benjamin allen

Well, for the last couple of days I drove down to Nottingham, to meet Gem and James, where we went onto Warwick University (very pretty university by the way, although it did remind me of an airport) to meet with Simon and get drunk for three days. Wow, good times, good times. Best night was certainly Saturday, with the awesomeness that was Soasis, an Oasis tribute band (as if you couldn’t have guessed) which brings my total Oasis tribute bands to two (the other being Noasis, of course)
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Well I have been hard at work on the new site, although the deadline does seem to be looming up very quickly and I doubt that it will really, honestly get done to the best of my ability. However the assessment criteria are a joke so I should still score plenty high enough. More on that later, if I have any time left at all. All that’s new is that I have managed to fix in position the footer, on every page, and have begun work on the database abstraction code to make sure everything runs smoothly.

If you have done any web development work with CSS then you will know what a pain getting a fixed footer is, however with a little help from the internet, although mostly my own solution, I managed to create the following. It is fully cross browser, and the only negative point is that it introduces a slight vertical scroll bar on every page, regardless of content. Other than that a fully working, fixed footer! Great stuff.

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Yes, that’s right, another new website has been created by your’s truly. This time I haven’t thought of a name yet, any suggestions would be welcome. Although this piece does have to be submitted on Thursday so chop chop. Some may say I’m leaving it to the last minute, I say I produce some of my best work under pressure and this is simply my methodology. I’m correct damn it!
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Yes, I forgot some pictures from the BBQ, and I apologise. Now Eddie get’s his very own post, although I’m not sure the pictures would have fitted with the others. No no, these are far greater than a mere BBQ or giant spliff, this is levitation! Eddie is now classed as a God in my opinion, and as long as he can do this without the help of a trambampoline, I will forever be in awe of his unreal abilities. But I doubt it.
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After an unfortunate turn of events my grandfather was taken into hospital a few nights ago, of course this meant racing down to accident and emergency (or whatever it’s called now) to see him. Don’t worry he’s hanging in there, this entry isn’t some sympathy vote or anything so needy, rather an alarm call for the Hospital Director (or his/her secretary). Let me elaborate. As is well known here, the UK still hasn’t woken up to the fact that mobile phones are completely harmless and do not cause inteference with hospital equipment (or petrol station pumps) so a mobile phone ban is enforced throughout the hospital. Visitors are informed with numerous large, red signs liberally dotted about the place, reading as follows.

Now, apart from the truly clumsy grammar and sentence structure, which can just about be excused, the absolute killer for me was misuse of ‘their’. How is it someone in charge of an entire hospital (I’m only guessing that’s what a Hospital Director does, please, correct me if I am mistaken) can make such primary school error in their English? Is this person illiterate? My younger sister knows the difference between ‘their’, ‘there’, and ‘they’re’ without even thinking about it. Sort it out!

What other mistakes can I spot? Well that’s for you to find out of course, be sure to leave a comment.

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So it’s been a few weeks now and I have tried out Joost as much as I can bear. Yes, it really is that annoying. The flashy interface that tries to be a Mac fails miserably in the usability department with slow clunky buttons and a poor response time. Unfortunately this simply makes what your watching seem even worse, and the short (edited) clips aren’t going to cut it when I have Sky+ in the corner, on a large HD TV. Not enough choice, not enough quality, and there are already too many adverts. Just imagine watching an advert before every one minute YouTube clip and you have Joost. Except without the range of YouTube. And you can only watch if you’re invited.
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So how’s it going? Well I have seen an increase in the number of visits from Google, and most of the visitors are new ones, which is interesting. Does tha tmean people are not returning? Not sure what Google Analytics classes as a new user, have to look into it. Anyhow it is still amazing that a site like this, now only a month old and with a handful of posts (all of the utmost quality though, of course…) can be getting visits from google. And the site appears number one, from over seven million, in a query for ‘benjamin allen’.
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Time for an update to the image hosting I think, after I have finished a few more features. First up a little overview of how the whole thing works. Starting immediately after you signup you are automatically given the ability to upload JPEG pictures to your account for hosting on blogs, websites, or wherever. This is completely free and with no bandwidth limits or advertising. Below you can see the current (boring, I’ll be the first to admit) screen for uploading to fckall.
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Wow, Joost finally sent out some more invitations to the beta, and I was one of the lucky ones! Started the download immediately and very soon I was greeted with a black screen running a full screen demonstration of what Joost was all about.
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Yes that title is accurate, I have developed and am currently improving a free image hosting system on one of my pet websites, fckall. You can check it out now by signing up for an account, instantly. Simply follow the link and the instructions contained within. I am hoping to illustrate more about how the system works, and what I am doing to improve it, on this very blog so stay tuned for inside tricks. What do I mean by improve? Well, there are various sized versions of your images available already from your upload, but what if you could dynamically choose the size of your picture based on the URL? Pretty easy to do really, but why has no one done it?? I have no idea either. Oh, and if anyone has created something along those lines please tell me so I can check it out, I apologise for not finding it myself.

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Yes, it’s here again and what a nightmare it is. Everywhere is packed out with slow-walking, Mcdonalds-eating, window-shopping, pram-pushing, trash-talking (okay, maybe not) morons who think coming to Skegness for a day out is “just loverly”. Unfortunately it’s not. At all. The place is a hell hole of the worst kind. The shops are rubbish and small and mostly local, so expensive. There is no parking, there is no public transport, there are no communal areas, and there is a massive concentration of elderly people who have no idea what day it is, let alone where they left their medication. I could go on… and I shall. The traffic is a nightmare, it takes, maybe, twenty minutes to get into the town centre where, as I said before, unless you’re pretending to be disabled, you will find nowhere to park. In which case you need to head for the sea front and one of three car parks, with a maximum capacity of, like, 16 cars each. There you will drive around endlessly until you find another two identical cars to park up beside.
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Wooo! Yes, that’s correct the first BBQ of 2007 has gone down great, and we have the photos to prove it. Enjoy! Also enjoy my (hopefully witty) commentary and just so you know, I won’t be adding the photos in chronological order, in case thats not obvious, it’s more of a ‘what fits where’ order.
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I’m sure this has been done before, but who cares. Now we’re doing it and it’s going to rock!! Beginning 6pm we head up to Lincoln and hit play on the first of six discs. Amazing I know but we only conceived the idea a few days previous, got the whole deal arranged and now it’s actually happening! Okay, don’t want to jinx it. First on the checklist of items to take is the laptop of course, plus the large external speakers and subwoofer to make the entire building rumble (fortunately the university is closed for the holidays and there will be literally nobody there but us).
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