web-goddess

Aww, check it out! The Queen’s finally got a cellphone. I wonder what her ringtone is?

Salon.com defends their new interstitial ads, which I came across yesterday. I was really confused at first, and just kind of stared at the ad for a few seconds while I tried to figure out what had happened. I’m not a fan of them, but I’m not paying for a subscription either, so I guess I’ll just have to learn to put up with it.

Movie Robot or Programming Language? I got 10 out of 15 correct, but admittedly a large number of those were educated guesses. Snookums got 13. Yeah, we’re big nerds. (Link courtesy of John whom I cannot believe got “Johnny-5” wrong.)

This one’s for my Dad: This Old Souse, a drinking game based on the television programs This Old House and The New Yankee Workshop. Although my personal favorite, as you all should know, is Hometime (but the original series with JoJo, not the later ones with all of Dean’s other beeatches).

Folks, do not click on e-mail attachments. There’s yet another new virus on the loose. I repeat, do not click on e-mail attachments.

What do you buy the person who has everything? An ass-kicking.

Rodd and I are becoming addicted to the Harry Potter trading card game. I’m Hermione and he’s Draco. I was whipping him constantly when we were just playing with the starter pack, but we’ve since bought half a dozen expansion packs and now he’s starting to win. Oh, and in other news, we’ve become Satan worshippers.

Not. Honestly, these people drive me up the wall. They don’t give kids any credit for intelligence at all. Do children who read “Goldilocks and Three Bears” embark on a life of breaking and entering? How about “The Wizard of Oz”? There are good witches in that. My favorite book when I was twelve was called Fifth Grade Magic. And did I ever try to blight my classroom enemies with the chicken pox? I think not. What idiots.

Man, is this day turning out crappy or what? I figured as long as I have to sit here NOT at the Dahl Open House, I might as well answer some of the e-mail I’ve received at the site. So fifteen minutes later I pointed my browser to Waterstone’s to verify some information for a kid. (If you’re not from the UK, Waterstone’s is a big chain bookstore like Barnes & Noble.) And what greeted me on their home page? A big honkin’ orange screen informing me that my browser wasn’t good enough to see their crappy site. (I should pause here to remind everyone that I use an iMac at home, and currently my favorite browser is OmniWeb, which is free, small, and fast. It doesn’t do all the fancy-schmancy stuff, but IE for Mac OSX is slow as a three-legged dog.) So annnnyway, some hotshot wank designer managed to convince the Waterstone’s people that forcing punters to download and install a new browser is a good way to foster customer relations. They were wrong. I fired off a flaming e-mail that’d curl your hair, being sure to mention that not only were they not receiving my business, but I would never recommend them to any of the 15000+ visitors I receive at my Dahl site each day. (A slight exaggeration, but it was necessary for effect.) Bastards.

I’ve come across these “Web Standards” people before and I thought they were nuts. Zeldman and co. envision themselves as some kind of benevolent internet gods, (con)descending from the mountain to inform the brainless masses of their browser inadequacies. Why can’t they just leave it alone? I’m a web developer and I have no problem making my sites backwards-compatible. And in the few cases where a client has demanded something that would break in one browser, we didn’t ban users of that browser from visiting the site. That’s just ludicrous. That’s fine for a personal site, but businesses like Waterstone’s are going to find out that people don’t like being told what to do. I mean, hasn’t every usability expert for the last five years been saying to get rid of those “Resize your browser to 1470×376 to fully enjoy this site” messages? You know why? Because nobody ever does it! I cannot fathom why a retail company would agree to such a proposal. I can only conclude that the owners weren’t computer-savvy enough to smell the BS their wank web designer was shoveling at them.

Rant off. I need a beer.

Roger Ebert’s Answer Man column attempts some answers at what the 9/11 tragedy means with regard to film, entertainment, and irony. Personally I thought Ebert could’ve responded with a little more. I wanted him to really defend the need for escapism and humor right now. Instead he gave some quick answers that seemed to indicate that he didn’t really think the studios were going to magically change, and that he thought audiences wouldn’t respond to special effects in the same way anymore. I guess I’ll cut the guy some slack though; his family was in New York and he’s probably been as preoccupied as the rest of us.

Bloody Railtrack bastards! I’ve been waiting all summer for today, which is the Roald Dahl Foundation Open House. It’s up at his home Gipsy House in Great Missenden. It takes forty-five minutes to get there on the train. Well, normally, that is. But today, fifteen minutes before leaving the house, I fortuitously decided to check Railtrack’s website (no link because I hate them) to see what time the next train would leave. It informed me that due to work on the line, my journey would now start at Paddington and take three hours, encompassing two train changes and a bus trip. I couldn’t believe this, so I called their damn number to verify. AARRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH. It was true. And even if we left right now, we probably wouldn’t get there before it ended. So now I’m not going, and I may never get to go again. I hate British Rail. When I hung up the phone with the woman, I felt like Jeannie in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where she screams in frustration, calls the person a dickhead, and slams the phone down. Bastards.