Darfuria

Well, not really explained, as this is a pretty pointless post, but it’s something that I learned.

I was reading through a stylesheet on a website to try and find the colour of something, and as opposed to using CSamp to find the colour my mouse is hovering over, I thought I’d read through a few pages of code.

Anyway, I found a colour (not the one I wanted), and looked at it and thought “Hey, wait a minute, since when was the number 9 in hexadecimal (web colours are programmed in hexadecimal)? I thought it just went 1-8.” I then looked at the logic of that question, hexadecimal meaning 16, which means for it to go from 1-8, the letters would have to be A-H.

Obviously realising I’d never seen the letter G in hexadecimal it occured to me that I’d been interpreting hexadecimal wrong. I thought it was 8 digits and 8 letters, without really paying much attention to what digits and letters they are, but if you break it down, in much the same way French numeracy works (quatre vingt dix neuf being 4 20s, 10 and 9), hex obviously means 6 (A-F) and dec meaning 10 (0-9).

So, an interesting self-discovery there! Something you might learn from.

Yes, I did search the thesaurus for a word I could use in the title of this post.

Today when I arrived at work, I was reminded (accidentally) that I agreed to attend a course held downstairs. Apparently its focus was on accessibility in gaming, so I seemed like the best candidate at work to attend. How wrong I was.

Considering I generally can’t stand stupid people, and a person being or acting like an idiot annoys the hell out of me; I had to endure 6 hours of this twaddle.

Seriously, I was sat in a room of people who believed they were “IT literate” because they could open a bloody Word document. There was a woman sat a few chairs down from me, with a strong Retard accent, who claimed she copied and pasted things from her web browser to Microsoft Word without using the clipboard. Sorry, isn’t that impossible?

“Please teach me your oh-so fucking magical ways of bypassing inevitibility when you’re using the PC, because you’re quite obviously far more capable than I am.”

The majority of the course was spent with “Oooh”s and “Aaaah”s echoing from the attendees, and the occasional “Mmmmm” from the elderly women when something was shown on the plasma screen, which I had to constantly fix, because the so called “trainer” was an incapable bitch.

There was one point where they (Ability Net - the people running the course) were showing a piece of their software, and the woman presenting it didn’t even know how to use it. She didn’t know that you could do basic tasks with it such as open and save files.

She then went on to show us this screen reading software. Someone asked if you could type directly into the software for it to read out, whilst the rest of the room marvelled at this yellow highlighter scrolling over the text as a disembodied American robotic voice “read” the text on the screen. The woman answered the question with “No, you can’t type directly into the software, but you can copy and paste”, and then proceeded to accidentally type into the text-editor of the program and completely contradicted herself, and, yep, you guessed it, made herself look like a complete idiot.

The course generally focused on innovative methods of presenting accessibility to disabled users. Things such as switch software, which is highly boring. We moved on to the games after lunch, prior to this we spent 3 long, dull hours going through particularly boring, loathsome information about screen reading software and photo manipulation in very poor, free image packages. Things I’ve never even heard before. The tutors were very shocked to hear that I worked with Photoshop, pretty much on a daily basis.

Now, when I saw games, I thought it was going to be something relatively interesting. I mean, honestly, what teenage guy, disabled or otherwise, doesn’t want to blow something up? How wrong I was. The games’ high-point was a one-button operated game which was basically Space Invaders designed in MS Paint.

After the very humiliating session on games, we moved on to audio. Once more the two tutors were very impressed by the fact that I have actually recorded my own music, not used some pathetic MIDI samples, with real software and instruments. The guy was okay, I guess, but the woman was a complete retard who has one of those easy senses of humour. You know, the kind who is amused by Microsoft SAM pronouncing her name wrong, or something.

So, we played around with this budget version of Ejay, which offered you some MIDI samples (”patches”) of 6 different instruments, and you could drag them into different positions to make your very own song. Fucking yay.

All in all, I was so glad when the course ended at around 15:30. I retired to my desk, away from the idiots who were still bewildered by the fact they could paint some fucking red, green and yellow stripes on one of the Windows sample pictures, and felt completely done in. Being stupid really hurts your head.

Seriously, I was so bored and felt so small in comparision to the amount of technological literacy and computing talent radiating from these people, that I spent a good ten minutes giggling to myself over “A door isn’t a door when it’s ajar”.

There are a few websites which we host for clients at work, which were developed by employees who were there a few years ago. When we have to make changes to these websites, it often involves searching through various chunks of code to do some editing, modify some variables, whatever. It’s not so bad until you come across some really horrible programming.

There was a stylesheet I worked on a little while ago which had to be the most ugly block of code I’ve ever seen, ever, and changing it to get things to work differently wasn’t exactly the easiest task I set about doing. Currently I’m trying to make (what you would think would be) a simple edit to some ASP - the programming language of the devil (Bill Gates), himself.

You’d think that

If pageNo = i Then Response.Write("<strong>" & i & "</strong> :")

would make the current page bold, but does it? Of course not.

Just goes to show, really, that making your code nice, clean and tidy, and adding the occasional comment, really goes a long way.

Well, there are a few things that are really annoying me right now, both at home and elsewhere:

• My internet connection (probably the main thing)
• The distance between England and Ireland
• The constant smell of smoke, which I’m really sensitive to, at home
• The lack of yummy food
• My room (redecorate me!)
• The volume of the TV
• People not listening to me
• Arguments and general anti-social-ness
• The cat constantly whining on one side of my door or the other. Why can’t it Phase Shift?
• The unreliability of buses
• My lack of inspiration and motivation
• Getting ill so regularly

I’ll be so happy when all of these things are sorted. I’ve been whining at Tiscali for a while now, but they’re not being much help.

We all have to buy at least one card for someone during the course of a year. Often we will buy lots of cards, for varying different occasions. Mother’s day, Father’s day, Christmas, birthdays, get well soon, congratulations, etc.

I was buying cards for Mother’s day yesterday. One for my Mum, one for my Nan. It occured to me that all of the cards are the same. They just have a different picture, colour scheme, and the words are synonyms of the words on the card next to it.

I think a band such as Slayer should manufacture a line of celebratory cards. Something with text like:

“May you rot in the pits of hell whilst I feast on the flesh of your despair. Happy Mother’s day!”

I mean, sure, not many people would go for it - but it would add a real kick to the day. All of these soppy and teeth-grittingly cheesy cards are begining to piss me off. Somebody needs to do something new.

I mean, who had the oh-so clever idea to populate these cards with sickening words. There’s nothing wrong with saying something nice, don’t get me wrong, but there’s no need to make every card contain the poetry of the traditional dying person, madly in love with some woman who he can’t have. They really need to tone it down on cards a bit.

Pretty picture. Simple text. Done.

I guess the solution, really, is to make your own card… but I’m too lazy for that.

Other than the 15 minutes I wasted looking around card shops for cards that didn’t make me want to chainsaw the nearest person into a nice bloody pile on the floor, when I was on the bus into town, it stopped in the traffic, outside the sex shop. Nothing special to see, really, as the windows are covered with blinds. But due to the height of the bus, and the fact we were going up the hill, and the door to the shop is in an alcove, I couldn’t see the whole of the sign above the door. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera with me at the time, as it would have made an amusing picture… but basically, because of the angle differences, etc. I couldn’t see the “No” at the top of the sign. So from my point of view, the sign read:

“Under 18s permitted”

After that, I was walking through town, up to the internet café, when I saw a Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm-Flailing Tube Man (Family Guy) on top of Debenhams. That really made my day.