Was so busy at work today that my tea got cold.

Thank goodness the weekend has arrived.

Isn’t this cap hideous? It came free with a geek magazine subscription yesterday. I predict a short life in this house, followed by a swift departure by way of the nearest charity bin.

Geek stuff follows: Years ago a mob called RSACi (Recreational Software Advisory Council… I forget what the “i” was for, but they’ve changed names to ICRA now anyway) got together with Microsoft to design and implement special HTML metatags with which a publisher could flag if web pages had sex, violence, nudity or naughty language in them.

Internet Explorer could be set up so your kids couldn’t look at pages with this content above a particular level. So if I didn’t want the kids looking at a page with “moderate expletives (Expletives; non-sexual anatomical references)”, “killing (Humans or creatures injured or killed. Rewards injuring non-threatening creatures)”, “partial nudity” and “clothed sexual touching” (or worse), it took but a few clicks and a password to do it.

All very well in theory, but there were three problems: the first is it relied on publishers to put in these tags. Though toxiccustard.com isn’t exactly replete with objectionable content, it certainly has its share of swearing, so I put in a bunch of these tags to frighten the kiddies off. But your average pr0n site? They didn’t bother. Neither did anybody else. Only a handful of major sites took the time to tag their pages. So Microsoft’s web site has tags proclaiming that there’s nothing rude within, while sites featuring wobbly fleshy activities of all kinds have no such warnings.

The second problem is that few people know the options exist in web browsers, and even fewer have bothered to set it up. Recently I realised that my kids had been looking at my diary pages from school. I have long tagged my diary with language level 4 (”Explicit or crude language — Extreme hate speech or crude language. Explicit sexual references.”) because I occasionally dip into the lower depths of the English language (4 letter word department). So it’s obvious the school computers haven’t been set up to filter stuff out. And while one could hope that other schools have been more careful to do this, I’m not betting on it… and if almost no web sites have the labels, why would they bother?

And finally, although IE and Netscape (dominant at the time) implemented this feature, since Netscape has vanished, these days it’s only in IE. Firefox and other browsers are gaining market share (I’m switching — are you?), and they don’t have these options.

Then I discovered that at least one acquaintance can’t read my diary from work because of a web filter installed there. It’s not up to me to decide if he should or shouldn’t read my diary at work, and I don’t know how they’ve filtered me out, but it wouldn’t surprise me if their corporate proxy blocks out anything with too high a language level.

That’s just silly. Grown adults can’t read my page, but kiddies can. So the tags are coming off. (Along with all those old useless LinkExchange tags, but that’s another story.)

And as for kids’ web browsing habits, both at school and at home, nothing beats a little adult supervision.

Just discovered that the reason my camera kept complaining about flat batteries was that last time I charged the four of them, the little switch telling the charger how batteries to charge was clicked to “2″ instead of “4″.

Around the city, mostly in parks, automated public toilets have been popping up in the last few years. Unlike the loos of old, they have self-cleaning mechanisms, so in theory they should be clean — or at least minimally unpleasant. But distrust of the automatic door (and its ten minute timeout) is rife among users, especially parents with small children who fear their offspring getting locked in the things, unable to escape.

Last week my mum told me the tale of five-year-old Zoe and her stepfather, who used such a facility at an unknown location in the eastern burbs. Stepdad went in, did what he needed to do, and then came out. Zoe decided she needed to use it too (kids invariably do when they find such a device — they love the gizmos) and went in. But the worst automatic toilet nightmare came true: the door shut behind her, locked, and the auto cleaning mechanism kicked in.

Woosh. Splosh. One clean toilet, and one wet Zoe. Not to mention a tad traumatised by the whole experience. Well you would be, wouldn’t you?

When my mother heard about this, she was quite concerned, and never to let a crisis go unanswered, got on the phone and managed to get in contact with the head engineer at Exeloo, which makes these automated toilets.

Mr Exeloo Dude was quite rightly shocked at this news, and wanted to know all about it. “That shouldn’t happen!” he said. “It’s got a sensor! It’s not meant to clean when someone’s inside it!” He went on to say that such an event was almost unheard-of, and that to his knowledge only one similar incident had ever occurred before, in Adelaide. Ah yes. The infamous Adelaide incident. Undoubtedly a legend told in story and song in local government sanitation circles.

Most of all he wanted to know precisely where this errant washroom was located, so he could get his top Exeloo Engineers down there to give it a good going over. And he wanted to know that day, because he was apparently leaving the next morning to speak at a conference in China on public toilets. Or at least, I assume that would be his topic. Maybe the conference was not specifically about public toilets, but concerned itself with wider sanitary or water-related issues.

