Looking out across London there is a HUGE fire apparently at, at waterden road, straford, just where they are goig to do the olympics.

The london fire brigade latest news said "Incident - Waterden Road
Eight fire engines and around 40 firefighters are currently attending an incident on Waterden Road, East London. The Brigade was called at 1206."

So I'm at web 2.0 expo this week. It's starting well. I've learned how to optimise and fiddle re SEO stuff.

I also learnt if you get a speaker that likes the sound of his own voice too much then all the lunches are gone when you come out. (poor mark).

update - no coffee and wireless only works well when you can get an IP address, sat through 2hrs with no connections... wont drop my connection again...

So we started assembling the pieces of the greenhouse, first wrong (argh), then a different wrong (ARGH). After a little while longer we got a side bit right and finished. Sadly rain and poor light conditions stopped play at the point.

Next morning we were at it again early, assembling the other side, the ends (wrong, wrong, right, I blame the instructions, none too clear) and the roof. I have to mention at this point it was raining, windy and bloody cold, my fingers had the feeling of sausages unless I stopped to warn them every 20 minutes. Then we carried the whole lot over and put in on the base (after a short fight with the neighbours bush), finding out only that we hadn't got one end right, and had to do a quick turnaround of the baseplate. That done, I tied the base to the upper part, then we made the door and the frame for the window in the roof.

Then we started putting the glass in. You know that part where they tell you to wear gloves when handling glass, well its best to listen to advice like that. I got a fair few shallow cuts, mostly from the evil clips, then managed to take a nice slice out the end of my right little finger. If only my hands we're carrying insurances as big as most houses' contents insurance plans are, I would be rich by now. So bandaged up with some shiny children's plasters, we carried on until we had the roof glazed, all except the last bit of glass. Wouldn't you know it, it didn't fit !! I'll be having words with B&Q tomorrow, every piece of glass 610mm wide, except this one! So close of play again, having worked through the rain, coming down at 45%, and the cold, we were defeated by the loss of light to work by again, and shoddy materials.

vicky (my s.o) said,

"people don't want to see you playing with that Benjamin"

Benjamin replied

"so don't look"

If you have any opinions please post them.

Finally for those with a real warped sense of food, a sausage and cheese(?) battenburg cake

(thanks to anne's weblog)

Moving the text off the page (or making it VERY small) and having the background image of the cell be the image.

Problem - users with images turned off but quite capable of css.

Associated images backgrounding z-indexed over text

Problem - assuming the size was appropriate, we had then problems of semi transparent images being used. and equally issues with increased font sizes showing out from underneath.

javascript replacement

Problem - still image turned off problem, but maybe with some clever detection for this going on. But quite complex all the same.

additional - not forgetting if you hide text with css or have it as display:none it will be hidden from screenreaders and we loose one of our major aims of trying to get our code semantic in the first place. And also if we are hiding it from screenreaders there is an increased chance of hiding it from search engines, and then we're really back to stage one.

oh and I should link to a far more eloquent discussion on this or three, mezzoblue's image replacement, stopdesign's replace text

any ideas anyone?

Starring William Shatner and James Spader (amoung others), its a series about a law firm, its an intelegent darkly comedic series winning golden globes and emmy's.

But then again, cight has been though thick and thin with me, but the spam is piling high. Maybe I'll use it for something (but not mail).

...any ideas?

Its actually a good use of flash to explain the complex funding relationships. Also highlights how all the people round Bush are connected to Exxon funded companies, and how those companies ask Bush to do things or not and he does what they tell him.

oh, the surprise...