| A very disturbing newspaper article |
[Sep. 11th, 2008|10:36 am] |
... but not necessarily for the reason you think.
Go read this article on IOL entitled "Big Bang experiment marred by suicide" and consider what the most obvious worrying thing in it is.
Done? Good. To me, the following quote did it: "Large Hadron Collider (LHV)" (emphasis mine). Sure, the factual errors and minor dissemination of FUD in the article are a problem. The media fixation on a non-existent doomsday threat is a problem, but the girl mentioned almost certainly had far bigger problems that could have been triggered by anything.
The fact that a major news agency cannot be bothered to properly proofread an article that they're placing before millions of eyes makes me question their competence in everything else they do. I wouldn't care so much if this were a once-off, but it seems to be happening a lot recently.
Update: Looks like they fixed it. See my comment below. |
|
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| Better late than never |
[Sep. 3rd, 2008|09:36 am] |
It has come to my attention that it has been far too long since I last wrote in here. Sorry guys, been far too busy living life to write about it.
I hate those all-in-one-post blog entries that just contain point-form activities, so I'll do mine in paragraphs in random order. (Which is only slightly better.)
The jazz band has started up again (first real rehearsal tonight) for a gig on the 12th at Kirstenbosch. I don't have any further details, but it's going to be a good one. I only realised during last week's trombone section rehearsal how much I missed Wednesday night jazz. The Dukes band is fun, but the music isn't as challenging (some of it is downright boring, actually, but we need to do it) and we usually have big gaps where we're missing instruments.
I have been domesticated. I now own a pot and a pan and am actually cooking myself breakfast most mornings. Usually eggs on toast and such, but today I experimented with fried onion as well. I need to tune the herbs I add (basil and thyme were handy, but not that great) and reduce the quantity (a whole onion is too much) but it's an overall win. One of these days I might be able to actually cook some proper food. (Mom, if you're reading this, this paragraph is a lie. I eat muesli and yoghurt for breakfast and cook marvelous and healthy suppers every night.)
In the last month or so, I have watched most of Doctor Who (the new version) and Torchwood. Definitely near the top of my list of things I really want there to be more of.
I have received two emails about my Erlang stuff. One was a wonderful ego-boosting thank-you and the other seemed to be a question in a language my browser refuses to display except as hex-runes.
On browsers: I finally updated to Firefox 3 on my primary machine. Two things had been delaying this. Two extensions I really struggle without (Chromatabs and Tab Mix Plus) didn't have fx3 versions. They both now have beta versions (although in the case of the former it's actually a new extension). Fx3 really struggles with malformed certificates and won't let you add an exception to visit the site anyway. I think this is still the case, but the one site I relied on with a broken cert has finally fixed it. I quite like the new UI. The biggest win has to be that auth windows and plugin loads no longer lock the whole browser, something that had really irritated me in fx2.
Tomorrow morning shall see me giving my flat a much-overdue clean in preparation for the arrival of a houseguest. I should probably finish putting up my last blind, too. (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) pkeike, if you're reading this, ignore this paragraph. My flat is always spotless and I did nothing special to prepare for your arrival.)
And now, a rant:
Dear Google, please give me a version of Chrome I can actually use. I realise that most of your userbase is quite happy with a Windows-only version, but some of us prefer an OS that isn't actively hostile. At the very least, can we have one that works in wine By alienating a large class of free-software developers you're not buying any favours. Yours, $linux_lad. |
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| Ruby again. This time the parser. |
[Jul. 16th, 2008|05:16 pm] |
Disclaimer: The following was written while I was furious and frustrated. Please bear this in mind if anything offends you.
Until I came to my senses, I had actually fired up an editor to update my CV so I could find a job that wouldn't require me to fight with the festering pile of yuckiness that is Ruby. Consider the following irb session:
>> (1 + 2 +
?> 4)
=> 7
>> (1 + 2
>> + 4)
=> 4
As far as I can tell, if the linebreak results in two valid expressions, the first is thrown away and the second is used. Why this is the case, I have no idea. All I can surmise is that whoever wrote that bit of the parser was smoking crack. The fact that this hasn't been picked up and fixed just demonstrates that the Ruby community completely fails to care about quality. I can't even find reference to it on the internet.
