Wyrmlog

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?) 🙂

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…

Client: We’re holding the ceremony on the beach, so we’ll need a manta ray, or small shark of some kind.

Wedding Planner: You what?

Client: Well we can’t use a koi, they’re not salt water fish.

Wedding Planner: A koi?

Client: To symbolise the death of our single lives.

Wedding Planner: Is this a… Japanese thing?

Client: No.

Well, call me naive but I only just figured out that the themes to all three CSI series are by the Who. I mean Who Are You for the original CSI is pretty obvious, but it took an episode of The Simpsons*The one featuring the Who obviously to enlighten me about CSI: Miami (although I still have no idea what Who song it actually is – Magic Bus maybe? I dunno). Some poking around online revealed that the track with the really cool synth loop that starts CSI: New York is Baba O’Riley – although most people would probably call it Teenage Wasteland. So there you go.

Changing subject entirely, last week we had the Anzac Day long weekend. Rather than being content with merely the mandated three days off work I opted for four and a half instead – although I didn’t really enjoy them very much.

On the Friday morning I woke up feeling awful with some kind of flu/death cold, but decided it wouldn’t look good if I called in sick on the Friday before a long weekend and so dragged myself into the office for apperance’s sake. I managed to last until just after 12:00, at which point I decided that if I was going to die I’d rather do it at home, and left. On the Saturday I still felt pretty bad, but took it easy and by the evening was thankfully feeling a lot better.

On Sunday I was fine. So fine in fact that I decided to do what I’ve been saying I’ll do for the last decade or so and go to the Anzac Day dawn service. This decision was no doubt influcenced by the fact that rather than get up at 3:00am and catch a train/bus into the main service at the State War Memorial in King’s Park I could get up at 4:30am and amble down to the service at the local War Memorial in Haliday Park. So I got my clothes all sorted and laid out, and set my alarm for the pre-dawn hours.

The first sign of trouble with this plan occured at about 1:00am when I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I dozed fitfully for the next three and half hours and by the time my alarm went off was feeling absolutely exhausted and ill. So I reluctantly decided to skip the service, and rolled over to try and get back to sleep.

This didn’t work. I finally dragged myself out of bed with a pounding headache about 8:00am. By 9:00am it had become clear that it wasn’t just an ordinary headche, it was a migraine of epic proportions. So I took what analgesics I had in the house and went back to bed.

Usually my migraines progress as follows…

1. Get migraine.
2. Take whatever pain killers I can scrape together out of the medicine cabinet and go to bed.
3. Sleep for four or five hours.
4. Wake up feeling totally drained and spaced out, but with migraine gone.

This migraine however went…

1. Get migraine.
2. Take whatever pain killers I can scrape together out of the medicine cabinet and go to bed.
3. Totally fail to fall asleep thanks to constant pounding pain in head and neck.
4. Lie in bed for hours wishing I was dead.

Possibly contributing to my inability to sleep were the various groups of hoons downstairs holding Anzac Day parties. Actually, they probably weren’t so much Anzac Day parties as “we’ve got a day off work so let’s invite everyone we know around to get drunk and make noise” parties. They certainly suceeded on the last point. There seemed to be at least two parties, one of which favoured “Best of the 80’s” CDs and the other which favoured rap – favouring rap in fact to the point where they cranked their stereo right up in a friendly attempt to completely drown out the 80’s music. The 80’s party joined in the game by cranking their stereo up to drown out the rap, prompting the rap party to retaliate in kind. So my prolonged migraine experience was enhanced by the Eminen vs Fergal Sharkey mix of Cleaning out my Closet.

Eventually (after dragging myself out of bed and doing some research online) I called up the folks and begged them to bring me round some ibuprofen (in a cruel twist I’d normally have ibuprofen on hand but had run out a few days before). Thankfully they did so, and it damped down the pain to the point where I was able to actually sleep a bit. The migraine (and the parties) finally gave up the ghost about 1:00am, and I thankfully fell into a decent slumber for the first time in 24 hours.

WORST ANZAC DAY EVER!*Well, obviously the original was pretty bad for the ANZACs and the Turks, but I mean worst I’ve ever had to put up with.

Needless to say I didn’t go to work on Tuesday. Sleep deprivation and general post-migraine vaugeness are not really conducive to successful website programming 🙂

(I felt great on Wednesday though – you don’t realise how wonderful it feels to be out in the sun and fresh, cold air with clear vision and a clear head until you’ve spent a couple of days without them).