Obviously this was a matter of pride. If your job is the Exeloo engineer, you probably live, breathe and dream Exeloos, and the knowledge that kiddies are getting traumatised by your toilet facilities would weigh heavily on your mind.

Problem was my mother didn’t know the precise location of the possessed convenience. She made some enquiries, determined the spot, and rung back with the news: Kings Way in Glen Waverley.

“Ah ha!” Mr Exeloo Engineer proclaimed triumphantly. That one — the only one in entire city apparently — is not an Exeloo, but is an allegedly inferior French model of public facility, formerly used at the Sydney Olympics (wow, he knows the history) and imported to Glen Waverley after the Games finished. This model cleans itself after every single use — something that one could well argue is unsuitable for this drought-ravaged land of ours — and obviously has less than optimum detection of occupants.

And thus Mr Exeloo Engineer could depart for China, safe in the knowledge that it wasn’t one of his WCs that was defective. But that other company ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Eight out of eight on the footy tipping at the weekend. Of course, that wasn’t particularly unusual for the round — plenty of rank amateurs with no detailed footy knowledge like me managed high scores. I’m now equal first on one comp (much to Trish’s chagrin), equal second on the other.

My DVDs from Amazon UK arrived on Friday. Woo hoo! Unlike the credit card frequent spender points alarm clock I ordered, which is edging towards the anticipated 28 day delivery time. So, a clock from a warehouse somewhere in the country takes 4 weeks; DVDs from the other side of the planet get through in about a week. Logic? Not sure I’m seeing it.

Here is the toilet at work. It’s quite stylish actually. Although work is on a public floor of the building, the toilets are locked, secured by carefully guarded keys. Which is a pain sometimes, to be honest — no secrets from your colleagues when you waltz out the door with the key in your hand.

Hold your mouse over it to see some points of interest (?!?).

Want to post yours? Link in the Trackbacks or comments. Any toilet will do, work or home or any other that might take your fancy.

• Past photos in this series
• Notes on creating the image map/hot spots with text

“I’ll see you out in the street!” he shouted. Us shoppers and the checkout chicks and blokes looked on. The man had a huge gash on his head — dried — a dishevelled appearance and a dog chain in his hand. He repeated his threat to an unknown person in the liquor department, as Safeway people stood around and watched.

He stood back to let some people in, then said it again, mumbling about some injustice. Then he took his dog chain and swung it against a plastic bag recycle bin. It thumped threateningly. Seemingly unaware all eyes were on him, he sauntered out. Three Safeway blokes ran up to the door and locked it.

Has nobody called the cops, I wondered? The Safeway blokes waited a minute, looking out, then unlocked it and went outside to look. I paid for my groceries and warily wheeled out my trolley full of packed calico bags.

Yes, somebody had obviously called the cops. Three police cars were in carpark, and as I wheeled my trolley through, two more arrived, lights flashing, one left parked in the middle of the street, like in the cop shows.

The bloke may not be seeing much of the street tonight.

Five cop cars. I guess despite the occasional hiccup, it really is Safeway.

Friday night, the Deborah Conway mini-concert at Tony & Rae’s. Well done Tony & Rob for setting it up. Just a few songs, but they were a few great songs. Very enjoyable. Tony’s got it described in detail.

Saturday night at the Palais Theatre… first the support act, Architecture In Helsinki. Perhaps the best thing I can say is that they have potential. A couple of good songs, but they overwhelmingly left me with the impression of a high school rock Eisteddfod entry — all looking very young, leaning a bit too much towards shouting (instead of singing) into the microphone, and while they could play, seemed not quite adept at it.

I assume they have some fans though. In the interval, a couple sitting next to us disappeared, not to be seen again during the main act. I should also mention that one woman was spotted before the concert holding a cactus. Perhaps it was just an extension of the idea of playing music to your plants.

Anyway, to the main act: Belle & Sebastian. Jack Black’s character in High Fidelity described them as sad bastard music. Well many hundreds of sad bastards packed into the theatre (not quite a sell-out) and rocked out. Great stuff. These guys are obviously very accomplished musicians, but also have a terrific stage presence, and know their showmanship. Apart from a lot of their latest CD (glad I bought it and played it a few times), some of their biggest hits got the crowds dancing in the aisles, and on asking for requests, took a minute or two to learn and then play the Rolling Stones’ Under My Thumb, to the delight of all. They played flawlessly, brought extra zest to their songs, had terrific lighting and the banter with the audience was great. A couple of times they had a bunch of audience members up on stage dancing along, and gave one lucky girl a very memorable night by having her sing a verse of the closing song. The crowd loved it. A great night.