Why do you say ‘Mayday?’ It’s only a bank holiday. Why not ‘Shrove Tuesday’ or ‘Ascension Sunday?’  Ascension Sunday! Ascension Sunday! The fifteenth Wednesday after Pentecost. [That's how to get geeks on-side - quote Red Dwarf.]

My site is doing something a little odd. While I’m somewhat au fait with the basic tweakage of the stuff that makes my ones and zeros appear as beautiful works of aesthetic wonder that travel down your internet pipes and splatter onto the back of your screens, the deeper intricacies of the dark CSS and PHP arts are hidden from me.

If, therefore, you have any idea why some single pages of this site seem to render what should be a sidebar as a bottom-bar, I’d appreciate your advice. For reasons unknown, some pages shove the sidebar right down the bottom, under the comments. This doesn’t seem to be related to the post length or number of comments. Nor does it seem related to whether comments are closed or not.  I haven’t been able to figure out a common factor.  Which sucks, really.

This one, this one and this one, for instance, are doing it while this one, this one and this one aren’t.

What’s going on?

The site runs on Wordpress. It’s version 2.9 as I haven’t gotten around to going to 2.9.2 yet but, let’s face it, it’s relatively unlikely that’s causing the issue.  A few plugins installed – nothing too odd, I should think – and all at current versions.  If anyone is so bored they want to help and would like a list of plugins or any source files, feel free to shout.

UPDATE: All better now.  The luminescent brilliance of Golden Boy has, er, brilliantly located the problem and it should now be rectified. Brilliant. As you were, geeks. You can go back to installing Linux on everything and porting Doom to run on your mum’s teapot. Thanks.

Facebook, while it served a bit of a purpose for me two or three years ago quickly began to get a bit tedious. From the outset, I hated most of the apps and never used them. I balked at the virtual greetings and the messages reading ‘Barry took the What Sort Of Stool Are You quiz with the result: SOFT’. I never used the game apps either. That others were happy to use them is absolutely fine but I tired quickly of hearing that someone’s virtual cow needed a virtual vet’s arm up its virtual arse.

Along came Twitter and, for now at least, it remains largely free from the worst of the who-cares apps. I checked in on Facebook less and less and became more and more annoyed when I did. I put off the termination for months, reluctant to do so, afraid I might miss something. Reading of the many privacy issues lately had all but convinced me to bite the bullet and when, a few weeks ago, I logged on to be greeted by some annoying systems glitch, that was the straw that broke the mixed metaphor’s back.

Facebook is dead to me.

If you happened to follow me over there, please feel free to hang around here or check in with me on Twitter. I promise scintillating and erudite conversation. Or, at very least, some poor quality knob gags and news of what I had for breakfast.

It was a scone.

Seriously though.  It has been too long.  In my defence, I’ll simply say that I’ve been busy/lazy.  Only one of these is a half-lie.

It’s the Twitter, you see. The Twitter is taking up my time and, more importantly, taking the tiny kernels of ideas, thoughts, whines that I might have and allowing me to express them in tiny, tiny, 140-character chunks.  They get tweeted and never gestate sufficiently to allow an actual blog post of more that 140 characters.  Don’t hate me. All the cool kids are doing it. I’m not strong enough to go against the crowd.

And, worse still, now that I’m used to thinking in 140-character bursts, I don’t think I can sustain anything longer. It’s like our ADHD society took a giant leap away from any meaningful, significant discourse and instead chose to blurt evertything in staccato bursts instead.

I’m not doing a good job of selling this, am I?

It’s not really like that at all.  The truth is, I really like the Twitter. I like the communication with people I know in real life, people I already know virtually and with some people I’m just getting to know. It’s all good but it’s a get-it or don’t-get-it sort of thing. Some people like it and some don’t. That’s ok. Incidentally, if you get it, or want to try get it, I’m here.

Soon I will post an actual post.  About actual stuff.

Please forgive any grammatical or spelling errors. I’ve been drinking.  Mmmmm, beer.

“Hiiiiiiiii, Gerry.”

“Errrm, yeah, hi… Right, My name is… Oh right, done that.  I have a problem.”

“That’s the first step, Gerry.  Now all you need to do is to accept that you’re merely a helpless puppet in the palsied, control-freak hands of a higher power and you’re well on the way.”

“Wooooah, woah.  Higher power?  I’m pretty high on the atheistic scale.”

“That’s ok.  We just want you to turn your will and your life over to the care of god as you understand Him.”

“As I understand him?  But I understand him to be a wholly imaginary construct, only valid in the ignorant infancy of our species and utterly superfluous to any reasonable, rational and non-stupid civilisation in an age where science and, lets face it, common-sense prevails.”

“What?  But… That’s not the way to wellness.”

“Huh”

“Well, can’t you just pretend – like all the losers forced to come here by the courts.”

“Arse. ”

“But the steps?”

“Arse to the steps.  Arse, I say.”

While I may be on my fifth pint as I write this, I’m relatively certain that I don’t have any sort of serious alcohol problem.  I can stop any time I want, honest.  I do, however, seem to have developed a weird addiction for Twitter.  I’ve been ‘tweeting’ for a while now and I realise that I’ve been neglecting this blog for ‘The Twitter‘.