Ruby has long been way down on my list of languages to use. It has just dropped into the same class as PHP and Visual Basic. Congratulations, Ruby. I didn't think you could get worse. You did.
Edit: This saga continues in a new post. |
|
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| Idiocy on residential roads |
[May. 18th, 2008|10:58 am] |
Dear white minibus, registration CA 688-820,
Stopping on the side of the road (even the wrong side of the road) while the driver goes into a house on a residential road is fine. Doing so next to the only other parked vehicle on the other side of the road, leaving a space too narrow for anyone to drive through is, however, antisocial to the highest degree. Doing this when there is no alternative route that does not require getting back onto a busy main road is positively psychotic.
No love,
Me.
Further to the above, a note to the pedestrian who stopped on the corner, looked at my car with its indicator on, and then proceeded to cross the road I was turning into just as I turned into it: The only reason I stopped is that I don't want to have to deal with police on a Sunday. Next time, you will be run over. |
|
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| SMS spam insanity |
[Apr. 10th, 2008|04:42 pm] |
I received the following SMS today:
Need airtime?Buy it with your Visa or Visa Electron card at most supermarkets. No need to draw cash- U get 1 eXactcredit-To stop msgs,sms STOP SMS to 32227(R1)
Firstly, this is pure spam. Secondly, they want to charge me to use a premium service to remove myself from their list. This is, to me, completely unacceptable.
I did some research. It turns out that there is an organisation called WASPA that deals with Wireless Application Providers. Their list of members includes eXactmobile, which seems to fit the message ("eXactcredit"). They also have a code of conduct, from which I have copied the (abridged) relevant part:
5. Commercial communications
5.1. Sending of commercial communications
5.1.1. All commercial messages must contain a valid originating number and/or the name or identifier of the message originator.
5.1.2. Any message originator must have a facility to allow the recipient to remove his or herself from the message originator’s database, so as not to receive any further messages from that message originator.
5.1.3. Any mechanism for allowing a recipient to remove him or herself from a database must not cost more than one rand.
5.1.7. Upon request of the recipient, the message originator must, within a reasonable period of time, identify the source from which the recipient’s personal information was obtained.
5.2.1. Any commercial message is considered unsolicited (and hence spam) unless:
1. the recipient has requested the message;
2. the message recipient has a direct and recent prior commercial relationship with the message originator and would reasonably expect to receive marketing communications from the originator; or
3. the organisation supplying the originator with the recipient’s contact information has the recipient’s explicit consent to do so.
5.3.1. Members will not send or promote the sending of spam and will take reasonable measures to ensure that their facilities are not used by others for this purpose.
5.3.2. Members will provide a mechanism for dealing expeditiously with complaints about spam originating from their networks.
This message is definitely spam and, although the opt-out message meets the WASPA requirements, I see a paid unsubscribe mechanism as extortion.
I have contacted both eXactmobile and WASPA (the latter because I am not entirely certain that eXactmobile is the culprit). Updates when I hear from them.
Update: eXactmobile phoned me, and have removed my number from their db. It turns out that I was in there because I signed up for something five years ago and didn't uncheck the "you're allowed to send me crap" button. Go figure. Bonus points to WASPA for sorting it out quickly. |
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| An open letter to developers of autoupdating apps. |
[Apr. 9th, 2008|04:30 pm] |
Dear person who writes software with an autoupdater,
I live in a country where the internet is very slow and very expensive. I really like your application, and I would love to be running the latest, greatest version of it, but please let me decide when to update. You have no idea whether I am on free wireless at a coffee shop, the office's ADSL connection or my cellphone's GPRS.
Appropriate behaviour is to tell me that an update is available and then make a discreet "yes, I would like to update now" button available. This notification should not block what I am doing. This notification should not require immediate attention. There are two unforgivable sins in the autoupdate world:
1. Downloading tens or hundreds of megabytes without permission.
2. Requiring an unconditional restart.
The first is obvious once you consider that not everyone using your software lives in a first-world country with unlimited cheap bandwidth. The second should be obvious everywhere. If you must restart to complete the update, let us know ahead of time. Let us decide when to restart. Don't tell us the restart will happen in thirty seconds unless we say no.
