Author: Purple Wyrm

General Complaints Department

Bringing out the curmudgeon in everyone.

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.

We’re on a Mission from W3C

If I’m the best CSS designer in Perth then God help us all.

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.)

Bastards!

Nothing good, nothing funny, just thoughts on the worst kind of scum the human race can produce.

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.

It’s the End of the World as we Know It

With the Howard Government in control of the Senate should we all move to New Zealand?

And today the Howard Government takes control of the Senate, giving them the ability to push whatever kinds of crazy legislation they want into law with no opposition whatsoever. Well done voters of Australia! They have of course pledged to use this power ‘responsibly’, but these days the promises of a federal politician are so devalued as to compare infavorably with the Ugandan Mpopo Bead.

So, if entries to this log suddenly cease it’s probably because I’ve been imprisioned for seditious blogging and impeaching the good name of the Great Leader (either that or been fired for looking at clients all funny once the unfair dismissal laws are overturned).

The non-sequitur of a thousand and one uses

Enhancing human to human conversation since 1934.

Recently an employee at Rebecca’s work bought a bankrupt Ugandan publishing company on Ebay. I think that this would be a truly fantastic thing to own, as it would act as the ultimate conversational aid. For example…

“Hi, nice to meet you. So, what do you do?”
“I own a bankrupt Ugandan publishing company.”

“Have you finished that report yet?”
“Sorry, I’ve been busy. I own a bankrupt Ugandan publishing company you know.”

“Sir, would you care to explain why you were doing 120 in a school zone?”
“I own a bankrupt Ugandan publishing company officer!”

“How does the defendant plead?”
“Your Honour, I own a bankrupt Ugandan publishing company!”

“I made $10,000 on the stock market last week!”
“Well I own a bankrupt Ugandan publishing company!”

It’s the non-sequitur of a thousand and one uses!

We need more of this on our TVs

C’mon! You just know it’d be a hit! The perfect way to revive the somewhat tired Survivor franchis…

Survivor Skaro - Outwit, Outplay, EXTERMINATE!!

C’mon! You just know it’d be a hit! The perfect way to revive the somewhat tired Survivor franchise…

THE THIRD INFERIOR BEING TO BE EXTERMINATED FROM SURVIVOR SKARO IS… PAUL. PAUL. THE TRIBE HAS SPOKEN. YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED!!! ZZZZZZZZZ!!!!

ARRRRRRGGHHHH!!!!!

YOU WILL RETURN TO YOUR HABITATION UNITS!

Don’t tell me people wouldn’t watch that! 🙂

On a completely different note, for some reason we’re getting a live feed of Triple J here in Perth. It’s broadcast from the eastern states so usually we get it delayed by two hours – but around about midday today it went off air for about two minutes then came back live. So it’s 4:10 in the afternoon and I’m listening to Super Request (which is meant to start at 6:00). Until I figured out what was going on I thought I’d been abducted by the Zeta Reticulans 😉

It makes you wonder how they’ll fix it. I can’t see how without either going off air for two hours, or replaying two hours of broadcast.

10 – Beat head against table: 20 – Goto 10:

Cookies are delicious delicacies.

A client phoned up yesterday complaining that when he entered his url into Google (yeah, like that’s what you’re supposed to do with it, but anyway) one of the links returned said it was from his site, but it instead brought up “an add” saying he should buy “GTP Cookies”. He was of the opinion that it wasn’t right for us to use his website to sell “our products” and wanted us to stop doing it immediately and “fix his site”.

The page in question? This one.

Apparently the ability to…

  1. Read the text on the screen in front of you.
  2. Comprehend English.

…is no longer a requirement for running your own business.

Sigh

PS: If you happen to be multi-lingual please take the time to click on the flags at the top of the Cookie page and view our ‘translations’ into other languages. They were done rather quickly via Babelfish and are hence rather amusing. The Portugese one in particular is supposed to be a riot (photoreceptor leather-strap anyone?) 🙂

Worry Worry

Let’s spread the paranoia around!

You know, I suspect there may be something wrong with my email.

I’ve actually suspected this for a while because… well before I say why I’d better explain why I haven’t said anything about it before which is basically because I’m terribly neurotic :). You see I’ve emailed a number of people, and not received any replies. Rather than say anything about this I’ve been sitting around trying to decide if…

  1. They’ve received my emails and have just been too busy to get around to writing a reply, which is perfectly reasonable.
  2. They’ve received my emails and have decided to ignore me :).
  3. They haven’t received my emails, and are sitting around wondering exactly the same things I’m wondering.

The problem is of course if it’s option a and I then write a follow up email saying “Did you get my last email? Why didn’t you reply? What’s wrong with you?!” I’ll be guilting people out who have perfectly legitimate reasons not have emailed me back – which I don’t want to do because sometimes it take me ages to reply and I would thus be making myself a hypocrite of the highest order. But on the other hand if it’s c they may well be sitting around wondering why I’ve decided to ignore them – which isn’t good either.

So I’m short circuiting the process (sort of) by putting my dilema in blog form. That way I know people will see it. If they come and read my blog that is. Hmmm.

Anyway I’ve got the next two weeks off from work so I should be blogging a bit more frequently, but before I go I’d just like to say that Attagirl by Bettie Serveert is a fantastic song, and you can download it all free and legal (along with Aluminum, Copper, Iron, and many others) from Playlist Mag’s downloads section. Go check it out, your ears demand it of you!

PS: The ABC seem to be randomly skipping Dr Who stories featuring the Daleks. With Day of the Daleks this was merely annoying – with Destiny of the Daleks it’s confusing, since there’s no explanation why the comparatively likable Mary Tam suddenly turned into the extremely annoying Lalla Ward. Mind you, at least they played Genesis of the Daleks (their new HQ in East Perth probably would have been stormed by irate Whovians if they hadn’t) and we do have K9’s unexplained voice change in The Creature from the Pit to distract us…

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