Yesterday I was due to take my last two university exams of the academic year. There was a written exam in the morning and a practical exam in the afternoon, in which I was supposed to perform a short piece on my saxophone. The first exam was ok. I wouldn’t say it was a module I’m particularly strong at but I feel I’ve done alright. The second and last exam of the year…didn’t happen.
I’ve been suffering from quite a nasty throat infection for a couple of weeks now, and over the last few days it’s grown into something worse, a severe case of tonsillitus. Go me! It’s quite painful and hurts considerably when I try to eat, drink or even swallow. Talking has even been rather hard these last couple of days, so I haven’t been doing it much. There’s a first time for everything! Needless to say, I wasn’t in much of a condition yesterday to play the saxophone. I tried playing briefly to warm up a couple of hours before the exam, but brief is the significant word there. After just a few notes it was apparent that I just couldn’t play without causing even more pain. Thankfully, I was able to get the exam put back a week, so it now means I’ve still got one week until I’m totally free from all university commitments.
I’ve been able to see a doctor (finally!) this morning and have even more tablets to take now. The difference between the new tablets and the many others I was previously taking, is that these new ones actually work. The pain obviously hasn’t just vanished, but it has been significantly reduced already.
So, although a week later than planned, I should be back on the net in full swing in about a weeks time. There’s a lot for me to do when I get back into everything, but with a long summer break ahead, I should have plenty of time to get it done.
This afternoon I pretty much finished quite a long essay I’ve been writing for a while. So, I decided to use the free time I had for the rest of the day to try and work some more on the custom theme I’ve been trying to develop for this blog. The theme itself seems mostly completed but I feel it probably still needs tweaking in a couple of places.
I’ve done as much as I can to try and ensure that this theme works on every browser without any major differences. However, it’s still possible that there are a few cross-browser issues, particularly with internet explorer in lower screen resolutions. If you should notice any such problem, please let me know.
As I mentioned in my last post, this theme is hardly the greatest out there, but in my personal opinion, it’s at least a little bit more unique than the nice but very common WordPress default theme.
If you have any suggestions or comments about this theme, please do let me know.
The end of year exams have finally started at university. Two of them were last week and they didn’t go too badly. As always I thought they could probably have gone better, but that’s a feeling I commonly get after exams, as do most of the people I’ve spoken too. I’ve now only got a couple more exams to finish preparing for and a few pieces of coursework to hand in, but in a couple of weeks everything should be done, and summer can start early!
As you can probably gather, preparing for these exams and deadlines has left me with very little time for development as far as MyBB, MyBB Mods and this site are concerned. However, a few days ago I found myself with a few hours spare and decided to try and complete something I started a couple of months before hand…a customised theme for WordPress. My creativity when it comes to web pages has never been spectacular, but it’s something I’m planning on improving. I did however manage to get the theme to look fairly nice. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s completely unique and can only improve. So, you’re probably wondering why it isn’t the default theme here? Two words can answer that question…Internet Explorer! Sorry, I’ll try not to use those words again.
Whilst working on the theme, I was viewing it through my default web browser, Mozilla Firefox. Before making it live, I thought I had better test it in a few other browsers first just to be sure, even though the XHTML and CSS all seemed to validate correctly. Only one browser threw out problems, you know the one. Unfortunately, the number of problems it had was quite large. The entire layout was screwed up and needs some major attention. It looks like some of the CSS tags I used are simply ignored by that particular browser and some major reworking in needed. Sadly, I’m unlikely to have enough time (and probably patience) to give the theme the attention it needs until my exams finish in a couple of weeks. However, I will get it finished eventualy, and then there will be some significant changes around here. Plus, there might also be a minor URL change, but I’ll know more about that soon. 