I thought I’d take lots of random (and generally short) thoughts, and put them into one big post. Something to offend everyone. So here we go.

Cosplay

Cosplay is for losers. “Norms” aren’t freaked out by you – they are laughing at you.

There are only two situations where cosplay is acceptable:

1. At fancy dress parties
2. In the bedroom (if you are into that sort of thing)

Get full time jobs and stop hanging out at every convention in Jeff’s Shed.

Windows 7 is the best Windows ever

This article is my best article ever. If you’ve read my other articles, you know that means very little.

Lolita fashion

Lolita fashion is sick.

I’m not talking about a grown woman looking cute in some shirt, or even with pigtails. I’m talking full on shirley temple style outfits and wigs. If you like this stuff you are a pedophile.

They say there is someone for everyone

I want to introduce Gym Boy (the guy in my gym who uses the equipment until sweaty, then jumps straight into the pool without washing) to Gym Girl (the girl in my gym who uses the equipment until sweaty, for twice as long as the rules state you can use a single piece of equipment, and then leaves without towelling off herself or the sweat she has just dripped over the equipment).

Blackface on Hey Hey

The only thing offensive in that skit was that it wasn’t funny. It was not racist. Harden the fuck up Australia.

Gorgeous

Men should not use the word “gorgeous” except when talking to their partner, and then only sparingly. It should never be written down in anything you write. Ever.

Windows 7 is good

8 years of Windows users looking at Mac OS X and wishing they had that. Well, you’re a little closer. You still aren’t there, but maybe “near enough is good enough” for you. Of course, some of us aren’t willing to accept “good enough”.

Terminal illness

I like to think that if I had a terminal illness, yet was still mobile, I would go on the run and kill every rapist and murderer who got off with some stupidly low sentence for their crime. Our laws suck and the gene pool needs chlorine. Fortunately I don’t have a terminal disease (I hope). And anyway, the only weapon I own is a blunt samurai sword.

Women raising their arms above their heads in public

This is never a good look, no matter what you look like. Australian Idol contestants should pay attention.

Free range eggs

If you aren’t buying free range eggs, you are an arse and I don’t want to talk to you.

Glee

This show would actually be good, if it dropped all the singing and dancing.

Electricity bills are going up

People want to fix the damage they’ve done to the earth. They want greener power. Yet they don’t want to pay for it. Why do you think we’ve been using the dirty stuff for so long – it was cheap. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Mac users are arrogant and smug

They have good reason to be. Suck it up.

In a recent post, I said:

Do you think Apple create their legendary interfaces based solely on user input? Even Microsoft are smart enough to not do that.

However, I’ve noticed the following Windows 7 ads on the internet:

I give you, the OS built for Homer. :-)

In real life, if my mate told me he was now friends with some random guy he met at a pub, I’d wonder why I was being punished with such a shit story.

New Facebook updates hit this weekend. Every time my friends make a new friend, I get notified. Why am I being punished with such shit stories?

Facebook is now a continual stream of noise. It seems that every time my friends post anything on anything anywhere I get notified. Facebook is the new Twitter.

So apparently the Facebook geniuses made these changes largely as a result of user feedback.

Let me let you in on a secret of good software design. You can ask users for feedback. And then you are better off ignoring everything they say and doing it properly.

I exaggerate. A little. A good designer must take that input, find the nuggets that are actually useful, and then implement something that is actually going to work. Generally the user has not thought through all the use cases of the change they’ve requested. Do you think Apple create their legendary interfaces based solely on user input? Even Microsoft are smart enough to not do that.

Not following? Think about the car built for Homer.

This is Facebook as of today.

Tonight, I discovered I had left something on my Mac at work that I wanted at home. The problem: my machine at work is sleeping, like most of the personal machines on our internal network when we are not in the office. It is also wirelessly connected to our internal network, not connected via ethernet (for those one step ahead of where this post is going).

However, my machine at the office is also set up for Wireless Wake on Demand. Those who are interested can read some technical details here and setup details here. This is new in Snow Leopard, and you might recognise that we are talking about waking a machine that is wirelessly connected to a network, not a simple Wake-On-Lan sending a magic packet over ethernet.

So I VPNed to work from home, went to my Finder, selected the menu Go->Connect to Server... and put in “jamie.internal” (my machine’s name on the office network). My machine at work was woken in the background, and I connected to the machine as per normal in the Finder, got the file I wanted, disconnected, and closed down the VPN. My machine at the office went back to sleep and I had the file I wanted.

I could also have shared the screen to manipulate my Mac via its user interface, and apparently even shared iTunes if I had it running.

There is a bit more going on here than just sending a magic packet wirelessly to wake the machine – the Mac is asleep, but our office wireless router is broadcasting over bonjour the services my Mac can actually handle as if it was awake on the network, so that if I try to use these services, it wakes the machine up first. This also means then that my machine in the office, even when sleeping, will still appear on other machines on the internal network as if it was awake, advertising all it’s services. Similarly, if I had it sharing music in iTunes, it would appear as a shared source of music on another machine in iTunes, even when asleep.

This is obviously a very handy feature – possibly more so for my colleagues than for me given I could walk over to the office in 10 minutes from my home to manually get the file (though it is after midnight, and Melbourne streets at night are a little dangerous these days, so I possibly avoided a random stabbing or glassing).

I’m sure you can also see advantages in a system like this for the environment too – machines don’t have to necessarily be running 24 hours a day just so you can access an occasional resource.

This will also work for Macs connected via ethernet. It may also work from a Windows machine to access a Mac at your office (with a SMB share). Not tested, as Windows is not welcome in my home, but I assume it will work.