(no subject)

I notice that I didn't mention yesterday that I finally got a chance to catch up with Suzie on Monday night. Yes, she's back from Bournemouth, TEFL course under her belt and raring to go. We were going to Borders on Charing Cross road as always - they do big pots of tea for 2 quid and nice quiches but arrived to discover that, like the Oxford one, it's being turned into a Starbucks :( Not that I hugely dislike Starbucks you understand but the Borders cafe was nicer and did nice savoury food which Starbucks never seems to pull off although they do have some nice cakes. So anyway, the Starbucks wasn't ready yet so we had to wander off and find somewhere else, which lead to me discovering Cafe Nero. I had spinach ricotta in tomato/herb/etc sauce which was lovely and they put parmesan on it and everything and then we both had sun dried tomato and herb flavour crisps. Lovely! If only they had books as well it would be perfect :)

After that we decided to pop over to Easy Everything so that Suz could set up a website of her very own. Where I was confronted by one of those moments. We set her up with a geocities account and then signed on at which point it occurred to me that I've never tried to use any of the GUI stuff at Geocities because it always seemed like it would be easier to just learn the HTML (and it was). I took a quick look and decided that in the time we had it would be easier to let Suz bash a basic front page out on the GUI and then get her round to my house some time soon so that I can teach her to write basic HTML.

But the thing which bought me up short was that right until we fired up the GUI I hadn't even thought about it. I was just kind of assuming that more or less everyone can bash out a basic website in HTML. Which is completely unreasonable. I never seem to do very well with GUIs somehow - when I was setting up the gallery I looked round at some of the software for running galleries that's available on the net. And it was quite nice but I ended up thinking "I can't be arsed to customize this stuff. I'll just knock up a quick one in asp myself - that'll be easier". Note to self: This is not true for most people. Reading back that comes over as rather arrogant but I do genuinely forget that most people can't do this stuff. Trouble is, I mostly hang out with people who can do way more than me so I end up thinking of my skills as fairly basic. Which is true in a way but I still know a lot more than average. Go me :)