So there you go. Mentioned.

I also recently wrote an article for another website about my experiences building Secret. It’s currently their “Featured App”, so take a look.

Hope you are all well.

1) If there is only 1 person in the lap pool, use whichever lane you like, or even the centre of the pool.

2) If there are two people in the lap pool, choose a lane and stick to it. One lane each.

3) If there are more than two people, you swim in circles. That is, stick to your left, so as you come back the other way, the wall is always to your left.

Pretty simple people. And yes, the guy who jumped in and made me have to swim in a circle – see rule 2 above. It isn’t that hard.

And shower before you get in the pool you dirty bastards.

Thank you.

Er, no. Actually I’m in Japan, so I didn’t get to see the Logies. But I think I can predict the outcome anyway, as it is always the same.

• If the host was Bert Newton it would have been hilarious. If the host was Shaun Micallef it would have been hilarious, but half of the people watching wouldn’t have got it. Anyone else, and it would have been painful. I’m going for painful. And embarrassing.
• If the host went into the audience to walk amongst them and talk to them at some point, there would have been tears of sadness as the lamest jokes ever were made. You would have been cringing in your seat.
• There would have been lots of international guests and/or acts, because apparently Australia has no music industry of its own.
• At some point, an international music act would have played, and the younger members of the audience would be shown getting up and dancing uncomfortably. An older person such as Rebecca Gibney would also have been shown up dancing with younger “starlets” and looking ridiculous.
• There would have been lots of ads for some hair product or makeup product sponsor – usually spelt with American English. They might even have been involved in some “backstage” ad where some “backstage host” is shown talking to some hair stylist or makeup stylist.
• The night would have gone on far too long, and would have been as boring as bat shit.
• The event would have rated poorly as no one cares anymore.

Leave comments if I was right. :-) And greetings from Japan everyone!

It was 40 degrees that night, so inside Etihad with the roof closed it was even hotter. The place was packed. You couldn’t dance without bumping in to someone.

When we got there, we were talking to this friend of Kaoru’s on the dance floor (well, yelling, obviously, above the Doof Doof music) who was drinking some alcoholic drink in a plastic cup. She finished the drink, and threw the cup randomly across the dance floor. I was a little taken aback by that – who throws stuff on a floor ever?! And she’s Japanese – they treat floors with respect!

Where were the bins?!

But that was what everyone did all night. So as you danced you trod on plastic bottles and cups. The floor was piled high with rubbish. Not to mention little foils from drugs, cigarette butts (though it was non-smoking), and all sorts of other shit that people threw on the floor. Check out the photos. I did find one area where a group of people had started piling rubbish up in one spot – sort of like a tip in the middle of the dance floor. The feral kids in Mad Max came to mind – this is what the end of the world will look like.

These parties attract two kind of people (not including Kaoru and myself of course): girls dressed like sluts; and guys who seem to enjoy taking off their tops. I haven’t seen that many topless men since the Swanston street Indian taxi driver strike of 2009.

Not to mention that apparently I look like the type who takes drugs, since I was approached and asked if I wanted to buy. Seriously, do I look like I would be in to drugs? Maybe he confused my bored look with me being high? However, I came to the conclusion that the only way you can enjoy these parties is to take drugs or drink. Or both. Kaoru seemed to enjoy it more, but she was drinking. I had a red bull at around 9 PM and water for the rest of the night.

So, it got to 2 AM, and I had had enough. By then every song sounded the same. Actually, I’m pretty sure Armin was just playing the same shitty Eurotrash music over and over again, and the spaced out people on the dance floor couldn’t tell the difference. Unfortunately Kaoru told me we were staying until 6 AM. Longest 4 hours of my life.

Oh, did I mention the toilets? How could the floor be covered in so much piss and blood – yes blood – I don’t know. It seemed to magically get covered within 5 minutes of opening the doors.

Keep in mind I’m germophobic – so basically there are people touching me, men sweating all over me, floors covered in piss and blood, drugs all over the place, people smoking on the dance floor, and rubbish piling up everywhere!

So what about security? Well, there were no police. Instead there was hired security – basically two skinny Indian guys who walked through the crowd every now and then and approached no one about the drugs or smoking on the dance floor. So basically there was no security. I’m amazed the place didn’t turn into a giant riot.

Sure, Armin seemed to be enjoying himself. But then, he was up on stage, with plenty of empty space around him. He didn’t have drunk, drugged up, sweaty fuckwits dancing all around him. He just pushes some buttons and lights and sounds happen. I’m sure he’s very good at what he does, and I don’t want to take anything away from his profession. But seriously. I mean, he’s not a musician. He doesn’t play a guitar. He doesn’t sing. He doesn’t even play drums for fuck’s sake. He pushes buttons and plays shitty music.

So, 4 AM we take a rest. We sit in the stands. Kaoru goes off to the toilet. This drunk guy comes over to the stands a few seats away from me. He then vomits all over the seats. I move away and up the stairs, only to find a drunk girl vomiting into a recycle bin. Not sure that what she deposited for recycling is accepted by the city of Melbourne, but I appreciate her trying.

2 more hours to go. Somehow I survived. We then went home, and I went to bed.