Yours sincerely,
The guy who lost data and incurred nontrivial bandwidth charges. |
|
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| Ruby and Documentation: a rant |
[Mar. 31st, 2008|09:58 am] |
Why is it that people seem to think that autogenerated "API references" count as documentation?
If I am looking at a new library, I want a tutorial and an overview of the major features. I'm happy to dive into code and API references once I know more or less what I need to look at but please, for the sake of all the little children and their puppies, give me somewhere to bloody start!
Now that I have that out of my system, it's time to dive into this mess and see if I can figure out what I need. |
|
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| Ruby rant: Timeout::Error |
[Jan. 24th, 2008|05:44 pm] |
I am currently filled with hate and loathing. I'm going to need a few moments to cool off before I carry on working.
I was trying to make an http call from an irb session full of state I had carefully collected. Most of the code I used is in a script, but I had been doing a substantial amount of exploration over data from a few different place. While waiting for a large dataset from a busy server on the other end of a high-latency link, I got a timeout in the HTTP receive stuff. This in itself would not be a problem, except it crashed my irb session.
The problem is with the exception that a timeout raises:
module Timeout
class Error < Interrupt
end
end
The initiated will know that (a subset of) the Ruby exception hierarchy looks something like this:
Exception
- StandardError
- RuntimeError
- ZeroDivisionError
- ScriptError
- SyntaxError
- SystemExit
- SignalException
- Interrupt
The important bit there is that all the stuff you can reasonably expect to recover from is under StandardError. Because of this, a default rescue block will not catch anything that isn't a StandardError. The observant reader will notice that I helpfully showed Interrupt's position in the hierarchy. The observant reader will also notice that it is not a subclass of StandardError. This means that you need to catch it explicitly, or it will cause a crash.
Now, my theory is that Timeout was written by someone who misinterpreted "Interrupt" as meaning "interrupt what I'm doing", not "interrupt my application". This would be understandable, although still not acceptable, in a third-party library. Timeout is a core standard library module, however.
To summarise: If you're using the standard Ruby timeout mechanism, which you are if you use the HTTP libraries and almost certainly a whole host of others, you need to explicitly catch Timeout::Error or have a dodgy network bring your entire application crashing down around you. |
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| Rage and bitterness at Dell |
[Nov. 16th, 2007|09:46 am] |
My work laptop is a Dell. All in all, it's not a bad machine. It has crappy Intel audio and video chipsets that do weird stuff occasionally and the wifi is supported only in an OS I refuse to run, but this is common. On the other hand, it has dual-core goodness, plenty of RAM and a reasonably fast hard drive. The battery lasts a good two and a half hours if I'm not doing anything heavy with it.
The docking station, on the other hand, is a huge pile of almost entirely unmitigated pain. A docking station should be no more than a convenient port expander. Dell's docking station, on the other hand, requires its own power adapter because the laptop charger doesn't deliver enough to power the laptop and the docking station. It has a button that must be pressed before you take a running laptop off it. If there's a power cut, returning power triggers the ACPI suspend thing (which breaks the video card).
The reason for my rage and bitterness today is that I took the laptop off the docking station to use it in another room. I failed to push the "I want to take the laptop away" button because it's a stupid design and I forgot that it was necessary. The laptop worked fine, though. When I put the laptop back on the docking station, however, it hard-froze. No I/O whatsoever. It required a full power-cycle to put the machine back in a usable state.
To Dell: Get your bloody mind right. |
|
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| Public perception of crime |
[Oct. 19th, 2007|09:31 am] |
This morning, I have been bombarded with news of the tragic death of Lucky Dube. Now don't get me wrong, I think it's very sad that the man was killed, but a lot of what I've heard on the radio seems to me to be inappropriate.
This was clarified somewhat in a conversation with rooijan and pkeike. It's quotes like "how sad it is that our musical and cultural heroes are not respected and safe" that get to me. Why should a musician be any safer than a programmer or an engineer? What if the musician is a programmer and an engineer?
