Here is my rather unnattractive chocolate brown bathroom cabinet. All the bathroom features are chocolate brown plastic. That’s what comes from renting a house I suppose.

As usual you can pause your mouse over various bits to see text about it. (Sorry Firefox users, for some reason you’ll only see the first few words unless you specifically look at the properties of the link).

You can only see the lefthand shelves in this picture because of the awkward way the door/mirror works. But there’s virtually nothing in the righthand shelves anyway. Must be because I’m lefthanded.

So, let’s see yours. Put your links in the comments/trackback.

Number of days until the next Here Is My meme entry: 2. (The plan is to post one every Sunday). Have your cameras ready!

Number of people I’ve seen on the train this week reading The Da Vinci Code: 4 5 — including two in the same carriage.

Number of TV shows I endeavour to catch every week, no matter what: only 2 3 as a matter of fact — The Sopranos, Seven Wonders of the Industrial World. And how could I have forgotten Media Watch?

Number of e-mails sent from home since Sunday: 187. From other locations? Oh, I can’t be bothered counting them.

Number of reminders the Blood Bank have sent me about donating blood when they’re in my area again next week: 2 (one letter, one phone call. Thankfully the latter was a cut above your average telemarketer drone.)

Highest number of comments so far for one of my blog posts: 34 for April Fool’s Day.

Number of drinks I had yesterday: 3 cups of tea, 1 mug of hot chocolate, 2 orange juices, 1 glass of dark grape juice, 1 drink of water.

Number of bottles of orange juice the bloke in the cafe at lunch yesterday was claiming had disappeared in the 24 hours since he’d placed them there: 18. (Maybe a lot of people with colds wanting a Vitamin C hit?)

Temperature outside right now: 9.4 degrees C.

How many more meaningless numbers today after this one: 0.

I was glancing at my mobile phone bill, trying to make sense of a 3 minute 41 second call that cost me $13.62 (inc GST). The number said 1902226218, which I didn’t initially recognise, and had two calls listed against it at the same time. How could this make sense?

I was going to ring up the phone company and ask them how it was possible to make two calls at once, but they were only open 9-5. This gave me a little more time to think about it, and I realised that one item was the air-time, and the other was the 1900 premium service fee.

But what could it be? No, I don’t indulge in that kind of phone call.

Wait a minute… it couldn’t be that time I decided to get hold of the Doctor Who theme music (polyphonic version) for my phone, so I could play it to the kids, could it? (And absolutely not to play it as a mobile phone ringtone). I checked. Sure enough, it’s the number listed on YourTV for polyphonic ringtones.

$13.62?!? For a sodding phone jingle?!???

Now, I’ve recently discovered that my kids are wont to look at this site from school, so I’m considering that I may have to start tempering my language. But HOLY F—ING S–T, have I been ripped off or what? That’s the price of a cinema ticket, or would have gone a good way towards a DVD.

I remember calling. I rang on a whim. I didn’t dawdle through the menus. While it wasn’t quite as bad as that premium service on the Simpsons “You… have reached… XYZ… this… number…. is charged… at Argh… dollars… … per minute”, they did string it out a bit. It certainly wasn’t as simple as entering the code displayed on the web page. And I obviously didn’t quite register that it was going to cost me $3.96 a minute, or how many minutes it would take.

There are cheaper ways of getting ringtones — converting free MIDI files yourself using Nokia’s software, or SMS-based fixed-cost services. I bet this mob don’t get much repeat business.

There’s not much I can do about it. I’d love to share it around Neimann-Marcus-hoax-style, but evidently it’s copy-protected to prevent that. All in all it’s pretty damn cheeky really… I bet they haven’t paid the music’s copyright owner for it.

• This story has a happy ending

Dear web site designers,

Don’t design your whole site in Flash. Use it sparingly. Use it when you have to. If you use it, there’d better be a non-Flash way of looking at the same information, for people who can’t see Flash and for search engines (you know, those things which bring people to your site). Which means you might as well not bother.

Your mission statement and other such guff doesn’t matter to most people. Don’t show it as a splash screen.

In fact, don’t have a splash screen. They just slow people down. It’s like making people wait 30 seconds at the front door before letting them into your shop.

Don’t make people download pictures as ZIP files. JPGs and GIFs are compressed formats. You’re just making people jump through an extra hoop to see the picture, without saving any disk space or bandwidth.

Don’t use long web addresses (URIs) with lots of meaningless gibberish. Make them short enough to e-mail without problems — 70 characters or less. Make them easy to remember, pass verbally and dissect. (Most CMS writers still need to figure this out). Ideally URIs should not include long meaningless numbers like GUIDs.

Hide the trailing /index.shtml /default.aspx and /index.jsp etc filenames. They’re utterly pointless, make your URIs unnecessarily long, and easily avoided with some fiddling of your web server. .htaccess is your friend.

Get your URIs right, because if your pages live forever, so should your URLs.

Don’t write your pages in such a way that font size options in web browsers don’t work, or people using screen readers can’t figure out what’s going on.

Make it legible. No garish colours. Or at least make it work if the user switches your garish colours off.

Stop assuming people are using IE on Windows, and barring anybody else. You’re pissing off a small but significant (and growing) number of your potential customers.

Popup/under/over/whatever windows are evil. No matter how much ad revenue you might be getting from them.

If you’ve got sound on your site, you’d better have a dead easy way of turning it off. Without the user browsing to elsewhere.

Use Form Post for pages that change things or actually require field values to be hidden; use Get for pages that don’t. That’s what they were designed for.

You’d better have a good reason for using frames.

