For those who are interested, I’ve just uploaded some of my photos from Phill and Phil’s wedding to the members’ area gallery, photoLounge extra. The members’ area is password protected, so if you are a friend and don’t have the password, e-mail me and I’ll let you know!

Uploading those pictures prompted me to make my gallery code a little more robust. Being a home-grown project, it’s tailored to fit my own individual purposes, and expands its capabilities as and when I need it to! The problem I had when I uploaded the latest batch of photos was the inclusion of single apostrophes, which caused problems with both HTML and PHP parsing. After a lot of fiddling around I finally fixed it, through using a combination of stripslashes() to remove escape slashes and htmlspecialchars() to replace special HTML characters with their respective character codes. The trick was getting them in the right order, so that PHP could locate the folder and files correctly and then later ensure that the output to HTML was correctly formatted. A bit complicated, but I got there in the end! The result is that the gallery code should be a little more robust and will cope with apostrophes in file names and folder names too.

Whooah, there! Has it really been that long since my last post? Sorry for that little lapse. I’ve obviously been too busy recently. Or not not busy enough…

Yesterday I drove to Chislehurst on the outskirts of London with Ellie and AM for the wedding of Phil and Phill. Despite leaving early (in order to ensure we had plenty of time), we ended up arriving just as the bride did!! This was on account of me forgetting my belt and having to go back for it, having to stop at the petrol station to fill up and check the tyre pressures, and a short detour when we turned onto the M20 towards Kent instead of the A20 towards London! All good fun, and we did get there just about in time. The church was lovely, nice and old but in very good condition, and it was packed with people too, which was great. Phil looked stunning, the dress was really pretty, with sparkly bits in the dress and in the tiara and necklace. Phill looked the part too, though I didn’t get to see much of him during the service. The service itself was lovely – I always enjoy weddings, especially when it’s people I know!! A little worrying though – if I get this emotional and excited at someone else’s wedding, what on earth am I going to do when it comes to my own?…

The reception was good too. Phil and Phill had hired out a pub down the road with a nice big garden and function room. As always it was lovely to see old friends again, graduates who have gone their separate ways since graduating but who always seem to get together for weddings!! It was good to see Richard again, and Naomi, and even Katie was there! So much fun. The dance in the evening was good too, and started off with Phil and Phill doing a number on their own. But of course, being Phils, they couldn’t do things the normal traditional way – they danced to “Everybody needs somebody” from The Blues Brothers!!

This morning I got up bright an early, as I was scheduled to be missing church in order to go to a Mini Club event – a rolling road day! We all met up at T&M Auto Electrical on the Whitehall Industrial Estate in Colchester to have our cars put on their rolling road. For those who have not come across one of these, it’s basically two rollers inset in the ground which the front wheels sit in, electrical equipment is plugged into the engine and they calculate how powerful the engine is. I must point out from the start that this is not just an excuse for us to show off our engines, it’s actually a very good way of finding out how cleanly and efficiently the engine is running. For instance, my engine should have produced about 50 bhp as standard; if I got more than that then I would know that the engine is benefitting from whatever modifications I’ve made, if I got less that that I would know there was something wrong with it, and the nice friendly man would be able to tell me what was wrong. On the other hand, it was a great experience having everyone gathered round each car as they went through the entire rev range, pushing the cars to their limits! My little Neddy ended up with 52.2 bhp, which is very respectable. Apparently all that’s holding it up at the moment is the air filter, but I knew I needed one of those anyway, so that was reassuring! The slowest car of the day was a 998cc Mini City that produced about 40 bhp (it was running rather lean, so there wasn’t enough petrol going into the engine), and the most powerful was Billy’s Cooper which pumped out a healthy 73 bhp. Now, this may not sound much compared to the hundreds of horses you get in modern cars, but you have to remember that modern cars weigh twice as much as Minis, and Minis are still effectively using 1950′s engine technology, so those little numbers actually mean a lot more than you’d think. For those of you who might be interested, the whole day will be featured in the MiniWorld Magazine at some point (we had a photographer there taking pictures and interviewing us all, very exciting), so make sure you look out for that!

