daynemay

when parkour and mad soccer skills attack…

Email, so they say, is “the way old people communicate”. But if the alternative is a proliferation of inboxen breeding out of control, then sign me up for that senior citizen card.

Granted, a lot of what those articles are (or “were” – they’re old) talking about is communication in a different medium – e.g. SMS, IM (arguably) – which can fill niches that email can’t¹. But a lot of it is pretty much email by another name – inboxes in Facebook, Myspace, WAYN, BallOfDirt, other social-network sites, and other “weren’t a social network but now shoehorning one on top of our existing stuff because all the cool kids are doing it” sites.

I’ve already got an inbox. Feed me through that, and spend the rest of your time, effort and money making other, cooler stuff for me to use.

[1] This is a potential branch-point for a whole big tangential thing about mobile broadband, always-on connectivity, etc. But I’ll leave it.

An excerpt from the spec from which I’m working:

‘Cancel’ will behave like a clear function that clears all the details.

What do you say we just call that button “Clear”?

this is sparta

Guthrie’s bike after I went over the handlebars, back in 2006.

I mentioned the other day that I had dicked with the permalink structure. Cam brought to my attention that in doing so, I had rogered the RSS feed. So I’ve (re-)restored the permalink structure (i.e. to the one I didn’t want), in the interests of making the feed work.

Such are the tribulations we face.

Greg's review of 10000 BC

In our final year of university, Glover and I went halves in a pair of wrist expander, hand-strength springy exercise thingos. The sole purpose of them was to build up our hand strength to the point that we could crush the Dean’s hand when receiving our degrees at graduation. As it turned out, someone else was handing out the degrees, and she was (a) a she; and (b) not the youngest of shes. Neither of us was man enough to crush the hand of a little old lady, so we both chickened out.

Going through some old stuff in the long, slow unpack the other day, I came across my wrist expander, hand-strength springy exercise thingo. It now lives on my desk at work, readying me for next time I meet someone new…

Credit where it’s due: campegg got me thinking about the tumblelog thing. I dislike the term, but I like the concept, as long as I can shove in the occasional rant of my own as well. So I’ve gone with the little layout reshuffle that you see now. Of course, if you’re anything like me, you probably read blogs in a feed reader, and so don’t give a rat’s arse about my “little layout reshuffle”. But the world is full of people who are nothing like me, and on balance, that’s probably a good thing.

Apologies if you’ve linked to anything here in the last couple of days. I just dicked with the permalink structure (restoring the WordPress default), so your link will have broken.

If you don’t know what your program is supposed to do, you’d better not start writing it.
Edsger W. Dijkstra

Last year, for something to do, and to learn a bit about the Mozilla XPI extension architecture, I started writing a Thunderbird add-on.

Going for the region of the Venn diagram where “snappy” and “annoying” intersect, I called it “been2long”. Been2long’s raison d’etre, aside from my edification, was to alert me to contacts I hadn’t (uh…) contacted in a while. That “while” was configurable on a per-contact basis, and it worked OK for me for a bit, under Ubuntu Linux at home, and Windows XP at work.

Then my computer initiated some shenanigans late last year, and I stopped working on been2long when it was maybe (pulling a figure out of the air…) 95% complete.

Between then and now, I kinda lost interest in Thunderbird, and now I just read/write/respond to email within the (Gmail) web client. So now I’m thinking about building something similar for Gmail in Firefox.

That said, if you’re interested in using been2long for Thunderbird (1.5 – 2.0.0.*), then feel free to grab a copy of the XPI here^[1].

Thanks to other extension developers for code that I blatantly lifted from you, particularly Sebastian Apel, author of the very handy Birthday Reminder.

[1] Given that the accepted pronunciation of that file extension (XPI) is “zippy”, clearly Mozilla and I are targeting the same region on the Venn diagram.

Update: Goofed the URL for the (ahem) zippy download. All better now.

I recently bought a laptop from Dell (the XPS 1330). For one reason or another, I didn’t receive an invoice, and encountered trouble when requesting one online, so I wrote to customer service.
It’s easy enough to bitch when things go wrong (as I did a few weeks back), but on the principle that positive feedback is just as important as negative, and on the assumption that giant multinational corporations have feelings too, I thought I’d post the opening to the very prompt and helpful response from Dell Customer Service.

Dear Dayne,

I must thank you for your patience and kind understanding by giving me the opportunity to be of assistance to you. I sincerely hope you get much enjoyment and good use out of your new system.

Nice one.

Every time I get hyped up for a project, I end up staying awake until 4:00am on a school night tooling around with it and getting everything going.

It looks like tonight’s no exception. The only thing is, tonight’s project was supposed to be an IMified bot. As it turns out though, getting the developer account isn’t instant, so I decided to screw around and get daynemay.com up and running instead.

I’ve owned the domain name for the best part of a year. Over that year, I’ve dicked a bit with the whole LAMP stacky thing, with an eye to eventually building my own content management jazz. But let’s be honest: whatever I can be bothered doing afterhours will pale in comparison to what the massed hordes of open-source geekdom have already achieved, so I went with a fairly painless WordPress install, and will now slake my tinkering urge by screwing with the CSS and the rest of the theme.

So, in conclusion:

1. I will not spend all my time writing about working on this page.
2. Mad props to WordPress for a sweet platform from which to work.
3. Fingers crossed for that IMified dev account.
4. Screw it, I’m staying up until the morning.