A little bit of minor surgery on the computer this week. Its a home built job and when I first put it together it had that typical jet engine roar going. Over the last year or so it had undergone a few modifications and finally I have it down to a gentle background hum!

First was getting rid of the motherboard chipset fan. That was replaced with a Zalman northbridge heatsink. Just as well really, the first fan failed and the replacement was at deaths door. Don’t know why they bother with them really.

Took a while for the next step, but that was an Antec Sonata case and a Zalman CPU cooler. They did wonders together, but that was about when I noticed that the VGA card fan made the most terrible whine. So last week I finally got sick of it and got myself a noiseless Zalman VGA cooler (do you see any theme here?!).

The only problem with all of this is that I have noticed once you get rid of a noise you find another one behind it that is just as irritating. No wonder the PC shops are stocking so many of these noise reduction parts now. It must make wonderful business!

The big day for the twice-in-a-lifetime-event of the transit of Venus and the weather sucked. Overcast with altostratus all day and broken stratocumulus below that. Not the best weather for trying to see the sun.

For about a whole four minutes late morning (mid-transit) the cloud thinned a bit and luckily I happened to notice it in time.

A bit of welding glass and handheld 10x zoom on the Olympus digital camera results in this…

Camera was on automatic and the image is reduced 50% from original size. The first image is the original unenhanced. The second one has been changed to black and white, sharpened, and the contrast adjusted. It was visible to the naked eye through the welding glass as well, but the layer of cloud in the way made the view pretty blurry.

Not much time for web page things at the moment and the house stuff has been a bit quiet the last couple of weeks as well. Hopefully will get a few pictures and other bits and pieces up in a few days.

I finally managed to put the finishing touches to the story of our trip of Amsterdam. It’s amazing how long it can take to mess around with these things, fixing up all the pictures and text. Good thing we don’t get to go away that often!

The start of spring and the EU has grown from 15 to 25 members.

Finland’s most popular destination to the south, (ie, Estonia) is now a member of the EU. That combined with a recent relaxation of import allowances from other EU countries means cheap drinks for all! Woo hoo!

Playing around again with design for the site. Hopefully fixed the problems I saw with Internet Explorer. Have to see when I get to work if it still okay with version 5.5, but at least 6.0 and Mozilla are happy now, so thats a start :-).

Nothing much happening site wise. Haven’t had time lately to do any more development work apart from adding the house details. Other small things keep intruding, like going to work, and other such things :-(. Had to change the tires on the car to the summer ones as well today, since it is the last day you are allowed to use studded tires.

Hopefully soon I can add the pictures from our trip to Amsterdam and fix the Internet Explorer problems. Might be later this week though.

Still working on the problems with the site design. Seems that if I get it working in one browser it stops working in one of the others! So far I’m concentrating on the latest Mozilla, IE 6.0 and IE 5.5. I guess that covers 95% of the people online anyway. If someone is using something older they should download this now!

In other news spring is definitely here now, although temps have been up to 15 in the last week there is still lots of snow around. Mind you, basking in the hot sun with snow lying on the ground does tend to get a little confusing :-). It is melting fast, but some of those piles at the edges of car parks, etc, are pretty big. I’d think some of them will still be around in June!

Hopefully more house pictures tomorrow too.

Few problems with the redesign. As I have discovered, various versions of Internet Explorer are broken and don’t understand web pages that are writen directly to the specifications.

Hopefully now a few tweaks here and there have gotten rid of the biggest problems, but I guess I’ll be tinkering with this for a while yet to get it just right. Mozilla handles things quite well and is the most standards compliant, followed (distantly) by IE 6.0. That is the one that comes with Windows XP. Trailing far behind that is IE 5.5, which came as an upgrade for Windows 2000, etc. If you have anything less than IE 6.0 I suggest you upgrade now! Either that or download the Mozilla based browser FireFox.

I have redesigned the whole site. The previous design is basically reproduced, although now with completely valid (hopefully) XHTML 1.0 and using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to produce all layout.

Probably doesn’t mean much to most, but now the site design is completely separate from the content. So if we ever get bored with this layout it is a simple matter of changing the style sheets to change the design. Also, there is now a proper style sheet for printing. That means the menu and other items are dropped off the printed version since they are not needed there.

The content is split into English and Finnish as well and organised a bit more clearly.

On the house front, the windows are in and things are moving ahead quite well.