Unfortunately the day had a slightly sour end for a couple of us. As we were driving away from the garage, having had a great morning seeing how many horses we had under our bonnets, the other Mini Sidewalk stopped and the white Cooper behind didn’t! So that left a rather unattractive dent in his boot lid. Thankfully there was no structural damage, just cosmetic denting, but it’s still not a nice thing to happen. Thankfully, because of all the contacts we collectively have, it should be fairly easy to replace the bootlid and Jim’s front bumper without needing to worry about insurance claims, which is handy. That’s the great thing about being in the club – everyone’s willing to help everyone else!

Yesterday evening I went round to see my friend Billy, as he had offered to help me trim my wheel arches so that my wheels would fit. Unfortunately, it turns out it’s probably going to need a bit more than a quick snip to sort out. The wheels turn out to be 5.5×12, rather than 5×12 as I was told on the web site, and I think my front subframe might be slightly out at the front because the driver’s side wheel sticks out fractionally more than the passenger side. Apparently this is quite a common problem on Minis, but as long as the wheels don’t snag on anything it’s not a huge problem, the car will still be perfectly stable and the wheels won’t come off!! Anyway, Billy reckons there’s a fair amount that’ll need trimming off, the result of which is that I’m going to need new wheel arches. It seems to make more sense that way, as there’s no point in trimming the bodywork now to fit the wheels if it’s not going to be compatible with the new wheel arches I want. I was originally after some nice Wood & Picket arches, again just to be different, but because they screw in from underneath we don’t think it’s actually going to be possible, so I’ll have to make do with the slightly more common Group 2 arches. They’re pretty much the same, just slightly different in shape and style, but will still suit my car nicely. I certainly won’t be going for SportsPack arches, everyone has those at the moment!

So that’s kinda put everything on hold for the moment. The car is still driveable, just about, as long as I don’t have to make any tight corners. I reckon I shall probably put the old wheels back on for now, just to be on the safe side, and when I get the new wheel arches I’ll put the new wheels back on, knowing that they won’t grind on the bodywork. I shall probably put the new wheels on for shows, but for normal driving I shall stick with wheels that I know are safe!

On a slightly different tangent, I met a practising witch yesterday. He seemed like a nice enough guy, if a little off-track on the belief scale… He also has an encyclopoedic knowledge of Minis, so I expect I’ll run into him again at some point! Interesting experience though, I shall have to make sure I know what to say next time…

My new wheels arrived this morning! Lovely Revolution RFX rims with Monza tyres, plus a full set of alloy wheel nuts and four locking nuts. They look so cool!! Of course, that left me with the problem of fitting them. The Mini comes with a small wheel change kit, but it’s rather pathetic, and I’m not sure I’d really trust the puny little jack to lift the car safely. The wheel nut wrench is also pathetically small and unusable, so I took a trip out to Halfords and invested in a small bottle jack and a decent wheel nut wrench. It wasn’t particularly expensive, and it should last me a good long time, so I reckon it was worth the trip! I still haven’t fitted the wheels, they’re still sitting on the floor in the lounge, because my next door neighbour is powerwashing her drive and doesn’t want to make my car dirty! Very thoughtful of her, but it really doesn’t help in terms of getting my new wheels fitted! I’m just hoping now that the rain holds off long enough for her to finish and for me to fit my wheels. I probably won’t take any pictures today, I’ll wait until it’s good any sunny, but I just thought I’d share my excitement with everyone!

In other news, the forum I set up for the Colchester Mini Club is beginning to get going. A small handful of our members have signed up and started posting messages, so hopefully before long we’ll have a good online community there too.

While I was on the train coming back from London on Saturday I had a sudden moment of inspiration. Several years ago, when mobile phones were just starting to become popular, I drew a pictre of what I predicted would be the smallest phone possible. As it turns out, I wasn’t far wrong. I basically drew the smallest keypad I could comfortably get my fingers round, and had a screen popping up from inside. Mobile technology today has taken that principle the other way round – now keypads flip out from underneath the screen. But the overall size is still pretty much the same size as what I predicted all those years ago.

So here comes my idea – a mobile phone watch. Now, I know this isn’t a completely original idea, in that I expect several people have come up with that idea before, but let me show you what I mean. Below you’ll find a picture I drew to try to illustrate this. The general idea is that because we wear watches all the time it seems to make sense to make use of that and put a mobile phone there. You wouldn’t have to hold your wrist to your face though, Bluetooth hands-free headsets are all the rage, so you’d just need one of those instead. The watch face would be replaced by a circular screen, which would display the time when it wasn’t being used as a phone, but would show up like a small computer when being used.

