 |
Saturday, 15 June 2002 |
KubanEmpire has just launched the Oriel Café website, and it was great to see that Oriel are serving up Stefano Manfredi’s excellent coffee Espresso di Manfredi.
In Sydney I often drop in to the BitterSweet coffee shop in the Myer’s department store for a quick cup of Manfredi coffee. My favourite coffee of all.
10:26:55 PM 
|
|
My friends at KubanEmpire, an excellent little new media design firm located near my old homes in East Perth, have won the contract to build two new special websites for WA Business News as well as rejuvenating the newspaper ’s online presence.
Maybe there is an opportunity here to introduce the newspaper and its staff to weblogging?
10:20:15 PM
|
|
Weblogs stand to revolutionize the way newspaper people write, edit and publish on the web. And how businesses can advertise within newspapers online in new and improved ways.
Dave Winer dropped the hint that he is working on some kind of multi-author writing, publishing and syndication, stemming from UserLand’s current products—Radio and Radio Community Server—no doubt.
10:03:41 PM
|
|
I am trying out the Open Source version of the Netscape Navigator web browser—Mozilla 1.1a—and so far it is pretty good. Stable, faster than Netscape 6.2, some problems that the Netscape/Mozilla people never seem to bother to fix like the buttons in the Preferences dialogs. And a nasty problem with using macros to input text into form fields—Mozilla screws up badly when all other browsers do it correctly. I like Mozilla’s tabbed windows very much, though, and its Gecko layout engine is great.
I would like to replace Opera with something else for writing these weblog entries in, but with these macro bugs Mozilla ain’t it for now. Shame.
7:40:41 PM
|
|
A sweeping pedestrian piazza and tiered forum adjoins the Horseshoe Bridge near William Street where billboards stand now.
Under the plan, the Fremantle rail line, which for decades has divided the city from Northbridge, will be sunk underground from William Street up to King and Lake streets, linking the two roads and precincts.
A 600m curve of freeway ramp from the bottom of William Street to Riverside Drive which blocks the foreshore and the unsightly bus ramp at the Mounts Bay Road depot will be shifted or sunk underground, opening the vista from the new convention centre.
The master plan for the railway project is expected to be released next month.
1:11:45 PM
|
|
WA faces becoming a back-office branch of the Australian economy unless a serious effort is mounted to encourage home-grown companies to follow the lead of Wesfarmers and aspire to become dominant players in the Australian market.
A passionate believer in WA’s potential to become a major regional hub by leveraging off its expertise in the oil and gas, resources and service industries, Mr Hamilton argues that much more must be done to attract industry and investment here and more support provided to encourage WA-based companies to pursue the critical mass needed to attract institutional investors.
“Otherwise, the State will continue to lose its best and brightest individuals, while its most promising corporates are destined to become fodder for bigger competitors from beyond the State border,” he says.
Beware! The West Australian website is very badly designed and will not work correctly in many web browsers. I still have not managed to work out how to find archived stories on their site.
12:34:14 PM
|
|
Alan Saunders of ABC Radio National’s Saturday morning program The Comfort Zone is broadcasting a series of episodes he recently recorded in Perth.
He confirmed on the program that Perth is the Australian city with the largest percentage of Poms in the population. As they are almost all provincials, that explains a great deal about this city. All that the provincial Brits I knew ever wanted was an easy, quiet life free of challenge or change.
12:18:17 PM
|
|
Excellent!
11:18:06 AM
|
|
A quote from this great little interview with pioneer web designer Joe Gillespie of Web Page Design for Designers
Q: What makes for a good web site?
A: Compelling content delivered painlessly.
Pay particular attention to Joe’s answer to this question:
Q: Describe 3 qualities necessary to succeed online.
10:53:56 AM
|
|
When you have experienced other operating systems, other kinds of computers than the ubiquitous Windows machines, you know just how annoying Windows is because you have had those other, better experiences of computing.
That is not a joy most Windows users can lay claim to, especially office workers and the many poor unfortunate home users who have been conned into believing that Windows is all there is. In fact, many office workers do not even know they are using a thing named Windows. They often believe that their operating system is Word, I have found.
A site I visit often, when I am in a situation where I am forced to use Windows at work, is the Annoyances.org website. So popular it spawned a series of books from O’Reilly & Associates, Annoyances.org is a cabal of dedicated Windows freaks who nevertheless find many aspects of their favourite operating system deeply annoying. I find the same aspects of Windows deeply infuriating.
I was reminded of all this when trying to get my students at a little private college to zip a folder of files and email them to me. Only two out of 9 have managed to pull this feat off so far. The rest are baffled. Such a simple thing made so incredibly difficult by a useless, crude and sloppy operating system.
10:40:45 AM
|
|
© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
|
|
|
