Being Mr. Kenny

I like silly things. I like doing silly things, reading about silly things, and occasionally I like to write silly things to companies.

Below is a letter I wrote to Maynards (technically speaking, Cadbury Trebor Bassett, but who cares for ‘technically’, anyway).

I fully did write this, as well :)

My dear sirs,

I have long enjoyed Maynard’s Wine Gums. Since my early years they have ranked among chocolate, coffee, French cheese and various types of mousse in my enjoyment of foods. Imagine my distress, then, when I opened and snacked upon a pack of Wine Gums, the package of which I have enclosed.

The package contained, as they are wont, the usual number of wine gums, presented, as they are, as a stack — a totem pole, if you will — of delicious chewy confections. My dismay was quite unrelated to the quality of the sweets. Occasionally one finds a confectioner with less-than-excellent standards of stock rotation. These fellows frequently allow food to remain on the shelves for extended lengths of time which renders the usually soft and sumptious wine gums hard and unforgiving.

Sirs, I do not even begin to joke.

No, my discomfort and woe were brought on by a more mathematical problem. Namely, the proportion of colours to be found in the pack. Verily, I feast upon the black and the red varieties, but what calamity befell me? Why, I found no black sweets and but one red.

O, esteemed sirs, I freely confess that I was crestfallen. Nay, I was not inconsolable — take solace in it — but crestfallen nonetheless.

I do not write to request a refund. Mere money is not required. Neither, sirs, do I write to beseech a free sample of red and black wine gums. (Though one would not go amiss, I assure you, kind sirs.)

I write merely to express my sorrow, and gentle regret. Some time has passed since I made my discovery, and the pain has assuaged. Yet I feel it only proper to write to convey my sentiments.

I enclose, for your edification, a copy of this letter with all the vowels removed.

Yours faithfully,

Mark Kenny, BSc.

I await their response.

(more…)

TextMate is a text editor for the Mac OS. Regular Mac users won’t generally find it useful, but if you are at all involved in writing computer code — HTML, PHP, javascript, whatever — you will instantly and completely fall in love with TextMate.

I’m not even using my trademark hyperbole here.

TextMate is just a beautiful program. It solves problems in the most beautiful, elegant, behind the scenes way. Using it makes my head feel all clean inside. It is uncluttered, precise, and neat beyond all expectation.

Watch one of the screencasts. I presume that this is the program’s author’s voice. (If it turns out not, I think my little heart shall break.)

Is this not the most beautiful, calming and reassuring voice you have ever heard? If I was on a flight, and this was the pilot’s voice, I would instantly lose all fear and apprehension. Possibly for the rest of my life. The plane could even plummet from the sky in flames and explosions, and if this man’s voice came through the speakers, I wouldn’t care at all.

Using the program has a similar feel to it. It just works. If you’re a fledgling web developer and only know how to use HTML and CSS, get this app, use it, and you will move into PHP almost naturally. I can hand-on-my-heart say that this is one of the best purchases I ever made.

Similar Mac apps that I have fallen in love with include CSSEdit and Transmit (an FTP client).

TextMate: it saved my life, sort of. (The only reason it didn’t was because my life didn’t need saving when I found it.)

Hi folks, hi.

I’m spending today in quiet contemplation of crisps. Crisps … I don’t know, crisps are just something to think about sometimes, to meditate upon. Their flavoursome crunchiness; their thin, fried deliciosity.

I think they are a metaphor for life. Life is so very fragile, but with the right number of additives and flavour enhancers, you can make something worthwhile of it. Even if only short-lived.

I’m being ironically cynical here, folks. Life’s great. Crisps are great.

Let’s write to Walkers. Let’s take photos of ourselves now, and write in our letters: “This is how thin I am now, but I love your crisps so much, I am going to eat nothing else until I get fat. I’m gonna keep you guys updated with regular mailings and photographs, so keep an eye open for those.” Maybe fake a letter from your doctor saying that he* has given his blessing to your project.

I think crisps are spiritual, too. I wonder if you can find crisps in the Bible. Something to look up, I think.

* I put ‘he’ because if I had a female doctor, I would have used the entirely valid, and not made-up at all word, “doctress”.

I was thinking the other day about the childhood game of ‘it’. This is the game where you run around chasing each other. One person is ‘it’ — i.e. they have to chase people and touch them, whereupon the person they touch becomes ‘it’ and must pass find some other unwilling victim to whom to pass the baton.

What a game! Imagine that being entertaining, how funny!

I got to thinking that there are people today, grown adults, who are walking around being ‘it’ and they don’t even know. They probably don’t even remember that last game they played, where they became ‘it’ and were unable to pass it on before the whistle went or the bell rang, to signal the end of play. How many people have moved away from home, or left the country, and took their ‘it’ status with them.

Think about it: you could have been ‘it’ for the last ten years, and you would never even know. And who has passed it on without knowing it? Shaking hands at a school reunion, say.

Now that is some classy mystery thinking right there. This is like trying to think of infinity. Check it out, guys, our childhood lives on, completely of its own accord. Awesome.

I am excited beyond words about HTML 5. It’s all about the HTML 5.

I love languages, and I found this site a few years ago, but came across it again today.

I find the “Constructed scripts” really interesting, it’s basically made up alphabets. It’s quite geeky. I mean, this is stuff done by people who obviously have quite a lot of spare time. Some of them are rubbish, but some are really beautiful. Like Ayeri, for example.

I like the fact that people are interested enough in something that’s entirely imaginary, and of no use to the real world whatsoever, to make up symbols for an alphabet. I think most of them are from fantasy novel writers. Fantasy novel writers always tend to be a little bit other-worldly and obsessive about tiny details of worlds that don’t exist.

Anyway, just something that dragged me away from invoicing for a few moments today.

This post doesn’t actually have anything to do with this title, but I was thinking about writing a post with this title, then I discovered that the best thing about the post was the title, so it kinda fell by the wayside.

Anyway, I wanted to write about coffee. I drink quite a lot of coffee, and I have grown to become dependent upon it to love it. Everyone knows that coffee is going to destroy everyone’s lives because apparently it’s more poisonous than smoking, more deadly than hemlock, and more damaging than falling down a mountain. (Health scares).

So I found this site that talks about how awesome coffee is and all its health benefits. Apparently, coffee is the best thing in the entire world, which is what I thought in the first place. Stick that up your face and smoke it, everyone else!

Check out how I justify my wicked habit »