The Frumplingtons

If you’ve ever printed out a page from someone’s web site, you’ll know that the results can sometimes be a bit yucky. Whole sheets of paper — as well as equally valuable time and ink — can be wasted on printing adverts or decorative header images, e.g., that big wooden duck that’s currently sitting at the top of our own page.

One wordpress.com blog I was reading recently looked fine to begin with. It had the usual long list of links on the sidebar to archives, categories and other blogs. Out of curiosity, I did a ‘print preview’ in my browser and saw that I would need 11 sheets of paper if I wanted to print the page. Five of those sheets alone were taken up by sidebar ‘fluff’. I chose, on this occasion, not to print.

Shana often encounters this problem when printing crochet- or craft-related pages. One page she tried to print today would print text only in a faint colour.

One way to get rid of the stuff you don’t want to print is to simply save the page offline, view the source code in a text editor and delete all superfluous matter — wooden ducks included — yourself. You can probably go through the document and change the text colour to something more, well, visible, while you’re at it.

It’s a lot of hassle, though, especially if you’re not into all that geeky editing stuff. So why can’t the owners of these web sites do something to help? (When I say ‘web sites’, I’m thinking especially of the kind of blogs that offer patterns or instructions, because surely they must realise people will want to print them out — unless, of course, they expect their readers not to print them out at all; do they expect people to do all their knitting in front of their computer monitors instead?)

Webmasters in general, unless they are interested in technical things like CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), have, unfortunately, little idea on what to do about it. Print styles are nothing new, though: A List Apart were writing about print style sheets six years ago!

If Blogger (which is owned by Google) and Wordpress were to put a few lines of print styles into the code for their blogspot.com and wordpress.com blogs, this problem would be solved virtually overnight. Individual bloggers could be given the final say, maybe by being presented with the option of ticking or not ticking a box to indicate whether or not they want to offer print styles.

Oh, and if you were wondering, we do have our own print styles. Take a look at the source code (’view » source’ on your browser toolbar) and see how we’ve done it. Now, if we can do it, it can’t be that hard, can it?

It was a moment of sheer stupidity, I came downstairs yesterday carrying not one, but two glasses. Our stairs are not carpeted and I’m always very careful making my way down, especially as there is a nasty turn at the bottom where the stair narrows.

Obviously I wasn’t careful enough…just a few steps short of arriving safely in the hallway I slipped. One glass went flying, I held onto the other, and landed with a crash on to the base of my spine. My left leg calf muscle twisted and I just sat there screaming in pain.

Chris was a total sweetie, he cleared all the glass up, then once everywhere was clear, helped me to my feet, well foot, I couldn’t put my left leg down. Now I’m a stubborn old sod and I wasn’t about to spend the day limping around, so very gingerly I worked my leg until it eased up a bit.

But my back is another matter. It was already damaged from a horse riding accident when I was a kid, now I am in excrutiating pain, I can’t sit down and relax, so I have to perch. And when I stand up again, the pain shoots up my spine.

And I don’t care if this is nothing more than moaning, I have a right to moan, in fact I have a right to scream…so block your ears…AAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH!

That’s better

Junk mail used to be a continual annoyance. We just toss it in the bin these days, though; since computers became commonplace, we’ve all had hi-tech junk mail to deal with instead. Even my ’silver surfer’ relatives, who live in one of the yuckier parts of Humberside, probably get regular email spam. I just hope they realize it is spam!

Old-fashioned junk mail (the paper kind), however, never made your letterbox unusable. Neither does email spam, despite its fearsome reputation; it’s easy to glance at the subject lines in your inbox and decide what you can delete straight away.

Telephone spam, though, can cause big problems. Getting lots of unwanted calls, often at the most inconvenient times (e.g., when you’re having dinner, or when you’re settled down in front of the telly in the evening) means there is only one solution: you have to switch off the phone’s ringer. True, you might miss an important call from someone who is not pretending to do a survey or trying to sell you car insurance, but that’s the chance you have to take if you want some peace and quiet at night. You could, I suppose, sit right next to the phone, where you can see the ‘caller display’ clearly; or you could keep one eye glued to the red ‘incoming call’ light. But why should you have to? You should be able to leave your phone on and not have to bother about phone spammers.

Did someone mention the Telephone Preference Service? (Ha, excuse me while I try to get my sudden fit of laughter under control.) The TPS (a free service) is effective up to a point, but if phone spammers choose to use automated number generators overseas, or if they are not signed up to one of those useless voluntary codes of conduct, there’s not much the TPS can do about them.

Alternatively, you could pay your phone provider extra fees and ask them to block the unwanted numbers. But again, why should we all have to pay to avoid harrassment?

Junk mail and email spam refuse to disappear, despite the number of complaints about them. They have, in effect, simply become a way of life, because they’re relatively easy to ignore. But can the same thing ever happen with regard to phone spam? Maybe it’s too early to tell. Just one thing though:

Don’t forget to switch the ringer back on!

When I visit the BBC News page at Twitter, I go mainly to check the latest headlines. If I click on a link I expect it to take me to a page somewhere on bbc.co.uk where I can get more detailed information on the item I’m interested in.

