stuartandnicola.com

:-( Not a lot of progress on the website this week :-(
I've got loads of ideas, but work is a bit manic at the moment so it's not really conducive to keeping the website up to date! BUT, when things calm down a bit I've got some more ideas I want to try out, so watch this space...

It's been a nice weekend! Maz and Sean had their engagement party at the Packhorse on Saturday night, which was great. We tested their compatability by doing a version of Mr & Mrs, but it was ok - they passed!
Sunday was fairly energetic day - finally got all the salt and muck of the car, and at last hoovered out the pine needles from the Xmas tree! Of course, then Nikki wanted her car washed as well!
Paulene came round for tea as it was Mother's Day (and Brian is away on work) so we used up the last of the Bailey's and banana bread and butter pudding :-D
Not much progress on the website - did some admin stuff on the underlying code here at home, loaded up the pics from Maz and Sean's do (can't believe how easy it is now with the album script - takes no time at all!

Been a bit busy at work this work, so no real progress on the website! I did use my new found Flash skills to great effect on Thursday though - I had to do a presentation at work so I used a little animation I'd been working on.
Seems I now might be volunteered to put together a new presentation package for customer visits. Is that in my job description??

Got back from our long weekend away in the snowy city of Stockholm! No hanging around now with photos - already on-line a ready to go!http://www.stuartandnicola.com/html/stockholm.html
We went round some of the furniture / design shops this morning and have got loads of ideas for the potential extension... Don't the French have a thing they refer to as "Grand Projet". We seem to be heading that way with these plans....

I posted my first answer in a discussion board! I hope I got it right!!

.net magazine had a flash tutorial this month - one of those slidey puzzle games like I remember from when I was little. I had a go at recreating it in KoolMoves, and it works! There was a bit of tweaking needed to coax it in to life, but it got there!
Oh, and PaintShopPro has an image slicer to chop your picture in to nice regular squares, just like the game needs. And there was me going to do it by hand in Adobe Elements! Lucky I found PSP did it BEFORE I did the manual chopping :-)http://www.

A busy, but really nice, day today. We did Sunday lunch for eleven (we didn't even know for sure we could get eleven round our table!). Us, Nikki's mum and dad, Nikki's aunt and uncle, two cousins plus husband/wife, plus, ummm, I think it's Nikki's second cousin (son of cousin - is that right - need Nikki - she does the family tree stuff round here!)
Anyhow, it was a really nice day. Never cooked for that many before, but seemed to go off ok. Nigella's chocolate fudge cake was a success (we got a tip off from Nikki's aunt that chocolate fudge cake would go down well....) The recipe said it would serve 12 - twenty four more like - it comes out HUGE and it's very rich :-)

Not many posts to the log this week cos I've been playing with this KoolMoves / Flash stuff. I'm hooked! I've come over all creative :-D I think I'm getting the hang of it, slowly. All this "movieclips" stuff and actionscript is actually not too bad once you get the hang of it. It seems that Koolmoves, as far as I can tell, does nearly everything Flash does - I've been getting help from the support forum but also from the Macromedia website! The main "project" has been making the chemeng reunion animation - it seemed like a good place to start. At least I had a definite purpose so I had an "end product" in mind.

Everybody's at it! Maz and Sean got engaged in New York!
(we had a feeling this was going to happen... but don't tell them that :-D)
CONGRATULATIONS!

I should prob read a manual or something, but playing and break is MUCH more fun :-D. I seem to be there with my page intro now, I have streaming audio, a choice of two tracks, and a mute button. Although I've heard these loops so many times I'm going off them now! But, unless you try you'll never what you can and can't do. I kind of got an MP3 pre-loaded working, but it never loaded the MP3 first time round!http://www.stuartandnicola.com/html/stuart.html