Exactly one year since the last post. I gave up on Moveable Type because of some technical problems I couldn't sort out. So it's back to Blogger.

Wonder what blockquote looks like?

Lovage and potato soup: finely chop an onion, dice 2 large potatoes and sweat gently in olive oil for ten minutes. Add a pint of chicken stock, a heaped tablespoon of chopped lovage and some seasoning. Simmer for 15 minutes. Remove from heat and liquidise - not too much. The result is pale pistachio-coloured; thick; unctuous; soothing; delicious.

In search of tide tables on the web, in order to go to Sunderland Point tomorrow for a walk with Catherine and her parents, I eventually find what I'm looking for: a neat series of web pages about birdwatching in the Lancaster area which happens to include a link to the tide tables I need. Browsing the birdwatching pages I find a Garden Log. It has an uncanny familiarity. Almost as if it is describing my garden. Blimey, it's my next-door neighbour's website. And I never knew. So thanks Andrew, for giving me the information I needed to avoid getting wet feet on the way to Sunderland Point, and for telling me about all the wonderful birds you get in your garden - birds that somehow never seem to make it to mine. At least, not when I'm looking at any rate. (And I never knew you were a web designer.)

Back pain. My doctor suggests reading Treat Your Own Back by Robin McKenzie. Relief.

I haven't wanted to announce this over the last couple of weeks, but it seems reasonably safe to do so now: the Lancaster University Management School website is now pretty close to being an all-CSS design. The home page still uses tables, but every single other page - well over a thousand of them - now eschews tables completely for layout. All positioning is done with CSS. Smaller file sizes, faster downloads, better accessibility, nicer design and finer typography. Umm, yes. But also horrid rendering with some really nasty glitches in IE5/Win, and a bit ropy in IE5.5/Win too. We haven't quite got the style sheets right for IE5/Mac either. Ah, but in IE6/Win, and the various mozilla-type browsers, and in Apple's Safari, it looks pretty good.

The CSS validates (just), but we haven't got valid XHTML yet because our content management system can't produce clean code just yet. It's coming though.

We still have much to fix: those little annoying style issues in IE/Mac [update: I've fixed these now], and the horrendous things happening in IE5/Win. We have yet to introduce the new pure CSS home page, and we need to incorporate new styles for News & Events. But I think it's quite an achievement to get a site of this size and complexity running pure CSS. The original CSS design is mine, but the guys at Incutio - particularly Tim, and also Simon put in a fantastic amount of work to get my beginner's CSS working more consistently (my original style sheets looked fine in the Mac browsers, but tended to go wrong in IE/Win), incorporating a small amount of Javascript and integrating all the styles. Without Tim's efforts, we'd still be languishing with primitive table-based layouts that looked especially horrible in all the Mac browsers.

I've put together some pages about the LUMS site, and our decision to move to standards compliance with pure CSS. There is a bit about the history of the site too, which people from other universities might find of interest.

Next step: valid XHTML.

Though a Londoner originally, I have lived in the north of England for 12 years now. Going back to London for a few days still feels good. From the 4th of April to the 7th, Catherine and I spent 4 days staying in Bayswater - not an area I knew very well - partly because I had a presentation to make at the Association of Business Schools, and partly because I had an eye appointment at Charing Cross Hospital. Trip didn't get off to a good start: the hotel turned out to be rather grotty (The Blakemore), with a small scruffy room. After unpacking we headed out down Queensway and into Westbourne Grove. Found chic Bangladeshi restaurant called Ginger. 2 courses plus coffee for just over 7 pounds. Great food, not like any other Indian-type food I can remember having.

Am reading an Equal Music at the moment, so staying in Bayswater is very fitting.

On the Friday I needed to be up early for the presentation: the hotel room toilet overflowed, and kept on overflowing while I was in the shower, flooding us out of the room. Negotiations with hotel management and subsequent move to a new room like something out of French farce. Taxi to Grays Inn Road. I'm in luck, ABS have supplied a nice new laptop with IE6 installed. I was dreading having to use IE5 on Windows with its awful handling of CSS. The presentation and demo of our university website and its content management system goes very well. Phew.