Now here’s the nifty bit – the keys. First of all, let’s take the principle of the touch sensitive scrollers used on the iPod and put that round 70% of the watch. Because it’s touch sensitive, pressing in particular places will do different things, and will also allow you to scroll down a long text message. For instance, numbers could be entered by pressing on the locations of those numbers on a clockface, with 1-9 being as you’d expect and 12 acting as 0. If we can get our heads around that, we can assign the letters to each number as you’d find on a normal keypad and allow for text messaging. Then you’ve got a menu button at the bottom of the watch, a YES key at the top right and a NO key at the bottom right.

Pretty revolutionary, don’t you think? And of course because we are using a Bluetooth headset for sound we can also play MP3s through that too. Obviously photos and videos would be a bit of an issue, what with the circular screen, but it’s an interesting idea nonetheless. If any phone manufacturers out there like my idea, please let me know and I’ll sell it to you…

First off, my new photoLounge is up and running, completely replacing the old Coppermine system. It’s basically in two sections, one being an open-access gallery (photoLounge) and the other being a members only gallery (photoLounge extra). This means I can display photos of my Mini and other related things for everyone to look at, but keep personal photos a little more secure, so that not everyone in the world can see pictures of me and my friends making fools of ourselves! I’ve reverted to the password system I used on my old PhotoLounge, so if you remember that then it’s exactly the same (if not, let me know).

The second revolutionary thing I did today was buy some wheels. Yes, you read that right, I bought some wheels. I’ve been after a set of 5×12 Revolution RFX wheels for my Mini for some time, and I’ve saved enough money for them now, so I phoned up Huddersfield Spares and they should be delivered within the next few days. Very exciting! They’re not exactly common wheels, which was part of the attraction. Everyone has Minilight variants on their Minis, with a few sporty Minis having the normal four-spoke Revolution wheels, but very few people have five-spoke Revolutions. They look pretty cool too, and as they’re the same size as my current wheels they should fit on without me needing to make any modifications to the bodywork. Hopefully the wheels will come just in time for the next Mini event – Saturday 17th I’ll be at the Colchester Motor Show, Sunday 25th I shall be at a rolling road day (which will be covered by MiniWorld magazine!), and Sunday 2nd July is the Colchester to Great Yarmouth Mini Run. So plenty of opportunity there to show off my nice new wheels and headlights!

As many of you will know, I like to put some of my photos online for everyone to look at. Over the years I have gone through several different gallery systems, some of them home-grown and others off the shelf. There are links to two of these at the top of this blog – the old one is password protected and is a fairly rudimentary system I designed myself, the new one is powered by Coppermine and registered users can view some albums that aren’t publically available. However, as good as Coppermine is, I’ve not liked the way it does password protection, insisting that people have individual user accounts so that they can log in and see hidden albums. This isn’t exactly convenient, and I’ve not found an easy of way changing the appearance of the gallery either, except by choosing from a small selection of pre-installed themes, none of which I particularly like.

So I’ve made my own system again. Design-wise it’s similar in some ways to my old PhotoLounge, in that it’s white text on a black background, but I think I’ve done a better job of it this time. Technically speaking it’s a lot better, with a lot more clever PHP coding behind the scenes. It’s all done through one central PHP file, which checks to see what parameters are given to it and displays different information accordingly. It also shows thumbnails, which can be moved to a different side of the screen depending on your preference, and which can be made smaller if you think they’re taking up too much room. It’s pretty dynamic too, enabling me to simply upload a folder of photos and have them automatically appear.

If you want to have a look before it officially goes live, I’ve got a couple of albums already there for testing purposes, so do take a look and let me know what you think of it. You’ll find it at www.minipix.co.uk/photolounge/gallery.php. It’s still technically in BETA, so there may still be some bugs to iron out and some details to change. For instance, the picture in the top right corner may well change, since very few people who look at my photos even know who my brother is… Anyway, comments would be appreciated. And as soon as I work out a way of password protecting certain folders I’ll put more photos up there and replace the Coppermine gallery.

