Well, what a doggy day.

It seems that a couple of the dogs in the street decided that our backyard was going to be a play zone today.

Our two labradors were then variously visited by ‘Thor’ the Jack Russell and ‘Rusty’ the… well.. I’m not quite sure.

I shooed them away a couple of times… Rusty was quite an amazing jumper, clearing a 5 foot high wall with ease.

Anyway, say hello to the world Rusty:

What an asshole:  Court rejects womans plea on embryos

You’d think there’d be a more human solution, such as a legal agreement to remove any need for him to support any children.

But to take away her hope safe in the knowledge that you are losing none of your own is extremely cruel.

Abraham Lincoln ‘Gettysburg Address’, one of the greatest speeches ever written:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow - this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I’m in the process of reading Shelby Foote’s Civil War trilogy, so this stuff is playing on my mind lately :)  Strange urges to write in florid terms, things like ‘Kind Providence has seen fit for the release to go well’

ARG!

There should be a circle of hell devoted entirely to former employees of Adobe and their Acrobat development team.

I just lost 20 tabs of open web sites, a firefox instance and 20 minutes of my life when another ‘PDF of death’ from the net decided to commit suicide and take my computer with it.

No, it wasn’t a blue screen of death, just one of those CPU sucking moments when Windows decides that the hole ‘pre-emptive’ part of multi-tasking is a nice theoretical concept, but that in practice it should just give in to the first application to go apeshi*t.

Yes, for the last FOUR versions of acrobat viewer at least I get a PDF download that opens in a browser window and dies.

It can’t be that hard can it?  Why oh why can this not work reliably?

On that note, I just downloaded adobe Acrobat Enterprise/Professional/Whatever….. it took up 495MB of my drive.  it came with its own download manager, it loaded its own ’speed launcher’ app into start up, when I reboot, I’m certain their will be a system tray icon, I also now have pdf icons in my office apps.

By the time I get home I should expect to find a copy of itself raiding my fridge and leaving its wet towels on my bathroom floor.

I mean, it couldn’t get any more frigging intrusive could it?

What is it with software companies?  Is it to keep the vicious cycle going they have to make the user experience more and more involved?  What happened to ‘less is more’?

This is how open source / ASP model will win, because it will provide JUST the functionality people need, not all this other CRAP.

That said, I think Acrobat has some neat features, but you need to send your engineering team into a backroom and tell them to not come out again until they’ve found a lighter way of doing it!

I just whipped this up:

http://www.herod.net/dypm/

I’ve been struck by comment spam in the last few days with several spam comments awaiting moderation before I turned on akismet to block them.

This morning however, after 54 blocked comments, one got through akismet and I decided to try my hand at a WP plugin.

It turned out to be surprisingly easy, perhaps only 20 minutes work, including the learning of how wp plugins work for comments.

Credits to jroller for the inspiration. I guess we’ll find out if a spammer is interested in beating it - I’ve several ideas for improvements, but I’d rather keep them in reserve for when it gets beaten (which could be an hour from now, or a year )

Ever bought a Virgin Blue gift voucher?

Then you’ll know what a bad outcome that is!

You see, Virgin Blue sells gift vouchers online and they will mail you the voucher via the post.

But you can’t redeem the voucher online, you have to phone their call center to place the reservation.

But calling their call center incurs a $15 cost, each way, per ticket.

So, a $100 voucher, for two people to travel return to sydney winds up only shaving about $40 off the ticket, the other $60 is spent redeeming the voucher via the phone call!

This stinks!

Ah, another day, another exquisite trip with Cityrail

I was greeted at the door of my train by my personal hostess, who escorted me to my seat and supplied me with a freshly squeezed fruit juice. What I love about the evening trains is the in-trip movies - full dolby surround sound, free popcorn and complimentary foot massages.

Tomorrow I’ll be in the breakfast carriage, fresh muffins and hot coffee here I come! Okay, maybe not, maybe it was more like this:

• Train two carriages short.
• Had to sit in the aisle
• Watched a bad movie on my laptop (’God’s and Generals’)
• Sore butt / leg cramps
• Got a seat after 1hr 20min
• Home 30 minutes late

Hurrah for public transport! Down with cars!

Well, this weekend was a bit of a movie weekend, a bit of an eclectic bunch really:

Must Love Dogs Rating: 2/5

Downfall

Rating 5/5 (Although likely to be an acquired taste!)

De-Lovely

Rating 5/5

God’s and Generals

Rating: 1/5

What an appalling film.

Slow, historically questionable, badly acted(or at least, directed badly), appallingly written, scored like a hallmark card.

The most enjoyable portion is the opening credits.  And perhaps the battle scenes, where, for the most part, they stop talking!

I didn’t see the end, my laptop battery gave out.  Small mercies…

–

I started writing reviews of all these films, but it struck me, I’m really not very good at it tonight, and rather than my ramblings, I’ll keep it short!

P.S. I’m getting VERY frustrated with WordPresses HTML formatting of posts…. whitespace! keep the whitespace!

I’ve been surfing the web for old sites I used to visit and decided to drop in on google groups again.

I found my earliest presence on the internet, November 13, 1993!

Okay, I was young… I thought I was funny…. I watched star trek…. I’m so, so sorry.

Here it is posted via QUT by way of anon.penet.fi to Usenet.

I’d have my first web page, if I could find the floppy disks… and something to read them with I might do a little ‘look back’ on old sites, for some reason, it makes me sad when I can’t find them any more…

I’ve been eying up a rather large set of books in recent months

Yes, Shelby Foote’s 3 volume tome, ‘The Civil War’.

Whats been putting me off is the price, at $AU69.95 per volume and with three volumes its a little on the expensive side.

So I had a look at Amazon yesterday, and to my delight, they are selling ALL THREE for around $US42.00 - with postage, thats about $62.00 - or a good $140 less than buying it in Australia off my local bookshop.

Its not the bookshops fault, its the publishers.   But at that price difference, they deserve to have their market killed.

Anyway, it should arrive in the mail in about 2-3 weeks.