Archives: Notes

  • My favourite travel story is really pretty simple and happened the only time I’ve visited Boston.

    After arriving I decided to go for a walk as dusk fell. Within five minutes I saw another man jaywalking through a roundabout. 

    A car honked and in the broadest New England accent I’ve ever heard the man yelled “Hey, I’m walkin’ here”. It was just like in the movies. 

    My Bostonian friends hate this story. 

  • My partner is watching a lecture series about the American war of independence and I’m finding it really disconcerting because the lecturer looks like (and sounds slightly like) Dr Phil.

  • In reply to: this post

    As part of my cooking YouTube adventures, I’ve been watching the Fellow channel a fair bit. The main effect this is having is I say bish bash bosh a lot during meal prep now.

  • Breaking: A word often used at the start of a sentence to try and make it seem more interesting than it actually is.

  • A single paragraph in an email I sent today included both “woefully inadequate” and the word “frankly”. I could feel the boomer vibes coming off me as I wrote it.

    In my defence, it was to the bank who have deprecated their internet banking in favour of an app. 

  • In reply to: this post

    The Pulp concert was a really good the rock and the roll gig, a really good set list.

    Half way through the clouds cleared just as the moon was at peak eclipse over the Myer Music Bowl’s canopy.

    I’ve put together a playlist of the set.

  • The checkout flow for paying for VA flights via PayID is really nicely done.

    For local fairs avoiding a surcharge isn’t a huge saving but, if anything, it’s lower friction than finding your wallet, getting out a credit card so why not save a few bucks.

  • As an apparently capable person, the number of times it gets to two o’clock (or later) and I realise that the reason I’m hungry is because I haven’t had lunch is truly alarming.

  • I’ll take Reply Guys for one hundred dollars, thanks Alex.

  • I’m getting the impression that every middle aged person in Melbourne will be at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl for Pulp tonight.

  • I’ve just noticed that the lens cleaner that came with my glasses warns “avoid contact with eyes, not for use with contact lenses”.

    Every warning tells a story, often of extreme stupidity.

  • Oh good, Climate Town have released a new video overnight. That will be nice and depressing watching for this-evening. I’ll watch it before Shrinking so I have a palate cleanser.

  • Today’s web api that I wish existed:

    document.hasFocusIncludingAnyIframesButSecurityMagicEnforcedWithinTheScopesUsingThisData()

    Granted, it’s not a catchy name but I’d sure find it handy.

    I kind of need something like the visibility API but accounting for changing windows.

  • The doom machine is on fire today. Sometimes I miss the days of dial-up when the internet was intermittent.

  • Rain: falling gently on to the tin roof. 

    Cat: eagerly snuggling up and purring beside me

    Me: struggling to stay awake after a big long walk 

    Actually me: not really bothering with the struggle, honestly. 

  • Twenty years later and they’re still, on occasion, referred to as “the Chaser boys”.

  • Obviously the reason LinkedIn have started doing games is because the want to bring people to the site each day to play a game and then go and check their feeds to read about the morning routines of self proclaimed global thought leaders.

    Ironically I think I’m reading my feed less because I’ve been to the site so why would I go there again.

  • Watching a slow, middle aged and slightly overweight cat try and catch a bird is always amusing. Much more so when there is an audible thump as the cat runs in to the window.

    She then had a lie down in front of the window as if to say “I meant that, that was totally planned. I knew the window was there all along.”

  • We need an emoji for meta joke about people not getting the joke.

  • Ring door bell:

    • $200
    • Requires internet to ring your bell
    • Privacy nightmare

    Peep hole viewer

    • $19.95
  • Our city council provides the opportunity for rate payers to pay in a lump sum rather than quarterly. For this option they offer a generous discount of 0.00%.

    Who would do this?!

  • Stale ticket bots should never close tickets, instead they should email the maintainer at exponentially decreasing intervals demanding a response. The person who opened the ticket should never see these notifications.

    I will die on this hill.

  • What is wrong with people?!, humans hitting the horn at traffic lights before it’s physically possible for a car to start moving edition.

    It’s probably a good thing I don’t drive, I think I’d sit there until the light turned very yellow before taking off so they had to wait for the next green light.

    At least until the first such human came at me with a tire iron.

  • Whoops, hung up on the blood bank.

    They do that thing that spammers do of having the computer dial the number and leaving you with silence when you answer.

    If it quacks like a duck, I’m going to treat it as a duck.

  • Town Hall station smells really musty.

  • Me, hanging a sheet in such a way that the cat can get both sun and a linen cubby: I am not owned by this creature.

  • The average Australian produces 22.4 kilograms of e-waste a year…

    I’m pretty tech savvy and just can’t figure out how someone would generate so much waste. We go through a few batteries and that’s about it typically.

  • A bill to amend the Spam Act 2003 to require unsubscribe links on after purchase/attendance/looking at a thing for a few milliseconds surveys because even though they’re technically transactional they’re about as welcome as an email pointing out relevant content to a blog post you wrote ten years ago that you might want to include as a link and related issues.

  • After a minor upgrade to macOS Sequoia last week it has been prompting me for my password daily, up from weekly, to re-enable Touch ID to unlock it. 