Meet Catherine at 3.30 in Waterstones in Piccadilly. Then up to John Lewis's in Oxford Street where I buy a couple of shirts. In the evening to another restaurant in Westbourne Grove - Pizza Paradiso. We both have pasta with seafood. Very good. Afterwards we walk to Notting Hill Gate and then down Kensington Church Street before heading back across the park to Queensway.

Saturday: fantastic weather. Sharp, so sharp. Cold too, but oh so brilliant. We decide to go to the Aztec exhibition at the Royal Academy, but our walk through Kensington Gardens gets extended, and extended...we walk on across Hyde Park, and then down through Green Park, arriving at Buckingham Palace just as the guard is changing. Then down the Mall and up to the Royal Academy only to find an enormous queue. Decide to leave the Aztecs for another day. Lunch at a small café in Soho. Then down across Trafalgar Square, down Whitehall - just in time for the changing of the guard (again) - past Downing Street to Westminster Abbey. Closed. Damn. Walk over Westmister Bridge, down the South Bank for coffee at the Festival Hall. Continue walk east along the South Bank. Catherine spots poster advertising free music at the National Theatre. Pop in for a drink at the bar, and flop down in comfy chairs to listen to a flamenco guitarist and spend a pleasant hour people watching.

Then to the Queen Elizabeth Hall to see a performance of Foi, by Belgian dance group Les Ballets C de la B. Intense, exhausting stuff. Beautiful mediaeval music, troubling stuff on stage. Some of it I can't watch and close my eyes to avoid the blood. Judith Mackrell's review in the Guardian.

Back to Bayswater on the tube. We drink tea in our hotel room and then go out to buy a sandwich in Queensway. I fall asleep quite exhausted.

Sunday: grey and drizzly. Breakfast at Maison Bertaux in Soho - still much the same as when I first visited it in 1975 when a student at St Martin's School of Art. Great croissants. So-so coffee. Then tube to Old Street and walk to Columbia Road plant and flower market. Very crowded. Difficult to move. Maybe the best unknown tourist spot in London? Then walk to Kingsland Road and the Geffrye Museum. Having lived in Hackney in the seventies and eighties, these are old haunts for me, but so much has changed. The Geffrye has been done up and is now a very worthwhile museum of social history. Round the museum there are now a cluster of Vietnamese restaurants. We choose the busiest - Song Que Café and have a fantastic 2 course lunch of rather fine food for just 3.25 pounds each. London can be a really cheap place if you know where to look.

Back onto the tube - to Chelsea, and a walk through the grounds of Chelsea Hospital and then through the backstreets around the King's Road.

Monday. Aztecs at last. No queue. Memorable exhibition. Impressed by the individuality of the sculpture. Keep imagining the sculptors who produced the work; this very individual work. Scary at times, but very grand indeed. At 12.30 I head off for Hammersmith and Charing Cross Hospital. Eye test is fine. Back on tube and meet Catherine in Piccadilly at 3.30. To John Lewis's again where Catherine buys a lampshade for the dining room and a DVD of Amelie from HMV. Collect bags from the hotel and get to Euston in time for the 5.30 train back to Lancaster. London can be a great place. After Brussels it felt so clean, green and cared for.

The dullest blog in the world.

My brother has discovered my weblog. And so, evidently, has Google. It's about time I started keeping it more up-to-date.

Just back from a short 3-day holiday in Brussels. Moules, lambic beers, exploring Art Nouveau Brussels - especially the architecture of Victor Horta. Wonderful time, very enjoyable, but Christ, Brussels is a filthy place. Work piling up right now - so more on the trip later.

To use up some of the Seville oranges we had left after making marmalade at the weekend, I made a very simple duck salad this evening. Catherine found this Nigella Lawson recipe on the web. Fried a duck breast very slowly till it was crisp on the outside and pink and juicy in the middle. Then sliced it on the diagonal into 10 pink slices. Made a dressing with the juice of half a lime, juice of a Seville orange, some Thai fish sauce, half a chopped red chilli, some grated ginger and a few drops of sesame oil. Arranged the slices of duck on a salad of lettuce and rocket and poured the dressing over. It was lovely. We ate it with ciabatta bread. A Mosel riesling went along very nicely too. 20 minutes to prepare the lot. Pudding was stewed apricots with vanilla ice cream.

