Misc

Probably the thing that stood out most from my first French lesson is the overloading of ça va; apparently there’s nothing it can’t do. Of course, trying to get this right in a room full of people where meaning can’t reliably be inferred as a result of the use of the rising inflection. Although that seems likely to be the least of my accent related crimes against the French language.

It’s like I was out to 2 in the morning with the cool kids yesterday, but I didn’t actually get to, you know, go out. Clearly I should have gone out on the piss with the Google Wave mob and at least got the fun out of it.

Why am I the go-to guy to be unfathomably rude via the medium of honesty?

A reminder of why I try to avoid going to the gym at peak lunch hours: patrons draped over the equipment gossiping like fishwives. Gentlemen, if you wanted to bend each others’ ears, you could have done it at the pub.

Still, there’s always the unintentional humour; nothing beats the amusement value of watching a couple of young blokes using a deadlift machine to grunt and scream their way into lifting weights for a few poorly-controlled, albeit machine-assisted reps, then high-fiving each other. You’re doing it wrong.

In an effort to make the commenting slightly more user-friendly I’ve added Markdown support for the handful of readers who would like to be able to leave links.

What is the barista trying to tell me?

So when I had coffee at Mojo on the wharf, I got this design. Answers on the back of a postcardcomment block please.

WTF: Othellos Gifts of Distinction?

What are these gifts, exactly: handkerchiefs? Chokers?

Coming up next: Medea’s Babyware.

I liked Typo. It had much goodness. It’s AJAXy attractiveness, especially when I picked it up, was a thing of beauty.

But I got fed up. Not with Typo itself, although I’ve not been best pleased with how some of the admin UI appears to have gone in the 5.x series, but with the pain of Rails. Rails is a fast-moving target, and there appears to be minimal concern with backward and forward compatability. Perhaps it’s a sexy dev environment, but from my point of view there are a bunch of (unacceptable) pain points; specifically:

• There’s an ever-moving feast of deployment options - FastCGI, mongrel, capistrano, you name it - that change constantly. Sometimes the feast turns out to be a meal of shit cakes.
• The API churn means there’s no easy path for me to migrate this version of Typo to newer ones. I can’t run this one on Rails build that will support newer versions of Typo. Newer versions of Typo won’t run on older builds of Rails. This is at the point where an evening of fooling around suggests I’d need to do a minimum of two custom Rails builds and possibly a full Ruby build just to roll forward.

I know Ruby is hip and sexy and stuff, and that things like frameworks on, say, Perl or PHP are, like, sooooo 90s, but really: I’d like to be able to roll forward my blog software without it performing a process I believe we in the technical trade refer to as “shitting blood and dying.” I’d also like it to require slightly less planning than would be required for rolling an enterprise banking app, you know?

(I’d also suggest that when it’s trivial to find Rails hackers coding up solutions to escape the pain of migrating their blog software there’s an indication that something isn’t right there…)

Not the place to take a small child with poor impulse control, then.

Further to Ada’s exploration into the nature of things I was treated to the following exchange while she worked on a puzzle:

“Is that a hammer?”

“No, daddy, it is a picture of a hammer.”

Driving by Mermaids today I noticed a big poster advertising a “Retro night”.

What, I wonder, does retro night at a strip joint look like? Do they have 80s hair metal? Don’t strip clubs have that already? Will the strippers have big 80s hair? Or have they thrown down their razors for that retro-70s bush?