A Donkey on the Edge

As I mentioned before, a nice UPS man took my iBook away to be mended under Apple’s iBook Logic Board Repair Extension Programme

It came back all shiny and new less than a week later :-)

It blew up again a week after that :-(

We’ve just been through the bipolar UPS man circuit again (the circuit, not the UPS man) and are currently hoping if it does go wrong again, it’ll happen under the 90 day repair warrantee.

Fingers all very crossed…

So I’ve been using Basecamp as the project extranet for the Lecture List. It’s just fantastic to see a web-based tool so well implemented, it’s a beauty, it’s fast, it just works very very well :-)

One of the interface details is “fade” pannels—areas that are bright yellow on pageload, but very quickly fade to white.

The idea is sound—let’s say you’ve just added a comment to a long list of comments. Once you click on “add my comment” the page reloads and in the process you/05/”loose your place” visually on the returned page. The “fade” pannel takes your eye right back to where you were adding something. A simple device, but very cool:-)

I implemented a similar fade-to-white effect as a page transition on the Pumpernickle site. At the time I was in the thick of another Flash-or-no-Flash argument (*yawn*) on a bulletin board and I sort of wrote it to prove to someone that you could make smooth, beautiful transitions without plugings.

Anyway, I’m no programmer, but I got something dirty together and it’s served well over the last few years.

I was curious to see how 37Signals had solved the interval-time and colour-step array problems (I ended up with two arrays—one for decreasing time steps and one for colours).

I just wanted to say “wow”. We are soooo not worthy;-) The 37S javascript file is absolutely tiny, the system uses only one array, the function that does the job is four lines of code and it’s called recursively (of course).

If I was starting off in this industry I’d want a job in Chicago :-)

I make tracy Island out of yellow play-do and get as far as the nice abstract blob of the island, the runway with the fold-back trees and am just starting on the Mies VDR square buildings when Clemmie attacks and eats the buildings.

She then eats them just as quickly as i can shape them…

Currently on hold (Billy Joel “Uptown Girl”) at the HP online store (“order by phone 0845 270 4215”). I called to ask which models in the Colourjet series are Postscript, networked etc etc.

The guy (an HP employee) replied “what’s Postscript?”

This is funny and sad and shocking and made my heart sink in so many ways I can’t begin to describe;-) I replied “Postscript is a language used to describe raster images for the purposes of sending them to laser printers. It was written by Adobe and first used in anger by the Hewlett-Packard Development Company in their very qualified laser engines. These were made famous by the first generation of Applewriter printers in the early 1990’s”

The guy said “oh.” and put me on hold.

90 seconds later a chirpy sales rep comes on (Angela Dickson x2219). After a five minute conversation, she states that she is unable to confirm or deny whether the HP Color LaserJet 3500n printer (Hewlett-Packard part number Q1320A) is or is not a Postscript printer, or indeed if it were a Postcript printer, which version of Postscript it would be.

In the end, she kindly offered to call me back tomorrow (she needed to talk to her manager about this) with a “resolution”

I write because this is like a baker not knowing about flour, a children’s television producer not having watched “Sesame Street” or the president not knowing the constitution (ok, maybe not that last one). This is just plain wrong…

Nice of the Dana Centre to provide an open Wi-Fi network.

As long as it goes through port 80 you can do what you like for as long as you like. Very civilized :-)

…the Association of Photographers’ rights negotiator and European Pyramide representative and end up without her email address, but with the knowledge that if I want to I can see my chakras spinning :-)

http://www.auraphoto.com

Is filled with darkness right this second.

In cheap black suits and unpolished DMs sit at a reception desk.

I was there (the BMW service centre in Battersea) from 9:30 til 16:30 and they didn’t budge. I hope they get paid enough, though on close inspection they both had screens to play with and spent most of the day drawing funny faces in a photoshop-alike programme. I guess this is why The American Right want prisoners to not have access to television or the internet, I guess a screen is just enough freedom to not go mad?

But anyway, I’m feeling better (but you couldn’t tell from that introduction).

Just had a lovely drive (my first sunny day driving through London in a while) from the Dogs Home, past Vauxhall bridge and along the south bank to Waterloo, then through the lovely old Kingsway tunnel which has been open for a while now but I never seem to use…

Did the whole drive chasing a shiny new KTM. Very shit-off-shovel big four-stroke single with a lovely thumpa-thumpa sort of rythm, sort of looks like a wasp — black and yellow with a waist. He’d get me at the lights and I’d catch him on the straights (just). Anyway, this reprehensible behaviour gave me a nice warm glow inside, so i should get through my all-nighter in one piece :-)

I think i really need a nice long bike trip, maybe Morocco, get some soft-sand practice and some sunshine…