the mighty magpie

This is my mate Harry. I meet him on the way home sometimes. Sometimes he surprises me, but tonight I saw him ‘interacting’ with someone ahead of me, so I was ready – even had time to get the iPhone out and ready in movie mode!

I love magpies. The football team and the birds! Magpies are so gutsy – I mean I’m hundreds of times his size, but I’m invading his home and all he’s thinking about is the missus and the kids. You really can’t blame him for doing what the little voices in his head are telling him. Anyone who’s had chooks in their backyard can’t really be afraid of a bird.

… and look at that second effort! he’s probably wearing a number 8

bear’s weedy bastard twin

Bear Grylls just posted a message to twitter about the trailer to his new season of Man v Wild. I like Bear, the show gets a bit monotonous and I wish he wouldn’t kill animals when he clearly doesn’t need to, but this latest trailer moved him into far more ridiculous territory. As I watched the unconvincing CGI of him commando rolling across an imaginary landscape, I was getting a memory of someone else. When he turned toward the camera in one of the final frames, it clicked! He is the spitting image of Arnold Rimmer!

separated at birth

Even better, he is Arnold Rimmer’s wet dream of how he wishes he could be! I’ll never be able to look at Bear the same way again!

father and son

Lance Armstrong’s steely glare might not be seen on Le Tour again, but any aspiring cyclists should beware that he’s passed it on to someone else…

Lance and Max Armstrong

Saw this photo (right) of Lance and his son Max on the Livestrong website, and was immediately reminded of the celebrated Armstrong ‘look’*. Peas in a pod eh?

the green fisherman…

Really saddens me to see recent stories regarding new marine parks and sanctuaries lead to ill informed, populist, knee jerk responses from fellow fishermen.

Firstly: conservationists, or ‘greenies’, the word so many fishermen spit out without any clue as to the meaning. What do greenies want? In this case, they want better living conditions for fish species so that those species may prosper and their environment improve. So, what? are all these angry fishermen against that? I don’t think so… when are you all going to realise, YOU ARE ON THE SAME SIDE. Continue reading “the green fisherman…”

le tour crashes for sbs

I love SBS, Australia’s second ‘public’ broadcaster. I have thoroughly enjoyed watching the World Cup, and am now settling into enjoy the Tour de France.
During the World Cup, I’ve found the free ESPN Soccernet 2010 iPhone App just brilliant. It does what you need, scores, reviews, stats… an exceptional example of a sport app. So when the Tour de France rolled around, I thought there’d be some great free app that I could use to keep track of the big event…

I have to admit, I was a little surprised to find hardly anything, however, the only app that looked promising came from our own SBS – they do such a great job of the TV coverage and website, that I thought the app was bound to be good too. There was a free one to try and a paid version if you feel the need for extra features… at least that’s the way these things usually work, isn’t it?

The disappointment starts…

The free app seems to be nothing more than a ‘rich’ ad. I can’t get anything useful out of it. Every screen is dominated by a huge ad, which doesn’t matter that much given that the app doesn’t do anything anyway! This is wrong, I don’t pay for many apps, but free apps aren’t supposed to be useless, they can provide a cut down experience, but they’ve still gotta work!

OK, so maybe the paid app is better. Ouch!! $5.99! it’s going to have to be a LOT better, might read the reviews first… Uh Oh, those are not positive reviews. Seems like SBS have a problem on their hands. I have never seen such a low rating on a ‘serious’ app before, so far they have 1 positive rating out of 51. Stay away from this app! To be fair, SBS is not the developer, it’s some dodgy crowd called Participant Sports who seem to have no website – both the developer and support link lead to some facebook page that I can’t even load. How can Apple let something like this go by?

I’ve just been on a team that developed an iPhone app, so I have some insight into just how complicated it can be – not the app itself, but the whole back end supply of feeds and resources. So, I’m not going to harshly judge, but they are going to need to pull a massive rabbit out of the hat to get the whole thing working and save face. It’s a disaster!

I’m thinking the rabbit might need to look like: a refund to all paid users, a real fix for the app, drop the paid app and release the full app for free, and all of this in no more than two days. Not asking too much really 😉

Driven to distraction…

I work for a large university. My workload is split about 48% support, 48% production and 4% design. Needless to say, my Graphic Design skills are rusty. It’s the sort of thing you really have to do regularly or it just slips.

Anyway, recently, I had two new site designs to work on. Nothing ground breaking or particularly difficult, but the requirement was a bit more than the same old university template driven site. I tried. I tried again… and again! Those ‘rusty’ skills seemed to have seized up altogether, I had designer’s block!!

You can laugh, but I even had nightmares about not being able to get the computer to do what I wanted it to. I sort of knew the problem – my workplace is an IT production environment, not a design studio. It’s full of noise and clutter, devoid of character and cadence, it’s boring and grey, not colourful and inspirational. On top of that, the flow of work never stops! Emails, tweets, IMs, newsfeeds – there were too many distractions. Anyway, after the bad dreams the other night, I decided on an action plan.

