Archive for the ‘ramblings’ Category.
June 8, 2009, 2:03 pm
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:
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*
March 16, 2009, 7:37 pm
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!
December 18, 2008, 7:30 pm
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:
suddenly dissapear:
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:
I fail to understand this. I… just fail. I really don’t understand why this is considered sensitive, and why it’s been removed.
December 15, 2008, 7:08 pm
It seems that as well as firing all their journalists, SMH have forgotten how to do math.
Well done!
December 15, 2008, 8:06 am
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
December 15, 2008, 7:29 am
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 about 7 hours ago from Tweetie
Well praps I went a bit far with coke and pepsi. Should’ve tweeter “you can dislike both coke and pepsi” x about 7 hours ago from Tweetie