacle at the weekend with Homesite, I decided to persevere with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX and to be honest, I could well be sold on the idea!

In just a couple of hours tonight, I completed the re-jig of my site and I’ve made some progress with another project too. Turns out the coder view in Dreamweaver MX isn’t too bad once you wean yourself away from the Homesite syntax highlighting.

I’ve had to put the article commenting on hold until I’m done with said “other project”, but I can imagine I’ll be using DWMX to code it when I do.

In fact – not just the honeymoon. The whole affair is on the rocks at the moment and this could be the final straw. Oh yes – Homesite 5 has wronged me today. For over four years I’ve used that piece of s….. software almost every day of the week.

And today, whilst I foolishly used the code collapse function, Homesite chose to delete around a hundred lines of code and replace them with a forward slash.

A forward slash.

One of these /

Why?

I have no idea, but the charms of Bradsoft‘s TopStyle seem all the more irresistable now that Homesite has chosen to cross me after all this time.

I knew something was wrong straight away, but rather than hit undo as I should have, I decided to close Homesite down to see if that would solve the funk it was in. Only afterwards did I realise that the hundred lines of code were now a forward slash and I was unable to retrieve them.

Actually, the fault lies at the door of Macromedia, in this case. Had they maintained Homesite when they bought Allaire instead of concentrating on Dreamweaver then the three year old bug in the code collapse function would probably have been fixed by now.

Damn these megacorps!