Archives: Notes

  • Skipping a conference you’ve traveled some distance to attend in order to binge watch several series of Taskmaster on their YouTube channel. Discuss.

  • International travel is high fiving a fellow traveler because you’ve made it to 9pm (9:17, to be precise) before going to bed.

  • In reply to: this post

    I do feel sorry for the person sitting next to the guy wearing two day old airplane clothes. I want to move away from me!

  • Time to recommence travel to WC Asia. I missed a connection after someone fell sick in Sydney and we needed to return to the gate. It can’t be helped and Singapore Airlines put me up in a very nice hotel so I don’t have to deal with any travel insurance claims.

  • Uber driver for the trip to the airport this morning had not adjusted their car’s clock. Cue mild panic.

  • Most of my luggage for WordCamp Asia in Mumbai is socks and jocks because I can remember how well my body coped last time I was in the tropics proper. Not. At. All. 

  • I’m getting a lot of “since when can I read a clock, Peter?!” vibes from the cat as she waits for dinner tonight.

  • Google Maps gets very confused with travelling inbound from Footscray on the Metro Tunnel. They always recommend catching an outbound train to Middle Footscray and changing to an inbound train that stops at Footscray. It’s been doing this for weeks. 

  • Something I miss now we’re in the streaming era is the clarity around when it’s ok to post spoilers. It’s especially difficult for Netflix when they drop the entire season at the same time. 

  • In this house we remember supermarkets and bottle shops are closed on Good Friday in odd numbered years only. Whoops.

  • I grew up with Harry Potter. It means a lot to me so I’m going to watch the new series. It doesn’t make me any less of an ally.

    Yes, it does. There’s no ambiguity, you are less of an ally.

    What you’re actually saying is “I’m an ally unless it inconveniences me”.

  • The show everyone has been telling us for years is really good is really good, Deadloch edition. 

  • We will never get along if you can read the headline “Complaints about foul smells skyrocket in Melbourne’s west” without making a fart joke.

  • 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.