Saturday evening (Burns Night) haggis comparison: McSween's: spicy, nice chewy texture with plenty of bite. Scotland Haggis Company: spicier, but with a softer texture. Everyone enoyed both; particularly after a couple of glasses of Scotch. We started the meal with Catherine's Cock-a-Leekie. A lovely recipe that included prunes, along with the leeks and chicken.

Cana and I had a meeting at Nyenrode University, between Amsterdam and Utrecht on Tuesday. Long day. Up at 3.00am for a 3.50 taxi pick-up in Lancaster. Arrive Liverpool 5.30. Coffee and a sausage sandwich. Uneventful flight. Arrive Amsterdam around 9.00. Catch train from Schiphol station to Breukelen, changing at Druivendrecht. Arrive Breukelen. Unstaffed station, building work everywhere. No sign of taxi rank. Windmills, canals, geese flying overhead in v-formation. Eventually locate taxi-rank to find driver manoevreing his Mercedes over a concrete bollard that he has run into. Not an encouraging start. The meeting is in Nyenrode Castle. A moat with ducks; a tall square fortress: old, dark-red pitted brick. Flag flutters from a tower. Maroon and yellow painted shutters. Lunch is in what our host for the day calls the Dutch style: ham or cheese rolls with milk. No-one touches the milk. Pleasant walk in the grounds down Hobbema-like lime-tree avenues. Sunshine, birdsong, spring-like. Fallow deer in a field. Leave at 4.30: 30 minute wait for taxi back to Breukelen. 30 minute wait on station platform with 2 colleagues from universities in London and Dublin. Weather has turned cold. Schiphol again: make mistake of going through passport control before looking for a place at which we can eat. I forgot that the restaurants are all on the main airport concourse and that beyond passport control all we can get are snacks. Flight delayed 2.5 hours. EasyJet give us 1 Euro 80 as compensation. You can't even buy a coffee with that. Beer at one of the cafés. Cana gets out her accounts. I read Austerlitz. Back at the departure gate, we play word games, then mental noughts and crosses. I lose. 10.30pm, Liverpool. Our blessed taxi driver - dear man - is still waiting for us. Home just past midnight. 21-hour day.

I thought Safari horrid when it was first released. It was the brushed metal appearance that particularly grated. Now, 9 days later, I find I use it almost all the time. What a shame I can't post to Blogger with it.

Last Monday I launched the LUMS online CV system. We've not undertaken any publicity yet, so unique site visitors are averaging only around 30-50 per day, and most of those are students logging on to use the system to update their CVs. Today, 4 days after launch, we received 3 contact forms from employers. In each case, the employer had searched in Yahoo, identified one of our student CVs, and sent off the contact form. That's pretty good going, and a vindication of our decision to keep the CVs public, and not require employers to obtain a password to search our CVs. But if I was searching for a suitable employee, I don't think I would go to Google and stick a few key words in, hoping to turn up somebody's CV.

People talk about spilling coffee on the keyboard... ...but what about Port (Andy's Port)? Oops. At least the keyboard still seems to be working. The keys are a bit sticky, and the caps lock is a problem. Think I've got the broken glass out now (so we're down to 3 red wine glasses). But these Mac keyboards are transparent. And Port is sort of...dark, and purple, and sticky... Sam's Teach yourself CSS in 24 hours doesn't looks so good any more either. Don't tell Catherine.

