Monthly Archives: January 2006

Computers/Technology

Ecto – First Impressions

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One of the things I’ve been trying out over this holiday, is using something other than the built in editor to edit blog postings, mainly from the point of view that offline editing allows me to make better use of some of the tools on the Mac to make writing the posts easier – chief among those being the built in spelling checker.

After comparing the options, I decided to go for Ecto, some of the things that swayed my decision where the glowing reviews, particularly a detailed review that a friend of Howards produced, the impressive feature list, plus the fact that there is a PC version too.

So far, aside from this posting the only published posting on the blog that uses Ecto is the New Year posting. There have been a couple of annoyances, which I suspect may be as much to do with the way I have been doing things before, and I may be able to work around with the configuration settings.

I had to spend a little time getting the preview window set up so that the preview looks like the finished posting, which was primarily copying chunks of the style-sheets from the web site into the Ecto configuration screens, it was slightly tedious, but is all done now. There is still one hiccup currently, although the main preview window looks fine, the font size in the front page preview pane is still too small, which is annoying, but I can live with it.

The actual posting turned out to be a bit more complicated, particularly with regards to doing the picture. Recently I’ve been using the WordPress Javascript Quicktags to put pictures into postings, and taking pictures straight from Flickr – although usually just by cutting and pasting the link from the relevant page on Flickr. For a start, Ecto doesn’t have Flickr support built right in, but that is pretty easy to get around by pasting in the image link. However getting the drop shadow quick tag to work is again going to require a bit of fiddling I think – for the New Year post I actually ended up wrapping it in the quick-tag in the web based editor first.

There also seems to be a bit of a bug in that it is failing to set the post categories correctly for any edits that are posted, so I’ll have to take a look at that. Again probably a configuration issue somewhere.

Having said that, it is really nice having a spelling checker on my posts – hopefully weird and whacky spelling on the blog will be a thing of the past now – and Ecto seems configurable enough that I should be able to get it working with Flickr in the way I want too. Once I’ve made a few more posts I’ll write something a bit more detailed.

MobLog, Pictures

Happy New Year

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Kerri and Beth

So here we are in 2006!

Last night we saw in the new year with Jo and Kerri, who work with Beth, plus Jo’s boyfriend Drew, and Kerri’s housemate Lisa and her boyfriend Chris. In actual fact it was a comparatively quiet and reserved(ish) gathering, kicking off with an excellent selection of curries which Jo and Drew picked up from a local restaurant, followed up by fruit salad and chocolate cake prepared by Beth.

After dinner, as seems to be pretty common for gatherings over Christmas and New Year, out came the games. We’d brought along Fluxx, which I blogged about just before Christmas which we played first. It has to be said that it was pretty obvious who wasn’t drinking and who was – myself and Drew were driving, and Chris hadn’t drunk quite as much – as Drew and Chris picked it up pretty quickly, whilst Kerri and Lisa, who were playing as a team, still didn’t get it even when we’d finished.

It’s interesting comparing how differently the game plays with a full six players, as compared to the two player games I’ve had with Beth. Certainly there were a lot fewer rule change cards played, and as Barry pointed out any sort of strategy goes out the window. There was one point early on when after using the ‘rotate hands’ card I had all the elements for a winning hand, but then by the time my turn came round the goal had changed. Ultimately I clinched the game thanks to a lucky draw when someone played the ‘scramble the keepers’ cards, and I got the ‘let’s play that again’ card, and was able to fish the ‘steal a keeper’ card out of the discard pile. However, much more by luck than anything else.

That finished just in time for midnight, which was followed by a large amount of fireworks from surrounding houses, and then we played a game that Lisa had been given for Christmas called Name Dropping.

The general aim of the game will be familiar to anyone who has seen They Think It’s All Over, as it’s effectively the Name the Sportsman round, but with multiple categories of person. At this point Jo became rather competitive – especially as in round one, myself and Beth scored one more point than her and Drew. Ultimately we were all pretty closely matched, and for every round where we scored really well, there was one where we struggled to even score one or two. Thankfully by the end Jo and Drew did actually win by a couple of points – I suspect Drew probably would have had a harder time if they hadn’t!!! The amazing thing was that Jo still complained about not having the rules explained so it was harder for them, despite the fact that they had won!

Anyway, since we had to be up for Church in the morning, at this point we made our excuses and headed home. All in all and enjoyable evening. (There are a few more pictures in our photo gallery too.)

After church we headed off for a slightly different evening, finally getting to see Howard’s new place in Winchester (and very nice it is too). We also took Howard out for dinner and were one of the few customers enjoying the food at the local Loch Fyne Fish Restaurant – New Years Day not being the most popular night for eating out. It’s not a restaurant chain that we’d tried before, but definitely one we’d try again I’m sure, especially as they have a restaurant in Reading too.