It would be different if he was specifically targeted because of who he was. I doubt the hijackers who murdered him knew or cared -- they were just trying to steal his car. I resent being told that I am less worthy of protection or sympathy just because I'm not famous. (Yes, this is a minority view. I still don't like it.) |
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| Durban name changes |
[Apr. 23rd, 2007|02:19 pm] |
A whole bunch of streets and buildings in and around Durban are to be renamed to honour political figures and former terrorists. There is still time to chime in on the whole thing. See the link in the email I sent to them for more details:
Good day,
I am strongly opposed to the overwhelming majority of the proposed name
changes, as per the document available at
http://www.durban.gov.za/durban/Municipality/municipality_news/durban-street-name-changes/view.
In my opinion, the place to honour political figures is on monuments and in
history books, not street signs. Thus, changing street names for the mere
purpose of changing them is a huge unwarranted expense.
Changing descriptive names such as "Pinetown Civic Centre" would seem to be
counterproductive.
Some of the proposed names aren't even South African heroes. For exaple,
"Fidel Castro", "Yasser Arafat" and "Che Guvara" (which is misspelled!) have
little or no bearing on this country or city.
In conclusion, name changes on this scale will serve only to confuse and enough
public money has already been spent already on such foolishness.
Yours sincerely,
Jeremy Thurgood |
|
|
| Involuntary mailing lists |
[Apr. 17th, 2007|05:07 pm] |
I received an email today from a mailing list to which I did not subscribe. It was a Christian evangelistic email that started as follows:
From: goodword@niconet.za.net
Subject: [Goodword] Good day
Sally jumped up as soon as she saw the surgeon come out of the operating room.
She said: "How is my little boy? Is he going to be all right? When can I see
him?"
The surgeon said, "I'm sorry. We did all we could, but your boy didn't make it."
Sally said, "Why do little children get cancer? Doesn't God care any more? Where
were you, God, when my son needed you?"
The surgeon asked, "Would you like some time alone with your son? One of the
nurses will be out in a few minutes, before he's transported to the university."
I did a little poking around and then composed the following reply (from my gmail address, since I don't want to expose my private email to everyone on the list):
To: goodword@niconet.za.net, goodword-owner@niconet.za.net,
coertzen@mtnloaded.co.za
Subject: Unethical mailing list owners
Jeremy jumped up as soon as he saw the mail arrive in his inbox. He
said: "What is this message? Is it something interesting? Is it a
message from a friend?"
The mail client said, "I'm sorry. I deliver what I get, and this is a
religious spam email."
Jeremy said, "Why do people get signed up to mailing lists without
their consent? Doesn't anyone have any ethical standards anymore?
Where are you, spam fliter, when I needed you most?"
The mail client asked, "Would you like some time to frame a suitable
reply? One of the STMP servers will be waiting whenever you have
overcome your instinctive rage and write something worthy of actually
being read."
--==ooOOoo==--
Who signed me up to this mailing list? Why did I not get a
confirmation email that would allow me to refuse? Why can I not
easily unsubscribe from the list's web interface?
This list (and another which apparently hasn't seen any traffic) seem
to be the only things living on the niconet.za.net domain. The
relevant bits of the whois record (public information, I wouldn't
stoop to revealing anything private in an email of this nature) is as
follows:
Domain Name : niconet.za.net
Registered for : Nico Coertzen
54 Karas Avenue
Vaalpark
1947
South Africa
Administrative Contact : Nico Coertzen <coertzen@mtnloaded.co.za>
Nico Coertzen
54 Karas Avenue
Vaalpark
Free State
1947
South Africa
+27784928570
Mr Coertzen: Is this your list? If not, can you soundly thump
whoever runs it? I am highly unimpressed with this situation and
intend to take matters further if it is not resolved speedily.
Please note that I have sent this from a secondary address, as I do
not wish the address that has been subscribed to the list to be
public.
Thank you,
Jeremy
I now await the response. |
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| An open letter to cyclists |
[Mar. 19th, 2007|08:03 pm] |
How not to get killed when sharing a road with jerith:
- If you're going to ride in the middle of the lane on a tree-lined and windy road at twilight, don't wear a dark purple jersey.
- If you're going to ride with two friends, don't take up both lanes on a two-lane road.
