Stupid Animated Characters; or, Your web page might not be the only one I have open right now
Web pages with stupid animated characters in them are annoying enough in their own right, but they get me all the more annoyed when the stupid animated characters start talking the moment the page is loaded.
Nokia's Park WiFi page, for example. (WARNING: Stupid Animated Characters.)
What bugs me so much is the assumption on the part of the site developers that just because the page has been loaded in my browser, I am looking at it immediately.
Tabs are not new in web browsers, no matter how new they might appear to IE users. A lot of us have been using tabs, and what's more, opening pages in background tabs for years now. That's how I do the vast majority of my browsing.
It follows that I'm rarely looking at a page while it loads; I'll open it in the background and devote my attention to it when it suits me, ta. To open a bunch of links in background tabs and then have to guess which bastard one is talking at me is hugely irritating.
Please, developers who insist on using Stupid Animated Characters: can you not at least give us web users the opportunity to load the Stupidness and play it when we like, perhaps with a large "Play" or "Talk" button? Please?
Grumph.
Saturday, August 26, 2006
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Yay and yay and humbug
X-ray: "Normal."
MRI brain scan: "Normal."
EEG electric activity scan: "The brain waves on the right side of your brain look slightly different to those on the left; the significance of this is uncertain."
Riiight.
When the doctors told me that I really shouldn't drive for a while, at least until the cause of my mysterious fainting episode had been established, I arrogantly and naively thought I'd be able to manage just fine without access to a car.
"I'm a relatively fit, active young man living in a small town that has easy access to everything essential for day-to-day life," I thought to myself. "I can get by."
And I did, for a while. But after a few weeks the frustration started to grow. The recycling piled up in the utility room, because I didn't do my monthly trip to the recycling centre to get rid of it. My newly-constructed office remained half-decorated because I couldn't, on a whim, drive to appropriate stores to get the paint, shelving and other bits and bobs I wanted to use. Our season ticket to Longleat sat unused on the microwave, because I wasn't able to take Barney there for day trips as I'd planned. And while the hot weather wilted everyone in sight, I failed to be organised enough to get on the train to the seaside for a day.
It turns out that I'm not nearly as radical as I thought I was, and every bit as lazy as I wanted to think I was not. Living without a car turned out to be time-consuming (endless hours waiting for buses), expensive (I pay about £5 for a return to Bath, nine miles away), and annoying. Sure, I could get to most shops for most things, I could get to a pub and a post office and visit most of my friends, but I couldn't transport any objects, I couldn't carry heavy bag loads of stuff. Despite my fondness for thinking myself environmentally friendly, I'm still a car-dependant consumer like everyone else, and found it very hard to change my ways.
Now I've been given the all-clear, and things are looking brighter. I have a long list of things I want to do in the car, and an enhanced admiration for people who really have taken the radical step of ditching cars completely.
That said, I've re-kindled my fondness for cycling, and the constant treks up and down the hill into town on the bike have, I'm sure, helped me get a little fitter than I might otherwise have been. I've no intention of using the car for short around-town journeys; indeed, I'm determined to make an effort to think harder than ever before about getting in the car in the first place - "Do I have to drive, or am I just being lazy?"
As for my funny episode back in April, no-one really knows what it was. I've been prodded and x-rayed and scanned and tested many times since, and everything has come back saying I am as normal and as healthy as a 35-year-old part-time freelance writer can be expected to be. So yay for me, yay for the NHS, yay for cycling, and yay for coming to terms with just how easy it is to be a lazy so-and-so when you've got a car key in your hand and a tank full of petrol. Brummmmm.
Saturday, August 26, 2006
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Someone special
When she was about 19, Sally spent some time travelling around Ireland. She found herself in a village on a crossroads; on three corners were pubs, and on the the fourth corner a church.
She stayed with a friend in a room in one of the pubs, right above the bar. They tried to have an early night but the noise from downstairs was too much, so they got dressed again and went down to join in.
One of the local lads took a shine to Sally and asked her out. He was dressed up that night in a smart suit, looked very much the young gent - Sally said yes, and he promised to pick her up the following day.
Pick her up he did, in his van, to accompany him on his job delivering gas canisters to remote cottages. Sally sat on an upturned orange crate, which served as the passenger seat, with a small dog behind her panting in her ear. The young lad was now dressed in jeans and a scruffy T-shirt and didn't look nearly so gentlemanly. There were huge holes in the floor of the van through which Julie could watch the road whizzing by.
At every cottage they stopped at for deliveries, the young lad would jump out and carry a gas canister to the waiting housewife, who would nudge him, point at Sally waiting in the van, and ask him if he'd found someone special.
It turned out he hadn't, because when they returned to the town he disappeared very quickly and Sally was left to herself once more. Not that she minded - he wasn't great company anyway.
Labels: writing
Saturday, August 26, 2006
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In a muddle
I'm rather relieved that Steven Johnson gets as upset about AV equipment as I do.
I've spent the last few years assuming that I was a fairly clued-up sort of fella when it came to technology and gadgets. I hadn't met a device I couldn't get my head round, not until recently.
Now we've got a Freeview box and a VCR/DVD-R machine, I find the simple process of recording telly to be beyond me. Just trying to get an episode of Doctor Who on tape requires several minutes of serious concentration on my part, and the nagging feeling afterwards that I've done it wrong.
Telly is so complicated now. We have just the three remotes, which is bareable but pretty stupid when you stop to think about it. The mess of cables at the back, and the interconnections between Scart and AV and audio sockets leaves me more in a spin than any computer I've ever dealt with.
No wonder I spend increasing amounts of time in the kitchen with my radio.
Labels: writing
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
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Equation
Labels: photos
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
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Wide
Labels: photos
Sunday, August 06, 2006
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