Category Archives: Bla

This is where bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla and sometimes bla.

Theme upgrade!

Written by . Posted on December 17, 2011. Filed under Bla. No comments.

This site has been pretty much dormant in 2011, next year I intend to help the internet out by putting more opinions and shit on it, specifically mine. Or my poorly filtered versions at the very least. To aid in this endeavour I’ve gone and updated the site theme, hopefully now people will be able to read it without also developing acute nausea. Maybe.

The discerning WordPress type nerd will have noticed this theme is based on Neutica+, nothing too fancy but a good upgrade from Neutica which I was running previously. I also have one custom plugin that tweaks a few styles & adds some new behaviour, the rest is all stock WordPress & various plugins because really, who needs the extra fucking work.

Now check back next year, and there might be some actual new new content. Later!

 

The tweets I never sent

Written by . Posted on October 8, 2011. Filed under Bla. No comments.

Since sometime early this year I’ve maintained a text file of unsent tweets. Most of these have been all typed up & ready to go, but instead of hitting send I decided the world did not need to know these things at that time. Now reading back through them as discarded thoughts instead of messages to the world most don’t seem that bad, so here are the tweets I never sent over the last 6 months.

In the interests of full disclosure I should say this isn’t the complete list. I’ve withheld the stuff from the last couple of weeks, and culled about 30% for being just too stupid, angry, incomplete or incoherent. Enjoy, I guess.

Pissing away another hour of life because I can’t spell otpion correctly… #debuggingsucks

If growing a beard has taught me anything, it’s how easy it is to lose combs.

My new system for rating mixes in iTunes? 1 star per gunfingers. Yes, I need to leave the computer more often. #thesunitburns

Now that imminent global economic collapse trader man is not a hoax again do we resume the panic or is that just funny old news now?

Reform copyright. Fix patents. Protect privacy. Institutionalize social innovation. Re-tool defunct industries. #talklikeapirateday

Bester’s ‘Stars my Destination’, @bruces’s ‘Schismatrix’ & @shineanthology’s uh, Shine anthology. Pretty good spread I thought.

’8 hours work’ doesn’t mean it will be done in a day. This is a design studio, not a sausage factory.

Read article -> Gain hope for future of humanity, problems are there to be solved! Read comments -> Lose all hope, want to kill everybody.

I think about half the tweets I type out get thrown away without posting.

That pink cowboy hat makes me think you’re a shitty, boring person.

I swear some designers think the web is rendered by rainbow pixies shaking unicorn bones at the screen.

Who uses the ignorant asshole commenter or juvenile troll stereotypes when designing their use case personas? Why not?

Hipster tourists out wandering around looking like lost time-travelers, kicked out of 3 last centuries by fashion police. #atemporality

“You’ve got the votes & the money, you’ve got no conscience. Get out of the way. Over the long term you attitude is fatal.” -@bruces

I wonder how much of that black teflon shit I’ve ingested out of frying pans over the years. Must be like a woks worth.

There you go. I can’t believe you actually read that. Check back in like another 4 months when I have another super exciting blog post to share!

Spelling & Blablablabla

Written by . Posted on July 24, 2011. Filed under Bla, Spelling & Handwriting. No comments.

So I forgot to set up robo-posts for the second half of the year and there have been no new installments of Spelling & Handwriting. But let’s be honest this is really no great loss, that shit was incredibly boring. The rest will still go up, I’ll just do it in a massive batch some time.

In other news, Google+ now exists and for the first time in the history of the social networkings I have a publicly visible profile. You can find me at http://gplus.to/sjef. I’ll be more active on there, so bar robo-posts until I embark on some noteworthy project that requires documentation this place will probably be pretty dormant for the time being.

Spelling & Handwriting

Written by . Posted on March 29, 2011. Filed under Bla, Spelling & Handwriting. No comments.