The first will get you killed accidentally, unless you're lucky enough to round a curve into a rare patch of the remaining sunlight just before I hit you. Still, if it's a choice between taking out a cyclist and maybe having a head-on collision with another car doing 60kph in the opposite direction around a blind curve, the cyclist dies every time. Consider yourself warned.
The second will get you killed deliberately, especially if you make rude signs at me when I hoot. Sure, take the middle of one lane when it's dangerous to ride on the side and let me overtake. I'll get annoyed and maybe mutter imprecations under my breath, but I can live with that. Taking up both lanes is inexcusable. If I hadn't had to turn off as early as I did, you would have been picking bits of bike off my tyres.
Use some common sense, people! |
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| Nanny pharmacists |
[Feb. 27th, 2007|09:50 am] |
I am just recovering from a really nasty bout of the flu. I am not going to bore you with the details of the sickness (although I did finally catch up on my TopGear backlog) but one event is rather more memorable.
Yesterday, my aunt went to the pharmacy to get a bunch of medication I'd run out of. They wouldn't let her buy a bottle of paracetamol and a box of medlemon (a medicated drink with lots of aspirin and caffeine in it) at the same time despite assurances that they would not be taken together. She had to go to another shop to buy the medlemon.
I appreciate their concern for my health, but I would much prefer that they sold me the meds with a warning rather than not letting me have them at all. I know that I shouldn't be taking 800mg of aspirin and 500mg of paracetamol together. I also know that the caffeine in the medlemon is counterproductive if I want to sleep. I also know that my stomach doesn't like aspirin if I haven't just eaten.
Taking all these things into account, I drink medlemon with food when I wake up and through the day and I take paracetamol for the sore throat and headache when I want to sleep with six hours between the various meds. |
|
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| A rant about FICA |
[Jan. 3rd, 2007|03:43 pm] |
As most South Africans know, banking in this country now requires all banks and their customers to be compliant with the Financial Intelligence Centre Act. This requires people to provide banks with certain details to allow easier tracking of money laundering and fraud. If these details are not provided, the banks will freeze your accounts until such time as they are.
Now, the two main requirements (and all I have ever been asked to provide, actually) are:
- Some form of ID. ID books work and, surprisingly, driver's licenses. For some reason, South African passports are not acceptable to Nedbank.
- Proof of address. This one I shall expound upon at greater length.
Theoretically, proof of place of employment and such are also required. My cellphone providers require this, but my bank doesn't. Perhaps they're somehow extracting it from my monthly salary deposits.
On to the proof of address thing. This is an impossible problem to solve. There are a whole bunch of people who cannot provide a reasonable proof of address for perfectly legitimate reasons. For example, one of the guys I work with used to live in a block of flats with dodgy post boxes. Stuff delivered there sometimes went missing, so he had everything sent to a PO box instead.
Compare this to what they accept as proof of address. I brought in a random cellphone bill. Other people I know have provided almost any semiofficial item of mail with both a name and address on it, which is trivial to forge. Thus, this particular rule combines the likelihood of a large number of people lying about their address with a fairly large pool of people who cannot reasonably comply without jumping through lots of hoops.
Also, consider the reliability of our banks. I have had to provide the same FICA information several times for my account. On the most recent occasion, I was phoned twice after I had already done it. The second time I had the woman on the other end of the phone check the actual bank information rather than just the list of people she had to phone. Surprisingly, I was listed as being compliant. Why can they not to that basic check before they waste time and money phoning me?
Anyways, rant over. Time to get back to work. |
|
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| Further Vodacom woes. Somebody give me a shotgun. |
[Dec. 19th, 2006|10:55 am] |
My most recent email to Vodacom.
Vodacom Customer Care wrote:
> Dear Jeremy
>
> Thank you for your e-mail.
>
> PLease accept our sincere apology for the late response, however I did a
> search on your e-mail address and the e-mail below was the only record.
> Kindly be advised that I have escalated your query to our Data Division
> for further review and feedback. Your reference number is AS-3MMO-G635P.
>
> Should you have any further queries, please contact us via e-mail at
> customercare@vodacom.co.za.
I have now waited nearly two more weeks for Vodacom to get back to me.
