Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Time	Event
10:14a	Rain rain don't go away... We finally got the rain last night. It was lovely. Not thunderstorms and torrents, but nice steady rain. I went out at about 3am to see if I could work out what was making the annoying ping ping ping noise, and was a bit surprised to see no cat.  I know cats are good at taking care of themselves but I was a little worried because he's so old and pathetic. So I wandered up and down the garden for a bit in nothing but sandals and a waterproof slung over my shoulders - so lovely after the heat wave! Eventually I saw a black and white shape in the hedge and realised Thomas was (quite sensibly) lurking under a bush. I tried to coax him out to grab him and drag him into the house, but while he kept mewing at high speed, he wouldn't come out. So I gave up and went back in, then turned around and there he was :) Yesterday we had a smallish games evening where we sat in the garden and played mah jong. It was slightly marred by Thomas chasing a fledgeling blackbird around, to the great distress of the parents, but Gwen and Al did heroic work distracting Thomas and I was very happy this morning to see it taking trial flights around the garden accompanied by a watchful adult. Thomas is in and I've temporarily shut the catflap to give it a freer run. Nothing I can do about the younger and livelier cats of the neighbourhood, but maybe it will survive...ah! There it goes again. Flying low at just the height to attract a cat...and not too great about gaining altitude...sorry Thomas, you're staying inside this morning. It's still grey and damp so hopefully Thomas won't mind too much. I've definitely got the mah jong bug! I would dearly love another game this weekend but I'm not sure we can tempt two volunteers around...any 2 people want to come play on Saturday evening? More welcome as usual but only 4 can play at once so we'd have to take turns. (3 Comments | Comment on this)
1:44p	Martin Gardner query My Dad has been given a strangely-cut piece of paper folded into a square, which physically simulates a method for remembering Maxwell's Relations (something to do with thermodynamics, don't worry about it). The problem is that he has posted it to me, and I have unfolded it in a curious fashion, but now cannot refold it - and neither of us knows how to use it anyway. The kindly scientist who gave it to him said that it was based on an article in "Fun with Maths" by Martin Gardner. Now, while it has a very Martin Gardnerish sort of look (anybody here remember hexaflexagons?) I cannot find any references to a book of that name by Gardner. The piece of paper is shaped like a square with the corners cut out. It is then folded into a square with four quadrants. You can refold it in various ways to show other panels in the quadrants. No, that probably doesn't make any sense if you haven't seen it. Anyway, does this ring any bells with anybody? I'd dearly love to find the original reference, and help Dad refold and use it! (12 Comments | Comment on this)
6:34p	Officially Impressed I've been playing with the Agora forum for Joomla, and came up against various issues including the usual IE6 layout foulup. I posted on the forums and the response has been amazing. Actual developers have taken the time to query me about the nature of the problems, and one of the founders has just suggested what appears to be a perfect fix for the IE6 issue. What lovely and talented people. Once they get it finished, the final product will be fab. I will need to restyle it / retext it quite extensively because it is pretty cryptic if you aren't used to forums - and my users will mostly never have used a forum in their lives. For example, words like index, topic etc. won't mean a thing to them, and they need a big obvious button saying "New Message" instead of a little one saying "New Topic". But this is all stuff I should be able to do. And the functionality is all really good (user maps, profiles, groups etc). (Comment on this)

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