Growing up is optional

Donavon Frankenreiter was on the Sports Cafe the other night and found another two new fans.

His music is nice simple cruisy surf tunes. If you like Jack Johnson (who he used to hang with) you’ll probably like it.

I’ve been using Gmail for a while now. At first I though it was just another webmail client with big storage, but the more I use it the more I like it.

One of the most useful things about it is the ads and search results. The example I have here is from an email to the Web Standards Group list.

The sponsored links are obviously those that are paid for by advertisers, but the real value for me is in the related pages. They are very quickly adding to my del.icio.us bookmarks.

I know that google is scanning my messages, but i don’t put anything in them that I wouldn’t put on a postcard.

Labour weekend has come and gone, ending the long dearth of holidays and marking the beginning of full-on Christmas advertising and the impending summer (yay for summer!). It also marks the first sunburn of the season: a mild but distict sting on my neck and number 1 shaved scalp as I step into the shower.

NZ has some of the worst skin cancer rates in the world, mainly attributed to our outdoors lifestyle and ‘she’ll be right’ attitudes. However, some blame for this must also rest with the whole western world. This isn’t rant about the ‘ozone hole’, but I do think that I get burnt more readily that when I was young.

I took Grace (my daughter) to the skate/bmx area at Mclean Park. We went at about 9 am, which is a good time to go because it is empty and we have it to ourselves. Grace was fearless and wanted to try to drop in on the quarter pipe. I didn’t let her; she’s only been riding a bike for 3 months, although she did ride down some of the other big ramps. I took both Grace and Oscar back to the park in the afternoon. It was crowded and there were a lot of older (late teen) riders.

When I first went to McLean Park in as a teenager in 1987 there was a definite pecking order: the best skaters got the most time on the (very old, run down) halfpipe. Gommets didn’t get a chance. When the put in a new pipe in the early 90s it was the same, although even the worst skateboarders were higher than all but the best inline/blade skaters. BMX was last. I was lucky at that stage that I was big enough to get respect (and ramp time). I was never serious: I just used the BMX to improve my technical skills for mountain biking.

In the last few years they pulled down the ramp and put in more of a street style park with lots of smaller ramps, rails, boxes etc. Things seem to have changed: BMX is now accepted at McLean Park, along with the kids on scooters. It says a lot for the character of the older BMX and skaters that they were very aware and respectful of all of the smaller kids around. I was pleasantly surprised. I give them all a big public thank you.

I’m sitting in my lounge on a Saturday night while the NPC final is happenning. I can’t watch it live because I wont shell out the $20/month extra to get Sky Sport. As much as my thoughts are probably generated by my own selfishness, I can’t help but wonder if the professional (aka TV) rugby is better for the sport in NZ than when it was free to air. What has improved since rugby became a professional sport? I think it’s fair enough that the top player are paid, but the salaries are only a small part of the cost. What did the administrators do before they were getting paid too? Was it any better for the players? …for the spectators?

I signed up a while ago for Flickr and del.icio.us. I didn’t get it at first (much like blogging). I still haven’t added much to either yet but keep an eye out.

• Flickr
• del.icio.us

1. Customer requests help
2. Help comes in about 2 hours
3. Customer thinks that’s not too bad
4. Customer requests help with another problem
5. 12 hours later, customer upgrades 2nd request to urgent
6. 12 hours later customer leaves message on 2nd help ticket again
7. 12 hours later, customer re-opens 1st ticket, because it did get answered, alerting support to 2nd request
8. Support answers 1st ticket, ignores 2nd
9. Customer opens 1st ticket again
10. Support aplogises for missing 2nd request, says someone will be on to it soon, closes first request
11. 4 hours later, still no response to 2nd ticket, customer comments on 2nd ticket that he thinks their support is terrible
12. Support says that they did not respond because they did not understand what the customer was requesting
13. Customer replies that 48 hours is a long time to seek clarification, especially that they say support is 24/7
14. Customer goes to new supplier

I recently had to help someone at work with an intranet that they had been instructed to build. They came to me with a (table based) layout that I promptly turned into CSS looking close enough to how it was. as I was explaining to him how/why to do things I thought about things that I frequently take forgranted now. So here they are: The top ten things (I think) a newbie should learn about CSS

1. Semantic HTML
2. Selectors
3. Inheritance
4. Units
5. The Box Model
6. Positioning
7. Floats
8. Hacks (a necessary evil)
9. IDs vs. Classes
10. Alternative media

I’m back, on a new host, with a fresh WP install. They need to work on the default template.

So far so good. The server is heaps faster. Page processing time for this homepage has dropped by about 80%

Something weird is happenning. It doesn’t fill me with confidence. I’m not sure I like this host.