If this issue is not resolved by January, I *will* be finding an
alternative service provider, even if I have to send my data by carrier
pigeon.
--J
Why the hell haven't I left yet? |
|
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| While I'm in a complaining mood, Ster Kinekor. |
[Dec. 8th, 2006|03:33 pm] |
My submission to their online complaints system:
The online booking system performs incredibly and unnecessarily poorly,
possibly only under load.
I tried to book tickets to Casino Royale last Saturday (2 December) and was
continually met with "System unavailable, retry?" errors. These would occur
every few seconds, even when I was not interacting with the system. I was
unable to complete the booking because there was insufficient time between
failures to enter the movie card numbers for my booking and a failure/retry
cleared the numbers I was entering.
While I have no knowledge of the system other than trying to use it, I believe
the client is continually contacting the server for some reason. All this
unnecessary traffic firstly puts load on the server leading to far more
frequent failures than would normally be the case and secondly leads to
spurious failures that do nothing more than interrupt the user experience and
(in my case at least) result in a lost booking.
All of the issues I have seen on the booking system are solved technical
problems. It remains only to implement the (in most cases) fairly simple
architectural and implementation changes.
I would like to recommend that Ster Kinekor hire some competent web application
engineers to rebuild the system rather than apparently relying on graphic
designers to come up with something flashy but barely functional.
I didn't pull any punches on this one. I'm tired of crap on the web. |
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| More Vodacom 3G woes (continued) |
[Dec. 6th, 2006|11:27 am] |
This is a followup to my previous Vodacom rant.
Good day,
I sent a query from vodacom4me.co.za more than a month ago and have
heard nothing since the email quoted below on the second of November.
(I will not apologise for the formatting. This is how I received the
message myself.)
Vodacom Customer Care wrote:
> Dear JeremyThank you for your e-mail. Kindly be advised that your
> query has been escalted throught to our Data Department for further
> investigation.You will be contacted as soon as possible from someone
> in the data department with feedback.In future they can be contacted
> on 082 155 (free from vodacom).Should you have any further queries,
> please contact us via e-mail at customercare@vodacom.co.za. Warm
> RegardsDeon AndrewsEmail Contact Centre-----Original Message-----From:
> jerith_vodacom@jerith.za.netSent: 2006/11/02 09:34:43 AMTo: Vodacom
> Customer CareSubject: Vodacom4Me Query: Out of date bandwidth usage
> information on vodacom4me.co.za Full name: Jeremy ThurgoodE-mail
> address: jerith_vodacom@jerith.za.netMobile number: 0828294472Mobile
> handset: Message: Good day,I have recently discovered that the
> vodacom4me bandwidth usage information is more than a day out of date.
> Specifically, I used about 10mb on the evening of 2006-10-30 and
> another 10mb on the evening of 2006-10-31. Until last night, my
> October usage claimed approximately 498000kb. This morning, it showed
> 509900.8 KB.On the same page as the usage information is the following
> text:"""Please Note: * Bundled info could be up to 3 hours old."""This
> is clearly inaccurate and could end up costing me a lot of money if I
> base my end-of-month usage on how much bandwidth Vodacom tells me I
> still have available.This website is the only way I can track my
> usage, since my Vodacom-supplied router does not provide any usable
> monitoring information. Usage for the current session is displayed in
> the web interface, but there''s no easy way to automate collection of
> this and if a session should drop unexpectedly (which is not
> uncommon), this information is lost.This time I was lucky, and hadn''t
> used much bandwidth for the few days prior to the 30th, so I didn''t
> go over my limit. This will not usually be the case. What can I
> expect from Vodacom in terms of either ensuring the accuracy of this
> information or compensation for overruns based on out of date
> information? Surely I am not expected to keep track of every byte
> myself. If I am, can the basic tools for this please be provided in
> the router firmware?Thanks,--J “This e-mail is sent on the Terms and
> Conditions that can be accessed by Clicking on this link
> http://www.vodacom.co.za/legal/email.jsp "
This is clearly not as much of an issue to Vodacom as it is to me. I
would like this issue to either be addressed (I'll even settle for a
good reason as to why it can't be addressed and permission to use
third-party firmware without voiding my router's warranty) or
I want to be released from my 3G contract with Vodacom so I can find
another service provider who is more willing to help.
