Amazon re-shipped my order with Parcelforce. They left it with my neighbour earlier today. It is now in my kitchen.
So, let’s recap.
DHL – lie on their website five times about leaving me a card, and ship it back to amazon a week later.
Parcelforce – it arrives.
No contest, really, is it?
Today’s subject: The wearing of sunglasses pushed up on one’s head.
On women, this seems to say, casual / impromptu hairband / just breezed in from Monaco in an open-top sports car.
On men, this seems to say, “I am a Complete Arse.”
Now, I am aware that this may be a male-centric viewpoint. It may even be a 100% Simes-centric viewpoint. Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts. :)
Every time I walk past a sign saying
THIS MACHINE IS ALARMED
into my head pops
“I’m a bit nervous myself!”
I can’t be the only one to find it amusing that a packet of peanuts contains a big warning notice on the back saying:
CONTAINS PEANUTS
Impatiently wondering just where it is my lovely package from amazon.co.uk has got to, I log into the DHL parcel tracker web site, look it up, and am greeted with this:
Now, you can probably already guess how many cards I have actually discovered on my doormat from them, but just so we’re clear: NONE.
NOT. A. SINGLE. ONE.
So where the hell are they “leaving” them? Wedged into the doorframe of the building (I have seen this) so that the instant anyone who lives in any of the other three flats uses the door, the card falls out and disappears? Tucked neatly into the flower baskets hanging either side of the door? SATURN?
Useless bastards, the lot of them.
You could probably write an entertaining psychology paper around which image people choose for this link, too. For me it was this or “I am a statistic”.
Some thoughts have been crystallising in my head on this subject, partly thanks to
The latter view was one I used to share. I think it stems from a combination of two views: the view that 90% of all output in the “blogosphere” is dross (which is largely true) and that any one article is of equal value to everybody who might come across it (which is false). There is also a flaw in the implicit assumption that it’s the same 90% which will be dross for everyone, which is related to point 2.
Let us take, as an example, me. I think it’s unquestionable that the vast majority of posts I make (this one included) are of most interest to me, perhaps some interest to a subset of the people I know, and zero interest to the world at large. This is, however, true for any media. Any published media has a target audience – it’s just the case that when everyone can publish there are a lot of small overlapping target audiences. Because this post is pseudo-punditry, we should invent a new term and claim it was all our idea in the first place. “Micropublishing”. (No doubt the lucrative lecture tours will come later.)
Much of what makes the “b-o-s” appear dross is of course also what makes individual posts interesting to the small target audience – the personal nature of the information. And, of course, the presentation of such. I’m usually interested in what my friends are thinking, and more so if they express it in an interesting and witty fashion. Further away from my circle of interest, interesting and witty posts from strangers will probably get more attention than dull ones, and posts on subjects addressing my personal interests more so than posts which don’t. Beyond that, I’m not reading any more.
The “I don’t do blogs” view essentially distils down to “I’m not really interested in what my friends are saying”. I’m sure it’s not a conscious choice, but that is more or less how it ends up. And it also depends on how narrowly you define the word.
If you look at any of the popular web comics, they generally come with “news posts” attached. Some of them predate the word “blog” but they are blogs in all but name. Then there’s slashdot, of course. And most of the news sites I read now come with some blogesque stuff attached, because it’s a quick way to report stuff which might be of interest but doesn’t really justify working up a full article for. So if you avoid all of your friends’ journals, and the web comic sites, and those bits of the news sites, then yeah, I guess you don’t do blogs, but how much interesting information are you missing out on?
So, er, in conclusion, I should probably get out more. But what the heck. It’s only a blog – you don’t have to read it, right?
Our app has kind of a portal-y front-end on it, which means we have a frame set with between two and four frames, all of which use basically the same CSS. The CSS is not cacheable because we’re running over https, so it adds a substantial amount to the payload for any given portal page.
The solution? Load the CSS into the frameset, and use this bit of code right here in the onLoad() of each of the in-frame documents:
function loadStylesFromRootWindow() { var sheets = window.top.document.styleSheets; for (var i = 0; i < sheets.length; i ++) { var sheet = document.createStyleSheet(); sheet.cssText = sheets[i].cssText; } }
I should probably mention that there's almost certainly no chance of this working with anything other than IE, but in a closed environment such as this I don't care. :)
Don’t carry your cellphone conversation with you into the toilets. Just don’t. It’s Just Plain Wrong.
Crazy hours, a fixed deadline, a fixed scope, and dealing with risks by hoping they’ll go away. Project management at its finest.
