marc.vic.max.elliot

Here’s another shot taken by Max today at my Mum’s place with her camera.

Hi all, I’m back!

The trip to Shanghai was fairly uneventful and it was good to get back on Friday afternoon and see the family again. Here’s a brief rundown of my week:

Saturday:  Left Wellington at 07:00 and was told at check-in that my requested airpoints upgrade to business class had come through – yay!  Got to Auckland to find that my colleague had also got an upgrade!  Too bad Air New Zealand business class is shite on a 767 (but better than cattle class!) An eleven hour flight later and we’re in Hong Kong where we get a cab to our hotel.

The evening is spent wandering around the night markets with some Australian based colleagues and the whole next day is taken up with looking around markets and computer fairs until 16:00 when we have to be in a cab to the airport for our 2 hour flight to Shanghai. Items of note bought – one small USB SC card reader for about 15

Sunday night to Wednesday is spent at the technical summit in Shanghai being scanned whenever we enter or leave a session (even to go to the loo!) Talk about control!  We also went to the night markets.  Items bought – Matching fake Rolexes for 60 NZD the pair.

Pete and I decided when we got to Shanghai that we would rather spend some extra time in HK so we changed our flights and left Shanghai at 16:15 on Wednesday where that evening and Thursday were spent in a similar fashion to our trip up.  Items bought – Cases for my ipod and x50v, in-line remote for the ipod, some clothes for Vic and I from Esprit.

Our flight was at 19:00 and again my upgrade came through! Six hours sleep on the flight was brilliant and after a quick flight from Auckland to Wellington I was home at last!

Highlights of the trip?

Coming back and after I’d been home a few hours I met Max on the stairs and asked him for a hug. He gives me a big hug and says “I love you Daddy”!  Going away for a week was almost worth just that

Catching the maglev train from Shanghai city to the airport.  Firstly it’s cool technology and secondly the image below shows the speed that we got up to – on a train!!

I’ll miss my boys while I’m away for a week 🙁

Elliot’s growing up so quickly!  He’s really interacting now and can keep his head up for quite a few minutes.

As for Max he’s turning into a typical tearaway two year old who can be divine one minute and a stroppy shit the next! lol!  Here he is pretending to be Superman with an All Blacks silver fern cape

Well the upgrade from ExpressionEngine 1.2.1 to 1.3 seems to have gone without a hitch…….

Jay pointed out that the comment notification emails were splitting and wrapping the hyperlinks so that if you clicked on one you got a very strange page………..

This has now (hopefully) been fixed.

Continue reading »

Saturday saw Dad and I sawing and nailing.  I hate to think how many 6” nails I hammered in but the raised garden is about 30m long and we went three boards up so almost 100m of boards were put into place.

Now all we have to do is fill it!  When the guys come to do the paving later this month we’ll get them to use the stuff they dig up to partially fill it and then get some nice topsoil to finish it off.  Then Vic will have the garden she’s wanted for some time (but no time to do anything with it!)

It took me a while to find the right code but at last I have got random images in the banner!  It’s easy enough to find scripts that do random images in an HTML page but harder to find ones that can randomise CSS backgrounds.  Refresh this page a few times to see what happens at the top.  Notice how the background changes but the text (which isn’t part of the image) doesn’t? Cool!

Here’s the article at A list apart and the CSS insertion is in the discussion.