30 Oct 2006
I am about to start crying because of a web application for the second time in (I think) as many days. No, it’s not MySpace (it was sufficiently vanquished after some tumbling about with pointed sticks).
I suppose I should have known better. Just because there’s no warning, doesn’t mean it’s not about to do something stupid. Particularly given the University of Sydney’s web team’s fetish for session timeouts like they’re running some high-grade-cipher-required (they use 256bit SSL certs for everything) nuclear launch system. Only not, because Kim isn’t a student. But, then again, even if he were the usability issues would probably be manifestly more successful than the UN/non-proliferation treaties.
Whatever. So I spent too long agonising (and I do mean agonising) over subject selection for pre-enrolment (I know, I don’t need to worry, I can change it later — whatever. I’m having a stressful day and for whatever reason am choosing to get this out of the way now so that I don’t experience this later. That’s the theory.) and then the monster ate it all. What really [expletive] me is that when I finally made my last choice, I went and entered it then its bloody popup-confirmation system (which, incidentally, is quite usable but I despise it on principle) still worked. Submit it? Sorry, you’re not logged in. Log in? Their [another expletive] auth proxy doesn’t even pass the right GET vars (strips ? and possibly ampersands, too, it seems, so I got a lovely 404 page), let alone everything I just POST’d. Talk about stabbing users in the back.
Words cannot express how irate I am right now.
To top it off, I’m increasingly convinced I somehow managed to screw up my whole degree programme whilst still in first year Arts. No, I didn’t think that were possible, either. I am adequately pissed off with the world to leave this post here.
30 Oct 2006
Snazzy. And enormous. 1700 × 700 × some height but who really cares so long as there’s legroom enough?
It gives me a sense of consumeristic pleasure ($175 and it’s not cheap & nasty flatpack… it’s slightly better-than-IKEA-quality flatpack ;-)) and makes the room seems loads bigger and… will not help me pass my exams in the least. Nor will it sort out my subject selection for next year.
Take victories where you can find them, I suppose.
28 Oct 2006
I’ve never been so stubbornly opposed by a website. This is actually so painful that if it weren’t necessary to somehow observe people using MySpace I would have given up well and truly by now. I actually can’t use this. I am sitting here scratching my head trying to figure out how to add a photo via the embedded photo upload thing to my profile. What is this? I’m so sure I’m not the only one that gets royally pissed off at this thing. Why?
28 Oct 2006
I think in blog posts whenever I feel compelled to write. I try to start with a title but if it doesn’t come I don’t fuss too much, even though the creative beauty of a concise title is often superior to much of what I churn out. Then an opening sentence has probably formed in my mind even as I come up with the title (or, if I don’t have a title, I have a sentence waiting in its place that’s great but too long/inappropriate as a title for other reasons) and it spills out of my fingers. It isn’t always miraculous but feels, to me, meaningful or pithy and catchy or gratuitously clever (or even regularly clever without puns that make you want to spew) — rarely is a title purely descriptive.
The sentence shapes the first paragraph, which tends to go on until I run out of linking sentences, at which point I begin a new one. Or, sometimes, ideas will be separated into paragraphs (as anyone who tells people how to write will advise). Sometimes (other some-times, for there are many) I’m spilling words onto a page and don’t want to break the line in case it stops. That’s why poetry feels pretentious: the idea that ideas will readily transcend lines is steeped in artifice. I can’t look back a sentence or it all fades away and momentum is lost forever. The present sentence is all that can be re-read (perhaps that explains my long sentences?) and even that… well, sometimes extensive punctuation (my overused parentheses bow politely) demarcs boundaries not to ever be transgressed.
But then I felt like writing and the idea faded, or was fulfilled, and the want to share faded to invisibility. As did the inertia of words, it all rolled to a stop. Tiredness met experience and writing, all of a sudden, was not the same as remembering, living. And whilst text can creatively extend so many things, sometimes it isn’t a matter of extension or sharing at all. Some things, no matter how they are thought, are not for writing, blogging, publishing, and never will be.
26 Oct 2006
(in Australia). For everything else, there’s eBay and Amazon.
My money doesn’t go anywhere near as far on textbooks here as it would if we were fortunate enough to have books at the same price they are in the US. I’m trying to track down some Vygotsky works (and Fisher’s collection is categorised by emptiness, haven’t checked out UNSW yet but imagine it wouldn’t be much/any better) and don’t want to spend the earth to pursue what is, essentially, an entirely peripheral interest. So I can spend, you know, $190 on a decent text in Australia, or I can get that bundled with one other (also apparently excellent resource) for US$50 plus shipping from Amazon. It’s absolutely nuts.
One day someone will try to explain the economics behind this to me. And that day my head will implode with frustration.