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Tuesday, 4 June 2002 |
Well, I got my prints ordered, as well as 500 business cards to hand out to all my fans (hah, hah) on the night. They should all be done Friday, not Thursday as hoped. It’ll be a busy Friday.
The cards are being done by a new printing firm franchise that appears to be Western Australian in origin. A lot of franchises seem to spring up here. The printing firm is named Worldwide Online Printing. It was not so long ago that even at the cheapest franchise printers 500 business cards would cost much, much more than they do now. Competition is a good thing.
9:22:26 PM 
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UserLand Radio is the desktop tool I use to build this weblog each day (well, almost each day). It only costs US$39.95, and developer Dave Winer keeps adding new and useful features on a regular basis, for free. Is that great value or what?
I may not understand exactly what each and every new feature he adds does, but I do know that it is making blogging a better experience and weblogs better writing and communication tools.
9:41:05 AM
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Usability guru (that word is so 1970s) Jacob Nielsen is now working directly with Macromedia to improve Flash website usability, and the perception that Flash is somehow bad.
It is more a question of education than anything else.
“There continues to be tremendous innovation in the designer and developer community around creating the best user experiences using Macromedia Flash,” said Kevin Lynch, chief software architect, Macromedia. “We’re thrilled to be working with Jakob Nielsen to turn these experiences into best practices as we all learn about building rich Internet applications. Our ultimate goal is to make these 99 percent good.”
That is a quote from the press release written in the standard non-webbish corporatese of these things. But such comments aside, the fact that a handful of Australian corporate IT managers have forbidden their users from installing the Flash plug-in and have created a climate of fear of Flash in their firms is not a good thing.
What damage, pray tell, would playing Flash movies on your Windows machine possibly do? Distract poor bored corporate drones with some hypnotically alluring rotating logos built in Flash? Force them to cease all their work in MS Office and do nothing all day long but surf the web looking for more such Flash movies like some strung-out junkie looking for an angry fix in the negro streets at dawn; mad, restless, the best minds of our generation destroyed by Macromedia’s most entrancing invention?
Banning Flash because somebody somewhere at some time has done some bad work with it is like banning cars, drugs, alcohol and anything that might ever be used as a weapon because these things have been used to do bad things with.
9:07:27 AM
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It has been a difficult few weeks here at Gottschalk Manor, as I organize my contribution to this three-man show that opens the Artrage festival organization’s new gallery—Bread Box Gallery—at 233 James Street, Northbridge, at 7PM on Friday 7th June.
It has not been the actual organising so much as all the other things that have got in the way, although I have not been able to get the images printed in anything like the way I wanted. In fact they have not been printed at all, and I have to go and get some stand-in prints shortly this morning.
I will be glad when I have something like a real job again. It is far too hard to get real things done when you have no job and little or no money to do it with. I hope the advertising business begins recovering soon.
8:49:33 AM
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It has been pouring rain here in parched dry Perth, during the day and overnight, with flooding in the streets, and it looks like more rain is on its way.
About time. The dams were almost dry. There has been little rain for months. There has been a ban on sprinkler use. Now watering all those huge green lawns all over Perth is no longer necessary.
Those lawns are a stupid luxury. Let’s see, would I rather live, or look at a nice green lawn? Nah, I’d rather admire the lawn and die.
8:39:43 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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