House gantt chart

*hugs* Thank you everyone who commented on the last post.

OK, I have

• Asked the letting agent if they'd consider extending the lease (because worst case they say "no")  
• Avoided asking them if they personally hate me, or if it's just business, because 90% of people are nice and 10% of people are rude, and there's no actual benefit of knowing which are which if I don't have to deal with them again  
• Checked the terms of my original contract
   
• Begun release my emotional attachment to random cheap bits of furniture that if I end up moving somewhere short term probably wouldn't be worth storing.

I will:

• First priority, look for other flats to let, and make sure the worst case is "have to move to another flat" which is not bad  
• Second priority, look for houses and mortgages, because I need to do that anyway. It's highly unlikely I can arrange it in two months, but I happen upon the perfect place, it would work out really well.  
• Third priority, investigate options for possible short term (less than 6-month) lets in case I suddenly do find somewhere to buy, but need somewhere for a couple of months to bridge the gap.

Markdown!

I didn't notice, Dreamwidth have introduced support for markdown syntax!

I find that an awful lot more useful than HTML or rich text because I usually only want bold and italic, but I like to be able to copy the text into a text editor or read it without a lot of html tags.

You can easily make unordered lists

• just
• like
• this

And you can make automatically-ordered lists

1. although
2. they
3. only
4. use
5. successive
6. positive
7. integers

And the one thing I always found a pain in LJ/DW HTML, making a

Blockquote

And it's even easy to

Blockquote several
different lines
of text
by putting a >
at the beginning
of the first

And it even has

int main()
{
  cout << "automatic formatting" << " of code " << "samples";
}

It's a very recent, very quick and dirty beta, so it's amazing it just works as well as it does. Ironically the one thing it doesn't do is applying the formatting before it crossposts a post, so the dreamwidth copy of this post has the formatted version, and the livejournal copy has the original source (see link below for the other one). I imagine there's a dreamwidth bug for this, or maybe eventually livejournal will copy the code changes.

LBD

( Read more... )

Dreamwidth style

I currently write posts in dreamwidth and have them crossposted to LiveJournal. I hope to persuade as many people as possible to do something similar from dreamwidth, or wordpress/tumblr/blogger/etc or a private blog, etc for their medium-form and long-form blogging, so there's still some community if livejournal suddenly disappears.

I'd also like to help foster more of a sense of community on Dreamwidth by thinking of that as my primary platform rather than just an interface to livejournal.

But I keep not doing so, and I've been asking myself why. I think it's just that my default style on dreamwidth (the default home page and the default for my journal) I don't like as much as the default style for livejournal. And that for ages I've used the candle icon as my default icon, but it doesn't actually feel like "me".

So, can you customise a site skin? Any suggestions for good dreamwidth styles? I really want something really simple, with a white background, a splash of light blue colour, that shows user icons but otherwise looks as much like a minimalist professional site and as little like a blogging platform as possible... Any suggestions?

Gym

I signed up for the gym, and went swimming, although I'll have a proper induction on Friday.

It feels really good to have swum for an hour, and really good to think "that's plenty, I don't have to push myself absolutely as far as I can, I can leave now, have an evening of other stuff, and come again later in the week, even if only for half an hour."

I swam 65 lengths -- does anyone know if they're 20m or 25m? 25m is the standard, but I can't judge if the pool is shorter because I usually swim at Jesus green. Fitocracy says "yay".

It's ever so strange being in public without my glasses. I can see people, but I can't see faces, so I can't tell if someone is looking at me, so everyone seems very generic, I feel obliged to plaster a goofy grin on my face in case anyone looks at me and thinks I'm scowling because I didn't realise, and it's easy to stare at people I'm thinking "is that a fuzzy pink blob or a person" when I'm completely visible to them.