Kaoru enjoyed the night. I think I enjoyed the Jam doughnut I ate when I got there, and that final bow Armin made at 6 AM.

Next year we find an all night 80s party! Some music with actual words and a tune would be nice.

So yesterday I once again avoided him, and went to another counter. The checkout chick there also underfilled! Not as much as the old guy, but still a damn underfiller! Sure, you don’t want the overfill so that the bag breaks or requires two people to lift it, but how difficult is it to just not underfill the bag? This isn’t rocket science!

Sadly, a member of the general public, who didn’t quite get the joke behind the art, had to add their own touch.

Although you can set the user interface to display metadata from the mp3 files – whenever you accelerate, the information blanks out. Apparently the user interface designers felt looking at track names could be distracting! Incredible, I know.

The alternative interface is to actually look at filenames (these don’t blank out!). The trouble here is that you end up looking at something like the following:

Ugly. ROOT FOLDER? .mp3 extension?

The numbers at the start of the filenames is a common saved file convention in iTunes. The Prius adds its own numbers to the files when you look at the file list, so you end up seeing the following:

An ugly mess. No idea what band is playing either (well, you would if you liked Guns N’ Roses I guess).

Anyway, there is a trick to cleaning all this up.

First, if you put all your tracks inside a folder at the root level of the disk, the folder name will be displayed instead of ROOT FOLDER. That by itself is a huge improvement. Use the name of the band and things start to look up.

The next thing is that the filename actually displays only 16 characters. This is another example of how poor the user interface is – there is room probably for twice that. Anyway, the trick here is to remove any numbers from the start of track filenames, and add spaces BEFORE the .mp3 extension, so that the extension is out > 16 characters and thus not shown.

To do this, I wrote a quick Perl script on my Mac and ran it over the folder of MP3 files I created ready to burn to CD.

#!/usr/bin/perl
@files = <*.mp3>;
foreach $file (@files) {
    $orig = $file;
    $file =~ s/^\d* //;
    $file =~ /(.*)\.mp3/;
    $file = sprintf("%-40s", $1).".mp3";
    `mv "$orig" "$file"`;
}

I put all this in a folder named “Guns N' Roses“, and burnt it to CD. The result:

It’s not perfect, but it is a big improvement over the default display.

Where are all the good user interface designers? Do they all work at Apple?

One of the highlights of the conference was that we got to look at Apple’s “state-of-the-art” antenna test labs. Incredible images and an amazing video. But this video revealed more than just a cool, expensive, lab setup.

Notice anything from this still from the video (taken at around 45 seconds in)?

But the most amazing leak comes from later in that video:

After last year’s abysmal ceremony – possibly the worst ever – this year was actually pretty good. Bert Newton was great – as expected. He was charming, at ease, funny, and received a standing ovation. Everyone loves Bert.

I’ve got to say though, I was worried. With Hey Hey back on Nine, I was sure we would be treated to stupid Hey Hey inspired comedy skits. Fortunately there were none. And fortunately Hey Hey didn’t win any awards. There is hope for Australian television after all.

Straight out of the gate we had Shaun Micallef. The guy is a comic genius, and his acceptance speech was hilarious as always. In fact, Shaun, or at least the show he hosts, won 3 awards. So we saw a lot of Shaun that night.

I’m still annoyed that we have to have “international” guests at the Logies. I don’t get why we can’t seem to stand on our own feet? Couldn’t we have had Paul Kelly instead of John Mayer for example? How good would that have been?!

Having said that, k.d. lang was brilliant. Absolutely magnificent.

It wasn’t all roses though. There was not enough Bert for a start. It started well, and then Bert disappeared for most of the night. We had a rather lame Don Lane tribute (Don’s son PJ seems rather talentless, yet keeps showing up each year at these awards). And the night went on far too long.

We were also witness to a new trend in Australian television award ceremonies – when you win an award, you must stand up with every cast member and backstage hand, spend 10 minutes finding each other, hug, kiss, congratulate each other, and then slowly wind your way through the tables in order to bring the entire mob up on to stage with you. No wonder it went on so long.

Ray Meagher winning the Gold Logie added some Aussie colour to the proceedings with a comment about winning a chook raffle. That brought some life back in to a long night – but unfortunately, that was the end of evening.

Anyway, overall one of the better Logies.  Would be great though to one day just celebrate Aussie talent.

Finding good mushy peas is actually not easy – I’ve tried many different brands, and amazingly the brand I found I liked the most are Coles $mart Buy Mushy Green Peas – basically a cheap no-name brand. Here’s the simple can that houses the taste sensation that is the minted mushy pea:

So, I’ve been eating these for a while now, and I thought I’d show some images of what they are like. First, in the can – not a pleasant sight at all. And then out of the can in a bowl – much better!

Yum!

Now, apparently the green food colouring used is considered bad for you – it’s always something with these health nuts! So Coles have started selling this without the food colouring. They taste the same, but check out the colour! It just isn’t the same experience:

Close your eyes and think of England!

Coatsie, having seen my previous article, asked me if I would be the child’s scienceparent. I am honoured and accepted immediately. Chemistry sets, electronic kits, models of the solar system – all lining up as potential gifts…well, when they are a little older… :-)

Congratulations once again guys!