Thank you,
Jeremy Thurgood
Need I say more? |
|
|
| Disturbing new trends in webvertising. |
[Nov. 24th, 2006|10:56 am] |
Two recent trends in web-based advertising have just gotten up my nose to the point where I am ready to LART the people responsible. Unfortunately, they're widespread enough that effective LARTing is impractical.
The first is the now-ubiquitous flash ad. The major problem I have with flash is that it steals all keyboard input. Since my bed browsing is primarily keyboard driven (when I'm reading an article, at least -- I do still click on links most of the time), having the arrow keys and pgup/pgdown suddenly stop functioning is *really* annoying. This morning, however, a new bogeyman reared its ugly head. The flash ad had managed to escape its bounds (probably due to shoddy web design and insufficient testing on major browsers) and cover a large chunk of the text I was tryin to read, as can be seen in this screenshot. To add insult to injury, the feedback process is byzantine to the point of being almost inaccessible.
The second, and rather more subtle, issue is that of embedding textual adverts in the text of an article. This leads to a jarring and somewhat painful context switch on the part of the reader. In the case of Google ads (as seen at physorg.com) the advert is at least somewhat announced and in a recognisable form. Over at thislondon.co.uk they put their own text ads inline, linking to other articles completely unrelated to the one I am currently reading.
Please, STOP THE MADNESS!
This public service announcement is brought to you by the Society For The Prevention Of Monkey-Driven Internets. |
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| Sisters, cars and tiresome persistence |
[Oct. 11th, 2006|09:46 am] |
This is something of a rant and something of a declaration of finality.
My sister, as many of you already know, lives in Cape Town and studies at UCT. For the past few months, since she got her driver's license, she has been bugging me about my car. Well, technically it's my mother's car but I have had more or less exclusive use of it for several years.
The "debate" has raged back and forth since then:
Sister: You need to get a new car so I can have Mom's.
Me: I will be getting a new car at the end of the year. You can have Mom's then.
Sister: But I need it now. I saw a nice second-hand golf for R20k...
Me: I'm not going to buy a second-hand golf. The plan has always been to give you the car at the end of the year.
Sister: But I need it now! You don't know what it's like to always have to ask friends to take you places!
Me: If you need to go anywhere when I'm not at work, phone me. I'm quite happy to drive you around.
Sister: That's OK, I don't need you to drive me. But I need a car.
Mom: Enough! You can have the car next year! Drop it!
Well, now she has moved out of res and into a house with a few other people. Except she apparently neglected to check whether the house was near the campus bus route. So now she wants me give her my car and make another plan until the end of the semester. "Just a week", although the UCT calendar puts the end of the semester at the end of the month and then exams are after that. If I can't spend the time without a car, I can always buy another one...
At the end of today's phone call, after I had patiently explained that I actually do need a car for more than just work <-> home and that buying a car this week isn't an option, she hung up on me. Apparently seeing reason is unbearably frustrating.
I can see things from her side: It isn't easy to be independent and have a thriving social life when you don't have a car. Especially if your big brother is in the same city and has a car you believe should rightfully be yours. Especially if said big brother has no social life to speak of (his geeky friends and computery meetings don't count) and only needs a car because he doesn't want to stay with some cousins who live within walking distance of work. Especially if he can afford a shiny new car (or failing that, a crappy old car) of his own so you can have the one that should rightfully be yours. Even if you have nowhere to park said car. Even if you're going to be out of town for a couple of months and have nowhere to leave it during that time. Big brother can look after it, can't he?
OK, perhaps that wasn't entirely fair. But I'm getting to the point where I'm going to just stop answering her calls. I'm happy to help out, but I'm not going to give in to her every whim and I'm not going to rearrange my life to bail her out of whatever messes she digs herself into by not thinking before she rearranges her life.
My sister is not getting the car until she's back in Cape Town next year. That will give me time to save enough for a good deposit on a nice new car and will avoid the problem of where to park it when she's away. It's also what the original plan was and what I've been basing my life-rearranging decisions around. End of story. |
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