Archive for the ‘ramblings’ Category.

Ways to make me unsubscribe from your feed #1

I’ve noticed a trend where a lot of feeds are includ­ing large blocky ads at the bot­tom of each feed item. I can live with that; a little ugly, but I can skip them easily.

Today I saw some­thing new:
cheezburger-fail

That’s right: two com­plete posts con­sist­ing of noth­ing more than the same ad.

Scrolling down shows me that the very next item is exactly the same add from “The Fail Blog”, another site oper­ated by the same company.

Ads with con­tent I can stand. Ads without con­tent?  *unsubscribe*

Laundry powder gets huge upgrade

I was in the super­mar­ket get­ting some laun­dry powder last night and noticed some­thing really strange: every single brand of con­cen­trated laun­dry powder was advert­ising on their pack­aging the fact that they’re about to be relaunched in a new ver­sion. The new powders are all going to be 2x as con­cen­trated, and most brands made a big deal out of the fact that the new pack­aging will there­fore be half the size.

Golly. Every brand? All at once? All decid­ing to redo their for­mu­la­tion, redo their pack­aging, and retool their man­u­fac­tur­ing plants, all with identical changes to for­mu­la­tion and pack­aging, all at the same time? Unpossible!

You’d almost think that every brand of powder was actu­ally exactly the same, made at the same plant, and just pack­aged slightly dif­fer­ently. But that would surely never happen!

Censorship of.. flight details?

A few days ago, a colleage poin­ted met at Air­Ser­vices Australia’s new fancy flight tracker, which allows you to watch planes com­ing and going in the air­space around Sydney air­port. There are plenty of things not to like — MS Vir­tual Earth ;) , the nasty click-through EULA that you have to agree to before you even find out what the site provides…

But, that aside, it’s fairly cool. Planes, fly­ing, around Sydney! Res­ults from noise-level meters, so you can see just how noisy your new sub­urb is going to be. Even details about the planes — type of plane, alti­tude, flight numbers..

So today there was a tra­gic acci­dent involving two planes with trainee pilots. SMH have a video online which shows the flight tracker, and shows the two planes involved col­lid­ing (and then one of them drop­ping off the radar — lit­er­ally). Accord­ing to the timestamps super­im­posed on the video, the crash hap­pens just after 11:23am

The site lets you see his­tor­ical data: in the box on the lower-left, un-tick the “Show Cur­rent Flights” but­ton, then use the con­trols to choose the day and time you’d like to look at. So it’s easy enough to go back to 11:20am and run through the next few minutes and see the crash for yourself.

Except… that it’s not. There are no planes in that area at that time. In fact, there’s no light avi­ation at all. Someone has excised all light avi­ation records between 11:00am and 11:59:16am. If you set the timer to start art 10:59, you see a whole bunch of planes:

before

sud­denly dissapear:

after

It’s not a subtle removal either, even if you ignore all the planes which freeze and then van­ish from the graph. There’s a nice graph show­ing you the num­ber of move­ments per hour for the day — spot what’s odd about today:

15-1216-1217-1218-12

I fail to under­stand this. I… just fail. I really don’t under­stand why this is con­sidered sens­it­ive, and why it’s been removed.

SMH: Not so clever with the counting

It seems that as well as fir­ing all their journ­al­ists, SMH have for­got­ten how to do math.

smh-counting-fail

Well done!

Kitties is cute

What’s cuter than a kitty-cat giv­ing you morn­ing cuddles?

Two kitty-cats giv­ing morn­ing cuddles!

The pic­ture below is moment­ous — it’s the first time both cats have con­sen­ted to cuddle at the same time.

Burrito licks Linus' ear while I cuddle them both

Burrito licks Linus’ ear while I cuddle them both

Stephen Fry: Tweeting with class

From his tweet­stream overnight (my time):

Well, sit­ting in JFK lounge. Fly­ing to LA this morn­ing. Sharp con­trast. But, you know, it’s pos­sible to love LA and NYC x
It’s pos­sible to like the Beatles and the Stones. x
You can love Moz­art and Wag­ner x
You can like Dick­ens and Aus­ten x
You can like iPhones and Black­Ber­ries x
Carbs and pro­tein x
Bach and Mahler x
Coke and Pepsi. (Coke and Ecstasy for that mat­ter …) x
But NOT Vista and OS X. Non posso. Unmög­lich. x
Well praps I went a bit far with coke and pepsi. Should’ve tweeter “you can dis­like both coke and pepsi” x