pebblerocker

I met my local MP today, when he stopped his (large, four-wheel-drive, shiny) car to ask me for directions. After I'd told him how to get to the primary school he gave me his card, you know, a bit of self-promotion while he had me there. I'm not going to vote for him and it won't make any difference -- my electorate is a safe National seat so he's just about guaranteed to get back in.

I've checked on the elections site and found out who the other candidates are to choose from. Leaving it a bit late, election is on the 26th, but there's time to get the hang of things. The only candidate I knew about until now, other than the current guy, was the Labour one whose hoarding down the road has had a moustache drawn on it. I'm sure the addition was not politically motivated, it'll just be "oh, a sign with no graffiti!", the urge to scribble on things, but whatever the motivation, the attempt to deface the hoarding has actually improved it. They've given her a Charles I-style perky job and she looks super-snazzy with a moustache!

My partner was watching Top Gear. I was doing my own thing and not paying much attention until --

"James! Put it in!" moans Jeremy Clarkson in tones of anguish.

What the...? Just what is he watching??

Turns out he was watching the polar exploration special where Clarkson and May attempt to drive a ute to the north pole, camping as they go, and Clarkson was begging May to shove in a tent peg.

Heh... That doesn't sound much better. Into the ground, that is, before the wind carried the tent away across the ice and left them to freeze to death.

I am aware of the existence of Top Gear RPS, I've investigated a little in case it's something I'd like to read, but people seem to write mostly Clarkson/May and Clarkson/Hammond, and I think Hammond/May makes way more sense, probably with voyeur!Clarkson via hidden camera or something. I get these sort of pairings in my head which are completely obvious to me and I end up baffled that nobody else thinks this way, but still I can't just go with reading whatever pairing is popular when it's all wrong in my head.

None of my photos of snow coming down show anything, but here my kitten wears some snow on his fur to show you.
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Yuck. Basic programming concept FAIL. Web accessibility FAIL. I was going to sign up for Skype as new instant messenger of choice, because MSN messenger has gone somewhat downhill over the last decade and because you have to be on the IM network your friends use, so off I went to the Skype website to sign up. Filled in all my details (first and last name are required fields, I LIED), put in my desired user name -- "Username Pebblerocker not available." Right, I've never ever seen my username unavailable and am mightily annoyed by the scum-sucker who snagged it, but I'll just put Pebble instead since that's what gaming friends call me. Unticked the "Please spam my provided email address" box, made an attempt at the captcha, submitted the form: page reloads with the message "Please review the details you provided". Nothing obvious to show what's gone wrong; the "Enter username" text above the field is red instead of black, so I figure that must be what's wrong, but nothing's highlighted and there's no message next to it. Tried a variation on username, it appeared to be accepted, no "Username unavailable" message like the first time, so I deciphered the new captcha and tried again. Page reloads, same result. With nothing to go on, I tried a few other things and kept getting the same page reloading with the same "Please review details" message. Five or six bloody captchas I had to put in, none of which were real words. Eventually closed the tab in frustration; I may try getting Skype one day when I'm feeling really mentally resilient, but it's not going to happen tonight.

Obviously they have some way of checking whether a username's available before you submit the form, it rejected Pebblerocker straight off, but then it gave up checking for availability and gave up telling me anything was wrong and left me to guess. Bad design there. Very bad with the new captcha on every attempt. Very bad not having the problem area of the form highlighted so I could go straight to that and change the problem input. I have a lot of problems signing up for new services; there's a lot of very bad form design out there and there are heaps I've been completely unable to fill out because there IS NO ANSWER to the questions they're asking. Photobucket, for example: I was going to sign up for that and didn't because I couldn't answer which US state I live in. Going in with the intention of filling out sensible information that the service could plausibly require (username, password, email) takes a different mindset to going in and making shit up and lying about questions that don't even apply. Lying about my real name isn't the same thing; I consider that to be information nobody on the internet EVER has the right to know and if they ask for it they're going to get Pebblerocker Pebblerocker and they'll just have to suck on it.

Huh -- I wonder if my Skype thing was rejected because I didn't choose a gender? There was nothing to say that that was why it didn't go through or that it was a required field -- but there was nothing to say it wasn't.

As a person who just uses the damn internet from time to time I reckon I have a far better grasp of web accessibility and usability than anyone who actually gets paid to do it.

First frost of the year this morning. We've had a mild winter so far but had to get ice off the car before leaving for work. The grass doesn't soak your shoes so much when it's crunchy. I hope my young tree fern survives its first year; apparently you can stuff straw into the top to protect the baby fronds from the cold.

