SMS used to be exciting. It could be a greeting from my jetsetting sister, anywhere in the world… or my mate the tour guide, also in exotic places. It’s lost its mystique. Particularly on weekdays, it’s no fun anymore. Here’s why.
I know it’s optional, in these dark days certainly useful, and it’s all part of the technology becoming mature and part of everyday life, but it’s a shame the excitement’s gone.
(Man, I’ve gotta get this phone’s screen cleaned.)
Tony pointed me to an interesting article on Charles Wright’s Bleeblog about “Zero-Day holes” — security flaws that may have been in products forever, with not even the manufacturer knowing. Not entirely surprising I suppose. From time to time we hear of some research company telling us about the latest problem they’ve found in Windows or Internet Explorer, and that Microsoft has issued a patch. But it’s not always the white hats that find the flaws.
Some are dumping IE and moving over to Firefox for their web browsing. I’ve certainly considered it too, since the kids hit some games web site last week that installed some horrible Gator/Gain adware. Bleuch. Firefox looks pretty good, with only a couple of gotchas evident from my experimenting.
What every web browser needs is some kind of lockdown mode, where you tell it “You’ve got all the plug-ins you’re getting” (eg Flash, Shockwave, PDF, maybe RealPlayer at a pinch). “You can display Java applets, run Javascript, play movies and sounds, and that’s your lot mate. No file downloads, no popups, no ActiveX, no fucking Gain time and password sychronising bullshit, nothing else. Ever.” Firefox may come close, or I suppose I could go fiddling with browser and Windows permissions to attain that level of safety under a “kids” logon, but I haven’t got around to investigating it yet.
Crisis on Friday night when a certain girlfriend lost her handbag. It hasn’t shown up yet either. Perhaps the taxi driver liked the look of the two books contained within. And the glasses.
Finally watched Bowling For Columbine. I can’t think of much to say about it than probably hasn’t been said before. I’ll just give it the thumbs up and move on.
Got my hair cut on Saturday. Consequently when I went for a walk in the squally wind on Sunday down to the park and the shops, I was definitely in a state of arse freezing offedness. I stood in the park watching the local football club kersplatting some poor other visiting team (Outer-Outer-Beaconsfield rank amateur under 16s or something), wondering how they all kept warm in their shorts and sleeveless jumpers. All that running around helps I suppose. When the locals finished kersplatting the others at full time, they graciously all shook hands and went into the club room for some rousing cheering and singing, and I’m guessing a full-on all-night piss-up.
The local neighbourhood teenagers had been watching the game from the roof of a nearby park equipment shed, in between doing wheelies on their bikes and swearing in excited high-pitched voices. As they mooched off, one straggler swaggering along behind the others tried to do an oh-so-cool spit onto the grass. The wind blew the saliva straight back onto him, leaving him to have to wipe it off his face and jumper.
The SHun article showed up. With me looking slightly grumpy in it. I thought I was doing this for the glory of the organisation, not to be listed as Daniel Bowen, private citizen. Oh well.
The end of the financial year looms. I’ve started sorting out all my bits of paper, and found one which reminded me that as of July 1st, the credit card bonus pointy scheme I’m a member of will change so that one card point will equal only a measely half a Qantas frequent flyer point. So I have two days to decide if I want to convert a bunch of points (I have 48,000 on my Visa Card… yikes, that’s a bit scary actually) for a possible jetsetting long-distance holiday in the future, or if there’s anything in the glossy redemption brochure that might be worth grabbing. The clock/radio looks nice, and would be a worthy replacement for the one I have, whose alarm set time button has just broken.
Tipping. After managing only 5 out of 8 over the split round, I am no longer leading the footy tipping. If this trend continues, looks like Trish might be taking home the perpetual trophy this year. Some visitors to my house might well rejoice at this news. Visitors to Trish’s house, however, may not be quite so delighted.
Tempo. It must have made their day when ten of us tramped in off Degraves Street, followed by mild panic when no table proved quite big enough to accomodate us. But we managed to squeeze in somehow. The chef probably reacted with some incredulity when faced with seven orders for the Lasagne, whose reputation preceded it. It was damn good, too. The bruschetta, House Red and a hot chocolate afterwards also went down a treat.
Milk Suckao at Max Brenner’s chocolate bar, QV. The idea of a self-heated (by a candle) miniature cup, wherein you can mix little bits of chocolate into milk, stir and wait for it to melt, is, I think, better in theory than in practice. Brenner’s little bits of chocolate are undeniably yummy (in the milk or out of it). Maybe if you want to spend your time mucking about mixing the ingredients, then trying to get the straw/spoon thing working (try as I might, mine didn’t work as a straw) then it might appeal. I’d rather be chatting to whoever you’re there with — which to my mind is half the point of going somewhere for a hot chocolate.
I came away with the impression that I’d just paid $5.50 to make a hot chocolate myself. Their other drinks and cakes looked good, but the Suckao? Call me a philistine if you like, but I’m not planning to repeat the experience.
A flurry of activity at the school yesterday when I dropped the kids off, as a film crew had arrived to record a public service advert to go to air later in the year. SunSmart, or healthy eating, or exercise, one of those types of things. They had wheeled in actors to play the main characters, and also brought along a fake section of wall with a old-style target painted on it. (Reminds me of Angry Kid, actually.) They planned to shoot some general shots of kids playing at lunchtime, and requested that — despite it being the depths of winter — everyone bring their hats along to wear.
I’ve been fiddling with my blog setup a bit. At some stage I’m thinking I might import all my older diary entries into the database, though there’s a fair few of them to do. But then I’d be able to do “On this day” type links and other fun-but-useless stuff like that. Meanwhile I did find a wondrous Wordpress plug-in that caches pages so they only get re-built when something changes. Should speed things up a bit. Very cool, in a geeky kind of way.
One of my e-mail accounts is getting horrendous amounts of German nationalist spam. Multiple messages per day, and about 40 copies of each one. I did two years of German in high school, and afterwards promptly forgot almost all of it. I did translate the subject line from one of the (multiple) spams, which said “Bankrott des Gesundheitswesens durch Auslaender!” The Google translation reckons this means “Bankruptcy of the health service by foreigners!” For any German spammers who might be reading, you’ve got the wrong person. I don’t speak German, I’ve never been to Germany, I’m not planning on going any time soon, and rest assured that if I ever do, I’ll have travel insurance that is sufficient to see me treated at no expense to German taxpayers if I should have the misfortune to require it. In fact I’ll try and bring my (rather woeful I know) Australian tourist dollars in to boost your economy. Just stop sending me all these smegging e-mails!
The working week has been a reasonably busy one for me. It doesn’t seem like it’s been a long one, but TGIF — I for one am looking forward to the weekend.
Recently I was looking through a bunch of old floppy disks, having a bit of a cleanup, and found a bunch of old favourite sound files, which I thought I’d share. Most of them date back to a job in 1996…
There’s 847 messages in my e-mail Inbox.
70 of them are unread.
I think this thing is getting out of hand.
I need to spend a few hours one day clearing it out. One day. Not today.
