I’ve not been functioning at 100% for a couple of days now. It actually started Tuesday night with an ache near my right shoulder. I had a hot shower and went to bed, thinking it would pass, as such aches usually do. After 5 hours of trying to find a painless position to sleep in, 2.5 hours of sleep and 1 disastrous minute of noise outside it was clear the pain wasn’t going away.

Largely because of the trouble sleeping (even after trying ibuprofen, normally the painkiller that works best for me) I decided to ring up my doctor and make an appointment for Wednesday afternoon. His conclusion: it’s nothing serious, and it’s in the muscle which heals quicker than anything wrong with the shoulder joint. Advice: more painkillers before sleeping.

I took more painkillers Wednesday night, and it put something of a dent in the pain but not enough of one. Instead of just trying to find the right position I’d drop of for 15 or 20 minutes occasionally and then wake up again. When waking up around 01:00 after a 10 minute nap I suddenly felt very warm, around 01:03 my thermometer confirmed a fever.

The pain around the shoulder finally started to go down thursday evening, though it’s still not gone. Clichéd though it may be, it really does hurt when I laugh (the jerky shoulder movement does it). That allowed the painkillers to kill enough pain to let me sleep pretty well last night.

Currently I’m not feeling the shoulder too much, though it reminds me whenever I feel like laughing. But the fever is still there. I was actually battling some sort of minor virus before the shoulder happened and I’m guessing two bad nights took down my immune system enough for it to get through.

But what I really wanted to get to in this blog post is what the fever seems to be doing to me. I can still focus, almost to my normal level of concentration, but I find I have far less control over what I focus on.

I have of course been more tired than usual, from both the lack of sleep and the fever, which plays into concentration as well. Probably also plays into my ability to judge how well I’m concentrating. But still, though I haven’t been doing much of what I feel I ought to be doing I’ve done what I have been doing quite well.

The latest thing is a little php countdown script for NaNoWriMo 2007 I’ve added to the site here. It’s not advanced PHP by any stretch of the imagination, and large parts of it are actually just a re-used bash script I already had on Linux, but it was fun to do. It was also surprisingly easy to concentrate on, because it was what I felt like doing impulsively.

For some reason I can do a lot, even with a fever, as long as it’s following a natural impulse. It’s only when I try to force myself to focus that concentrating becomes like pulling teeth.

I actually remember another fever, some years back, which led me to set my then record for words written in a single day, somewhere around five or six thousand. That record is now at sixteen thousand, but it was another case of following an impulse with a fever. I guess that’s what they mean by working at a fevered pace.

And no, the wet weather we’re having here isn’t the only reason I’m thinking of November. Late August is the time I start thinking about NaNoWriMo. Today the mood suddenly caught me, possibly because of the November like weather.

I was cycling, in the rain, when suddenly a project I’ve had on the back-burner for a while popped into my mind. The Pride of the Smiths, which might well be book one in a series about the Huroan Guild Wars, suddenly floated to the top with an “I could do that this year” feeling.

It’s a fantasy project, which also fits pretty well into my alternating SciFi or Fantasy for NaNoWriMo. Tech Runners, last year, was SciFi; Flame Dancer, 2005, was Fantasy; an Lightning, 2004, was SciFi.

Of course alternating SciFi and Fantasy isn’t a hard an fast rule, since inspiration is the most important thing for NaNo, but it’s nice to keep that tradition going.

Another small change to the site: I’ve now got the top and bottom black bars in a fixed position setting, so that the content scrolls between them. I’ve also redone the top bar so that people can see where they are on the site.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, but could never find a reliable enough way to make sure the content scrolling beneath had exactly the right margins top and bottom. Then finally I hit on a hack: have exactly the same content appear on the bottom layer as well.

The only remaining problem is that the system doesn’t work in IE6, which won’t read the “position: fixed” element in CSS. So what I’ve done there is just eliminate one of the duplicates. Meanwhile this has reaffirmed my determination to put an IE6 only message telling people to get a better browser on the main page.

I’ve added another set of photos. These were taken only yesterday, making this my quickest turn around for a set of photos making it to the website so far. And since I wanted to add a short description with this photoset I decided to go through and add descriptions to all my photosets. I figured it was as well to do it now while there are only three of them.

I just figured out how to send a message to IE6 users only, without using any javascript to determine browser identity. I probably should have figured this one out much sooner, since it’s pretty much a variation on a trick I’ve used a number of times before.

Fact: only MSIE6 will read CSS starting with an underscore.

Fact: all browsers, including MSIE6 obey the last CSS they read if there are contradictory instructions.

So what do we do in our CSS?

div.ie6
{
display: none;
_display: inline;
}

And in our HTML/PHP?

<div class=”ie6″>If you can read this, you need a better browser!</div>

Easy enough, when you get right down to it. Just don’t ask me how long it took me to figure this out after learning about this little CSS peculiarity with IE6.

And if you’re looking to send a similar message to IE6 users, feel free to use this code.

After my recent episode watching the countdown on a download while I had a headache, I’m not counting seconds again, but in a different way. I’ve been doing some web design stuff, let’s call it “operation currently still secret project”, for which I just found myself looking at the images likely to be included in the final product.

It’s a good looking page, if I do say so myself, and largely due to the images (which, needless to say, someone else made). But looking at the image files I’m looking at over 150 kbytes worth of data. Now that’s not a lot for me, but I found myself thinking what it would be like for someone on dial up.

It’s still not very bad, but rather than the half a second (theoretical minimum) it would take my connection to gather up all those images, it would that a 56kbit line about 20 or 30 seconds. It almost makes me feel nostalgic, thinking back to the days when you’d sit, waiting for an image to load.

At the same time I don’t worry about this the way I worry about making sure things work in IE6 (and hating every second of testing it requires). Large parts of the internet are now a broadband world, it’s as simple as that.

My headache has gone up and down between splitting and nagging but not actually gone. So to kill some more time I figured I’d blog something I’ve been meaning to blog anyway.

I’ve been playing some Lands Of Lore: The Throne Of Chaos lately. It’s an older game, but still fun, and I’ve played it through a few times before. The game also feature some great voice overs by, among others, Patrick Stewart.

I noticed something interesting about my memory during play. Most of the time I have to look out where I’m going, it’s been long enough since I last played it. But for some reason I could walk from the exit of the Gorhka Swamp to the entrance of the Urbish Mines in the Opinwood virtually without looking at the screen.

I have a confession to make in this post. I’m blogging right now just to kill time. Time I should probably be spending on something far more useful. Unfortunately I have a monster of a headache right now, and just found myself watching for several minutes, as the time on a big download slowly ticked down.

So I decided to blog instead. It’s probably better for my sanity than watching the time tick down on a download, and accomplishes at least as much.  More, at least in the sense that I can take updating this blog off my to do list for a while.

And since I’m updating the blog anyway I might as well do a quick reading update. Because I have been getting some nice reading time in recently. For my most recent reading Harry Potter 7 is probably a good place to start. I read that within six and a half hours of receiving it, exactly two weeks ago today.

After that I re-read Watership Down – one of those books I read probably once a year – and David Weber’s Windrider’s Oath. Then I moved into new (for me) material again with Dan Simmons’s Hyperion, followed by S.L. Viehl’s Plague Of Memory. I was quite happy to finally get around to those two,  because they’ve both been by my bedside ready to be read for quite a while.

Unfortunately while the above means I did clear a couple of things from the to-be-read list I also bought four more books during that same period. So the motto “so many books, so little time” still holds true. But I guess that as long as I enjoy reading I can live with that.