I’m having the kind of week where Trent Reznor lyrics are making sense to me.
On the upside I’ve been having fun designing new Snoos for the Warhammer subreddit…
Category: Life and Associated Annoyances
More on Flickr
I’m doing my best to reserve judgement on the Flickr redesign, but now that I’ve had the time for a good look around, and more information on the future of the site is emerging, I’m shifting towards really disliking it.
The entire interface seems to have been shifted towards “look at all the pretty pictures!” while making it a pain in the arse to see any of the meta-information – titles, descriptions, dates, locations, etc – that might have been entered about said pretty pictures.
Now, I don’t use Flickr to show off pretty pictures, I use it to store and annotate photographs of things that I find interesting, and other people might find interesting too. Without the context of the meta-information, a lot of my photos are pointless, so the redesign has made the site a hell of lot less useful for me.
I’m not making any rash decisions yet, but I’ll be watching Flickr very carefully over the next couple of months to see if things improve. If not, I may well cancel my pro account, pull all my stuff down and find somewhere else to keep it.
Zoids!
Status Update
Feeling tired, run down and depressed. Probably ate too much chocolate over Easter.
But hey, it’s Friday. With enough caffeine and Mates of State I should be able to make it to quitting time, then I can sleep all weekend.
(Ignore the Anime – Only decent version of the song I could find on Youtube)
Goodbye Telstra
On Friday my landline died. I called Telstra and was informed that the problem was at their end, and it would be fixed by Wednesday the 6th at the latest, free of charge.
Yesterday (the 6th), on getting home I found that my landline was still not fixed. I called Telstra to ask what was going on but the wait to speak to someone was estimated at 15 minutes, so I hung up and decided to call this morning at work.
I arrived at work and, literally as I picked up my mobile to call them I got an SMS informing me that ‘unfortunately’ the fix to my phone line has been rescheduled to Wednesday the 13th.
I am not going to rant. I am not going to rave. I am going to call Telstra up and calmly register my displeasure. Then, once my phone line is up and running again, I will be taking my business elsewhere. I will also be looking into what is required to register a complaint with the Telecommunications Ombudsman.
That is all.
Still Not King
Met up with Hobbits. Walked forty miles. Skinned a squirrel and ate it.
Still no Internet.
No TV and No Beer make Homer Something Something…
Got home on Friday night to discover that my landline was dead as the proverbial doornail. No internet all long weekend. Frankly it’s amazing I’m still alive.
Apparently Telstra are going to fix it either today or tomorrow. So they say at least. I ain’t exactly sanguine.
I did get some… stuff done though. Pictures will be posted when my home connection us back up and running, and my brain has recovered from going cold turkey.
Dagnabit!
Just took an extended lunch break to add a page for This is Jinsy to TV Tropes only to have TV Tropes eat it.
Dagnabit!
(Later: Went back and redid it this evening. Behold its majesty!)
Currently Making my Life Hell…
Imagine, if you will, that you’re a mechanic. Not the world’s greatest mechanic by any means, but a decent mechanic who earns a decent wage fixing and tuning cars and trucks.
One day you get a call from someone wanting you to come out and tune up their car. So you hop in your van and drive out to their address. On arrival however you discover that it’s not a car.
It’s this….
Before you have time to react, the Captain whacks a hat on your head, says “Welcome aboard! You’re our new Head Engineer!” and drags you down to the engine room.
Which looks like this…
Mistaking your look of horror for one of mere concern, the captain says “Don’t worry, the manuals are right here…”
You pick up one of the decaying books at random and open it. Every single page looks like this…
The Captain continues “All set? Your tools are over there…”
“…and we think the forward port engine is about to fall off. Have fun!”
Through strenuous effort (and a lot of desperate banging on random pipes) you manage to keep the ship in the air. You even manage to accommodate some of the crew’s requests, such as restoring the air conditioning and halting the gradual detachment of the starboard mess hall. Buoyed by your apparent competence the crew send in a flood of new requests for things such as hot tubs and mood lighting, some of which you can manage and many of which you have to ignore.
Making matters worse, through all of this the Captain insists on a weekly meeting at Airship HQ in Zurich. Once a week you have to fly to Zurich and sit in a small room staring at a list of requests and upgrades. After about an hour the meeting is declared a success and you fly back to the airship to continue banging on pipes.
You find yourself entertaining thoughts of sabotaging the engines, or at least ignoring the more desperate maintenance tasks so the ship will fall out of the sky and (as long as you survive) you won’t have to deal with it any more. But your professionalism wins through, you take a deep breath and get on with tightening a valve that you think will correct the water pressure on deck three. Maybe.
Dachshund Antibiotics II
About this time last year, while recovering from a badly failed holiday and probable scrub typhus, I made a post titled ‘Dachshund Antibiotics’. This was a somewhat lame pun based on the fact that I had been put on doxycycline for the typhus, and ‘doxie’ is American slang for dachshund. “Doxie-cycline” therefore equals “dachshund-antibiotics”. See?
(I said it was somewhat lame…)
In any case, my blog is apparently now quite popular among people looking for antibiotics to give to their wiener dogs – I get several of them a week in my referrer stats. Not an anticipated consequence of my pun, but an interesting one.
Anyway the reason I bring all this up is that I’m back on the doxies as a result of a case of bronchitis which has resisted two rounds of amoxicillin, even when supplemented with super-duper clavulanic acid (guaranteed to kill the trickiest of amoxicillin resistant bacteria!). I feel like hell, am coughing like an infant at a homeopathic vaccination clinic and am only at work today because we’re in the middle of a heatwave and the office has better aircon that my apartment.
Hopefully the doxycycline will cut in before my skin combusts.