Some other things worth mentioning – the repeats of Dr Who on the ABC have reached the “Key to Time” season. This is where the Doctor goes bashing around the cosmos collecting the six parts of the said key which are disguised as various mundane objects scattered throughout the space time continuum. It only occured to me the other day that this is exactly where Douglas Adams got the idea for the scattering of the Wikkit Gate in Life the Universe and Everything (if anyone doubts this insight it should be pointed out that Adams was a script editor for Dr Who at this point, and in fact penned the second story in the Key to Time sequence The Pirate Planet). This shouldn’t actually come as much of a surprise, after all Dirk Gently’s Hollistic Detective Agency recycles huge chunks of the never finished Dr Who story Shada (Professor Chronotis was originally meant to be a retired Time Lord, and even in the finished novel his time machine is still quite obviously a TARDIS :).

Also (while on the subject of TV science fiction) Channel 7 have finally got around to screening Stargate: Atlantis. Naturally they’re screening it at an ungodly hour of the night, so I’ve been taping it – a system that has been working quite well except for the one time when I somehow managed to tape the ABC instead and ended up with a reality TV show about yuppie Americans being dumped in remote third world countries and freaking out because there’s nowhere to plug in their hair curlers – which would have been quite amusing except I wanted Stargate damnit!

Anyway I’m really enjoying it. As much as I enjoyed the original Stargate SG1 you have to admit that the series really is past it now. The galaxy has been pretty much explored, we pretty much know everything that’s out there, we know all about the Goa’uld and pretty much have the technology to keep them at bay, we know all the characters inside out and just about all the stories that can be told have been told. Whereas in Atlantis you’ve got a small team of new people with very limited resources stranded on the other side of the universe in an alien galaxy facing an enemy just as bad (if not worse) as the Goa’uld and that we know almost nothing about. It’s a much more risky situation and allows for some great story telling again.

So yeah, I’m a big fan of Atlantis. Some more of the reasons being…

• The Wraith. Take an elf from the Lord of The Rings movies, soak him in bleach for a few days, give him fangs and some facial hair, and then dress him in one of those trenchcoats the bad guys wore in Dark City. Oh, and make him hiss a lot. The perfect cool villain or what?
• McKay. It’s great to have a member of the team who’s a real pain in the backside. McKay is a damn smart scientist/engineer, but he’s also arrogant, egotistical, a complainer, a bit of a coward, and doesn’t suffer fools (ie: just about everyone else in his opinion) at all*Hmmm, reminds me of me 🙂. He’s hilarious! And he’s Canadian, which brings us to the next point…
• The Atlantis mission is international. There are scientists and military from dozens of countries involved and so you can tell who’s who they all wear flag patches on their shoulders. You can entertain yourself for hours*Well, OK, a few minutes at most. picking out and identifying the flags on all the extras. Like that guy in the Jumper with McKay when they open up the roof for the first time – he’s Czeck! I know because I looked up the flag he was wearing! Yes! I’m such a geek! 🙂
• Doctor Beckett. He’s Scottish and has an entertaining accent. One of those fast sort of Ewan McGregor clackety-clackety Scottish accents that are really fun to listen to and then try to imitate badly. And what’s more he wears the cross of St Andrew on his shoulder, not the Union Jack, which*I am of vague Scottish descent and therefore like every other non-Scottish person of vague Scottish descent around the globe am a fanatical Scottish Nationalist on principle, except where it might have to involve actually doing or indeed knowing anything about the issue of Scottish independance. Hooray Bannockburn! Boo Culloden! Three cheers for Bonnie Prince Charlie! Ect! 😀 is great to see. Hopefully the English members of the mission wear the cross of St George.
• The new Stargate. The blue lighting and glowing star-dots are great. Orange lights and engraved constellations are so 1990’s! 🙂
• Torri Higginson 😉

Also now on at a riduculous time of night is Battlestar Galactica (I said they were going to do that), so I’m taping it as well. I am almost ridiculously addicted to that show – I’m just compelled to find out what happens next. It’s just so damn cool!

(Please insert here about ten paragraphs of fannish ranting about why Galactica is about the best sci-fi on TV at the moment. Thank you.)

