Back From The Dead

Yes folks, I have returned from the metaphorical grave. In more ways than one. I swear to God that the searing temperatures of the past few days left me on the verge of heat exhaustion. Believe me, being in a car for large parts of the day when temperatures get that high is no joke. Couple that with high overnight temperatures which made it near impossible to sleep, and I found myself on the verge of collapse. It was a real relief when I woke up in the early hours today to hear the rain pouring down outside and a cool breeze blowing through the open windows. I know many people will have been disappointed by today's overcast sky and lower temperatures, but for me it was a Godsend. Of course my continuing IT problems really didn't help over the past few days. To cut a long story short, my old IBM laptop is dead. After being given an estimate for attempting to extract the data on it's hard drive, I decided that there wasn't anything on there worth £160.

Anyway, I'm back on line now, having bought a brand new laptop, (having grown tired of cheap second hand ones which last barely two years). I can't deny that this particular laptop wasn't (nor would ever be), my first choice, but it was available from stock and within my price range. Compared to the IBM it seems shockingly lightweight - flimsy keyboard, plastic casing and less than compact shape. But it does have a dual core processor, HD widescreen display, (I actually hate widescreen displays on laptops, but you can't seem to get anything else these days), lots of memory and Windows 7. The fact is that just about every laptop I looked at had the same flaws (particularly with regard to keyboards), to get quality like the IBM I would have had to pay a far higher price than I was prepared to fork out. Despite my reservations, this new laptop is pretty damn fast with nice graphics.

Anyway, getting onto the important issues - viewing The Sleaze in widescreen has given me a lot of food for thought. Basically, if I ever manage to get this bloody redesign underway, I'm now inclined to abandon the fluid design and go for a fixed width layout. It would solve several problems at a stroke and considerably simplify the development process. Mot fundamentally, it will make it easier to retain the site's current basic layout, which I'm keen to do. In the meantime, thanks to this week's shenanigans, the existing site is so far behind schedule in terms of updates, I'm now facing the prospect of writing three stories back-to-back. Including the half completed one which is now inaccessible on the IBM's hard drive. Luckily I have a rough draft and will shortly be attempting to use this to rewrite it from memory. So, hopefully by early next week I'll have a new story posted. Fingers crossed!