Being Mr. Kenny

Listen up, Spammers, this is the cry of my heart:

I hope you all fall off a bridge.

Join with me now, readers — say it loud, say it proud.

“Spammers, we hope you all fall off a bridge.”

Answer: that tapping noise in my room whose source I have narrowed down to: somewhere on the street where I live.

It’s not so much the constant tap tap tap (although it sounds more like “tap tap tap … tap? … tap tap tap … tap?”) it’s the fact I have no idea where it’s coming from. If I knew I wouldn’t care, I’d be able to label it as “pipes” or “car door” or “electrical fire starting under the floorboards”. That way I’d at least be able to get some sleep, but not knowing is the most annoying thing there is.

It’s stopped now, and for some reason that makes it more annoying. Anyway, it’s my birthday today, and I am 23 years of age! I must now commence the eating of chocolate.

Or maybe be sick. Or maybe it’s enough to make you cry sick.

Look at it. A trail of misery going all the way back to the early Victorian times. And that’s just version 7!

OK, that’s enough rants about IE. I actually don’t hate it as much as I like to make out. And to be fair, the earlier versions were pretty good for their time. I think version 4 was the first browser to fully support CSS when it came out. It’s such a crying shame they let IE 6 go to the dogs.

IE will always have a special place in my heart. I never use it any more, but it was the browser I learnt the internet on. Strangely, though, I’ve always thought “Bookmarks” was better than “Favorites”.

And by far, IE7 has the prettiest most loveliest logo ever. It looks like it’s smiling!

Generally, I’m pleased and relieved that IE is finally getting its act together, but still frustrated by the fact I had to spend two days getting shefbase to look right, even after the upgrade.

Despite your recent upgrade, you are still a miserable piece of technology. I hate you, and I dearly wish to see your failure. May you crash and burn, you useless, outdated cripple of a web browser.

Death and misery forever be upon Internet Explorer!

Update: Ha ha! I’ve beaten you again. O death, where is thy sting? O Internet Explorer, where is thy victory? I can do all things through CSS which strengtheneth me! (Is this blasphemous?)

I just read that “The best things in life are free”. What does that even mean?

Apply that to open source for a second. Imagine someone justifying open source by saying, “the best things in life are free”. Well that’s not true! How much time and effort have people put into making that open source application work? I would say that it cost them quite a lot.

Or Google. We use that for free. I must search for things a hundred times a day, its my first port of call, and everything in the whole world that draws breath loves it. Even cats, and fleas, and paramecia, and viruses. Every organism in the biosphere loves Google, and that is good and just, and so may it continue until the end of days. I am so much of a rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth fan of Gmail, I have had to stop myself, on a number of occasions, from writing to the people who had that whole lawsuit over the name to tell them what horrible little insects they are.

If you’re reading, people who set up the original Gmail, you are horrible little insects. Nasty! Dirty! Check it out, I made a picture of you:

Anyway, my point is that even Google, with its incalculably massive contribution to humanity, isn’t free. We pay for it in adverts every time we search, or read our Gmail, or visit a website that uses AdSense.

Nothing in life worth having can be “free”, by definition. That’s illogical nonsense and we must discredit the idea wherever we find it! Also, we must discredit the horrible little insects who sued Google. The end.

Why is it that Thunderbird can’t make up its mind about whether or not to send email in plain text or HTML? I would have thought that practically all email clients these days have absolutely no problem in displaying an email sent in HTML format. It seems extremely silly that it still asks you what to do.

In my opinion, it ought to just send all emails as HTML by default, and give you the option to change that setting in the preferences. Good software design is about making decisions on the behalf of your users, not presenting them with as many options as you can — especially not when they’re trying to do something! When I click send, I want the email to go away, I don’t want to have to choose what format it’s sent in. It’s not something I particularly care about anyway.

Not long ago I made a rather nasty post about Ellie West. I don’t usually make it my business to publicly insult people on my blog, but seeing as she’s a fictional character (and a public figure at that) I thought it fair game. Ellie West is the name of Telewest mascot, and though she may have a bit of a cheesy name (and terrible hair) she is not, in fairness, a brazen liar or, indeed, a whore. I’m willing to admit that that may have been going a bit far…

It’s still true that setting up the wireless router was touch and go, but these things always are. Although, that said, we’ve since got one that works and provides good signal all over the house, so maybe there’s another apology due at some point. Installing the wireless router was great fun, actually. At first it seemed to be going the same way as the other one — stubbornly refusing to connect to the internet, despite all the swearing that was being hurled its way — but then, as if by magic, it just started working. I mean, it just suddenly … worked! It was almost beautiful, I nearly wept.

Anyway, the reason for this retraction is that someone from Telewest found my poisonous little diatribe and had the impeccable grace to drop me an email to talk about the whole thing, leaving their contact details. Well I must say, that was unexpected but certainly very welcome!

So to the good people of Telewest: thank you!