Look to the right of your screen. See that nice blue stripe that runs the length of the page now? Doesn’t it look great?

I’ve been try­ing to get the site design fin­ished for a while now. But with­out some way of eas­ily track­ing changes I make to the back­end it’s been a bit dif­fi­cult. It doesn’t help when the code is only 20% mine either.

Sure, it would be easy to make one change at a time, but that takes up way too much time:

• Change code.
• Save Code
• Refresh page.
• Wash, rinse, repeat.

It was good for­tune then, that I read about Mike’s impres­sions of a handy lit­tle add-on (yes, I don’t like the name either) called Fire­Bug.
It turns Fire­fox into a cod­ing sand­box. It’s light years ahead of the pre­vi­ous add-on I used: Web Devel­oper, which has a more ‘look but don’t touch’ vibe.

As Fire­Bug just sim­u­lates cod­ing changes you do need to retype them for real, but it’s a small price to pay to get this site look­ing just how I imag­ined it.

1984 is one of the great clas­sic nov­els. One of the great­est of all time in fact. This is what every­one will tell you. It’s some­thing I never truly realised until I sat down and read it for myself. It’s a book who’s influ­ence far sur­passes the con­fines of the lit­er­ary world. It’s affect can be seen on every­thing from tele­vi­sion, to com­put­ers to food and even sci­ence fic­tion itself.

As I read the book, one thing became appar­ent. What lit­tle knowl­edge of the book I had accu­mu­lated over the years, through pop cul­ture and the like, didn’t match up with the nar­ra­tive. Every­thing I knew about the story was in fact myth!

In a way I’m glad I didn’t have any true fore­knowl­edge of the book. Knowl­edge of con­cepts and themes like era­sure of the past, the war (and it’s pro­pa­ganda), Room 101 and the loss of the self. It would’ve spoilt some­thing that, unlike many post-war fic­tions still remains rel­e­vant today, 60 years after it was first published.

Some­times it’s just nice to get away from work. Take last week for exam­ple. Along with the reg­u­la­tion ANZAC Day hol­i­day we also took the Thurs­day and Fri­day off, giv­ing us a five day super-weekend in which to frit­ter away our hard earned monies. And frit­ter we did.

On our first day off we wan­dered out to Healesville to check out the Sanc­tu­ary. We pow­ered through the park on our own self-guided tour. Unfor­tu­nately we timed it just well enough to miss every hands-on show they had on that day. After a few hours of snap­ping pho­tos and fill­ing our brains with knowl­edge of Aus­traliana we were both feel­ing hun­gry. We jumped in the car and drove the few hun­dred metres dis­tance to Giant Steps/Innocent Bystander.

Really. You think we wouldn’t head into wine coun­try and not stop off at a winery?

We ordered way too much food. Some­thing that occurred to us after the sec­ond pizza was forced into what lit­tle space remained on the table. Thats not to say that we ordered ridicu­lous amounts of food. It was a small­ish table.

Now the food. Oh yes, the food. With the well pub­li­cised explo­sion of good food out­lets in the out­ers of Mel­bourne, we were always going to be in for a treat. Pies, chips and cans of coke are now a thing of the past. Say hello to mush­room piz­zas, rice balls, and bou­tique soft drinks.

While sam­pling a few wines we men­tioned this to the bar chick. She told us that yes, they now have this sur­plus of good food, backed up by a series of farmer’s mar­kets, but they have no real fresh fish for the locals to pur­chase. It’s a lux­ury. I thought this was odd, given that Healesville sits on a main high­way, only 70-odd kilo­me­tres from the city.

While the the pop­u­la­tion isn’t riot­ing in the streets over a lack of sea-bound delights, there’s cer­tainly a niche that needs to be filled.