Joseph Bloggs: Talkin' Loud & Sayin' Nothin'

If running a marathon has taught me anything (apart from "don't run marathons"), it's taught me that definite goals with set deadlines are a good way of getting things done. In fact, they seem to be the only way I get anything done (if you don't count stuff that my wife organises for me).

All very obvious you might think. I've always shied away from setting myself deadlines and targets where creative projects are concerned though, because of some misplaced idea that it restricts the creative juices and also that it just wasn't very cool.

Well, that's all very well, but it's almost eight years since I produced my online comic Oneironaut for my MA project. For the project I produced episode 1, and the intention was always to carry on producing episodes, for a story arc of seven-or-eight issues.

Well, I finished the MA, got a job, got married, blah blah blah and here we are eight years later and no bleedin' episode 2!!

Well, it's not good this, if I can run a bleedin' marathon I'm sure I can find time to do a bit of drawing and writing and stuff.

All I need to do is make a public declaration of a definite deadline for the release of Oneironaut: Episode 2, so here we go:

Episode 2 of Oneironaut will be online on or before January 1^st 2010.

You can hold me to that.

This year I have mostly been training for the Paris Marathon.

It was Hev's idea, and I thought it would be a challenge and would help me raise my fitness levels for football. Well, it was a challenge alright (as if that was ever in doubt), but I'm not sure my body's any better prepared for football - it's ruined my knees!

The training has been hell on my knees, and so was the marathon itself, but I finished it (just - I walked/hobbled/staggered the last 6 miles) - it took me just under six hours (5:55 was the chip time)!

If you're the kind who like proof, or just enjoy watching others suffer, here's a hilarious video of me stumbling zombie-like across the finish line.

Nice...

In stark contrast to this my wife, who only started running last year and has a pacemaker, hardly walked at all and finished in 5:08...

Is there nothing this woman can't do (apart from spell)?

Speaking of pacemakers, we ran the marathon on behalf of the British Heart Foundation. Thanks very much to everyone who sponsored us, it helped us through and is for a good cause.. If you haven't but fancy it, we'd be most grateful, you can sponsor us online on Hev and Joe's JustGiving page.

Thaaaanks!

There's a common practice in Web design of hiding certain pieces of information on the page that are useful in a non-visual context (for instance in screen readers used by blind users), but is somewhat redundant in a visual context (i.e. having a heading saying main navigation above a nav bar).

The standard(ish) technique for hiding these items is to position such items off-screen using CSS styles like this:

.hideMe{

position: absolute;
left: -9000px;
top -9000px;

}

This the places the element way off screen and out of the main flow of the layout (because it's absolutely positioned).

Today I've been trying to do this to a legend tag, but have had difficulty getting it to work in Firefox (and usually it's such a well behaved browser...)

The problem seems to be that Firefox writes some very strict style rules for the legend tag in it's inbuilt styles, using many !important declarations. In theory you should still be able to override !important default browser styles with an !important declaration of your own, i.e.:

.hideMe{

position: absolute !important;
left: -9000px !important;
top -9000px !important;

}

In practice however, this doesn't seem to work.

Apparently this is down to a special treatment that Firefox gives the legend tag. Bug or feature? You decide...

So what's the work around?

One solution is to use the display: none style, but since many screenreaders correctly interpret the rule, that seems a bit pointless, as you're hiding it from the people you wanted to provide it for; may as well not have the tag at all...

The work around I've come up with relies on the fact that the 'special treatment' of the legend tag doesn't extend to margins:

.hideMe
{

/* hide the element off screen (nb: this won't work for legends in firefox) */

position: absolute !important;
left: -999px !important;
top: -990px !important;

/*  hide off-screen using margin (works in firefox for legend tags)*/

height: 0px;
padding:0px;
margin-left: -90000px;
margin-top: -900000px;
}

It seems to work, though I haven't tested it extensively, so may present problems in some contexts...

It's not an ideal solution, I'd prefer to affect a genuine ovveride to the default styles. It looks like there's no way of genuinely overriding the position style on the legend tag in Firefox, but if anyone know different please let me know...

For reasons that I've never quite been able to fathom, a post that I wrote about avoiding chilli burn way back in January 2004 come up as the number one result when you Google 'chilli burn'.

As a result, it's attracted a few comments and has turned into a mini forum on chilli burn, though more focused on curing chilli burn than preventing it, as people aren't quite that forward-thinking in their Googling (yes, I know Google don't want it used as a verb, but I can't imagine why, what higher brand recognition is there?)

I check the page from time to time for new comments (okay, all the time, obsessively) and today I've reached 100 comments!

Wow, I've made it. I can retire.

To celebrate this momentous occasion I'm going to buy a book on search engine optimisation and try and figure out why it happened in the first place...

You may remember that in January on this blog I rashly agreed to run the Grim Challenge this year.

I'd been training throughout the year for the The Grim, but training had dropped off the last month or so, owing to colds, muscle strains, etc... So I was feeling less than 100% prepared.

Also, last year was it was a beautiful mild winter day . This year it was bright and beautiful enough, but mild it was not. The Grim involves running through muddy puddles and this year, come the Sunday morning, most of these puddles were frozen over. The organisers were using sledgehammer and 4x4's to break the ice on puddles, so that we could then run through them. Great.

(thanks to Sophie for the picture)

Needless to say, running through icy puddles was very cold on the feet, but it was good fun, as was the sludgy mud pits. My legs struggled somewhat with eight miles and I wasn't quite able to keep up with my team mates, Rich and Nik, but I was only about three minutes behind them, coming in at 1:22:57, which is respectable. Also, I finished 1000^th (out of 1900).

Despite the strain on my legs, (and the two days of leaden legs afterwards) it was fun, and I might even do it again next year...