Category: Journal

I’m completely shocked tonight on hearing the news about the space shuttle Columbia breaking up over Texas. It’s the kind of thing you suspect would happen during lift off, as with Challenger, as opposed to when the mission is just about done and dusted.

The space travel of science fiction is obviously some way off when the best minds on the planet at NASA cannot guarantee the safety of a crew on a journey which has become fairly routine over the last couple of decades.

Whether it turns out to be fatigue from 28 missions in just over 20 years of service, or some other component failure that brought about the demise of Columbia, it’s a horrible tragedy. For the folks on Sky News and BBC News 24 to be sitting there discussing the possibility of terrorist involvement seems absolutely deplorable to me. It’s bad enough without so called experts trying to sensationalise their coverage with the T word.

Just started reading Michael Moore‘s incendary book on the state of Modern America. It’s one of those works which I promised myself I’d read at some point, and with HMV doing a three for two offer on paperbacks at the moment, it seemed like a good time to pick it up.

I’ll let you know what I make of it when I’m done, but a couple of chapters in I’m already convinced that Stupid White Men would be a more worthwhile part of the national curriculum in schools than anything by Shakespeare!

The Q4/2002 and Q1/2003 versions of this site kind of blended into one another as I moved stuff around, played a bit with the banner, and messed around with the colours. All in all, nothing significant came of it!

At the moment I’m working on some code so that visitors can add comments on articles, a proper archiving system including previous Feel Good Factor ratings and I’m actually up for another attempt at a fluid css layout as opposed to the current fixed width affair.

Of course, remaining professional about this means I’m not going to upload it until it’s ready… a la Grolsch – I’m horrified with the amount of alleged “web guru” sites out there with the “Under Construction” disclaimer when you hit a dead end in navigation.

Since when did that become acceptable again? Might as well have the animated gif of a little guy digging centered on the page. It’s completely Mickey Mouse and there’s absolutely no place for it on a decent website. If the content isn’t there – don’t link to the page, FFS!