All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. .

Bad Kitty

Animals, Life

Today, Claire purchased the a pack of Spacebags – the vacuum able plastic storage bags. After giving them a good run with some of our infrequently used items, Claire was nothing but impressed and wanted to show me them immediately.

We walked into the spare room and Claire was shocked that the bags were no longer collapsed and thought that she must not have sealed them correctly. Upon closer inspection, it was revealed that Princess decided that this new contraption needed to pass the claw test.

You guessed it:

Kitty 1, Spacebags 0

Naughty kitty, naughty.

Deafening Silence

General

For quite some time now, one of our cars has had an annoying drumming sound coming from the back of it. We’ve had it serviced two or three times since the noise started happening and I’ve asked the mechanics to track it down and each time they’ve come up empty.

At one of the first services after the noise started, I suggested to one of the mechanics that it might have been a faulty tyre. At the time, The mechanics said that was very unlikely and I agreed but pointed out that one of my older brothers has had it happen to him; so it might have been worth a look. They looked over all of the tyres and didn’t see anything wrong and the wheels have been rotated and balanced numerous times without it being picked up as well.

Since the noise started, Claire and I have put around 40,000Km onto her car and the rear tyres have worn sufficiently to warrant replacing them without doing it prematurely. After having a new pair of Yokohama tyres fitted today, I was pleased to find that the drumming noise we’d become so accustomed is now gone.

It was so unfamiliar to drive the Mazda today without the noise. I couldn’t stop commenting to Claire today while driving around how strange and fantastic it was to have the noise gone; feels like we’ve got a new car again!

Bridging The Gap

Sport

The new squash season has started at the Robina Squash Club and I’ve already made pretty reasonable headway into improving my game. After losing every encounter I had with Steve last season, I put together a short list of improvements that I needed to make to my game:

  • Vary the pace of the ball more
  • Change the length of my shots
  • Boast the ball more
  • Develop a slice backhand

This week was my first encounter with Steve since last season and after trying to implement each of those points, it made a huge difference to the score:

  1. 15 – 10
  2. 13 – 15
  3. 9 – 15
  4. 12 – 15

it might seem like there is a lot of losing in there, however the games were very competitive and this was the first time I really had Steve working hard on the court.

To vary the hitting pace, I selectively chose the loose ball and drove my forehand hard and low. The significant change in pace, coupled with the low ball means that it doesn’t bounce much and it comes onto your opponent much faster – that worked really well. As a by product of changing the pace of the ball, I was able to comfortable change the length as well, which made Steve have to move a lot on the court. Unfortunately, I only found one or two opportunities to boast the ball; fortunately one of them was a high ball! The slice backhand worked really well, however I persisted with attempting a slicing drop shot off the serve and dropped four consecutive balls into the tin during game three. Although I lost the points, it was quite valuable as I now know that with further practice I’ll be able to hit that shot during the game as they only just missed.

The next couple points which I’m going to add to my list are:

  • Run run run, just like tennis is a pressure thing. When I hit a loose ball, I often don’t chase it down as I think to myself I don’t deserve to return it was I should have played a better stroke. That isn’t the right attitude on a squash court at all, so from now on I’m going to consider it penance to chase down the stray balls.
  • Know your opponent. When I was playing casual squash with a couple of mates, it was very easy for me to keep an eye on where they were on the court and hit the ball appropriately. Since starting fixtures, I haven’t been doing that as much and I know I’m making poor shot choices as a side effect.
  • Ball placement strategy. I want to work on a hitting strategy, such that I’m forcing my opponent into hitting a particular type of ball into a particular region of the court – as the only ‘reasonable’ shot left to make. If I can force my opponent into hitting particular shots, it increases my ability to play to my strengths on the court.

If you’re interested in joining the club for some fun and fitness, you can contact:

Robina Squash Club
University Drive
Robina QLD, 4226
0427 627 229

Degeekified

Hardware, Humour, Life

Tonight while doing some work, the kitty decided it was a perfect time to play with one of her toys. Unfortunately, while she was fetching her toy from behind the computer – she bumped the video card cable and my computer shutdown unexpectedly.

To get my computer to start again, I needed to take the side panel off of my Lian Li case, re-seat the video card and tighten the thumbscrew. As I was restoring things to their rightful positions, I realised a shocking fact:

I haven’t taken the side panel off my computer in nearly two years!

With such a traumatic event taking place, I think I need to go and buy some computer hardware on the principle of it.

Internet Explorer IMG Element & Empty Width/Height Attribute Error

Programming, Software

Recently found an error, bug or omission within the Internet Explorer rendering engine which I haven’t personally encountered before. The error involves the familiar <img> element and the use of the width and height attributes.

The following <img> element definitions will render as expected within Mozilla and Opera:

  • <img src="/path/to/image.jpg" />
  • <img src="/path/to/image.jpg" width="" />
  • <img src="/path/to/image.jpg" height="" />
  • <img src="/path/to/image.jpg" width="" height="" />

When a web browser encounters an img element without width or height attributes, the browser is required to render the image in its default aspect ratio. When either of the width or height attributes are provided, the browser is required to resize the image when rendered to meet the requested size.

Unfortunately, when Internet Explorer encounters items two, three and four listed above an error occurs where the browser does not render the image at all. Instead of disregarding the img elements empty width and height attributes, it considers the empty value to equate to zero (0) and the image is rendered appropriately.