Finally, someone has noticed that I can never find hats or bike helmets to fit. The reason is obvious. I'm massively-brained, according to Stigherrian.
Next step: forming the "massively-brained" support group, with an online shopping service for the larger-endowed cranium. I can just see the spams now: "Impress her with your massive... Sudoku score"?
Conversation had with a clerk at Mitre 10 (large DIY store chain in Australia) on Saturday morning:
Me: I'm after some 50mm 6 gauge screws with pan heads, stainless steel.
Clerk: (looks around the shelves a bit) No we don't have that. We've only got what's here. You probably need to try a specialist fastening store.
Me: What you mean like a hardware store?
Clerk: ...
WTF is Mitre 10 if not a store where you'd expect to find screws in various incarnations? How difficult would it be for them to have a small cupboard with many small drawers stocked with every imaginable type of screw? The profit margin on screws at retail must be enormous, so you'd think there'd be an economic incentive.
Mitre 10, you're no more than a jumped-up $2 shop these days. You suck!
Peter Moore got me into the blog Swedesplease which is all about Swedish indie pop music. I figured I could find some interesting music, after all The Shout Out Louds are Swedish.
Much of the music has been kinda ordinary, but the hit rate has improved after they introduced me to The Social Services, introduced as a "Swelandish" band. Two thirds Scottish, one third Swedish. Beautiful, melancholy tunes in exactly the kind of style I love in indie pop.
Unfortunately, they're clearly new to this marketing thing. There's no point marketing if people can't buy your product. How the fuck do I buy their album?!?!? I know it's called "Six Feet Above The Ground" but that's it.
Come on guys, it wouldn't be that hard to set up a PayPal account and a rudimentary online ordering system that ends up with downloadable mp3s. It'd do for me!
Last night we had a few mates around for dinner to celebrate the bathroom being done, and thank our hosts who put us up while our house was without a toilet. I planned to do a roast chicken with all the trimmings, but hit an obstacle very early. The oven doesn't work any more! Feels to me like the linkage between the lever you use to spark and initially start the gas has disconnected with whatever it's supposed to connect to. Bugger!
So, I sat around thinking about alternatives and eyed up the barbecue. It's one of those enormous six burner jobs, donated by my uncle who isn't living in a place big enough for it. It also came with all the bits for a rotisserie, but I'd never got around to trying it out. Solution to our little problem!
So I threaded the chook on the rotisserie and put all the baking trays with vegies around it. I quickly worked out what the extra little ring and screw thing were for -- they're to keep the meat attached to the prongs at the other end, as otherwise you end up with a spinning rotisserie but not a spinning bird.
The result was actually really really good! One of the tastiest roasts I've ever done. The chicken was a little overcooked, but the barbecue flavour made up for any imperfections there. The vegetables were spectacular! Crispy potato skins but not dry inside. Lovely charred pumpkin. Caramelised onions and garlic. Yummy!
Amazing what you can do when you're forced to improvise.
Well we're finally done on the bathroom, but for two small jobs. I need to paint the door, which I'm doing today, and we have to put up the shower screen. The wall to which we're attaching the shower screen is just a cavity wall, and of course the studs are not where the screen has to go. So we'll have to open up that wall from the other side and put in a structural stud to hold the (bloody heavy and pivoting) shower screen.
So it's pretty much done! We toasted it with some mates last night and some nice Chandon NV. Thanks Matt, Maz, Mikey and Leonie for putting us up while we were toiletless. Speaking of toilets, have a look at this lovely unit:
Right, I'm off to put the first coat on that door.
Continuing my series on chutzpah.
Chutzpah is demanding that your successor do what you spent eleven years refusing to do.
Despite ABC Playback being touted as Windows/Mac support only, it should be pretty easy to hack up. Looking at it on Windows this morning with the trusty Live HTTP Headers Firefox extension switched on, I've grabbed what seem to be the important URLs, which are XML files.
The actual interface is embarrassingly tedious. They've tried for the latest and greatest in Flash crappiness, which probably means it'll be slow as a dog on a low-end computer. Fortunately, the data is passed through XML, so it'll only be a short time before someone writes a MythTV plugin to grab, parse and play.
There's a channel list, which corresponds to the three channels: ABC CatchUp, ABC Real and ABC Shop. Loading up one of the URLs given for a channel, you get a listing of the content on that channel, including where to get the file. Seems to be you need "rtmp://cp44823.edgefcs.net/ondemand" and then the bit after.
So, despite being annoyed they're blowing our money not supporting all operating systems and instead building crappy Flash stuff, we should be able to bend it to our will.
Google have launched Google Transit support for Perth's public transport system.
Hopefully, and it would seem likely given they're based in Sydney, they'll start work on the appalling Sydney transport system timetables. The "Plan Your Trip" functionality isn't bad, but the timetable display across the various agencies is insane. I fail to see that when you go from the 131500 site and select a train station (say, Stanmore) and want to see the timetable, you inntead get a list of all the train lines. For the record, Stanmore station is services by two train lines: Inner West and South. WTF? Oh but they, handily, provide exactly the same dropdown again in the top-right, which this time tells you which line services your station. Joined up government.
Then when you drill down into the timetables, instead of anything resembling sanity -- say, defaulting to "when is the next train", you get... an HTML rendering of the printed timetables. And do you think it might be customised to only show the trains that stop at your station? Oh no, you get to know exactly when there'll be an express train whizzing through your station.
Who the hell are the people that wrote this crap? Do they even use public transport? Have they ever tried to use their own site? Unbelievable!
Screen scraper writers, start your engines.
Quick as a flash after my last post about online ordering systems, Hadley Rich suggested shopify, which while a hosted system, seems to be written by people with a clue. Railsy kinda clues, which means the designs are lovely, and they've focussed on doing one thing well.
Moments later, Lindsay suggested almost the same thing: Active Merchant which is the system shopify built for the merchant stuff. Synchronicity?
Anyway, the nice thing about the shopify service is it's got a templating system you can both hack and understand nice and easily. So even though all these systems are set up for multiple products, I should be able to steer it into being a single-product system. What's more, the really cool stuff I actually want to play with, Google Website Optimizer, will be very easy to integrate.
Now to decide if the tax bollocks is worth the effort. The ATO material seems to suggest you don't have to charge GST if your turnover is, or is expected to be, under $75,000 per year. That would simplify things greatly, but they don't actually come out and say that. Guess for such things you need expert advice.
Mary, I'm totally with you about online ordering. So many companies just don't get it. Worse yet, utility companies in Australia are just appalling. Origin Energy, I'm looking at you, dickheads! Their online "order" form seemingly goes absolutely nowhere. How useful!
So on that note, I've been thinking of setting up an online ordering site myself. More as an experiment in marketing and conversion rate improvement than anything else. If I decide the tax crap isn't going to make it onerous, I'll be doing it shortly.
What software should I use? This will be a single-product site, but I'd like to have proper order management and notification, along with rudimentary stock control ideally. Online payment is essential. And I want to run it all (except perhaps the payment) on my own server. Not written in PHP would be good.