moments ago, our lives were saved by the heroic actions of tui in a midnight battle between loyal CANINE and fierce POSSUM

We had returned from a pleasant dinner with carl and tsering. Having retired to bed the three of us lay in bed unsuspecting.

Unaware that mortal danger scratched its way up the stairs. TERROR etc.

In the dark of the night a terrible possum crept into the safety of our house. One moment, Tui lay sleeping.

(Actually, I was lying there wondering why he hadn't gone to see to some drunk kids wandering past in the road outside. I must be getting a bit reactionary in my old age. Git ma gun! Dem kids outside agin!)

The next he sprang to his feet and raced downstairs. A brawl ensued in the living room, and when the dust had settled a possum had fallen. CRUNCH CRUNCH.

Enticed by the smell of human baby sleeping, this VICIOUS CRITTER had the temerity to burst into our safe haven.

The vicious New Zealand possum is widely feared, for once they have svent of a human prey they rarely desist until they have done their worst.

However this foul beast had not banked on brave Tui.

And so we owe Tui our lives once more. Tui will be awarded the Glorious Bone of Ecological Consideration for his efforts tonight, and has snacked mightily on salami which is his flavourite.

Previously Tui has also despatched two possums and three rats. Thanks, Tui. We owe ya.

i'm gonna play to my kids to get them to sleep one day. maybe i'll hit stop before the "goodnight from channel two" voiceover at the end though :)

the girl at mitre 10 asked what the humane trap was. i said,

it's a rat trap.

she said,

ew, do you like rats?

the humane trap didn't work. rats are too smart for that shit.

tui is a very good dog, he likes to hunt rats. only bad ones though. (not lovely friendly rats like shiva.)

mummy rat is pissed off now. the nest is gone. the food is gone. the trap is still ignored (rats are really smart, i will grant them that. but they smell bad.)

we feel your pain, mummy rat. but we asked you to leave nicely, and you didn't, so we killed your family.

been listening to this Slug album "Sad Clown Bad Dub" driving around northland and ... i gotta share this track with ya shane ... mostly for the lyric that says,

The words Bad Dub are right in the title
So FUCK your criticism of the sound quality
This is not an album
The sole intentions is to eat better while on the road

This one's for Anneliese too ... Love you fellas

• 04 Running with Scissors.mp3
• 07 Hungry Fuck.mp3

Thought about buying an iPod for this weekend, but realised my MP3 CD player has more space on it than a 512MB iPod ... and with a folder of MP3 CDs in the front seat I can beat a fullsize iPod ... with a bit of shuffling.

So here's what I burned myself instead (for the weekend on the road):

• BEP - Behind the Front
• Hallelujah Picassos - Drinking with Judas, Hateman In Love
• HLAH - Blood on the Honky Tonk Dance Floor 1&2
• Nancy Sinatra - Boots
• Outkast - BigBoi+DrePresentOutkast, Stankonia (?)
• Slug - Sad Clown Bad Dub
• Supa Chiney - Black Chiney 8

HLAH and Nancy for singalongs in the car (poor Tui as audience)

i bought two reams yesterday from the warehouse at three times this price, so i think a little chrominance variation would be quite acceptable. (i did bother to buy 'renewable plantation pine' but who knows what that means.)

but "*whiteness may vary"? WTF? it's white paper isn't it?

bubbles was downstairs

little mouse was upstairs

they both got caught last night (oooh, stereo!), little mouse is very small and was silly enough to check out a second trap after escaping the first (because it was 1am and i was fool enough to try and relocate her from the perfectly good wire cage into a jar, and she bounced straight out)

destined for: your house ...

hi there and welcome everybody i'm going to give a little talk about fixed and fluid today glad you could join us.

fixed design and fluid design
How do i lay out a page when i don't know how wide the page is, but i have to put some images (which do have a specific width) into it?
most sites on the INTARWEB answer this question by either opting to use a fixed design (where the design has a specific pixel width on the page) or opting to use a fluid design (where the design element's width is proportional to the page). curiously this really only seems to matter for horizontal width, because people find it completely acceptable to have to scroll vertically (they're used to that) but totally unacceptable to scroll horizontally (that's so un-TV).

when you're designing a website, and you come from a page design background, this will probably strike you as completely dumb. that's OK, you're getting paid so just accept that it's dumb and take the money and make the client happy, that's why they gave up tooling around with stupid dreamweaver anyway.

back to the topic at hand

a successful fluid-width site is trademe.co.nz. you can see this "fluid design" in action by visiting the site and changing the width of your browser window. here's what it looks like at (roughly) three dfferent common screen sizes:

you need to click these to view them; they show trademe.co.nz at 800x600, 1024x768 and 1152x864 pixels. hold mouse over and look at URL/hover thingy to see which is which if you can't see already. note how the trademe page adjusts itself to this; the header is less dominant on a larger screen (because the header graphic has a fixed width of less than 800 pixels) and the white centre column expands more than the sidebars do, because it's got the "juicy" bit.

a very successful fixed width site is google.com the front page at least. but i didn't think of that in time, so i took some screenshots of dogandlemon.com, which is another quite nice fixed width site. notice how at various browser widths the design remains constant; instead the fixed width design sits comfortably inside an expanding ocean of tasteful grey.

if you're used to PAGE design, where the paper is a nice stable platform for arranging letters and images, this is nuts. but on the web ... well, you've got people seeing your site on a webpad, a laptop, a cellphone, a screen reader, or maybe - maybe - an identical desktop computer and monitor to what you're using ...

anyway this is important if you're implementing design and i wanted to explain what it's all about. but i'm not going to give you any practical advice in dealing with it, oh no. haha. maybe i will later but that's it for now. just think about how it'll look at various sizes ... that's all :)

oh if you google for 'fixed versus fluid design' i'm sure you'll turn up some nice articles

anyway you don't need to think about this stuff too hard, it's not the nineties any more, but it might help to understand

the kids who made the excellent SALAD BONES hip-hop/poetrymatic compilation a couple years ago have released it under a CC (free for your ears!) license. go download your own copy of salad bones and listen up now. it's &f'n marvellous. i loved it then, lost the cd, now i get it back for free. w00p open source kids. that's how art used to be :)

"arse-lickin spoken word with hogg-phlappin beats"

oh my golly a flat blog, that's so KHAMP!