Yesterday - Sunday - was Catherine's birthday. We spent most of it in the office while Catherine tried to finish off her Open University assignment and mail it off before the deadline of the 23rd. While she worked on her site diagram, I started reading Joe Clark's Building Accessible Websites. Catherine's done a lovely job, in the face of a badly-organised and ill-conceived course. It's designed as a beginner's course, an introduction to web design. Yet a good many of the participants appeared to be very experienced. The assignment posted, we got back home and I cooked a turbot; the recipe one of Rick Stein's: poached in water in the oven and then served with a sauce of butter, parsley, thyme and chives. Very simple. To celebrate her birthday, and the conclusion of the OU course, we drank a bottle of Corton Blanc 1995, from Chandon de Briailles. Wonderful wine: peachy and minerally with a delicious long, lingering finish which went on and on.

Here's a really nice CSS design. But it doesn't seem to render quite right in IE5.5/Win. But in Mac OSX it looks lovely.

Yesterday my employer, a university, ran its first ever staff course on CSS and 'making your site accessible'. 3 people turned up. Today, in part 2, I was the only participant. How depressing.

For the last few months I've been using Chimera for most of my surfing. Now IE has started getting jealous. It bounces up and down in the dock when it thinks I've been using the opposition for too long.

Managed to fix a few of the remaining problems with OS X.2. Sorted out Word's US-letter default by editing the 'normal' template (just change page set-up to 'A4' and save the template); and got my HP printer working nicely too. Now everything seems hunky-dory. Smooth and unruffled performance. As usual, my favourite browser - Chimera - crashes on me now and again; as does my least favourite browser - IE. But other than those two misbehaving applications, all else runs very nicely indeed. And the system itself is as bomb-proof as it has always been. I haven't had one system crash since installing OS X in September 2001. And now that I have the Macromedia MX applications, I don't need to use Classic at all.

Installed Mac OS X.2 at home last night. Sweetest and most problem-free operating system upgrade I have ever done. I'm at a loss as to how to import my old Mail app Address Book, and my old iTunes library to the new system, but that is no doubt due to my own idiocy. Microsoft Word still exhibits a lot of annoying behaviour. Most frustrating: the application forgets the default paper size setting. Every time I open a document and try to print, it defaults to 'US letter'. Every other app I've installed (including Excel and PowerPoint) defaults correctly to A4. Apart from these quibbles, living within X.2 is a very pleasant experience so far.

Catherine's lost luggage finally turned up at 9.50 yesterday evening. That's nearly a week that it was missing. I'll never understand why it is that the airline industry can be so cavalier in the way they treat passenger luggage. Just how did they manage to leave behind 10% of the luggage on a half-full flight from Amsterdam to Manchester? Beats me.

Back again after 10 days in Italy.

Sunday 21 July: Flight out from Manchester delayed 1.5 hours. That meant we'd miss our connection to Turin in Amsterdam. Woman on Help Desk at Manchester Airport didn't know where Turin was. Re-booked us on new flights to Amsterdam and then to Zurich and then to Turin. On arriving in Amsterdam we found that itinerary didn't work. Ended up with 6 hours to spare in Amsterdam. Took train into city and explored city centre.

Arrived Turin 10pm. Hot. Got decent (and cheap) hotel near Porta Nova Station. On Monday we took train for Aosta. Grabbed panini from the station buffet to eat on the train. If only you could get high-quality fast-food like this in Britain. Arrive Aosta early afternoon. Very hot. Nice town. Easy going after Turin. Fantastic views north to the snowy Grand Combin over the border in Switzerland. Spent an hour or two in the main square (airey and grand), alternating between iced peach tea at a terrace café and discussions with the very helpful Tourist Office. Caught last bus to the mountain village of Valnontey, in a high valley leading to the Gran Paradiso.

Trouble with the cuisine in the Val d'Aosta is that everything is based on polenta (heavy and stodgy) and cheese (no good for me). Mmm....Mangia! House wine good though, and a nice atmosphere in the restaurant we found on arriving in Valnontey at 9pm.

Tuesday 23 July: Great hotel - the 'Lou Tsalette'. Very small and ultra-cheap. Clean, comfortable, simple. A decent breakfast too for Italy, with cereals and yoghurt besides some excellent bread and coffee. Spent day walking to head of valley at altitude of around 2500 metres or so. Wild flowers magnificent. Clear weather. No cloud. No haze. Glaciers look like they are shrinking fast.

