Forms are perhaps the bane of web development for me; you can't get them to look good, you can't find a foolproof way to make them act well and lets not even start of trying to get them into a pacified state, free from the dangers of user input (surprise ending: form input will never be completely trustworthy). A lot of sites would appear to have aesthetically pleasing forms, however this is a careful ruse by them as they sidestep the problem of forms by having only one or two of them, and then they usually only have a few fields. The monstrosities I am required to deal with almost daily are things of grotesque beauty, veritable Rube Goldberg machines of complexity.

Read the rest of this entry

Waking up after 0730, Matt recounted his short evening with the Germans at the CdlM after which we had a now standard breakfast and headed towards the beach. Slightly later than usual we were "forced" to catch a real taxi (read: one less likely to induce death e.g. coco-taxis) which turned out to be a modern, air-conditioned people carrier crossed with a tank. The ride to the beach was swift meaning we got to the dive hut in time to catch Leo. He impressed upon me that he would examining me during the morning dive and filling in the paperwork for the course I was apparently taking; this was probably also due to an inspection taking place of the dive hut and associated divers which made everyone involved slightly twitchy.

Read the rest of this entry