One of the small, yet slightly interesting things I’ve noticed about the series is that the 12 Colonies seem to be named after the 12 signs of the Zodiac. I don’t know if this is something they’ve adopted from the original series but so far we’ve had mention of Caprica (sorry, that should be Cylon Occupied Caprica ;-), Sagittar, Gemenon and Picon. Presumably we’ll eventually hear from Aquon, Tauron, Leonar, Cancon, Aeron, Virgar, Libron and Scorpus – or something like that 🙂

OK, I’ve ranted on enough. Got to cook lunch (my oven is finally online! Hooray!) then go and buy some antihistamines before I devolve into a picanthropus*Obligatory Stargate joke. or something 🙂

Why should test data be boring? I say make it as interesting as possible! For instance (from some work I was doing today)…

Far more interesting than fields full of “Test” 🙂

Well, there we go. Everyone’s favourite rodent serenader has won the Papal election. Cardinal Ratzinger (sorry, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI) is now Pope with all the mystical theological powers that position entails – which may or may not include the ability to crack walnuts with his teeth.

Judging by the photos in all the papers he does quite look the role – like someone’s jolly and good natured grandfather, or maybe a beardless Santa Claus. Obviously the Cardinals decided to hark back to all those medieval Popes who enjoyed a good meal, as opposed to the rather skinny and ascetic John Paul. Appearances aside however he’s apparently a staunch conservative, so we’ll just have to see if he’ll end up moving the Catholic Church forwards, backwards, or just keeps it running on the spot.

While I don’t know if he’ll be a good Pope, I do know one thing he’s good for – search engine hits. My ramblings about St Malachy and comments on what a great name Ratzinger is saw my visitor numbers jump from 13 on Tuesday to 314 yesterday. I’m quite pleased at the idea of 314 people looking for solid information about De Gloria Olivae and ending up reading my ill-informed rants, it’s probably done them all a world of good 🙂

Hmmm, I’ll have to check out what the Malachy pundits are saying about Ratzinger (sorry! His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI). They’ve had a couple of days, they should have found a weak and subjective link to olives by now. I would have been much more impressed if St Malachy had said something like De Muris Carmen, but that’s probably just me 🙂

Better go, I have work to do.

On the whole – in my experience – Real Estate agents are not the smartest people in the world. There were all those dramas with Josie (my property manager back at the Gables) for instance*She is apparently now a very big wheel in the state Real Estate Institute. As someone who lived under her “management” I find this terifying.. Or the ones with the people who took over when Rebecca got totally fed up with Josie’s incompetance (such as their reluctance to join the 20th century by accepting rent payment in any form except cash or cheque). Or the various issues with the people I bought this place from (like quoting the price $5,000 too low). Basically it seems as if people who can’t suceed in any other career gravitate towards property sales like a moth to a flame*You’ve hijacked my brain, Like a moth to a flame, If you don’t release me, I’ll leave just the same, Moth gonna fly, Moth gonna fly, Moth gonna fly….

My workday today did nothing to damage this opinion.

Case One: One of our real estate clients called us up with instructions to switch their email hosting over to their new, on-site mail server. On being asked why a small real estate office would need their own mail server, they informed us that sharing just one email address around the office was getting inconvenient. When asked why they didn’t talk to us (ie: the company that hosts their website and email) about this, they said that they talked to the people who service their office computers instead, because they’ve been dealing with them for years.

Cost we’d charge for setting up any number of new email addresses for them on their current hosting? Maybe $22 GST inclusive.

Cost of their new mail server? $20,000.

Ahem.

Case Two: A new client, setting up a real estate site with us wants to put pictures of food on it. Why? Because people won’t expect to see pictures of food on a real estate site, so it’ll make the site “memorable”.

He’s quite right, people don’t expect to see pictures of food on a real estate site. They expect to see pictures of real estate.

Honestly. These people are living in Bizzaro World.

Question 1: What do you think would be an appropriate time to play the Offspring with your stereo pumped up as loud as it will go?

1. 12:15 on a Saturday afternoon.
2. 12:15 on a Friday night/Saturday morning.
3. 12:15 on a Tuesday Night/Wednesday morning.

Question 2: When one of your neighbours knocks on your door to complain about the noise, what do you think would be an appropriate reaction?

1. Apologise and turn the music off.
2. Apologise and turn the music down.
3. Inform said neighbour (by yelling at the top of your lungs) that you have no respect for him because his girlfriend sold you “bush weed” and said it was hydro, threaten to beat him up, then change CDs to Marilyn Manson just to make a point.

If you answered 3 for both questions you may well be the guy living opposite my bedroom window!

It’s times like this I really wish I had an electromagnetic pulse cannon.

Well, it turns out John A. hasn’t killed off the forum, he’s just removed the link on the site. It’s still there when you know where to look. Which is good, for obvious reasons.

You know, when The Cure are being used to sell pet food*Love Cats being used in a cat food add, so it’s not quite as nuts as it seems. I mean, it’s not like Killing an Arab is selling horse feed or something., the end of the world can’t be far away.