Tables and individual font tags are dead. Viva la CSS.

How many damn pages give me script errors? Test them, make sure they work, or don’t use them.

What are your biggest web page gripes? Any suggestions, additions, corrections?

And okay, so I haven’t quite achieved all these points on my web sites… especially the older ones. But I’m getting there… gradually. Eagle-eyed geeks might notice I’ve changed the Permalinks to make them friendlier. The old ones (post 1/1/04) will continue to work. Oh yeah, and I have the day off today. Nyah nyah etc.

With recent accusations that IBM punch-card machines were used by the Nazis to more efficiently bring about the Holocaust, I was just pondering how companies who have had less than illustrious histories document events they’d rather forget about.

WW2 footage often shows German forces driving Mercedes trucks. In their truck history, they talk about the “dictatorial regime” forcing the company to make particular types of vehicles.

Krups, who apparently made gas chambers used in the camps, manages to gloss over much of their history, by only talking about their post-1846 “founding years”, before resuming the story at 1950.

Volkswagen are fairly candid about their role in supplying the German Armed forces with vehicles, and the fact that their labour was made up of “approximately 20,000 forced labourers, prisoners of war, and later also concentration camp inmates”. They also point out that in 1998 they started a programme to compensate those workers. Better late than never I suppose.

I’m not sure I can draw any meaningful conclusion from all this. And I’m not sure why I thought it worth looking into. I just found it interesting.

Last night I found myself watching some of the Concert For NYC, in particular The Who’s performance. I’m still not going to splurge out on their forthcoming concert (dubbed rather cruelly by one friend as “Who’s left?”). But this four song performance from 2001 is great music. And remembering it in context, very moving, a gesture across the Atlantic, reaching out to a shattered city.

What I found fascinating is the set ends in the seminal protest song “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. If you’re familiar with the lyrics, you’ll know that many interpret it as a rallying cry against politicians of all sides pulling the wool over the populace’s eyes, justifying painful wars and revolutions for the same reasons as before.

Ring any bells?

And the world looks just the same
And history ain’t changed
‘Cause the banners, they all flown in the last war

Sitting here in 2004, as what many would claim is an unjust war we should never have got involved in continues to stagger towards an ever-distant conclusion, the lyrics have more relevance today than in a long time.

Let’s just hope that last week’s handover of Iraq to the Iraqis can help bring a lasting peace.

PS. On a more superficial note, how come it’s only blokes who ever like The Who?

The problems with going to the movies at Chadstone on a Friday night are:

• There is no parking on the “entertainment precinct” side of the centre at 8pm on a Friday. Well that is, there are plenty of parking spaces, but every one of them is taken.
• There are, of course, no buses running. Oh, except one, but only every hour, and it goes nowhere near my house. Useless.
• You can park around the other side of the centre with no problems, but after you come out of the movie may find they’ve shut the corridors out to that side, so you have to walk all the way around the centre in the (thankfully not heavy on Friday night) rain.
• Hoyts seem to love Billy Joel, and had his greatest hits playing not only in the toilets, but also in the cinema before the movie. Maybe it was a cunning plan to get rid of the amorous couple in the back row after the previous movie had finished.
• The screen in cinema 3 needs cleaning or something. It had shimmery stuff on screen visible in bright scenes, making a mockery of the pro-Cinema “it’s the only way to see movies” advertising.

But enough whinging. The venue was by mutual agreement anyway. The purpose of the venture was to meet up with friends and see the third Harry Potter movie, Prisoner of Azbakan. Rated PG, though it almost rated an M before the appeal. I can’t see how it deserved an M. Yes it was a tad darker than the first two, but there was no gore, no blood, no sex, and not even Malfoy saying “fuck you, Potter!” No, it was really not much more adult than the first two.

Plenty of humour. Minimal Quidditch, thank goodness — it was exciting the first time, okay the second. To see it all a third time would have been tedious. The right bits of the plot were plucked out of the book, and made it quite exciting, including the bit at the end (I won’t give it away) which was quite clever. Although some observers have said “oh the Dementors, sucking out souls, how scary!” But I think most kids wouldn’t have a big problem with it.

Just like with the second movie last year, I was trying to remember who the guy playing Mr Weasley was, before remembering later in the film (Petersen, in Red Dwarf). Emma Thompson was very funny, as was Lenny Henry (both of these I didn’t realise until later who they were played by).

All in all, very enjoyable.

Before the bank changed the credit card bonus points regime yesterday and halved the number of frequent flyer points you can swap them for, I swapped almost all of them. I was kind of hoping I’d have enough to one day go over to Europe on points. Or if part of a bigger expedition, at least pay for my ticket. I didn’t get around to doing an exact calculation beforehand, but somehow have ended up with just over the required 110,000 points in my frequent flyer account. Woo hoo! Not planning to go any time soon, but at least the points are in there now.

Since my clock radio has broken, I decided I’d save the last 18,000 points for a replacement model. I hit the Sony web site and discovered the one on offer for my 18,000 points has an RRP of $109, so when it arrives, I’m expecting for a pretty damn nice clock radio. In this life I doubt I’d ever spend that much on a clock radio. At that price it should make the tea and iron a shirt in the morning for me.

I realised that of the many points flying around the place, probably 80 or 90K have been earnt on my credit cards over the last 10 years or so. That staggers me, really. 80,000 dollars has passed through those cards. I suppose I put a lot of groceries and car maintenance (ka-ching!) and air tickets and other stuff on the cards, but it still seems like a lot. Thank goodness I manage to pay them off completely every month. Well, when I remember to by the deadline…