The Occasional Masthead

What will follow is an extended whinge, read at your peril. If these comments offend, well, you have my phone number or email address.



Something that has been happening with increasing frequency over the past few years, although it has also been a long term trend and pattern, is a lot of people letting me down badly. I’m reaching the stage of being angry about it, rather than just disappointed, and being a lot less forgiving.


Some illustrations of trivial let downs has been the run of events for the past six weeks or so. Two events that I’d been planning for, looking forward to, organised by people I see socially, were cancelled at the last minute. Not only cancelled, one of them had the date changed only a few days before. Now these were not just “go somewhere for a drink” event, these were major “write a packing list and spend several days packing” events. And they were just… cancelled. To route around one of the cancellations and have at least some life, I spend a couple of days arranging for some people to come to my house and we were going to make music on Sunday afternoon. They didn’t turn up. They didn’t tell me they weren’t turning up, they haven’t contacted me since to apologise for not turning up. Not only is this sort of thing plain rude, it’s happening more and more frequently. And these are just social acquaintances, not what I would call “friends”, which is to say people I have shown considerable kindness to and support for in the past.


Something else that is going on is a number of people I never hear from unless they want a favour. Now, I am a generous person. Some of you who know me know that I am probably generous to a fault, running myself ragged assisting people and giving aid at the drop of a hat. I don’t do this in the belief that I am thus “owed” something, I do it because I can, and because I feel strongly that if I have the opportunity to choose to help someone, or to stand aside and not lend assistance, the universe is a slightly better place if I choose to help. But it is really starting to irritate me that when I in turn need help, or even just company or amusement, those people are nowhere to be found (with a very few noticeable exceptions, from unlikely sources).


But the worst thing, the very worst thing, is people I thought were friends who have just… faded away. Gone. Hung up the phone without bothering to tell me they were going away. Are you out there Arlene? Sian? Liz? Michael? Glen? Rebecca? Oh yes, you’re busy. Or have changed your interests, or gotten involved with other people, or just can’t be bothered any more. These are people that I have a long history with, have walked over hot coals for, and will continue to leap into the fire for. But they all just… stopped. Did I do something wrong? Have I turned into a rock, or a slug, that they don’t need to tell me what’s going on or why they don’t want to be in contact?


As it stands, right now, today, if I needed to pick up the phone and ask for a lift because my car has broken down, or a hand to move a heavy object, or someone to go and have a drink or coffee with, there is almost nobody who would not be too busy with children, jobs, lawnmowing, renovations or washing the car who would respond.


There are only two conclusions I can reach. Either I have become a repulsive thing who is too dreadful to be around, or all these people I thought were friends were just playing some adolescent game, unable to grasp what is important in life and what is not. Well, I’ve had enough. You want a favour, you want a hand? Show me the money. If all I am is some lackey, at least I should be paid for my time and effort.


After all, that is what my life now consists of. Sleep, eat, and work. Repeat until dead.

Or at the very least, farewell. When I first started looking at RSS feeds, I quickly came across NetNewsWire, and Lo, my Love was Great. Then Apple released Tiger, and with it the new version of Safari that had the ability to notice and deal with RSS fees. And Lo, my Heart was Torn In Two. Where would I go to trace my feeds? Safari or NetNewsWire? In the end I realised I hadn’t run the latter for weeks, so I’ve just sat down and copied most of my feeds from NetNewsWire into Safari.

I know that Safari isn’t perfect as a news reader, but it’s not bad. More importantly, it provides a smoother sort of flow for me: login, crank up Mail, crank up Safari, wait until various things are slurped down. Hmm, what’s new on that feed? Oh, clicky to read more. And it opens in the same application. That’s the clincher for me—one less application.

Now, you probably didn’t notice, but I’m editing this in ecto. The love there is growing too.

Look ma! iTunes Clicky Goodness… this is what I’m listening to.

The Wife of Ushers Well from the album “All Around My Hat” by Steeleye Span

I’m still trying to figure out if I want to use ecto or MarsEdit to edit this blog with. While poking around to judge the goodness or badness of each, I realised that even though I’d been reading about Markdown I’d not actually installed and tried it. Thus, this is marked up, still through the web interface, with Markdown rather than Textile. We’ll see. I know that ecto uses Markdown, but I have to see whether MarsEdit does, so I’ll save this without publishing.

It’s kind of worked, but we’ll have to see. Ok, it kind of works in ecto, but you have to switch into HTML mode in order to use Markdown mark-up. This isn’t a huge hassle, just an interesting feature.

It’s still fairly simple in ecto to add random photos:

Although there are some odd behaviors due to me publishing locally then copying. Hmm. Another oddness - ecto caches locally when saving as draft. It appears that I have to publish to push it to the server, but I will see if I can push it as draft.

OK, back to MarsEdit. I guess one of the main things of interest is to see what it does with "Quotes", which are always a bit of a horror to enter and get working. That and apostrophes, which I've always been keen on getting 'Right'.

And what happens if I try to ad an image? Urk. Cut it out, it was ugly, and didn't build a nice thumbnail for me the way that ecto did. I think I will probably run with ecto, since it also has the nice ability to add in tune info from iTunes, and so on.

Ok, there’s nobody who’s likely to read this that doesn’t know that the iTunes music store has finally opened in Australia (about three years late, thank you Australian music industry). Shiny!

I’ve already downloaded the freebie of the week - something I’ve been interested to be able to do for ages, as it’s a good way to find new music - and am poking around looking at Sting, drooling to find out there is a new Eurthymics album on the way, and hoping to find some Bach.

About gorram time.

A wonderful dummy-spit from Joel on Architecture Astronauts - I’m glad to see that I’m not the only person who was a bit suspicious about this “Web 2.0” label. Don’t get me wrong, the direction being taken by Google, Backpackit and other lovely on-line webby things really pops my cork. It’s just that I wish the people behind and related to some of this change in direction didn’t talk so damned much.

I really like the new Dictionary application in Tiger. The way it displays it’s results is quite lovely, and one of these days I will paste a picture. However, a word I just read in an article about a great teacher struck me: Rebarbative. The dictionary says:

rebarbative
adjective formal
unattractive and objectionable : rebarbative modern buildings.

ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from French rébarbatif, -ive, from Old French se rebarber ‘face each other “beard to beard” aggressively,’ from barbe ‘beard.’

So how about that. Nice word.

Three or four random links to things which are Shiny (yes I’ve been watching Firefly)

Shiny Thing The First: Noises to play on the phone to get rid of people

Shiny Thing The Second: Merlin Mann on how to Write Sensible Email

Shiny Thing The Third: The New York Times picks up on how evil distraction in the workplace is

Shiny Thing The Last: what happens when you throw a digital camera in the air

Can I just say:

Firefly DVD!
Firefly DVD!
Firefly DVD!
Firefly DVD!
Firefly DVD!
Firefly DVD!

Followed by a little happy dance. I will probably be singing the theme song, internally, all night. (Internally because I’m still quite ill and my throat is sore and swollen)