Saturday was the apps4nsw development day, a “hack day” event where programmers were challenged to mash up government data in new useful ways. The Snook went along as part of the Yahoo team. (He tried to get me to go, but I felt like a day at home knitting was a bigger priority.) I followed along throughout the morning on the Twitter stream when I saw a bunch of people retweeting a Flickr photo. I clicked through and saw a very familiar neck…

Hey! That’s my Snookums! I immediately emailed to tell him he was Twitter-famous.

The project he helped with didn’t win a prize, but I was proud of him just for taking part.

I feel like my pre-verbal nephew who can’t enunciate what he feels and is reduced to caveman-like outbursts of rage. DAH! DAH DAH DAH!

• I tried to buy an international calling card at the Chinese grocery near my house tonight. I spent like 10 minutes reading fine print on stupid posters and flipping through brochures and finally found the one I wanted. I spent $10 on it, walked back to my house, and realised it was for recharging mobiles, NOT using with a landline. I ran back over, expecting them to exchange it. They refused. Policy of no exchange on phone cards. “But I was here 2 minutes ago! This isn’t what I thought it was! I didn’t scratch the PIN off! I SHOP HERE ALL THE TIME!” They told me I could come back and see the manager tomorrow. I said I needed the card for a call at 6am in the morning. No go. I finally threw it on the counter and told them I’d never shop there again. Tomorrow I’ll stop in just long enough to tell the manager the same.
• Okay, so having wasted $10, how am I going to connect to the RRT show tomorrow at 6am? I could ring on the landline, but obviously it’s the principle of the thing now. So I just spent a goddamn HOUR trying various ways of doing it via VOIP. I tried the stupid ShoePhone. I tried using Google Talk. I tried it with telephone. I couldn’t get any of them to work. At best, I’d get choppy audio that sounded like it was coming through a fan. I’m going to have to suck it up and pay to ring in.
• I used to have several cron jobs that did useful things at this site, like processing Moblog posts (emailed images from my iPhone) and updating my podcast download stats and posting my Google Reader items. Sometime in the past few months, Quadrahosting changed something and they all stopped working. I spent a couple fruitless hours with the Snook trying to fix them. No go.
• Earlier this week I spent $60+ on Moneywell for my Mac and our iPhones. It’s personal finance software that’s meant to sync to your phones. Yet the first evening, we couldn’t get the sync to work at all. One phone would work; one wouldn’t. Sometimes neither. Then today suddenly without changing anything, they’re both working. Until they stop.

WHY DOES EVERYTHING SUCK? If supposedly smart techie people like me can’t figure this crap out, how the heck is the rest of the world?

Chewbacca says you should have your own domain name. Good tip.