This is annoying, I think.

I just got an email from Shisha Pipe UK, where I buy tobacco for my water pipe (shisha / nargile / hookah):

“Due to the English Customs and excise we no longer sell Tobacco Molasses.
Apparently molasses shisha tobacco purchased in the UK from shops in London do not have any import duty paid and is illegal in the UK.
Customs & Excise state that the tobacco import duty is £71.76 per kilogram which would make a 250 gram pack cost in duty alone £17.94”

Is this another case of political correctness gone mad? No it isn’t. It seems it’s the law. But it is irksome. Who knew it was illegal? The tax/duty seems a lot, and this on top of the UK smoking ban which has put a lot of hookah lounges at risk, or even out of business.

I smoke it infrequently, but I would miss it. It’s pleasurable. And ancient. And yes, it is a misconception that a water pipe is used for anything other than perfectly legal tobacco. Isn’t it? More on Wikipedia.More

Tags: government, tax, shisha, hookah, molasses, tobacco

A small apology to web developer Josh Lockhart, who was kind enough to comment on a recent post. I’ve tweaked the order of my new blog pages a little and in the process, seem to have broken the path to the off-site commenting system.

It doesn’t look like I can easily restore the comment so for sake of completeness I’m quoting it here:

“I have posted several tutorials that demonstrate how to integrate PrettyPhoto on a Styled Text or HTML page in RapidWeaver. I also posted a tutorial showing how to convert a RapidWeaver Photo Album into a PrettyPhoto lightbox gallery.

Links are:

http://www.joshlockhart.com/index.php/tutorials/article/convert-a-rapidweaver-photo-album-into-a-prettyphoto-lightbox-gallery/

http://www.joshlockhart.com/index.php/tutorials/article/flex-how-to-use-the-built-in-prettyphoto-lightbox-styed-text-page/

http://www.joshlockhart.com/index.php/tutorials/article/flex-how-to-use-the-built-in-prettyphoto-lightbox-html-page/

Best, Josh”

To which my reply was:

Josh, many thanks for this. I've watched your tutorials and found them really helpful in getting Mediabox running, and actually, it was from these tutorials that I learned about PrettyPhoto. Trouble is, I'm such a novice that I still haven't figured out how to get it working - I'm sorry to say that I'm not sure where to put the code, except partly by trial and error. Your theme Flex, with the built-in jQuery javascript library is a great solution I think. Hmm, maybe I should try it... Oh, by the way, I really like your Silk theme too. Are you planning to add any of the extra 'flexibility' of Flex to it? That would be great. BW Miki

Look. I know nobody cares, but I feel better, okay?

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Tags: lightbox, mediabox, rapidweaver, software

I want to put my stuff online in an easily navigable and attractive way for as many people to see as would like to. So this site is built with Rapidweaver and its excellent range of 3rd party plugins. It’s standards compliant  and I like the ease of use so I can throw something together quickly. I’ve just added Mediabox, as I recently blogged. Although I haven’t done comprehensive testing it seems to work fine on both PC’s and Macs and in all browsers.

All that is except for Internet Explorer 8, which seems to break on the video pages that contain the Mediabox code. Why is that? I’m not going waste my time trying to figure it out just now, as it works on everything else. So I urge all you IE users out there to do yourselves a favour and switch to Firefox. Not for my sake you understand. It’s just better. More stuff works on it. It’s as simple as that.

UPDATE 4 September 2008: Working now in IE8 and IE7 hopefully

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Tags: rapidweaver, video, software, web