Wednesday 24 July: Walked up to the Refugio di Vittorio Sella. Terriffic heat. Feels like all Italy is walking up to the refuge. Flowers even better than yesterday. On arrival at refuge, Catherine gets second wind and suggests walking on to a lake and then beyond on a tricky path to the Casolari d'Herbetet, just underneath the Gran Paradiso. Steep 45 degree slope. Path contours the slope. A narrow groove across the mountainside. Curious chamois observe our progress. Tricky rock slab to cross. I move across confidently before discovering it's worthy of a basic rock-climbing grade. Too late to stop Catherine who has begun to move across it. Panic. Won't do that again in a hurry. 11-hour walk in total.

Thursday 25 July: Caught bus back to Aosta, and then from there to Valpelline near Swiss border. Not many tourists. A working alpine village. Stay at village pub, La Croce Bianca. Room is dark and smells damp. Food good though. The Val Pelline (the valley rather than the village) runs east from here, with the main chain of the Pennine Alps just to the north, forming the border between Italy and Switzerland. A few years back I climbed one of the peaks on the border chain - the perfect little snow cone of the Bec d'Epicoune. And just north again, the other side of the Otemma glacier, there are a couple of other peaks I've climbed: La Ruinette, and Mont Blanc de Cheilon. On another trip, Robin, Patrick and I climbed the Tête Blanche and walked down the Haut Glacier de Tsa-de-Tzan - overlooking the upper Val Palline - before moving onto the Bouquetins bivouac hut near Arolla. Nice to see these mountains from the other side.

Friday 26 July: Wake up with bad cold. We walk up the valley to Bionnay. An overcast morning. Cool. Signs of terrible winter flood damage. On way back it gets hot. Walk takes us back through high forest well above the valley floor. 1:30000 map proves inadequate. Paths on ground bare no relationship to paths on map. I think the map-maker invented them. An old shepherd's hamlet, high above the valley floor. Still being used (for cheese making?).

Saturday 27 July: Taxi from Valpelline up a side valley to the higher village of Ollomont. Dump our stuff at our new hotel and set off for long walk over a col. A bare grassy region below Mont Gelé, with the Grand Combin towering up behind. Flowers continue to amaze. Edelweiss here; the first time we've seen it on the trip. Our hotel, the Locanda della Vecchia Miniera, is a converted mine and very comfortable. Landlady gives us a glass of Prosecco as an eperitif. Meal is good, with a white wine from the Val d'Aosta. Lovely room with an enormous rustic double bed and matching furniture.

Sunday 28 July: Series of taxi rides, buses and trains back to Turin via Aosta. Book into same hotel near station. Stroll the streets in the early evening. Dangerous for pedestrians used to Britain's driving habits. Begin to fear that every Torinese driver is out to get me. Lovely meal of spaghetti con vongole and peaches in white wine at a simple restaurant.

Monday 29 July: Turin. Catherine organises a couple of walks around the city, exploring the sites. Obligatory stop-overs at ice-cream parlours and cafés. Very grand city. Nowhere in Britain to match. Grand baroque streets. Piazzi and palazzi. Green spaces and parks. Colonnades.

Tuesday 30 July: spent morning walking around Turin again (museums and galleries all closed). Went to Bicerin, fantastic old café away from the centre. Catherine had a rich concoction of coffee, chocolate, cream and brandy. Not ideal in hot weather. Flight back to Manchester at 4.00pm. Heavy thunderstorm in Amsterdam. Plane held up for an hour. Arrive Manchester 9pm. Catherine's baggage fails to turn up. Back in the UK, we realise we've been missing a great Commonwealth Games.

Finally seem to have got blogger working. Bye bye those 503 template errors. Have been fiddling with the template, and still can't get that published. Catherine diagnosed me as narcoleptic yesterday. Sleep liable to descend at any moment. Must be stress-induced. Question: is it the 21.5 hour shift a week ago? Or the threat of audience participation inflicted by Nederlands Dance 2 at the Lowry?

After 5 days of heavy rain and storms the sun is out in Lancaster. Pondlife basks just beneath the water surface.