graham’s blog

Photo?

Testing again with a photo

Yes?

I’ve just installed the Wordpress iPhone app from the app store and this is a test post. Please ignore (or not)!!

Adjustments

I’m making some adjustments to my new theme. I’ve increased the overall width then increased those of the two columns. The right sidebar remains as it was.

I’ve also increased the font size to 120% making it, I hope, easier to read.

This leaves the beader and the feature photos narrower than they should be but I’ll get round to that later. Please be patient.

I’ll be bringing some of the widgets too and adding the plugin suggested in a recent comment.

Notes from the field

I’ve been a member of Plaxo for 9 months now. I have a complicated calendar setup and wanted to synchronize them all.

I was using Google Calendar at home and Outlook at work. I also have an iMac (I love my iMac) so iCalendar is available. If you add Linked-In and mobile access it all leads into something complicated but reasonable (I thought).

Well I’m sad to report that although these services do synchronize I get regularly many duplicate entries and worst of all a lot of my birthdays show up (in multiple entries also) the preceding day of the anniversary.

I think I’ll be cancelling my Premium membership but will have to try and sort it all out soon. It’s becoming a mess.

I don’t want to have to simplify my multiple calendars just to be able to synchronize them!

Shorts

Here are some notes for today:

“The Rule of Four” (Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason)

I finished my book. I’ve been reading the “Rule of Four” by Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason. People Magazine said of it “If you loved The Da Vinci Code … dive into this” well I did but can’t say that I was overly ecstatic about it. Don’t get me wrong. It is a good book. It isn’t a great book. Have you read it?

I found a good scanner last weekend. The HP ScanJet G4050. It scans 16 slides without reloading. It takes about 5 minutes to scan all the slides but the result is not bad at all. I’m discovering and reliving a lot of memories of holidays, birthdays, weddings and extensive family memorabilia.

Here is an example.

Localisation woes

Two things that have bothered me today.

First off I log into MySpace only to be greeted by a welcome to the Swiss MySpace and in German! The login screen had mention of French so I chose that in order to understand what was happening. Once I had logged in I was directed to the UK MySpace.

Problem is I live in Switzerland but in order to ‘benefit’ from Swiss Groups or happenings I would have to accept MySpace in French. My Web language however is English. Why can’t we have a Swiss English Speaking Group ? I’m sure that Stephanie would have something to say about this over at Climb to the Stars as she has extensive coverage of language problems on the Web on her blog.

My mind has gone a complete blank for the other item I wanted to post here but I am sure it had something to do with a site assuming that because I am living in Switzerland I must speak Germann.

I get “junk mail” from Nero, Filemaker and Iris in German and there is no way to get them to change languages so all these messages get deleted.

I’m not an exception. A recent ethnological survey lists 12 living languages in Switzerland.

Websites should bear this in mind but at least leave English (as it tends to be a common language for many) when they are localising.

A major pain is EBay that directs Swiss customers to their German website or more subtly Swiss (French speaking) sites that direct their customers to French Websites. I’ll stop there or I’ll start ranting.