    I’ve cleaned the sensor and removed and resaved my fingerprints but neither worked. 

    Any suggestions? 

  • As best I can tell, the only way to prevent Apple Music automatically opening when connecting headphones is to delete Music.app.

    Bravo, excellent own goal there Apple.

  • Last night I rewatched the original West End production of Sam Mendes’ 1993 Cabaret revival.

    For me, the Mendes version will always be the canonical version because I saw a Sydney production of it with Tina Arena as Sally and Toby Allen as the Emcee. Nadine Garner and Henri Szeps were in supporting roles. It was as simply an amazing cast.

    I hadn’t watched it for a couple of years and last night it was different.

    After the last twelve months in the US it felt more like a a warning for the future than a reflection of past events.

    It rang true for the ICE raids and kidnappings of anyone with a little colour in their skin. Particularly the Herr Schultz line “…but I’m a German. A German.”

    It rang true for all the anti-trans & LGBTQIA+ sentiment. The Emcee ends up in a concentration camp at the end and has a pink triangle stamped on his clothing.

    Twelve months. It’s only twelve months since he got back in the white house.

  • Ugh, Apple is showing notification bubbles on both my phone and my laptop for the major OS updates with the UI that has been universally canned. Great work because now I can’t tell if there’s a security update to install.

  • In reply to: this post

    The time I tweeted “It’s on. Rolling coverage: https://bit.ly/abc_news #libspill” during the short period when both Rickrolling and Australian governments imploding during their first term were popular.

  • In reply to: this post

    Some references I’m seeing out of the corner of my eye that I haven’t thought of/seen for a while:

    • selectivizr
    • IE8
    • Boxcutters
    • Media Temple
    • #qanda
    • WordPress 3.3
    • Australian Idol
    • Bob Earth – I miss that guys social media presence
    • The word Webmaster
    • ABC 2
    • CJ Craig
  • In the process of deleting 21,693 tweets using Cyd, thanks to Ben Buchanan for the recommendation.

    The vast majority are on my site in the notes section.

  • I’ve been getting in to cooking YouTube recently in the hope of picking up technique rather than recipes. 

    A recent video (the first I’d watched on the channel) pointed out that soaking chopped onion is a great way to get rid of the excessive, their word, onion flavour. 

    I have never smashed the “never recommend this channel” button so quickly. 

  • In reply to: this post

    I feel terrible for the staff at the Adelaide Festival, they’ve been working solidly on the event for twelve months (possibly longer for some shows) only for the board to ruin the reputation of the festival at the eleventh hour.

    If you do go to an event at this year’s AF please remember that the people you see producing the shows are probably devastated.

    None of the people you see front-of-house were involved… most of them are not even on payroll yet.

  • In reply to: this post

    The new Adelaide Festival Board has now made an unambiguous apology to Randa Abdel-Fattah: “We apologise to Dr Abdel-Fattah unreservedly for the harm the Adelaide Festival Corporation has caused her.”

    They’ve removed the previous board’s statement from the site. I’d have been transparent and kept it with a notice directing readers to the newer statement but there’s no perfect decision here.

  • The Maribyrnong River swans are back with a family. This year with four cygnets, up from three last year. We saw mum and dad taking the kids for a swim down the river in the final stages of dusk last night.

    I tried to get a picture but was too far away so it looked like the photo of the Loch Ness Monster.

  • More news outlets need to report that the abusive Grok images are by design. It was developed to counter other AI systems being “too woke” according to Musk. He has said as much many many times.

  • On the cancellation of the Adelaide Writers’ Week, the board says “We also apologise to Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah for how the decision was represented”.

    Which is very different to the board apologising for the decision itself and completely fails to acknowledge the board’s fuck up.

  • curl -I what terrible things have happened overnight do i even want to know dot com

    HTTP/2 301
    Location: https://www.abc.net.au/news

  • Sure, there’s about an acre of floor space, a cat bed and a cushioned chair to choose from but, sure, let’s risk getting crushed under a caster wheel of the very heavy desk chair.

    Idiot creature.

  • The brand new canvas awning we had installed upstairs has been great this week. Today it’s in the up position due to the wind. I can hear the wind alarms going off at the Docks so I think it’s a wise but unwelcome decision.

  • In reply to: this post

    Guess what?! It’s just a tunnel. The stations look nice enough but more could have been done to make it easier to differentiate them at a glance.

  • In reply to: this post

    On the way home I’ll make my first trip through the Metro tunnel, I predict it will be just like all the other tunnels I’ve traveled through.

  • I’m heading in to town to donate plasma for the first time. When they changed the rules for homos I’d just had a vaccine so I needed to wait and then forgot about it. I’m a little excited.

  • In reply to: this post

    I know it’s either a lack of or inadequate training and not the fault of the casual worker working on Christmas Eve.

  • ”Barista” at cafe I’m only going to because the regular one is closed: Are you enjoying your coffee?

    Brain: Honestly I think it would be nicer if you’d boiled the dirt from a plumber’s boots to a temperature that would melt steel.

    Me: Yes thank you. Merry Christmas.