Month: August 2004

being best man

Yesterday my brother(inlaw) tied the knot whilst the best man (that’s me) stood to one side and watched the happy proceedings. Lots of memories, it’s almost four years since my own wedding. It was a lovely day. I think this also means I have another sister now.

Best man is a pretty good job. You get front row seats and as part of the bridal party are included in most of the perks. But you do need to make a speech (and on behalf of the bridesmaids, thank the groom for thanking them in his speech. Which I did in a lovely falsetto).

The speech then. I tried to add an Olympics twist to the end which involved speaking Greek and French. I can’t speak a word of either. Well, maybe oi. That’s about it. So I turned to babelfish to translate the words and boy did I ever get a shock when the greek came back all, um, greek. That is, in the greek alphabet. Which I can’t read. Let alone pronounce. Still, I found some translation and pronunciation guides and think I might have gotten away with it.

It’s the thought that counts. Anyway, hearty congratulations to the new Mr and Mrs.

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gmail, anyone?

What is a guy supposed to do with six gmail invites? Blog? Why not.

Gnauk is what you get when you put your fingers on the wrong keys. You can tell I am not a typist. However, gmail is a web based email service being brought out by google. I think it’s really good. They have an interesting way of releasing it to the public which involves allowing existing users to invite others to join, from time to time. A bit similar to how their search derives page popularity from people linking to each others’ pages, and how blogger has that Next blog link happening.

Anyhow, if you want to try gmail post a comment because I don’t know what else to do with these invitations!

Working closer to home

I’’d like to work closer to home. I commute every day, it’s over an hour each way. About 50mins by Queensland Rail and 10––15mins by car between the station and home. Oh, and walking to work from the station in the city. Beats driving all that way though, and it’s good time to read (I’m reading The Eye of the World from Robert Jordan’’s The Wheel of Time series, and Rare Trades).

Here I am going off on a tangent again.

I would like to work closer to home. It’s high on my list of career goals. Thus it is with some excitement I can announce I have secured a job interview for Friday morning for a web developer position. If I get this job, I will be working one whole block closer to home. That should save me about 2––4 minutes every day.

Wish me luck 🙂

need javascript? that way lies madness

You can get some in my javascript library—once again the most popular content hosted on this server. Funny thing is, every time somebody asks me a question about one of my scripts, it invariably leads into discussion of problems in different browsers, issues with people disabling scripting, and of course, is it all accessible. And that always ends with me saying “you probably shouldn’t use javascript, that way lies madness.”

Which isn’t true at all of course. Javascript can do some neat things. But getting scripts to work in “browsers”—that wonderful word which too simply sumarises the quagmire of a platform/environment to which we web developers must work—well, that can be fun too. If you like debugging. Thankfully I do.

>Sometimes. Still, I feel sorry for our intern at work, who is working hard on a script to print multiple pages at once (simply because our policies are broken up into multiple files and people don’t know how to print them properly themselves). Find all the links on the page. Only keep the links that are to files in the same directory. Now for each one, open it in a new window and print it out. See? Easy, useful, javascript. hahaha. Madness! 🙂

It's DAY before MONTH, except in the good ol' US of A.

I’m a little disappointed with blogger today. They turned down my request for a timestamp format which included both date AND time and was not in a US date format. I really don’t like dates that go MM/DD/YY as the month and date are reversed to what’s normal here and it’s very confusing.
*sigh*

Luckily I just found an easy solution – remove the dates from all comments. I’m happy with that 🙂 This is a boring post though. Not so happy about that.

apple juice and milo

It was a mistake from the start, I admit that now.

Granted I was about twelve at the time, and convinced I was bored I suspect. I like apple juice (well, I did then, I prefer orange now), and I like milo (chocolate milk). So surely the two mixed together could only be better! Surely. Didn’t stop to think at the time that I don’t really like smoothies.

Just to set the record straight, and to help out future generations, let me state unequivocally that apple juice and milo and milk should never be brought together — under any circumstances — in a single drink.

Thank you.

I'm only half listening …

I love my phone, I love my MP3s. When you travel an hour to and from
the city (an hour each way that is) the music is a great backdrop.
Even with a mere 16MB memory stick (let’s say, 4 songs) that need to
be changed regularly, if they’re cool songs it’s a groovy time.

So it’s with a deep sadness that cannot be expressed in words that I
must say my headset is broken. I only get audio in the left ear.
Silence in the right. Silence. *sigh* You would not believe how hard
it is to replace this headset. Standard headphone won’t fit, an
adapter won’t support the microphone, nobody makes headsets this type
anyway, unless you want to pay $400 for top of the line bluetooth
headphones (which if I was rich I might consider).

Optus reckon my insurance should cover it. At least, that’s what they
said on the phone. I need to go into a store to take the next step.
Meanwhile I’m listing to port as my inner balance has gone askew …