Somehow I never manage to post anything here although I have 3 or 4 subjects that I make long speeches about in my head and that need writing down to share with people. "What would you do about..." and "This really bugs me" and "It would be really neat if..." and so on. Also I have two additions to the household who need an introduction because they're gorgeous and wonderful, so I mean to get around to uploading some photos eventually.

However winter blues has hit me pretty badly and my best achievements for the last few weeks are things like: Bought some food so we can eat proper meals again! Washed some of the clothes and got them dry! Read some good fanfic! Levelled up my amazon and got her to the City of the Damned -- which is probably the thing I put the most effort into as well as the least productive, but at least I have some fun, right?

Seems like everyone around here is having interesting dreams over the last 24 hours. An unusual conjunction of planets, perhaps.

I dreamt that the Enterprise had no Captain Kirk and it had two token Vulcans (Tuvok turned up) and instead of Chekov there was Davy Jones from the Monkees. I think I've read that Chekov was put in the show to attract the younger female demographic and was consciously modelled on Davy Jones to some extent; don't know if that's true, but my dream dredged up the information and used it.

In my dream version of Star Trek young Davy/Chekov would get captured nearly every week by a different evil alien warlord and he'd get dragged off and put in handcuffs, with much associated cosmetic tearing of his uniform, and the camera would go right in on him to show him trembling and begging, "Oh! Please don't hurt me, mister menacing alien starship captain!" and the bad guy would laugh his cruel laugh. And then Sulu, having commandeered the Enterprise from Spock and Uhura, would come charging in WITH HIS SWORD and kick some ass and rescue Davy Jones from the baddies, and then they would snuggle.

It's possible that I would enjoy watching this Star Trek more than seeing Captain Kirk get it on with the green-skinned space babe of the week :->

Today I passed a woman going down the road using crutches, and she was wearing a badge saying "I have low vision". Interesting -- not something I've seen before -- is it useful to her to carry a label telling people something about her they might not notice? -- what sort of changes does the badge make to the way she gets around in the world? I wonder.

I was also sent off along a different thought train because of the irony that it was my partner who saw the badge and told me what it said; my vision isn't good enough to have read it myself, without my glasses on. Boyfriend's vision is similarly poor (we can borrow each other's glasses for brief sign-reading etc) but he wears his glasses most of the time and thinks I should do the same. I find my glasses uncomfortable and fatiguing and they make it hard for me to see things close up (arm too short to read my watch with them on!) so I put them on when they're useful to me (when I'll be looking at exclusively far-off things which I need to see in detail) and the rest of the time I have strategies for working with the eyes I've got. To me boyfriend's attitude to glasses tastes of doctor-knows-best medical compliancism, but he says wearing glasses doesn't hurt his eyes like it does mine.

This kitten purrs like he's about to throw a bearing. He purrs louder than any kitty I've met, by weight. He purrs so hard he hiccups. It's so cute I can't stand it.

In other adorableness updates, these kits think any door opened by the humans always leads to a magical land of crinkly things and furniture to climb on, with chances of food. They've developed an interest in the really big room with the grass and wind and stuff and it's especially exciting since it's forbidden. And despite immediate punishment by water every time they get in they're still fascinated by that door in the bathroom... the one the humans go through to get clean!

Can we start saying "twenty-eleven" instead of "two thousand and eleven" now? Or "two thous and eleven", thank you radio announcers? (Thou means thousandth [of an inch], not thousand, and the plural of thou is thou, not thous, and we measure our tappet clearances using the metric system these days anyway.) I want to say "twenty-eleven" and I also can't wait four years for my hoverboard and for my fruit to come out of the ceiling when I call it.

I made a New Year's resolution to Write Stories, and I've not broken it yet although there's still time to break it before bedtime. I'm counting writing half a paragraph of a story I've been writing for four years as Writing Stories, and I'm counting writing some thoughts about what I might put into a story if I wrote one as Writing Stories, so it's been pretty easy not to fail at it so far. I find it very easy to make lists of things that might happen and write background details and do things like scribbling maps and inventing place and character names, but I have no idea at all how to turn that into actual stories where something happens and there's a beginning, middle and end. I'm sure I used to write stories as a child, so I must have known how to do it once, though I recall often having ideas and starting stories but not knowing how to finish them. I'm hoping that either if I try hard enough I'll eventually learn how it's done, or that the internet will suddenly give me sense-making instructions on how to write stories without me actually figuring out what to type into Google to find it.

I started reading Eragon by Christopher Paolini. A friend lent it to me PROMISING that although the movie fulfils all expectations and is amply as bad as reported, the book is actually all right. I heard the same about Twilight and got a few chapters in before the story made me feel so physically sick I couldn't keep going, so I went into Eragon with similar expectations and in contrast I'm being pleasantly surprised in some ways.

I intend to go on at some length, so a cut goes in about here. All spoiler-free.( Read more... )