Archives: Notes

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Elsewhere in the talk I use the phrase up cache creek without a paddle which I am reasonably proud of.

That thing when you are writing a talk and find yourself asking “what’s the funniest transition to use for this joke?”

AC/DC playing Melbourne reminds me of the best concert I never went to. 

Last time they played Melbourne, they were at Docklands Stadium. As a concert stadium it has a nasty habit of letting all the sound go straight up out of the venue. 

We were living in North Melbourne at the time and the wind was just right for sending a perfect mix in to our living room. 

We threw open all the doors and just listened to the concert for about an hour or two. At the end of the show there was a huge guitar solo: we looked at each other and said “that crowd is going fucking wild right now, right?” “Yep”.

I miss that flat in North Melbourne for many reasons, acca dacca being one of them. 

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I can almost hear a few people saying “too soon”.

I’m a little sad that the Peekaboo Bug page no longer resolves (it redirects to the site’s home page). The content isn’t lost, it’s just another reason to be thankful to the Web Archive.

Youngs, don’t worry about it… but ask an old why you’d prefix a CSS property with an underscore or an asterisk if you want to be entertained some time.

Alternative headline: Liberal cabinet agrees to lose more seats to Teal independents.

As a democracy nerd, I’m enjoying Annabel Crabb’s Civic Duty on iView.

The first episode was basically a love letter to the independence of the AEC, describing them as beige as a term of endearment. It made me want to gift one to America. No division of a population will be perfect but it’s really nice not have gerrymandering as just a thing we live with.

Not since the days of Joh, anyway.

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They didn’t even have the guts to go with “LIVE: GG sacks PM, announces double dissolution election”.

The ABC is doing a live blog of events that occurred 50 years ago. “This live blog could have been an article.”

Turns out that organising a really self-indulgent milestone birthday party is a lot of fun. At the start of the year I wasn’t going to do anything…

Now, it’s an eight to ten hour me fest with the optional afternoon package.

Streak freezes are bullshit. You didn’t do the thing, you broke your streak.

LinkedIn is claiming I have a 62-day win streak for their six-by-six Sudoku but it’s only about 30 something.

The hobbling scene in Misery remains a bit fucking too much.

Things I say in detailed technical conversations that I didn’t have on my bingo card: “👨 🏻🐰👨 🏻 appears differently to 👨🏻🐰👨🏻 which would trigger a false support detection even though none of the dudes are wearing bunny ears”.

Anyway… detecting emoji support is complex.

I remember being in tears of laughter when the Daily Show went all Simpsons Rake Theory with the phrase “Dick Cheney shot a 78-year-old man in the face”.

In their corporate wisdom Paramount have deleted it from the internet.

I like getting bots to do things, even when there will be no long term time savings. As I find ways to improve a process, I can just do it once and actually forget about it.

I must not import Toby’s database over mine while migrating his site to the new server, I said to myself.

So anyway, you’ll never guess what happened.

On the other hand, I know my backup works.

For the first time in ages I am building a site. I want to use sass to keep ’em separated. After years of build tooling improvements I decided to use Gulp because Sass + CleanCss results in a very clear 30 line file. thing.pipe() is clear and it just makes sense.

I’ve added the plugin check action to my WordPress plugin template repo now that security reports are created for each plugin update.

I’ve used the most basic configuration and will customise it based on each plugin’s needs.

Companies: we believe personal responsibility is the most effective way of solving the climate crisis.

Also companies: low waste refills are less profitable so we have decided not to sell them.

I quite enjoyed this video from Paul ET on the history of the movie trailer.

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Furthermore, I want to personally invoice Sam Altman $10,000 every time I see an AI generated security report closed as not applicable. $20,000 if the reporter subsequently comes back and asks for it to be closed informative to avoid a loss of H1 reputation.

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Apparently it’s because VoiceOver is a little bit crap. The browser and I were innocent bystanders. Sometimes, just sometimes, technology makes me want to kick a puppy while stealing candy from a baby

Today gave me this spring’s first sighting of 20ish ducks paddling up the Maribyrnong River in formation. It’s very cute.

I’m trying to do a thing with role=alert and can’t figure out whether to yell at myself, Firefox or VoiceOver. I suspect it’s a little of the first and the last. The browser is an innocent bystander.

I find it very strange that Firefox doesn’t provide a copy link to highlight feature but supports links to highlighted text. Outside of browser testing, it’s the only time I open Chrome.

I’m tempted to personally invoice Sam Altman $10 for every time I have to delete spam generated by Chat GPT.

