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.
Archives: Notes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I’m trying to find a print edition of Roald Dahl’s العملاق الطيب or ذكاء ثعلب (The BFG or Fantastic Mr Fox, Arabic translations), probably the latter due to the babblement of made up words in the BFG. I’d settle for an e-book though.
It’s not easy to shop in a language you don’t understand in an alphabet you can’t recognise. I’ve tried Goodreads for some links and while some of them go to translations, it tends to be a random language rather than the one you are looking at.
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We’ve been watching The League of Gentlemen recently but last night we didn’t feel like watching a horremdy (like a dramedy but for horror). We needed nice, simple and a lot of heart.
Scrubs was perfect: we watched the first three episodes of season one and it was so nice. We’ve got DVDs of the first three series so get the original music too.
I think Bill Lawrence has got a bright future.
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SMS from “Coinbase” (yes, scare quotes) “Your login code is 123456. Wasn’t you? Reach us at 1800 SCAM.” I’ve never seen that approach before.
With all these scams, the money laundering and the well known price manipulation you’d almost think that operating in the crypto market was somehow a dodgy thing for dodgy people.
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It’s started: Bluesky have asked me to verify my age through Kids Web Services. They have a very smart looking web site.
Their privacy policy seems fine, I guess but includes that well worn line “we may modify this Privacy Policy at any time.” I understand that line is basically the privacy policy version of E&OE but what’s not clear is how they want me to verify my age.
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A question about CSS sub-grid, is it possible to do without
div.can-i-do-without-thisin this example?Hashtag peter learns css again after somehow becoming a backend developer over the course of the last ten years
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Wow, have I forgotten a lot of CSS over the last ten years.
I’m trying to remember to use logical properties, even though my site is only ever going to appear in English.
It seems odd that a shorthand equivalent of
margin,padding, etc doesn’t exist for setting all four directions logically. The originals only really work for one or two values logically. -
I know I am an old silly but were I running a bank and transitioning people to a new system, I’d:
- provide the exact name of the new app
- provide the new access details before rather than after the transition
- only do so after internet banking was available via the internet
I guess this is why I am not a product manager at a bank.
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The EBU allowing Israel to compete in next year’s Eurovision is so weak. I hope SBS joins the broadcasters pulling out in protest of the genocide.
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I think the quickest fix I saw pushed through was boring a hole in the paywall for Covid related articles, from memory that took less that 24 hours after the first case was discovered in Australia.
It had nothing to do with my team but I think at first it was a bit of a kludge:
if category == covid then leak. -
When I was at Farifax, I once whinged so much about ending up on smh.com.au via links on theage.com.au that we got a fix through the system in about a week just so I’d shut up about it.
People were actually very good about it. Once I pointed out that “I’ve subscribed to the Age, why would I try to log in to the SMH after hitting the paywall?” everyone was sold fairly quickly. It probably helped that it was peak 2020 at the time. News was pretty important to Victorians at the time.
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The ABC News website insists on showing me the Today in NSW section even though I’ve got all the things set to Melbourne. The sidebar shows local news correctly but not the main feed.
I hit the CDN endpoint ae9.equinix-mel.netarch.akamai.com so there are multiple ways for the national broadcaster to detect I am, maybe, possibly, not in NSW.
They can be such a Sydney media outlet sometimes, across the board.
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Having a milestone birthday this week has got me thinking about the last ten years.
Buying a home has got to be a highlight, that it was the place we’d been renting for ten years beforehand is gravy. We knew its sins going in but also that we loved living here in good ol’ 3011.
A lot of professional achievements. From memory, I had the first functional commit on the CMS re-platforming for Fairfax but if not, it was one of the first five or six. I sometimes worry that that will be the biggest project I ever work on but I thought I’d worked on big projects ten years ago so who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
These days I make regular decisions that effect a “try not to think about it” number of websites. But I also get to help other developers contribute code to these same sites. Often is the people who have been showing up for years, but sometimes it’s a new contributor who then becomes a regular contributor and, finally, an old hand.
