Monthly Archives: May 2006

Life stuff

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I wonder how many people have noticed that the Tax Credit system used to have the slogan “It’s your money, take it” and it is now (effectively) “It may well not be. Careful…”

We’ve been told we can apply for some new housing being built elsewhere. It’s a village some 25 minutes away and the homes won’t be ready for 1-2 years. While we don’t want to leave this village the simple fact is that there will never be somewhere actually in this village which will be suitable in the long-term. We had also decided that we would never move away from the village until the girls were grown. We might just miss this one …. P will still be at school and although we could keep her at the same school the fact is that we need to take our futures into consideration. An offer like this – with what we are told is a high chance of success just does not happen often. I doubt it would happen again and we have no choice but to look to the future. The new builds will have either the right equipment there for when we need it or will be built with such alterations in mind. As unwelcome as that is the potential need for that has to be faced – and not moving does not stop reality – ostrich-like we are not. Typical …. just as I get the garage all sorted and tidy .. if we get in it’ll be a good thing. If we don’t then we can still say to The Powers That Be that we have tried and they said no. We shall wait and see.

And the dropping of 200mg has not been a success. Tonight it goes back up.

Lost

1

No, not the TV show. My PA bar. Somewhere in Asda is the main part of my PA bar. Damn. I wonder if whoever finds it will take it the ‘Lost and Found’ :) Wildcat have nothing, ColdSteel have a load of db errors… bugger.

[ColdSteel: 8mm*22mm CBB. I'd prefer a PA bar so I'm still looking..]

[[Ebay: 10mm CBB - PA bar really. And only a tenner :) ]]

Modblog goes WP

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http://modblog.bmezine.com (NSFW) has switched to WordPress. I like the current header though the red at the side of the screen is a bit overpowering for me – and hopefully the sidebar will get fixed. It’ll be much easier to use though (and apparently Shannon has a plugin that will cross-post from WP into IAM too). I wish he’d fix the feed from his IAM page though.

It is broke and we won’t fix it.

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Noticed the following?
“What you need to do is uninstall the program, reinstall it and then the program will work”
or
“Uninstall it, remove every single trace from your machine, reboot, reinstall”
or
“Use a greasemonkey script”
And ALL the above apply to some programs when their coders / devotees / screaming fanboys are asked things like “Why does it keep crashing” or “I can’t uninstall a faulty extension”. The top 2 to Firefox and Thunderbird commonly. And some people whinge at rebooting Windows.

The top two above are assuming some sort of installation error aren’t they? Yet don’t people tend to use installers? The second one actually involves editing the registry! Do they say how to remove all traces? Do they offer suggestions? Do they warn? Do they care?
The top two are laziness. “Hey, I’ve a problem with WordPress. It says ‘Headers already sent’ – what do I do?” That’s easy – tell your host to get a new server, format it properly and then install the OS properly this time. That’s what the top two answers are doing – lumphammer approach. I could understand it if I saw this sort of thing at the end of an exhaustive thread, but a couple of posts? laziness.
And greasemonkey is useful. And abused. Some scripts are there because basic functionality has been left out, or ‘features’ left in.

Thing is, if you are telling someone to remove/uninstall then they should also be told about data loss – you cannot assume they will know. “Ah!” they say “their information is actually in %/appdata” – but what if it’s their data that is the problem? Their uninstall/reinstall will be for nought. And didn’t people used to castigate the likes of Microsoft for using ‘hidden’ data folders when now we have Open Source programs doing precisely the same? (And as I blogged before, Ubuntu is equally guilty).

When you have your data fully backed up it’s very very easy to say “Nuke it all and start over”. If you have that attitude then the only reason you hang around in forums and newsgroups is to boost your ego without giving a damn about the person on the other end. People like that are almost as annoying as those that say “Search” in a bid to up their post count.

