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Feminism and socialism

Ken MacLeod has a beautiful anecdote about people being uncomfortable with using the word “socialist” to describe themselves:

“Over the years I have met a lot of women, and heard of a lot more, who are feminist in every aspect of their beliefs and attitudes but who firmly insist that they are not feminists. The reason they give is always the same: they don’t consider themselves feminists because they don’t hate men.

“Imagine if the left had taken the most hostile caricatures of what socialism was and what being a socialist meant, and proceeded to live up to them. Lots of people would now be saying things like, ‘I’m not a socialist, but I think capitalism sucks and should be replaced by a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by and in the interests of the whole community.’

“Oh, wait … ”

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Edinburgh Joiners

If anyone is looking for a joiner in Edinburgh, we can wholeheartedly recommend Southside Joiners (45 West Nicolson St., 0131 667 9744). They have just hung new doors throughout our house, and fitted new skirting boards in our hallway. They have done an excellent job, and at a very reasonably price, too.

This is going to be a big summer of house work for us. We’ve already painted the hall and the main bedroom, and now we’ve got the doors replaced. Over the next few months we’ll be painting the guest bedroom, and laying new wooden floors upstairs. We’ll also be getting Southside Joiners back to replace the doors of the built-in upstairs wardrobes, put in some new shelves, replace the bannisters on the staircase, and (the big one) build a new porch for our front door.

Oh, and we’re hoping to get a new bathroom at some point, too.

We’ve been in this house for five years now, and apart from laying a wooden floor in the living/dining room in 2001, we haven’t done much work in it in that time. We were thinking about building a conservatory last year, but we had very specific ideas about what we wanted. That took us out of the range of “standard” conservatories, and into the territory of the “specialist” conservatory companies. They produced some lovely designs, but the cost would have been almost 50% of the price for which we bought the whole house. So now we’re moving forward with lots of little projects instead.

Lots of work, but it’s worth it. The house is feeling a lot more sophisticated, complete, and relaxing already.

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Summer

Ah, summer. Wimbledon. Glastonbury. Strawberries and whipped cream.

But also, gardening. I hate gardening. It is a lot more fun than it used to be, though, because Alex enjoys playing outside so much. And when he sees me working, he wants to come and help. Today he was using a small garden fork as if it were a spade, pushing it into the ground, and stamping it down with his foot.

Also, no matter how much I dislike doing the garden work, it is quite satisfying to see the end results. Our jungle is slowly being transformed into something a bit more civilised…

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RSS Midsummer Madness

Whenever I start thinking about RSS, I know I’ve been spending too much time in the blogging world, and it’s time to unplug for a while. The fact that I’ve just redesigned my home page, and started using SharpReader to track a bundle of tech blogs is all the confirmation I need.

Luke Hutteman, the brains behind SharpReader, is aware of what happens when your feeds get out of control:

“One of the problems with using an RSS Aggregator is that it gives the illusion of allowing you to keep up with a practically infinite number of weblogs. Whenever you find a link to a new weblog with an interesting entry, the temptation is high to subscribe to this blog to keep up with other writings on it. After doing this for a while, you end up with a huge number of subscriptions and find that there is a limit to what you can keep up with after all, even when using an aggregator.”

Once you get to that point you can either cut back, or you can go mad spending every waking minute trying to stay on top of your feeds. I was there back in March (with a lot less than the 200 feeds Luke has). I haven’t quite reached that same level of blogsessiveness yet, but I know that I need to check my consumption.

On the other hand…

Continue reading “RSS Midsummer Madness”

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Site redesign in progress

Your blog is like your house on the web. Every now and then you feel like giving it a lick of fresh paint, and rearranging the furniture. If you’re reading this in your browser, rather than in a newsreader, you’ll probably notice that things have changed a bit. (You can still see the previous version for comparison.) I haven’t changed the archive templates yet, but I’ll drag them into the new format as soon as I have time.

Any comments on the new design are very welcome.

While I was designing the new look, the following sites, articles, and pages were invaluable references:

In the whole design, the single thing that caused (and is still causing, dammit) the most problems is the <select> list showing my archives in the sidebar. Honest, getting this to size correctly in IE, Mozilla, and Opera is a pain in the neck. You’d think that one of the fundamental HTML Form elements would be pretty well nailed down after a decade of specifications, but no… As soon as you throw CSS positioning with floated elements into the mix, you can just forget everything they teach you in web school. I may well abandon it at some point in the (near) future.

Update (26 June):

Consider it abandoned. The <select> list of archives, that is. It’s just not worth the pain. Also, the Quick Reviews section of the sidebar is now formatted with <div> blocks instead of tables (big “yay!” for css vertical-align:text-top), and all quick reviews in the sidebar should now have an image associated with them (big “yay!” for MT Macros). Upon Frank’s suggestion, I’ve shrunk the date headers in the main body. And finally, I’ve also made the text in the main body more black. It was HTML #222, but I looked at it on my LCD panel at work today, and it looked washed-out and faded. See this article at WOW Web Designs for a bit more information on this issue.