nocto

features that you desperately need on your computer. the office assistant suicide note amuses me best.

i get really wound up with packaging that is too hard to open. a lot of it just seems pointless. the packaging is designed to look good on the shelf or to be shop lifter resistant. and that just annoys me. i can pick the product i want without resorting to which variety looks nicer on the shelf and i’ve never shop lifted in my life. if i’m buying something mail order then why do i have to cut through bullet proof packaging? do companies have many shop lifters in their warehouses?

then there is the not entirely unrelated issue of why is most of this packaging needed anyway? i don’t need the colour pictures and several layers of inner packaging. padding for safe transport is one thing, wasting resources is another. most packaging just ends up in the bin in thirty seconds. or however long it takes you to remove the goods from it of course.

this page is now running in fully fledged xml and css powered mode. well, more or less, with hiccups. the rest of the site is to follow it into css, and then it’ll be much simpler to muddle stuff about and play. and playing is the whole point of this site really. besides, i learnt quite a lot, which makes a change lately.

to file under phrases i hate: i assure you. it translates as i have no data, no reasoning and only my belief that i know better than you to back up the fact that i’m right. learn some logic and learn that an assertion is the start of proving a theory and not the end of it. if you can’t explain to me why i should take your word for it then i can explain to you why i won’t.

i dreamt about building inside an old barn type of place, i was replacing the beams in the roof with a whole crowd of other people and then we all sat down up there when in that magical dreamlike way we were suddenly finished. then i got an attack of vertigo that led to the whole place swaying and feeling like it was going to collapse beneath me.

an attack of vertigo in a dream is a warning against being exploited by the opposite sex. barns are to do with prosperity, i guess if i was doing it up i must be trying to make myself more prosperous rather than less. a crowd of people means increasing happiness. i can’t find out about the swaying. although i often get vertigo in my dreams i never actually fall which seems like a good thing too. all those new timber beams look like a good sign too. usually when i look up this sort of stuff i end up depressed that the end of the world is night because my teeth fell out or something. my dreams seem pretty good at the moment. even if i did wake up clinging to the mattress for dear life.

woo, fun. browse the internet in 1995 mode here today!

“the button is ironic, of course!”

i like reading joel on software, not because i always agree with him (because i don’t) but because he always makes me think and i always want to argue with him just to figure out what i think about the issue that he’s talking about.

he writes that good software takes ten years and i instantly don’t agree with him. it seems too much of a generalisation to me. so i get thinking and i think something like ’software takes ten times longer than you think’ is a better generalisation. if it takes you a year to write a reasonable version of something then it’ll take you another nine to polish it and persuade everyone to use it. i think the same applies for the software that takes an hour, a day, a week or a month to write. they will be decent in ten hours, ten days, ten weeks or ten months.

i can write a script that’s useful for me in an hour and i probably save myself a large amount of time in the long run by spending that hour writing a script. however if i spend ten hours on the script i can get it out as something i don’t mind other people using and as a result a number of people will save time using it and the pay off is probably better.

in fact i think i could apply this rule to damn near anything. is this why my house is never clean and tidy? why i buy far more books than i read?

i don’t think there is anything special about ten. it’s a convenient point to focus on in a decimal ten fingered society. but i learnt something about myself and about estimation and why i’m always behind where i think i should be. that’s good, even if the thoughts are rambling

there’s an interesting article full of useful tips for travellers in the new york times. i laughed at the suggestion that you check that a british hotel offering a ‘private bath’ actually has a toilet as well as a bath. i didn’t realise this country was alone in that kind of elidation of essentials, the accurate but not correct description. but mostly i like the closing sentiment of this article which i think is great advice for coping with anything not just travelling:

let it enter our heads once in a great while that we might be wrong