Entries from Simon Butcher

All is well in the world of smart-phones since Fring arrived not too long ago. Despite having a logo that looks like it was designed in a few seconds of fierce MS-Paint wiggling, this application is actually becoming pretty useful to me.

After being dragged back to Walibi after only one week, it's turned out the park still has many early-season problems. The park itself has been heavily criticised in the media over the past week, including a scathing report on the Belga news-wire, «Walibi a vu du monde, mais a connu quelques soucis».

The short of the article is this: While Walibi's opening patronage was higher than the previous season (10,500 people), many attractions were closed for “temporary” reasons. Some of the rides were particularly rough on the opening Saturday, and technical staff worked overnight to help fix the problems. This may go some way to explaining why some rides did not open until the afternoon of the second day of the season.

The article goes on to state that the park management have invested €4m with special attention paid to increasing capacity of the existing rides, which is indeed visible in many places, but it looks like some rides have been somewhat neglected.

For a few years now, I've been hearing about The 1 Second Film, but I've never really paid attention to it. The idea is simple: For charity, put together a one second animated film (made up of 12 frames, each frame repeated twice to make one second of total footage) using donated funds.

Simple? Not really. When people donate money, they are essentially buying a producer credit for the film. Each credit costs $1.00 or higher, which means there's likely to be a huge number of credits — So huge, in fact, that it's predicted the credits for this film alone will last 90 minutes. To make things more impressive, they're shooting this extravaganza on 70mm film stock.

Ninety minutes of credits on 70mm stock — Unbelievable.

How could I write an article about my rollercoasterholicism without returning to Walibi on the first weekend of the 2007 season? Well, as it turns out, I couldn't possibly do such a thing, so I went today.

The interesting thing about Walibi is that the start of the season is always quite dreadful. Last year I arrived on the very first day only to find a messy park full of jerky rides and incompetent staff. I'm happy to say many of these problems were solved during this opening weekend, but perhaps not quite in the way I would have preferred.

So I've finally completed the five things you didn't know about me meme, and I've gone and twisted the rules of the game laid down by Jeff Pulver when he started the whole thing. The reason is simple: people I know are either blogless, or would ignore the request.

If I read your blog, and you're feeling left out, then apparently I misjudged your character, at which point you may go ahead and consider yourself tagged.

I was curious about the history of my tag, since there's a large element of social networking involved behind blog tagging. Continue reading "Five things: Epilogue"

This is the final part of my response to the “Five things you didn't know about me” meme; following parts one, two, three and four.

I thought my final entry in this five things serial should be something a little less morbid…

This is part four of my response to the “Five things you didn't know about me” meme; following parts one, two and three.

Probably coming as a surprise to most people, I was once diagnosed with latent schizophrenia. Apparently you're supposed to call it “schizotypal personality disorder” these days, but that sounds somewhat dramatic and verbose to me.

Until recently I have been reluctant to discuss it, but it's a part of who I am and I can neither change nor deny it. I'm not proud of it, and I don't really follow the psychology behind the whole thing, but I do know I have control over what's going on inside my brain.

This is part three of my response to the “Five things you didn't know about me” meme; following parts one and two.

In 1999, around my 18^th birthday, I was homeless for about a month. This isn't to say that I'm suddenly an expert on homelessness — far from it in fact — rather the brief experience had a profound effect on my attitudes to life. I'll be honest in saying the situation wasn't extraordinary considering I was kicked-out of home by my father.

According to Rebeccas Community, it is the number one reason for runaways, which is not too surprising.

This is part two of my response to the “Five things you didn't know about me” meme; following part one.

While I've never been entirely proud of it, I am quite content to remain a high-school drop-out. I never completed the VCE, and never went on to do university or TAFE.

After leaving school half-way through year 11 I have never really looked back, and now prefer to educate myself because I find it more reliable and rewarding than the education system ever was.

I suppose this means I'm only qualified up until middle school level!

Since Prae's blog entry requiring my attention, I've thought of responding with much apprehension. After much personal debate I've compiled a list of five things you don't know or probably dismissed.

Sorry for the rhyme, I've been doing that all day.

To be honest, since this annoying thing popped up, a few others have also suggested I follow suit. So here I am, more than three months late, but I certainly won't request that five other people must do this, because that's just as bad as a chain letter. Let's leave that stuff to the MySpace kiddies.

I've decided to not only list my five things, but explain them properly since I'm often easily misunderstood. To this end, I will explain five things you didn't know about be over five days.

I've always been interested in proper typography, especially in combination with internationalisation. Anyone who has worked with me on a project that would involve either will know that I'm particularly anal when it comes to finding and using the most appropriate layout and glyphs for the job.

My favourite examples are often ‘İstanbul’, ‘naïve’, and the difference between a Pound (‘£’, with one bar) and a Lira (‘₤’, with two bars, for which Wikipedia is presently incorrect).

To this end, I once unwisely offered potential flamebait to the Unicode group regarding single and double bar dollar signs. I know that historically the double-bar form depicted strength, but became the single-bar form because of the difficulty in representation using tiny sorts. I also know that Australia prefers a double-bar, New Zealand prefers a single-bar, and the USA don't care anymore as long as they get paid at the end of the day in their own currency.

Despite this, I have been very lax in this regard when it has come to my blogging.

It's been a long time since I've done some proper web design, but now I'm working on a mysterious project (long story) that requires me to dive-in once again. Compared to many other people, my design skills are mere tinkering in comparison. At the very least, though, my tinkering isn't as bad as the average MySpace page which is more likely to lock up your computer (it is considered the worst website around by many sources).

Unfortunately life in web design land is still a world of pain and torture.

Recently I've been talking about an article Dave Winer wrote about one of his long-time favourite rants: embedded HTTP servers in devices. Once again, I'm left with the bitter feeling that there's something built into human nature that makes most of us love waste.

Not only physically where we are become an ever-increasing disposable society, throwing away perfectly good things that just need small repairs, but also digitally on the Internet where we are wasting more and more bandwidth and CPU cycles with our bloated, lazy protocols and software designs.

It's time for me to put on my Womble hat and flog the dead horse one more time.

Once again, the flu jab has proven useless as I've come down with a flu strain that was not foreseen in the 2006-2007 northern hemisphere influenza season immunisation.

I took the day off from work on Monday and spent a lovely feverish day going back and forth between the couch and bed: uncomfortable and bored no matter where I was. I eventually gave up with exhaustion and went to bed around 7pm. After waking up from my 12 hour sleep yesterday, I felt pretty good, albeit a little dehydrated, so I went to work.

That was a big mistake.

I love events such as lunar eclipses. They tend to remind me how small I am compared to the size of the universe. It's amazing how something so simple can be so impressive.

This is the second lunar eclipse I've managed to witness, and the beautiful colour of the moon is something that will also still continue to impress me. Unfortunately the photo shown here isn't very good, but it's the best I could do with my little digital camera (along with some cropping and noise cleaning in GIMP, but otherwise no other alterations). This photo was taken around half-past midnight this morning.