21 Feb 2007
I just got a somewhat-bizarre phone call about how best to mix jelly and vodka. A spot of quick googling later (yes, take that, I just used it as a verb without respecting your trademark, punks) yielded this inebriation-friendly post from the BBC’s website:
The idea of vodkajelly is a simple one: get drunk as quickly as you can, by eating a food most commonly found at young children’s birthday parties.
The basic recipe is just that – very basic. Make up a packet of jelly, using between a quarter and half of the amount of water suggested. Top up with as much vodka as you like (or can handle).
Trust the Brits ;-)
Sounds worth trying sometime, though… probably not something to leave in a family-friendly fridge, and probably not with that sort of ratio… ½ Vodka jelly might be a bit much for those of us who would prefer not to get totally sloshed whilst eating dessert.
21 Feb 2007
I don’t know what kind of Internet access work are using (well, I know who they’re using: it’s not quite the same), but they should seriously think about changing things around a bit. Aside from wierd peering issues a few months back, now they’ve just dropped off the face of the planet for *counts* I think about three days now. Predictably, someone is pointing the finger at Telstra.
Everyone always points at Telstra. Customers don’t care whose fault it is — they’re paying whomever to provide a reliable service, not Telstra. Upstream contracts/networks are someone elses’ responsibility altogether!
It’s pretty abysmal that it takes three days to get Internet servicing more than 100 people working again… Sigh.
I’m here at home on perfectly functional Internet, but the things I’ve needed to do the last few days have involved the project website which has been equally unavailable. If I were a full time employee I’d have been paid for two days of doing nothing this week… why don’t people take redundancy a bit more seriously?!
It also may or may not be diplomatic for me to whinge about the corporate VoIP service they’re using at this point… it’s still working (presumably a separate link altogether), but it sounds like a really bad pre-DECT-era cordless telephone service, and that’s when your ears aren’t being blasted by the sounds of a modem as you dial in.
Grumble grumble. I might delete this post later if I think better of it… for the minute, suffice to say Josh is in a pretty bad mood about quality of service he’s meant to be depending upon. I learnt last week that I don’t have the freedom to negotiate service contracts (yes, even where none expressly providing that kind of service yet exist — think mobiles…) which made me a little upset (because I thought I’d done really well talking with a certain vendor who will remain nameless), but saw the point of it all. But when reliability gets this bad, for an all-online venture, I am afraid to entrust hosting to that kind of environment. You can get really good hosting in Oz for way under $300/month (and even less if you’re prepared to commit to contracts, because that’s the way most Aussie providers do things) — not necessarily myth-of-the-nines hosting (SegPub are one hosting company with a really good rep, but they only do a 99.5% SLA), but waaay better than three days of downtime in a month.
In case you were wondering, that works out to about 90% availability per annum. And it’s not necessarily going to flake out at times no-one is using it, and, given the demographic, it’s not an office-hours-only kind of service. And I wouldn’t be looking at alternate service providers because…?
(Yeah I’ll probably pull this article soon… just wanted to whine.)
20 Feb 2007
Either I have supremely bad timing when it comes to trying to access their website, or their reliability sucks of late. I normally pop in to view or upload photos every fortnight or month, and of the last four times I’ve tried to access it (counting uploading/tagging session as one “access”), it’s been unavailable “having a massage” twice.
I am slightly more grumpy (only slightly) about this because I pay for it. Obviously it’s a system wide thing, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Blogger just dropping off the radar like that multiple times in a couple of months. LiveJournal has been known to, but their community give them enough crap about it they know people are unimpressed. (And, yes, MySpace does this all the time, but anyone using it as a benchmark of technical excellence should be taken out and shot.)
It just all came back online & it was fascinating watching as different parts of the site slowly came back together (presumably the caching servers were all flushed and slowly filling up again from the content servers via load balancers stopping the whole thing falling over again… so much geekage…)
Shrug, I’ll probably renew when it’s time, just coz it’s so good to be able to dump a couple of GB of photos up there whenever I want, and tag & search them easily later on. Plus it’s cheap storage (potentially cheaper than BingoDisk, even, though obviously more limited in scope) which is always a good thing to have around.
20 Feb 2007
And that’s just what it’ll do.
I made the mistake of ordering an affogato at about 8 this evening, thinking that between going out with some friends after & general geeking out when I got home after, I’d be in bed by a fairly reasonable time (like 1am or thereabouts).
Clearly, I was wrong. Ah well… It’s been a good several hours! I don’t drink coffee often, as evidenced by the fact that a single shot of espresso can keep me up til 3 in the morning! On the plus side, I started learning InDesign by designing a timetable! It’s a sufficiently unpolished beast (as is Illlustrator) on PC when compared against Photoshop (and, to a lesser extent, Premiere Pro), but it feels far simpler than Illustrator.
I’ve recently subscribed to Before & After magazine and they’ve got some articles around using Illustrator, and when I see how it’s done things do just click, but I still feel a very long way from anything vaguely resembling proficiency with the app.
If you’d care to know what I consider “proficiency”, basically I just mean being able to sit with a client and have Illustrator in front of you and use it without embarrassment. I’m inches away from that goal with Photoshop, and Premiere Pro has always felt like something I can just guess at and get right 95% of the time, but for the rest of Creative Suite/Production Studio… not so much.
16 Feb 2007
I stumbled across this PHP5 CMS today (via a WSG member post) and it looks pretty good. I’m a little concerned about the (very)-AJAX admin side of things, but didn’t spend much time digging into it so it might gracefully degrade (maybe).
It’s almost frustrating to find such good and mature CMS products on the market and not have any need to use them for CYIADA… I spent the last week mostly trying to shape fairly simple data models for different aspects of the website and it’s rapidly becoming clear just how structurally complex multi-tiered community/community generated content sites are. At least in terms of relational DB complexity, yes, this is bigger than MySpace.
Anyway, SilverStripe looks worth a look for simpler endevours.
The complexity is mostly introduced where users become authors, which defies traditional CMS workflow altogether. It’s also far more structured than Wiki systems are, and far more private. Privacy is being balanced against flexibility which is being balanced against community and all of these are being met with time/cost concerns.
But I like to keep telling myself I don’t really know what I’m talking about and getting a programmer will solve all these dilemmas … yeah, right.
I’ve got sick of sitting on my hands and just want to be a web practitioner again. I know the product inside out, it’s been planned to the hilt, stakeholders are universally intrigued/waiting for it, and I’m being impatient and feeling generally like charging forwards. Which is, in all probability, not the best way to be approaching things.
These two consultants came in a week ago and we explained the project to them and (what I heard was) they said “we want flowcharts and scope documents”. I’ve killed a few trees in my time, but the next person to help me in that isn’t going to be a consultant telling me to rehash (yet again — I’ve written documents in so many forms, website copy so many times, etc.) what I’ve got without any further input. I’m in this weird place now where waiting for a programmer is nearly required for further planning action, and everyone but me appears to want more planning before action… meanwhile, I’m writing models for Django and scaring myself with the complexity and learning Adobe products better and generally landing squarely back in front-end territory, which is where I’ve comfortably been for the last two or so years. Well, with the exception of Adobe products, which I only finally caved to last year… whatever :P