Sad?  Probably.  Truth is, I am relishing the ‘micro’-blogging that Twitter allows.  And, oddly enough, the last couple of months have seen a spate of celebrity Twitter incursions. Twitter has hit the mainstream.  Perhaps that’s reason enough for those of you reading this not to bother with it.  If, however, that hasn’t deterred you, do feel free to ‘follow’ me – Gerry Hayes on Twitter

I know it’s sad.  I have no defence for that.

.

*A prize (well, more kudos really) to the first one that recognises the reference.

Welcome to Stare Into Space.

All new domain name.  All new, and completely original, look (see how it sparkles).  Same old dull content.  I am style above substance; form above function.  I am the lipstick on the pig.

Basically, my old blog was of a bygone era.  An era where I was anonymous and whinging about my day job.  Not actually having that (or, strictly speaking, any) job now, I have no further need of anonymity.  Quite the opposite – now I want people to know who I am.  To that end, I came out, so to speak, on my old blog a while back and, as I try to get people to take me a little more seriously at this writing lark, I began to feel a little embarrassed by my old blog’s name.  I didn’t really want to have to mutter ‘Jimmy Page’s Trousers‘ under my breath when people (and by that I mean important people who might give me money one day) asked for email addresses or the like.

So, I did what anyone would do when a good and loyal friend is considered ‘uncool’ by the in-crowd – I pretended I didn’t actually know Jimmy Page’s Trousers and went off with the cool kids to smoke and drop rocks from the overpass.  Sure, I felt a pang of guilt but, you know, they had beer.

Jimmy Page’s Trousers is no more. From now on, when people think of Gerry Hayes, they will think of staring into space.  Pretty apt really.

I’d really appreciate it anyone who linked to jimmypagestrousers.com could update their sites, links, blogrolls, or whatever to link to www.stareintospace.com

Also, you can click the subscribe icon (if you have one) in your browser’s address bar or click here to subscribe to new posts in your favourite RSS reader/aggregator thing.

Comments and suggestions are (genuinely) welcomed.  There will be some more tweaking of things that vex me with the design, so feel free to add to the list.  Really.

Thanks everyone.

Also, I’ve been busy, ok.  Oh, if I told you about all of the calls from agents and producers and studio-bigwigs and actors we’d be here all day.  What’s that you say?  Coppola?   Frank or Sofia?  I’ll call back.  What?  Spielberg?  Wants someone to script Schindler: The Revenge?  Yeah, yeah, I’ll call him tomorrow.

So then, slow posting?  There is an answer.

No need to struggle with large, unwieldy and irregular posts like the constipated lady on the ad (the one carrying the big handbag full of food-scraps).  Just follow me on Twitter and delight in frequent, easily-digestible bits of my brain.

Are you a ‘youth’ or someone desperately struggling to keep up the pretence?  Then visit me on Facebook and, if you know how to work it, let me know.

Incidentally, through some Internet sorcery, the Twitter stuff shows up over in the sidebar too.

Disclaimer:  Most of it will be shite.  So, you know, sorry.  I mean, as I post this, there’s a tweet (I understand that’s the word) about soup.  Jesus, soup?  What am I doing?  I could have waited until there was something better but that may never happen.

Instead I do other things.  I drink lots of tea.  I stare out of the window for a bit.  “That internet’s not going to surf itself”, I say and sluggishly click from one site to another.  There are so many unnecessary and inessential draws on my time.  How much masturbation do you think is too much, for instance?  So many pointless things eating into my day.  Eating into the time in which I should be doing something productive.

I need to break this dilatory pattern.  I need to steel myself and get a system going.  I need to turn off my email notifications.  I need to resist the siren call of Google Reader.  I need to stop wondering what’s happening on BBC News and Boing Boing.

Damn this internet.  Damn its e-ticement.  Damn it for its information-allure.  Damn its myriad methods of interrupting what I should be doing.  Damn it hell for its easily accessible pornography.

P.S.  In Sideshow Bob fashion, I am aware of the irony of posting on the internet in order to decry it.

Its uploader for Mac was buggy – editing anything already typed in the text fields before an upload caused it to go mental and, after every upload, it made me login again.  It limited me to 100M a month, which isn’t too bad on an ongoing basis but my initial surge of photos came to more than that and I’m not willing to fork out for additional space or wait a month to upload another few.  Lastly, and most imortantly, it lacked any decent sorting options – stuff was presented in the order in which it was uploaded and I couldn’t find anything to allow me to sort photos in the order in which they were actually taken.

So then, I am back with the Google chaps.  Picasaweb for me.  Gave me 1GB upfront which means I can actually upload the photos I want to without having to wait for three months.  Granted, if I’d stayed with flickr, in a year, I’d have more space than that but I’m all about the instant gratification, me.  Picasa also allows me to sort things the way I want to and makes it easier to organise photos once they’re uploaded.

To be fair, it’s not perfect.  Flickr was better at easily tagging photos or albums and flickr also has better ’social-networking’ (possibly in part because it’s the most popular).  I’m not really uploading photos for networking opportunities though, so these weren’t deal-breakers for me.

Also, Picasa doesn’t as yet have that flashy sidebar widget where the images expand and shrink.  Static selection of random images for my sidebar now.  Oh well.

Right; dull and geeky post over with.