Dan Makovec’s blog

What’s up with MySpace?

I don’t get the deal with MySpace.com - what’s so good about it?  It looks like every other web portal out there.  It’s like they mixed Yahoo and Friendster together.  So what?  Why does that make it so  good?  Can anybody explain it to me?  Please?

In Adelaide

I’m down in Adelaide for my grandmother’s 80th, and apart from the party and a couple of outings, it’s pretty much been business a usual - have laptop, will work.

Well, except that problem number one is no broadband. Not such an issue for my folks because they’ve never had it and in their words haven’t used the computer that much. I can see however that their usage has been growing and that they’re being seriously held back because of the unusable speed of a dialup link (imagine having to wait 4 hours for OpenOffice to download as we did the other night, or having basic services like yellow pages, maps and even email simply not work or at best allow time for a coffee between mouse clicks).

I’m doing my best to convince them of the benefits of going broadband - last time I was down I even did a spreadsheet for them for calculating how much they’d actually *save* by going to broadband by virtue of rerouting all of their timed voice calls through VOIP (at worst case with all things included it would have worked out the same cost as their current setup, at best they could have saved $50 a quarter). But I’ve since given up, knowing from my grandparents that stubborness and reluctance to accept change is a part of my family’s genetic makeup that I’m sure to inherit over the next few years.

For me, no broadband is making work extremely difficult - ssh tunnels to our servers are extremely slow, accessing reference material impossible, and retrieval of my 200+ daily emails tedious.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that as you get older either your tolerance to cold increases immeasurably, or your power of denial over the fact that you’re freezing takes hold of your other senses. As you can see from the current temperature, I won’t be going swimming any time soon. Still, the folks decide to leave the doors and windows open to “freshen up” the house.

Now, 14 degrees c may be a lovely temperature while renovating, welding, landscaping moving furniture, but it is NOT a great temperature to sit in front of a computer for 4 hours straight attempting to type. Fully dressed with thick socks, shoes and a jacket, I lost sensation in my fingers and toes after the first hour. Now that everybody’s gone out, the doors and windows are shut and the heater is on just to make typing bearable.

Maybe I’m just a wuss, but I’m sure there’s a reason that most offices are heated to at least 21 degrees. I thought Sydney was getting chilly until I made it down here.

Reducing Information Overload

I love reading about what’s going on out there in the big wide world.  Like just about every other techno-nut out there, I get a lot of my news via RSS feeds from all different sources.  I use Bloglines to keep track of all my news and categorise it.

Unfortunately as time has gone own and I’ve added more subscriptions to Bloglines, I’m at the point where if I don’t read my news feeds for even an hour, there are more articles than I can hope to skim through in the next hour waiting for me.  Solution: trim the fat.

Why subscribe to 3 Wired news feeds when just the “Top Stories” feed tells me all I need?

Why subscribe to Java feeds when I no longer give a shit about Java?

Why do I even have subscriptions to all of those “general interest” blogs that I must have found amusing on at least one occasion, but now completely clog up my inbox?

Why am I even subscribed to recipes feeds when I can’t be arsed cooking anything beyond stir fry, pasta or the occasional burrito?

I think at some point, possibly during my time in Yahootopia, I became addicted to RSS.  Now I’ve finally come to realise that the vast majority of shit that’s out there is exactly that - shit.  I had over 120 feeds on my list.  I’ve already cut these in half, and I’m going to keep on trimming until only the stuff I actually read is left.  That should reduce my sense of information overload!

Oops, wrong guy!

I nearly just fell off my chair watching this video. It appears that in the quest for super slick instant news reporting, somebody forgot their fact checks at the bastion of quality news reporting that is the BBC News service.

They’d meant to get in an expert on a particular tech subject, but accidentally pulled his taxi driver in for an interview instead. The result looks like something from Thank God You’re Here, but is apparently all real!

The video is here.

Even if you can’t hear the audio, watch the guy’s face when he realises he’s on air as he prepares to ad lib his way through the interview.

The transcript of the video is over here

It’s quirky little things like that which make me miss the UK all the more!

Do I have a gay face?

Nick sent me a link to an entry about how some guys just tend to look gay, no matter what they’re doing, wearing or fucking. The term for this condition is “Gayface”. As Jordan puts it:

As far as I can tell though, Gayface is a voluntary condition - whether those who have it are conscious of this voluntary condition or not is another story. I believe it has something to do with the inability of gay men to relax their fucking facial muscles, likely a result of extreme self-consciousness. The result is perpetually expressive eyebrows, two rows of teeth showing most of the time, wide eyes, severe head angling, and a forced, awkward smile.

It got me thinking, I wonder if I have the sort of face described in the photo? Looking back at some old pics, I do see the symptoms in some of them but not in others.

Rental fun

The ensuite was finished yesterday and we began using it today.

Just as well, the jack hammers turned up - about an hour and a half late - and demolished the main bathroom. Now the count down is on. I’m due in Adelaide on Thursday afternoon, and the build has to be finished by the time I hop on the plane. Will we make it? Only time will tell.

It’s occurred to me that I’ve always gone through a honeymoon with rental properties followed by a “I’ve got to get the hell out of here” phase. I wonder if I’m hitting that one at the moment? Brian sure is - Brisbane looks mighty tempting… especially today now the weather has finally turned to crap (16 degrees at the moment).

Adium doesn’t delete contacts!

Anybody else have this problem with Adium?

Select a contact and delete them. Confirm when asked, and *poof*, they disappear from your contacts list. Close and restart Adium, and they’re back again!

This shits me and has been doing so for the 6 months or so. None of the Adium updates seem to correct the problem. I’ve still got contacts in my list that I haven’t talked to in ages and have no intention of again.

Please guys, fix it!

And the winner is…

We’re experiencing the joy of meeting an Indonesian builder named David Copperfield, who turns up, jack hammers our Niagra Falls-style leaking bathroom to hell, claims he’ll be back tomorrow then disappears for a week with no trace.

Last night, despite my best efforts programming the the SatNav to avoid no less than seven congested stretches of road in the 10km between Bondi Junction and our house, we sat through our umpteenth traffic jam heading home at 6pm on a Sunday night.

It’s finally torn it. We’re getting out of this fuggin town!

Brian has hit the job sites, applying for roles in Brisbane. I’m a little cautious about moving there, but since I dragged him here I guess it’s only fair that we give his choice of town a go.

On the one hand it seems so quiet compared to how we’ve been living the past few years. On the other hand, with the absence of any diversity of culture that seems to be the norm in all Australian cities, what’s the point of putting up with the traffic, noise and pollution of a big town when you can get all the other conditions in a smaller town for a lot less money?

We’ll be applying the two year rule. If it doesn’t feel like home within two years, the bags are packed again and we’ll try somewhere else.

All of this is of course dependent on Brian finding work up there. There’s no definite departure date, although the latest it will occur is November 3. That’s a max of 6 months.

Of course one advantage of staying in Oz rather than moving to Europe is that I get to keep my car, rather than selling it so soon. We’re about to clock up 11,000km this week. Not too bad for 8 months of weekend only driving!