Well, the blog must have content. While going through my bookcase I came across this, spelling & handwriting schoolwork I did as near as I can remember back in 1991. Never really paid much attention to this book because you know, how interesting could it have been? Turns out there are some good bits…

As you can see this is an artifact of better days, when an advertisement depicting an armed robbery, re-enacted with crunchy chocolate caramel candy bars was still considered appropriate for the cover of a primary school exercise book. Note that I managed to miss-spell ‘spelling’ on the front cover, which I think is quite an accomplishment on its own.

The exercise book is split into three sections. We’ll go through each, starting in the back.

So in the back are just basic spelling exercises, bunch of words are dictated and you try to write them down. Get some right, get some wrong, pretty boring stuff. Moving on.

In the middle of the book are the handwriting exercises. These exercises would be written on the blackboard or on a pre-printed sheet, I can’t remember which was the case in this class, but as we’ll see that might have been a pretty important detail.

The exercises are simple form and letter repetitions to train muscle memory, each one also had a few sentences to copy as well. Each day they moved up in alphabetical order. I know, this sounds horribly mundane. Let’s just jump in and read one:

Every evening Eve and Emma went to Ellen’s place for dinner.

Oh, well good for them. Nothing strange about that. Let’s carry on…

Freddie Fender fiddled furiously with Fiona’s fiddle on Friday night following half time.

Nice one Freddie, I bet Fiona enjoyed that.

Gerry grew grapes in Gina’s garden greenhouse.

Sure he did. Gerry loves gardening…

Johnny Johnson jumped for joy when Justin juggled three jellybeans at June’s party

Nothing dirty going on here. It’s just in your head.

Larry licked Lisa’s lollipop while Louise leered at Lana.

Admit it, you came.

After that the rest of the alphabet gets run down without incident bar a random Asimov namedrop in the V exercise, until one day the letters run out and we start over again with letter pairs. First up is Ab:

Andrew ate Barry’s banana before breakfast in bed.

What. The. Fuck. Seriously, who wrote this shit? How many 10 years old kids copied this off blackboards across the country? Maybe any humor I see in this now is just due to 20 extra years worth of mindwarp, but surely teachers must have been laughing their asses off at this. I hope so anyway.

And then part III. Exercises in which we were given cards with words, and the assignment to create sentences containing them to demonstrate that we understood their usage. Here’s a typical example, written 20 years ago today.

1. He seemed to be immortal for he was the only one who actually survived the nuclear holocaust.

Guess he was pretty pimp.

2. Distribute is the futre tense of distribution.

I spelled fucking future wrong? 10 year old self, I am disappoint.

3. Captain Kirk’s starship is called the U.S.S Enterprise.

Can’t argue with that.

4. The adoption of Earl watchamaycallum was a historical event.

An historical event.

5. He condemned the adolescent to 9 months in prison.

Too bloody right.

6. He was rather immature during the conduction of the campaign.

Dick.

7. But he was very enthusiastic.

Oh well that’s all right then. Except for the part where it’s not, because that’s not a sentence. Oh well.

These exercises were done every few weeks right through to the end of the year, so for the rest of this year I’ll post them on the day they were originally done 20 years ago, and pick on the schoolwork of a 10 year old. Me.

And that’s my shitty filler blog content sorted for this year! Some of the entries are more entertaining, others less so if you even consider that possible at this point. If anything else interesting comes along I’ll let you know. Maybe.

 

Hello 2011

Written by . Posted on March 12, 2011. Filed under Bla. No comments.

A strange roller coaster bastard of a year already. Bit late with this update but I haven’t really had any time or inclination to write anything after forcing myself to most of last year.

Writing was a good experiment, but now having enjoyed learning a lot about plot, pacing and point of view, I’ve also decided that real writers are insane masochist cave dwellers and I intend to keep that shit strictly at hobby level for the foreseeable future.

Projects I’ve considered taking up this year include baseball, alcoholism, having breakfast and bash scripting. Maybe I’ll finish up some of the slush I created last year, inspiration may strike but for the next while it’s more likely to just be working, trying to keep up with the world, consuming more science fiction and not getting thrown out of the ride or puked on by the people up front. Interesting times.

* Update 29-03 – I ended up going with baseball and the occasional breakfast.