I was surprised to see this:

Lots!  Hilarious.

I did a quick experiment, and it seems that once you get past 60 attachments in an email, the display shows “lots”.  It seems to occur in Snow Leopard and Leopard, so maybe this has been around for a long time – it is rare to get so many attachments in one email, so I’m not surprised I hadn’t seen this before.

Apple has even internationalised this – so in Japanese, for example, you get:

That’s Apple sweating the details – unlike certain other companies we know.

Not sure why they chose 60 as the cut-off point (or why they had to have a cut-off point). I would have thought they’d have gone for 64, and that was what I was expecting as I added more and more items to a draft email to test. But still, it was funny and brought a smile to my face this morning.

Oh, and Happy New Year everyone!

“Faster simpler”? What does that mean? Did they possibly mean “Faster, simpler”? And given the other sentences ended with correct punctuation, shouldn’t that one end with a full stop?

Not to mention the large 7 is a different font than the 7 in the actual logo at the bottom?

It’s just lazy, like everything Microsoft does. Their ads have as much attention to detail as their operating system. No need to click the “Experience now” button – I think that ad tells you exactly what to expect.

Obama is currently in Japan to discuss regional security concerns. He is also requesting additional support to halt the production of the “Kung Fu kid” after previous attempts to stop Will Smith have failed.

So what’s next for Rove? Some say a permanent radio gig. Others say he’s working on the 4th phase of the road map for peace in the middle east. We’ll just have to wait and see.

“Don’t stay with XP, you’re bound to get confused, Windows 7 really rules.”

Those are the wise words of Will Smith. No not the Will Smith that spends most of his time butchering your childhood. This is a much smaller, pastier version who enjoys singing. Will appears to be a love child of the actual PC guy from the Apple commercials, brought into this world to defend his father’s honour.

Click the below link to see Will in action.

Will’s Windows 7 Rising

For those who aren’t aware, Tiger is filthy rich, so rich in fact he hires small children to polish his golf balls all day. I have no issues with this, he’s the mighty Tiger and he can do what he likes. But I have to remind the people that the Australian tax payers forked out 3 million for this guy to turn up and then prance around in plaid pants. According to Wikipedia “he was the highest-paid professional athlete in 2008, having earned an estimated $110 million from winnings and endorsements”.

Tiger Woods might be a golf player, but first and foremost he is nothing but a corporate whore and a sell out. He makes more money than the GDP of a small pacific island and then demands for more. He’s the face of Gillette, he has his own brand of Gatorade, a clothing range, video games and a range of flat pack furniture that would make the Swedish jealous. So before you next tune in to watch Tiger swing his club around like an angry homeless person defending his turf, I want you to ask yourself, is it right he’s stealing people’s wages to feed his Tiger empire? Tiger, you’re a disgrace.

ELDRICK TONT WOODS BE GONE!

Reconnect on Facebook

Logging in to the new look Facebook the other day I was greeted with the following suggestion:

Could it be that I actually talk to my wife in real life? Damn, Facebook is getting to be as crap as Twitter.

Windows 7 copied OS X

A Microsoft exec said they copied OS X. Another exec then said the first has no idea and they didn’t copy OS X – apparently the Windows 7 team lived in a bubble without internet access for the last 8 years and made it all themselves.

I’m going to surprise everyone and say that I think they didn’t copy OS X. If they did, they are shit copiers. Or the photocopier broke down part way through.

Evolution for children

My grand nephew is being brain washed by his grandparents in to Christianity. He’s 7 years old, and being told that God created Adam and Eve. They’ve got him reading a children’s version of the bible at night. Time for me to step up as Great Uncle and self-appointed Scienceparent – I’ve ordered him a book “Our family tree: An evolution story” – something he could also read at night. That’s a first step anyway to give him some balance.

Macs and viruses

I’ve had it with idiots who keep telling me the Mac has viruses too (defending the fact that Windows has a bizzilion viruses and you only have to connect to the internet for like 1 second with Windows 7 and you are infected). The Mac, currently, has no viruses. It has no viruses because no one has worked out how to make a virus for it – not because there are too few users. It is a holy grail for virus writers – the best they have done so far is write trojans for it (which every operating system can have).

Just because you wish the Mac was as virus ridden as the piece of shit operating system you choose to use does not make it a reality. Accept that your choice of computer is crap and live with it.

It is wireless, has no visible buttons (but is in fact a touch sensitive 2 button mouse), has multi-directional scrolling via a touch surface (with acceleration), and support for multi-touch gestures.

WarMouse today announced the availability of a new mouse – the OpenOfficeMouse. Let’s take a look at this beauty.

It is wired, has 18 buttons, a scroll wheel, and a joystick.

I was going to rant about the open source community and how they are even worse than Microsoft at innovation and usability (who would have thought it was possible?), but I think the OpenOfficeMouse does that without me saying anything more. But this monstrosity does remind me of a great cartoon – I recycle this a lot at the office when feature requests start to make the usability of our applications questionable.

Oh, and I apologise for the appalling title of this article. It is late.