  1. Clear my desk of clutter
  2. Tune out from the background noise
  3. Avoid electronic distractions

As it happened, it was surprisingly easy. Clearing the desk – well, that’s straightforward. Tuning out – a pair of headphones and the iPod. Electronic distractions – a little trickier, after all, I use the computer to do the work, I can’t very well turn that off!

What I did was create a new user account. I called it ‘Designer’, and I turned off everything – no email, no IM, no bookmarks – not even a desktop pic! Just Photoshop and Illustrator in my dock and a shared folder to move files to and from my main account. Using this account is like stepping into a private office, I get incredible amounts of work done without the distractions. When I need to, I just switch back. The change has been so dramatic that yesterday, having made huge progress on my design tasks, I was looking forward to coming to work for the first time in days.

So, there you have it. My #1 tip for getting things done. Create a purpose built account and use it to escape! It got me past my designer’s block 🙂

Code like it’s 1995!

Remember those sites that used to proudly pronounce that they were ‘Best viewed in Netscape 4 or above’, a practice we thankfully don’t see much of any more?
Well, today I had occasion to look something up on the Melbourne Bike Share website, and not being sure of the URL I ran it by Google with the following amusing result…


So, the service is “proudly supported by: This site is optimised for Internet Explorer 7.0 or newer…”, hmmm, presumably the letter B and the number 7 had a hand in it too!

Seriously though, it’s simply a warning for users of that outdated box of hammers that is IE6 to get with the program and upgrade. However, if it’s only meant for them, why are they broadcasting it to the world? Two words guys: Conditional Comments!

But why does it show up in the Google results this way? Because the supporters are represented by images WITH NO ALT TEXT! I’m sure they’d be delighted to know that!

spanked by the Germans

Like every other Aussie with a passing interest in the world cup, I vaguely hoped that the match against Germany would result in some national pride – even if a win was out of the question! Alas, a drubbing at the hands of an in form outfit. Blame is being apportioned to various parties, but in the end, they were just way too good and the hapless socceroos could not contain them.

Of course there are stats everywhere about the games and who did what, but I was astonished to find this graphic in the (excellent) ESPN iPhone App. It’s a map of where each player’s average position was on the field. Germany, as you can clearly see, were a picture of composure and organisation.

Germany average position map
Australia’s map, on the other hand, vaguely reminds me of the distribution pattern of chickens when you throw food on the ground.

Australian average position map
I really don’t know what it all means, but it’s a starkly clear difference, ain’t it?

trust google!

Now I’m confused. I’ve decided to switch to Chrome as my primary browser – I’ll still use Firefox as my main development browser but all the diagnostic tools I use do slow it down a bit, so I’m after something a bit snappier for general browsing. But today when I tried to load Gmail, I get this:

Chrome doesn't trust Google's security certificate!

Now, this may turn out to be some sort of anomoly, but it makes a nice screen grab 🙂

the inefficiency filter

It’s like there’s some sort of inefficiency filter built into microsoft products! Here I am frittering away my afternoon with html display differences between Outlook 2004 and Outlook 2007. I can’t reproduce the problems so I ask my client to send a screengrab… it arrives: 9.7Mb! a screengrab!!

Just out of curiosity, I took a screengrab of the screengrab, to see what file size the mac produced… 700kb. That’s a bit more sensible! Both are lossless formats (tif vs. png), so what’s the story? Is this the default format for windoze screengrabs? Do they write rows of invisible data into the file format just to get it up to that ridiculous size… some sort of inflation algorithm!?

microsoft larfs

Having kicked off a mac vs. pc flame war on work’s IT mailing list this morning, I was delighted to see the following irony play out on screen. As the good folk debated the weight of downloads and updates, Microsoft AutoUpdate launched and proceeded to tell me I needed 150Mb. of sealing wax to plug a few holes. Half way through, I get this priceless message…

Thank you Microsoft 🙂

taking back the tubes

A short while ago, I posted about my frustration with imrworldwide.com, a site that seemed to be slowing my browsing experience.

After a little investigation, I realised that this was no more than a market research company’s “spyware”, javascripts that serve no purpose other than to track and report on my movements. They certainly don’t add to my browsing experience. So, I asked the question at work: “how do I block these things?”, I’d tried to find a neat firefox plugin, but they were all a bit feature rich for my needs. I just wanted a block. Then I was reminded by the folk at work of the hosts file – a wonderful little file that I could edit to effectively short-circuit the usual DNS lookup process. Not only that, but I was pointed to this site, which provided a huge ready made list of undesirable urls that you could just paste in and enjoy never seeing again! You need to know what you’re doing – otherwise you risk breaking your connection to the internet, but it’s not terribly difficult.

OK, so it might be a little bit ‘tinfoil hat’, but it seems to be working nicely and now when I visit large commercial sites, they load faster and they don’t snoop on my movements. Instead of nauseating banner ads about losing weight and dental work, I get nice empty space. Combined with the FlashBlocker plugin the effect is really quite excellent!