Was going to write an insightful passage on our journey from sydney to sydney so far. But instead, enjoy a chat which sums most of it up. BTW, myself and brian are only joking when we are racist, so don't be offended. It's for our own personal comedy enjoyment.

6:44 PM Brian: tomas

me: brian

Brian: I hear Melbourne is beautiful in the fall

6:46 PM me: i hear you're a dick

w00t

6:47 PM on the end of the great ocean road now

Brian: is it fun, it it AMAAAZZIINNGGG

me: will travel back the coast to melb tomorrow

it

is

AMAAAAZZZING

you're reading my mind

Brian: wonderful

whats melbourne like??

6:48 PM me: melbournes cool

did some city sightseeing on friday but everyhtinh was closed because of some religious holiday or something

its a nice compact city

more "european" than sydney

6:49 PM Brian: eeehh yuck I hate the jews and their religious holidays its like hello already

me: we stayed in cooes in st kildas

6:50 PM Brian: Yeah I've heard its more cafe lifestlye

me: a nice bohemic area full of ecclectic bars and cafes

WEIRD

Brian: ecclectic

me: yes. ecclectic

Brian: alternative

me: its a word

Brian: tres chic

me: ineed

tres

tres.

hookers too

lots of em

Brian: fabulous,

sweet

6:51 PM me: hanging out on corners

Brian: good ones

??

did you sample

me: and we think we saw 2 gay old men pick each other up in their trucks

but can't be sure

the hookers were not too bad.

but still hookers

6:52 PM Brian: wonderful, what did you think of Canberra??

me: pfft

didn't do much. went to parliament and war memorial.

memorial was cool and big

6:53 PM we watched some parliament meeting too, it was interesting.

Brian: any shouting or 'here heres'

me: a few yays. and a good few nays

then they called in the bells.

not sure what that is, but i think they had to vote.

6:54 PM Brian: yay

me: milne was trying to pass some 50 million dollar limit on infrastructure thing

maybe it was "aye"

6:58 PM Brian: sounds like the funs being had

me: its grand

6:59 PM port fairy is a lovely little area

packed with weekenders and small.

it was 30 degrees today, and we should get good weather for the drive back to melb tomorrow too.

7:00 PM then off to tassie on tuesday. w00t.

7:01 PM Brian: sweet as. I got a mail actually off the tassies we were travelling and two of them are prob coming to Sydney for Anzac weekend so that will be cool to see them again

7:02 PM me: nobody cares, but whatever floats your boat.

Yes. Another Redesign.

A few days ago I took a photo with the photobooth app on my MacBook. I really liked it and as a result redesigned the blog today. Not a huge change, but it's a bit sharper and bigger than before. I was worried about lack of whitespace but there is not too much clutter, so that should be okay. Font sizes are all bigger. I've moved from 700 to 1000 pixels wide, as 700 was too squashed, and now theres a bit more spacing between things.

While the old design was a great move forward from the old standard blogger design, over time it became soft and with very little contrast. It was cluttered and the title bar took up too much space before the user hit content.


The new design is slightly less tall, so more content fits on the screen. It is much wider making room for even more content. I'm loving the MG Open Moderna typeface right now. You can be sure I will be using it again for some client work. I found it here. I definitely recommend adding smashing magazine to your regular visits.

Once more, like the last redesign, I am having trouble making the sidebar pretty. They are fine, but not brilliant.


Your comments are greatly appreciated. Ideas. Changes. Dislikes. Likes. Go shithouse.

When a software system is developed and a large amount of data is involved there has to be a way to break it all out, and make sense of the data. Relating data to different subjects and people and chronologically. Essentially, it all comes down to metadeta. Doesn't everything?* At least it does when you're a software developer who's passionate about organising data, relations and making sense of it all for the user.

I was sitting in work, looking at some code and I switched to iTunes to get some coding music on, and as always I looked for an opportunity to be distracted. I noticed that there were way too many genres in my music library.

It's an entire column in iTunes that I never use (I think it can be hidden, but thats erroneous) . That's one third of the browse bar thats never touched. After this revelation, I started to organise my music into genres. It's more difficult than I thought. Which genre should CSS go in? Pop? Rock? Indie? Soft Rock? And what the hell is soft rock? Is that even a genre? What's alternative? Alternative to what? I kind of guess Alternative Rock is Rock, but different. Isn't that what all bands are trying to achieve? Something the same, but different, something ... alternative.

So the question I ask is should music span more than 1 genre, should it be based on the general feel of the album, or on a specific song? Can a band cross genres between albums/songs?

I'm trying to conclude this post, but can't. Seems that a single album with many genres might give the user too much freedom, it could be dangerous. Constraints are good.

Lesson: Even if you can't figure out why something is built a certain way, there is usually a damn good reason for it, and someone has already sweat over it for a lengthy period before you thought of it.

Conclusion: To bring this back to software development - Just because a user requests a change to a piece of software, doesn't make it a viable reason to make the change. Most users don't know what they are asking for and can't see the long term effects. This is how software becomes bloated, the developer tries to please everyone. Further reading.

* Kind of like the matrix, but the CG isn't as good.