More about SACS Idol 2005

We’re going horrendously overboard and loving every minute of it. The e-voting interface is primed, redesigned, and ready, we’re planning live vision with instant replays of acts, professional voiceovers courtesy of Adrian the music nerd, and more than a few other surprises — and that’s just the technical side of things!

There’s a lineup of more than 15 talented, not-so-talented-but-amusing, and amusingly bad performances, and tickets are just $5 at the door! Get to the BBC Auditorium on Thursday for a night of great entertainment, with all proceeds going to Assistance Dogs Australia.

WYSI…WTF?

Macromedia’s Dreamweaver WYSIWYG mode is a bundle of fun, as base10solutions has just discovered during the development of a website that was going to be maintained by the client using Dreamweaver.

The layout was pixel perfect in most browsers using CSS — screenshots of both renderings follow (WARNING: Not for the faint hearted!)

Here, taken from a normal web browser (it’s Firefox, but renders the same in IE, so whatever):

And here, in (apparently) WYSIWYG mode:

The code was exactly the same.

Laptop keys

Hmm. I think our 2001 Gateway laptop is finally past it. About a fifth of the keys on it have died, including the space bar. I plan on shaking it lots tomorrow in the hope that something will jiggle back into place, but optimism was never my strong point…

The lost property

Nothing physical.

I just re-discovered CSS’s background-position property. I don’t use it anywhere near enough, and really should. It can do loads of useful stuff – a good example being the navigation on Dave Shea’s mezzoblue.

Anyone else been guilty of property neglect lately?

Reading affects writing

Just an observation, no need to grill me over a seemingly obvious statement. I reserve the proceeding space for musings not guaranteed to be of interest to any other individual on the planet.

Finished Ondaatje’s “In The Skin of a Lion” this afternoon, some time between a catalyst and an idea forming unconsciously whilst reading, and leaping out once it was finished into nothing because I didn’t have time to write (I was on a bus), so I spoke into the air (I walk along a fairly quiet route home)… it said nothing back.

Then, a few hours later, I tried to write it again. It happened, it’s working, albeit somewhat differently to that first elocution and my subsequent expectations of how it would work out — because it’s taken on the voice of Ondaatje! I can’t escape that quasi-poetic/prose mix he spurts forth nearly endlessly! The sentences are fragmented, and it doesn’t feel natural — the voice is not my own. It’s not his, but mine is so affected meaning is lost in translation.

It’s like drink driving. Intoxication on the creation of others leading to accidents. Disasters. The disaster of inadvertant emulation.