I do not expect to be bounced, without warning, to READ MORE >>

The Scottish nanny state government has come up with an ingenious way to stop people smoking. (And before you ask, no, it’s not the old fire extinguisher trick.) They are going to take cigarettes off display in shops and they are going to hide them underneath the counter.

Displays of cigarettes in shops are set to become a thing of the past as part of the Scottish Government’s continuing drive to stop smoking and make Scotland healthier.

source: Scottish government press release.

What a brilliant idea! So simple, yet so effective. Don’t you wish you’d thought of it yourself?

When you think about it, that must be why Britain (and Scotland in particular) doesn’t have a chronic problem with drugs and drug-related crime: because drugs are not on display in the local newsagent’s.

Compare the Scottish idyll with what’s going on in England and you’ll see where we’re going wrong. In England it’s booze that’s the cause of all our woes:

Hospital admissions linked to alcohol use have more than doubled in England since 1995, an NHS report shows. Alcohol was the main or secondary cause of 207,800 NHS admissions in 2006/7, compared to 93,500 in 1995/96.

There has also been a 20% rise in the number of GP prescriptions for treating alcohol dependency in the past four years, the NHS Information Centre said.

source: BBC News (Hospital alcohol admissions soar)

So, why not cure our ills with the Scottish solution? Simply take all alcohol off public display. Mind you, Bargain Boooooze and Teskbury’s off-licence section are going to look a bit empty, aren’t they? But who cares? If it works, let’s do it.

While we’re about it, let’s cut knife crime (get it? ‘Cut’. ‘Knife’. Aw, please yourself…) by taking all the cutlery off all High Street department store shelves.

In fact, we could go one better than Johnny Scotsman. A lot of English pubs use plastic glasses instead of, well, glass glasses. So why not make everyone get rid of their knifey knives and switch over to rubber ones instead? That would also reduce the number of accidents in the kitchen, so it’s good news all round, isn’t it?

What other problems does Britain have? Football hooliganism? Easy solution: hide all the footballs.

Next!

Obesity epidemic? We could solve that one overnight. Just hide all the food.

Yes, as you can probably tell, we are experts on daftity and we sure as dafty heck know a daft idea when we hear one. In fact, that could be our motto: “The Frumplingtons: tough on daftness, tough on the causes of daftness”.

And the Scots’ idea of hiding the ciggies is about as daft as they come, hoots mon!

Just been trying a few things in my offline sandbox. A few little tweaks with the aim of prettifying this blog. Yeah, I know it doesn’t really need prettification; not much anyway. But you never know, I might come up with a really ground-breaking design one of these days.

One thing that’s been bugging me is good old Internet Explorer. IE version 6, to be precise. It just won’t do what I want it to do. Even the simplest things, like showing a header image (properly specified re. margins, padding, dimensions and so on) without breaking the bleedin’ layout.

So from now on, whenever I make any alterations to the layout (or any other changes for that matter), they’ll be tested only in whatever version of Firefox we’re currently using. After all, there’s only so much browser annoyance a person can take. Explorer users, rest assured: you will still be able to read our outpourings. But if the page ever looks a bit wonky, you’ll just have to live with it. In fact, it could be the case that we actually look even better when wonky. Wouldn’t that be something?

According to BBC News, a webcam has been installed at the top of Lincoln Cathedral to allow people to watch a pair of peregrine falcons. A certain Gemma Rogers from the RSPB said they hoped wildlife enthusiasts would be able to watch the birds on its website.

Being a keen twitcher, I’d like nothing better than to sit watching falcons all day. However, as (when I read the story, at any rate) there was no hyperlink on either the BBC, the Lincoln Cathedral website or even the RSPB to the actual location of this webcam, it doesn’t look as if I’ll be taking a gander at it (get it? Nice bit of ornithological wordplay there, eh?) any time soon.

Note: If we do find where the cam is, we’ll put a link up here. On the front page, where our readers can find it. (BBC News, take note!)

The dumpster is fast becoming our second home this week: tonight, we had to get rid of two angel-wing begonias that had been attracting those horrible little fungus gnats. We have tried all sorts of things to discourage the gnats, but none of the methods you see recommended online have worked. So this evening we at last gave up the fight and binned the plants instead.

On a brighter note, our new Christmas tree should arrive tomorrow. I’d like to see fungus gnats try to nibble that: they’d probably die of plastic poisoning, the little creeps.

Well, whaddya know! Less than a week to go till Christmas, and our trusty (ha!) fibre-optic Christmas tree has stopped working. No pretty lights or anything. It’s just standing there looking like a plain old plastic tree. The dumpster beckons.

A replacement is on order.

Feeling a bit adventurous recently, I decided to try using a different search engine. You know, different from ‘the Big G’ (i.e., G**gle, for those who are having a hard time working out which one I’m blathering on about).

So I thought I’d try ask dot com.

However, no sooner had I put in my search (for ‘knots’, if you must know) I was confronted by (horror of horrors)…

…a pop up!!!

Here’s a screenshot:

(The red underline bit is my own emphasis.)

Two things sprang immediately to mind:

1. Most web users hate pop ups. (Well known fact No. 1)
2. You want twelve minutes of my time? Twelve minutes? Even the Big G never asks for that. Sorry guys, but in less than 12 nanoseconds I’d already left your site. There are other search engines, you know.