I needed to come up with some alt text for this photo from March 2019. It included the word thirst-trap.

I’m going through the notes section on my website to check for broken images and quickly check links.

Turns out I’ve been posting to my website first for twelve years now. First to syndicate to Twitter, when it was fun, and now to Mastodon.

At various times I thought about giving up and leaving my more ephemeral content for Twitter because I liked it. I’m glad I did not.

Host your own content, you never know when your favourite social media site will become your X-favourite site. The Nazi bar. Or both.

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I’ve found life without analytics really freeing. I used to worry about visiting my own site and messing up the stats. No stats, no worries.

It was also a stupid concern given that only referer spammers allow the scripts to run these days.

Not a good puzzle day… gave up on Wordle and had to send through my very impolite filler word and I broke the LinkedIn 6×6 Sudoku, although I’ll go back later. At least I got additional.today out nice and quickly.

Councils prioritizing private development over locals is one of those things that gives me the screaming shits and entirely reasonable amount.

In this case, the footpath that’s closed for so long that it needs a permanent sign leads up to pedestrian lights so, of course, people are crossing a reasonably busy road without the benefit of those traffic lights.

Friends doing nice things can be pretty great.

It has been 0️⃣ days since typing git checkout [repo] instead of git clone [repo].

It really seems that the Police Squad! TV series has been disappeared from the internet. I know a lot of it made it’s way in to the first Naked Gun movie but I’ve been wanting to re-watch it but it’s just vaporized.

Last night, the YouTube app on my TV was mostly showing music in my suggestions. Mostly related to what I’d listened to on YT Music during the week.

Stupidly, they were mostly audio only clips of tracks I’d listened to. Because obviously when I turn on the TV I want to listen to music.

I’m assuming they’ve turned up the Gemini in their YT algorithm.

Yay, I managed to update about 1500 notes on my site without accidentally sending a single one to Mastodon.

The code alongside the comment “don’t share old posts to Mastodon (magic number alert)” just paid for itself.

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Contrary to popular belief, I’m Going Home is the best number in Rocky Horror and I will not listen to anyone who suggests otherwise.

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Predictably, I am planning on watching Rocky Horror tonight. My copy is the 25th anniversary re-release.

The cat is distracting me by being adorable. ADORABLE.

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I’d like to use server side analytics but I suspect they’re even more susceptible to referrer spam. Apparently you can do it through CloudFront but they’re not very good; I have heard Cloudflare does a better job if you sign up for a pro account.

I’ve decided to remove analytics from my website. Referrer spam has beaten me and I figure most actual visitors, mostly nerds, to my site have blockers installed anyway. It’s also allowed me to remove Jetpack as that’s the only thing I was using it for.

Last night I watched a video of the Rocky Horror cast on the 50th anniversary.

I first watched it when I was about 10 and it’s a big part of why I love musicals and, I suspect, the reason why I go on a Broadway adventure every few years.

As a teen I saw it live with the extended family with some guy called Russell Crowe playing the role of Frank. Recent productions have been really bubble-gummy which takes away from the slide in to darkness after the Rocky’s awaking. I’m glad I got to see it in it’s original form.

Removing all trace of an infamous and highly embarrassing moment from the internet is child’s play compared to removing out of date info from an Apple contacts app.

I’ve never hosted a podcast nor been a guest on a podcast. I’m tempted to organise a monthly dinner club for the six people who can say the same.

I watched Spotswood on iView last night which somehow I’d never seen. It’s fun and largely stands the test of time.

What really trilled me was that a few scenes were filmed in the hood. In that movie way at the bottom of the hill they turned in to a completely different suburb but that doesn’t change the fact that a baby faced Ben Mendelsohn and Toni Collette rode a bike down a street near here.

We live near the freight bridge over the Maribyrnong River and you can always tell when an exciting train is coming through because there are bunch of youngs with high end cameras hanging around eagerly.

I don’t know what constitutes and exciting train, except maybe the steam engines that occasionally use the line, but the youngs have probably never got excited browser interoperability. Who am I to judge?

Now to the optometrist to find out how much worse my eyes have got in the last two years. I suspect a lot. Coincidentally, I think it was grand final day when I last had them checked.

I am still upset that the good cafe in a neighbouring suburb sold and became the bad cafe. The old barista spent months doing handover and they learnt nothing. NOTHING.

Not using the CSS cascade hastens the Antichrist.

— Peter Thiel, probably

I watched the Hamilton the Musical episode of Hard Quiz last night and all I can think is how much of a waste of a subject it was that the contestant didn’t make it to the final round.