Minimal

Signing off

Right, Christmas time is upon us, today’s my last day at work in 2003 and this, therefore, is probably my last post of the year. Have a jolly old time and be sure to make a new year’s resolution of not wasting your life reading drivel like this any more. ;)

Seriously though, if there’s anyone out there, have a good holiday. And cross your fingers for Beagle 2. :)

Re-learning English as a foreign language

Phil’s Hail to the Dizzee Rascal thread (recently renamed, I see &mdash hoping for more amusing hits, Phil?) continues to deliver the goods. I’ve taken it upon myself to actually learn what the hell these people are talking about and you can learn with me. Here are a few choice terms, with definitions courtesy of urbandictionary.com:

buff

Attractive, glamorous, or generally pleasing; physically fit and trim; nothing to do with beige or nudity.

sick

Interesting, cool, new; good, but a shade evil; nothing to do with vomit.

wagwan

A greeting; bastardization of “What’s going on?”; not a native American’s tent.

So there you go. Public service weblogging at its finest. Next week we’ll take a look at “poom po”, “chung” and a redefinition of “heavy”. Or maybe not.

We’re not worthy!

The other day, something pointed me in the direction of this polemic on the worth of weblogs. As is often the case with such things, various comments made me chuckle while other attacks hit fairly close to home. It made me wonder: “What have I done on the web that’s had any real worth?” Here’s my (meagre) list of genuinely useful output:

• 1994-1996: maintained the VB Arena (long since dead), one of many small sites popping up to support the blossoming Visual Basic community.
• 1998-1999: recoded, mainly for stability, the Grand Prix 2 Jam Editor (recently dead) — a simple utility for swapping graphics into and out of the PC-based F1 simulation.
• 2002: diarised my decision-making process when buying a new car (7days7cars), providing an everyday driver’s perspective on various cars’ strengths and weaknesses.

And... that’s about it. Note that only one of the above things incorporated a weblog. Also note that the weblog you’re reading right now doesn’t even register in the worthiness stakes. Time to give up? Hell, no. I’m doing this stuff for me. :)

Beard wars!

Hussein’s might be a bit shaggier and longer, but I reckon Ash has got him licked on the mad-n-starin’-eyes front. :)

Easing my way into the week

Forget leaving work early on Fridays — there’s a lot to be said for taking Monday mornings off. Okay, so today’s late arrival at my desk was more down to the nice people at Hotpoint than any inspiration on my part, but it certainly made a pleasant change. Not only did I get to chill with Radio 2 on (do you really think I’d stoop to Kilroy?), but the flat got a much-needed spring clean. And a whole season early, too! My mother would be so proud.

Actually, make that ‘relieved’.

Or maybe ‘appalled’. :)

I tuned out

You know, after all the hype about iTunes, I was kinda hoping it would make a worthy successor to Winamp. When it appeared for the PC, I took a chance and downloaded it. Now, I’m rather disappointed.

Let’s get the petty annoyances out of the way first. For one, it’s yet another skinned multimedia application. Spare me, for Christ’s sake. Next, it uses what I assume is Apple’s window-sizing methods. In other words, you can resize only from the bottom right of the window. Also, the maximise/minimise/restore functionality is truly messed up. Inexcusable, really, as the interface is ideally suited to being... well... normal. Sigh.

Window management issues aside (and it’s no worse than Media Player), let’s get back to the meat. Upon starting iTunes proper, I imported the My Music folder on my machine, but was disappointed with the presentation of my files once done. Gone were the useful folder hierarchies, although they were still there on the drive. Instead, I now had a massive long list of MP3 files with columns for Artist, Album, Track number, and so on. Unfortunately, this information was taken solely from the files’ ID3 tags rather than, say, folder names. Where my files weren’t tagged, I got no information, resulting in half of my MP3s being untitled tracks, bundled together as the same untitled artist.

That wouldn’t be such a big deal were it not for a key track-filtering mechanism relying on this information. The Browser pane seems like a pretty neat feature, but it sucks ass when every artist has no name. To compound this, there was no fallback — no way within the software to request a folder to be queued. That instantly put a major cramp on iTunes’ usability, for me at least.

Actually, even if I’d been tagged to hell and back, the Browser pane might still have frustrated. While the Genre/Artist/Album filters are a cute way of finding stuff, the Genre column was almost entirely useless. There’s so much bad categorisation around in the various online tag databases (from which tags are taken) that genre is rarely a usable filter. Also, as soon as you close the Browser pane, all filtering is lost. “Can’t I just set up the filter then hide the unnecessary UI again?” I wondered. No, apparently not. It just snaps shut and your filter is lost. Call me a minimalist, UI pedant, but that kind of thing really bugs me.

Finally, as a kick in the teeth for rejecting iTunes, on returning to Winamp, I find that my previously tag-free MP3s have now been tagged... with blankness. So, instead of at least seeing the filename in Winamp’s playlists, I see a not-very-useful hyphen. Swear? You bet I did.

There was a time when I’d considered buying a Mac, as its software gets rave reviews for usability. Now, however, I’m rather disillusioned. The day I make the switch has, at best, been put back.

Tiiiiimmmmmbeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Bugger, I missed it! Blyth Power Station’s chimneys were blown up (blown down?) last Sunday. Thankfully, the BBC caught it all on camera. Looks damned impressive, actually... and somewhat alarming. Normally when you see a chimney collapse, it goes pretty much straight down. These ones just flopped over, staying pretty rigid most of the way and getting a good reach because of it. If my house was one of those a hundred yards or so from their base, I would’ve been filling my pants!

Fun, anyone?

This is a really lazy blog entry, but I've been wanting to link to something PS2-related ever since the new adverts came on telly. The BBC Magazine came to the rescue.

Cheap as chips

Arguably, taking the afternoon off work to go and see a film makes it a very expensive cinema-going experience, but I’ll overlook that and concentrate on the ticket price instead: £3.13 to see Return of the King. And on the Metrocentre’s biggest screen too. Read it and weep, Londoners. ;)

Revelation

After years of using CSS and being frustrated by what I thought was a limitation in the application of classes, I’ve finally found out that you can apply multiple classes to a single element. Hallelujah! That’ll tidy up my stylesheets no end. As sad as it may be, I’m now a very happy man. Thanks to Phil for the link. :)