Month: July 2005

Tuesday July 19th 2005: 6:00pm – Attend Strata AGM at Bowls Club. Sixty-one people are needed for Quorum, sixteen turn up. AGM re-scheduled for one week hence. While idly sitting around waiting for forty-five extra people to turn up overhear mention of ‘Sylvester McCoy’ on radio, prompting memory to recall that some kind of Doctor Who bandwagon was meant to roll into town some time soon, featuring some of the surviving Doctors. Make mental note to look this up.

Wednesday July 20th 2005: 4:08pm – Look up Doctor Who bandwagon on internet. Discover it rolls into town for one show only on July 21st. Swear profusely and get depressed.

Wednesday July 20th 2005: 4:11pm – Shake off depression and decide to see if any tickets are still available. Tickets appear to still be available. Dig out credit card.

Wednesday July 20th 2005: 4:12pm – In course of ordering tickets discover bandwagon is hosted by Tim Ferguson. Swear profusely.

Wednesday July 20th 2005: 4:14pm – Discover ticket purchases require online registration with BOCS. Curse whoever set up such a stupid system and generally fume.

Wednesday July 20th 2005: 4:15pm – Cease fuming. Backtrack through BOCS site to find booking phone numbers.

Wednesday July 20th 2005: 4:18pm – Call toll free booking number. Can’t be accessed by office phone. Put this down to interference by the Illuminati.

Wednesday July 20th 2005: 4:19pm – Call normal number. Wait as phone rings and rings and rings.

Wednesday July 20th 2005: 4:20pm – Automated system kicks just as I’m about to hang up. Tells me to hold for an operator. Immediately puts me through to an operator. What kind of lunatic designed this system?

Wednesday July 20th 2005: 4:21pm – Order ticket. First and hopefully last time to spend $82.00 for something involving Tim Ferguson.

To be continued…

Ah, talk about your classics! Vampires, Gallifreyan history, linguistic changes, post technological decay, ridiculous eye makeup and Adric almost dies. What more could you ask for?

Episodes until Adric (and a few million dinosaurs) die a messy messy death – 34 and counting! 🙂

(PS: Helen and Ali – work is crazy at the moment but I’ll do my best to email this week.)

Apparently the Breakfast Show on radio station PMFM 92.9*Consisting of the same highly successful “two guys one girl mindlessly telling each other fart jokes and laughing hysterically” formula as every other commercial radio station breakfast show. is paying people 92 cents to switch over and listen to it.

They’re massively overvaluing their content if you ask me.

Apparently channel 9’s Comedy Inc*Which chiefly consists of the same tired old, mindless TV parodies that have passed for cutting edge humour on Australian TV ever since Fast Forward started doing it circa 1987. did a ‘skit’ last week suggesting that Missy Higgins (and her music) is nothing but a rip-off of Alanis Morrisette (and her music).

Comparing said artists (and their said music) shows that this is in fact highly accurate – insofar as they are both females of the species Homo Sapiens sapiens and they both sing.

One of our clients has gone to a third party company for a redesign of their site. Fair enough, their old one is looking pretty clunky these days and badly in need of recoding. But while the Graphic Designers have done a very good job creating a unified and attractive look for the site, the *ahem* “Web Designers” who carved it up have created an absolute monstrosity. Tables within tables within tables, an index page that consists of a Flash movie inside a table (just great for search engines that!), graphical headers with empty alt tags (the vision impaired? We don’t want no stinking vision impaired people on our site!), faulty doctypes, nary a meta tag to be seen, header tags either completely unused or scattered willy-nilly across the pages with gay abandon and no concern for proper hierarchy, paragraph breaks implemented with double BR tags – the list just goes on and on. If someone presented me with HTML like this as anything but a joke, I’d shoot them.

360id are undoubtedly good graphical designers, but if they’ve even ever heard of web standards it appears that they want no truck with them. Someone seriously needs to head down there with a copy of Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards and beat a few people around the head with it until they come to their senses.

(PS: In these, the waning days of our civilisation, nothing is too ridiculous to be taken seriously, so I had probably better state that the above is intended as a humourous expression of annoyance and I do not advocate or encourage beating anyone – at 360id or elsewhere – around the head with a copy of Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards, or any other book for that matter.)

(PPS: Some may attribute this diatribe to sour grapes over another company getting one of our clients – since we’ll still be providing a good chunk of their site functionality this is at best a minor factor in my disgruntlement. The major factor is that anyone could write code as antiquated as this in this day and age is a notion that deeply offends me.)

So much for getting a good night’s sleep.

I firmly believe that it’s only morally justifiable to kill another human being in direct defence of oneself or others – but if someone slipped me a gun and a list of the people who planted those bombs I’d find it very difficult not to put a bullet through each of their collective heads. People like that don’t deserve to share the planet with the rest of us.

You know it’s times like this it would be good to have a girlfriend. When appalling terrorist attacks and natural disasters and the like make it seem like the whole world is merrily proceeding to hell in a handbasket, it would be nice to snuggle up with someone who makes you feel that maybe it’s not all so bad after all. Oh well, a long shower is almost as good as a hug in any case, and hot water bills are covered in my strata fees.

I’m sitting here in the office, slowly freezing to death.

I don’t know why it’s so cold in here. I mean it’s cold outside, sure, Perth is having a real icy snap*Icy for Perth that is, which means nights down around 0