Opera

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1. See link
2. Click wheel to open in new tab
3. New tab says ‘Blank Page’
4. ‘Blank Page’
5. ‘Blank Page’
6. ‘Blank Page’
7. ‘Blank Page’
8. ‘Blank Page’
9. ‘Blank Page’
10. ‘Blank Page’
11. ………. might start loading.

What’s it got? Built-in crawling? Driving me nuts. IE7 here I come.

“Opera – the internet. Slowly”

Big letters not little

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Today is a half-day thanks to a monumental headache and copious amounts of painkillers. Got up, did some work, about threw up so back to bed for hours. Haven’t had a headache like this for ages.

The error logs [L] errors have gone. Must have been me as I removed the .htaccess rules but then the pages did work… odd. Today’s error log is very amusing. Loads of these:
File does not exist: /home/tamba2/public_html/t2/archives/2005/03/09/post-name/trackback
I don’t mean one or two, I don’t mean different IP’s. I means swathes of them, hitting every few seconds all from a few IP’s. The really really funny thing is that these idiots are having a problem with my web address that the first few spammers did – when all the spam started I got none at all while others drowned in the stuff. But then the spammers wised up – and managed to get a capital T there instead.
File does not exist: /home/tamba2/public_html/t2/archives/2005/03/09/
File DOES exist: /home/tamba2/public_html/T2/archives/2005/03/09/
I wonder if I should have just battered the clueless idiots with the cluebat?

And Firefox 2 (aka Bon Echo is looking okay. Spell check is good, close tabs thing is good, better options is good, session restore is good. Blue logo is not (because having FeedDemon, Bon Echo and Thunderbird – still looking for an alternative! – all open means as they are all blue to varying degrees makes the selection that bit slower.

And I just remembered something so I’m off to the FAQ.

Using and seeing a web calendar

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J is the organising person here. Don’t they say that behind every great man there is ‘woman who does’? Or something like that. She keeps loads on information about appts / dates / times / places and such in her mobile. She also keeps them in a diary but as her handwriting gets worse that is getting harder and more frustrating. But if she lost her phone she’d lose all the info. So I suggested an online calendar. Amazingly, she agreed (J and the Web … no. Only for banking).
Planzo – I’ve got one there somewhere and I dropped it for some reason.
Google – you need to be logged in. The display is cluttered
Webcalendar – needs quite fine mouse control. Input screen is unfriendly.
30 Boxes…… close. In fact, bar one thing it’s actually quite good. The one thing is fairly significant though – if you are visually impaired all their ‘Web 2.0′ themes make it unusable. 3 default themes and not one has got the ‘Contrast control’ used. Which is a shame. J has a calendar there, she has input some information (with a lot of looking at the screen to find out what is where) but really, they should have thought about a demographic outside of the 15-25 age group with 20-20 vision who don’t need to squint at an LCD screen even on the brightest of days. There IS a workround which involves effectively creating a user-content.css but that is a fugly solution to basic accessibility. Here’s me thinking that this ‘Web 2.0′ was all about making things work better. I’ve posted to their forum. I’ll see what they say. I have every expectation that the notion of ‘being able to see things’ will be brushed off. Be nice if that was not the case.

Oprah for God!

2

Her worldwide television show has raised the consciousness of the universe about the critical issues of homelessness, poverty, hunger, race, crime, AIDS, women’s inequality and others. These social conditions greatly hamper world peace. Oprah did not just talk about the issues, but donated large portions of her wealth to eliminate them.

So … she broadcasts to throughout the Solar System. She has identified all the vital issues that affect the universe. I know that “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” but hey, saying women’s inequality greatly hampers world peace is taking things just a little too far isn’t it? What is this ‘others’ ? Must be a hidden cause because I’ve not heard of it before. And she has given ‘large portions of her wealth’ – so damn what? For most people giving £50 would actually be a greater donation in relative terms than whatever she had given. And that last sentence would imply they have actually gone…..

Oprah for the Nobel Peace Price? Get a bloody grip ffs. http:// oprah4peaceprize. org

What next? QVC for a World Economics award?