A while back I wrote about how I had discovered Nisus Writer Express, a Mac OSX word processor that easily outperformed anything I tried up until then. I’m still on the 30-day trial, and still enjoying its ease of use and friendly interface, but I did venture onto the net again today to see if there was anything else I ought to try before actually buying it.

Mellel was another recommended candidate, so I downloaded the trail version of that too. Text handling was much the same quality as Nisus Writer Express, though the styles management was rather difficult to get into at short notice. The main thing that put me off though was the interface – as much as I like iTunes, I’m not sure I’d want my word processor to look like that! Apparently Mellel is very good at handling large documents, like novels or reports, but it’s a long time since I did any hefty word processing like that. Image handling is pretty poor too, with no ability to wrap text around an image. That said, I’ve discovered that NWE doesn’t do that either.

Just as I was about to give up the hunt and remain faithful to NWE, I came across Apple’s offering – iWork. This is a package of two products, Pages (word processor and desktop publishing program) and Keynote (presentation tool). From having looked through some of the features and watched the guided tour videos, it looks stunning. Bearing in mind that it’s designed by Apple, it can be pretty much guaranteed that it will look and feel perfectly at home in OSX, making full use of the built-in anti-aliasing (font smoothing) effects and animations. The built-in templates look suitably stunning (as you would expect from Apple), charts can be given a very impressive 3D feel with textures and lighting effects, images can be given complex masks (enabling you to quickly put a picture of your beloved in a heart cut-out, for instance) and you can apply filters and effects without having to edit the photo in an external program. You also get a very neat navigation aid by way of page preview thumbnails, in much the same way as window thumbnails in the OSX dock. On the presentation side, Keynote compares to MS Powerpoint in much the same way a Mercedes S Class compares to a go-kart. 3D effects, reflections, 2D and 3D transitions, video-quality text effects, and complete control over the timings and animation orders make this an equally amazing program.

So here comes the crunch. Do I make the bold step and buy iWork and hope it’s as good in practice as it looks on the web site, or do I stick with NWE which I at least know for sure works? iWork doesn’t provide a trial version, as far as I can see, and I don’t want to make the same mistake I made with AppleWorks (another word processor by Apple which is absolute rubbish). If anyone out there has used iWork I would value your opinions! I already have Adobe CreativeSuite 2, which comes with InDesign (a professional-grade layout design program), but I feel that’s overkill slightly if all I want to do is write a letter, and doesn’t really cope with large text documents like stories (it’s more suited to constructing booklets, posters, newsletters, that kind of thing). And of course if anyone can recommend any other Mac OSX programs that might fit my hazy requirements, please do let me know!

On Saturday afternoon I went to Clacton to see my friend Billy, who is a member of the Colchester Mini Club. I had been having some difficulty undoing a screw that was holding one of my headlights in, which meant that I couldn’t fit the other crystal headlamp that I’d bought. So I went round to Billy’s to see if he could help. Thankfully he had something called Duck Oil, which is like WD40 but miles better. A quick squirt of that on the offending screw and it came loose in no time! Very impressive, I shall have to keep my eyes peeled for that so I can get some for myself. The upshot of that is that I now have a very nice *complete* set of new crystal headlamps on my Mini, which look very cool indeed. I haven’t got any pictures of them yet, but as soon as I do I shall pop them online so you can all see. Yesterday I also gave Neddy a wash, taking advantage of the warmth and sunshine to get outside. Of course, that meant that later in the day it rained, but never mind.

Saturday night was the Chaplaincy Saturday Night Social, which we ended up hosting again. This week it was a water fight, which was a lot of fun! The weather was perfect for it, which was good, and although we didn’t have a huge number of people (seven of us in total) we managed to have a lot of fun and get very wet! We got a lot of strange looks from people though, as we ran around the nearby roads shooting each other! It involved a lot of tactics in places, some of which might have actually worked if we’d gone through with them properly. At the end of the evening we finished off with a “last one standing” face-off, where we were all in one of the alleyways near to my house, one team at one end and one at the other, the idea being that whoever was the last to get wet won. I ended up hidden behind a wall, waiting for one of the other team to come past so I could squirt them! And the plan worked like a dream – I got Chris in the face and he had no idea it was coming!! Of course, once the game was won we just emptied our pistols on each other and got each other well and truly soaked! And no, I don’t have any photos of that night – water and cameras don’t go together.