…or “I just want to make bacon and eggs, not save the planet”.

Supermarkets these days are like a minefield of emotional blackmail and potentially dangerous foodstuffs. I remember back when you could go grocery shopping and just pick the cheapest item, or the item with the prettiest label. I’m not very old, so either times have changed fast or I was just really naive back then. Now there are so many things to take into consideration. Here are the top 10 guilt zones in supermarkets today:

10. Yoghurt

I went to France recently, and yoghurt was pretty much yoghurt. It came in these cute little jars and tasted really good. Have you noticed how much space the yoghurt section of Aussie supermarkets takes up? I just want yoghurt that tastes good. But do I want yoghurt with low fat, no fat or full fat? You know, even full fat yoghurt doesn’t contain that much fat. Who the hell ever got fat by eating yoghurt? Plus then you have to think about how much good bacteria is in your yoghurt. Or what kind of fruit is in your yoghurt. Or how much sugar is in your yoghurt - that will be the next yoghurt guilt trap. Soon there will be a yoghurt product that has no fat and no sugar and is totally full of bacteria. You might as well just lick a bloody petri dish.

9. Fresh produce

The organic thing. Honestly I can’t work out what’s so good about organic stuff, except that sometimes it looks a lot fresher than the other stuff and costs more. Apparently it has no pesticides. First of all, shouldn’t we be washing off the pesticides when we get it home? Second of all, how are they keeping the bugs away with no pesticides? No wonder it’s so bloody expensive, they’re probably going around to the plants with little shotguns and shooting them every day. Tiny bullets don’t come cheap. Anyway there’s also some kind of implied guilt involved about non-organic foods killing the environment. Well of course you are, pesticides are meant to kill bugs and bugs are part of the environment, yeah?

8. Free-range meat

I once had this argument that went something like this: would you rather kill a happy chicken that has everything to live for, or would you rather put an unhappy chicken out of its misery? It’s a pretty good argument, but it still doesn’t stop you from crying when Jamie Oliver wheels 50 battery hens into your dining room.

7. Supermarket branded products

My friend Dewi once said that if you buy supermarket branded products (e.g. Woolworths Select), then you’re hurting the little guy because they are undercutting all the other food companies by selling the same thing but cheaper because they don’t have to go through a middle-man. See, but then you can take this even further and say that the big corporations are shunting out the even littler guys by using cheap labour and cost-cutting strategies to undercut family businesses who use more quality methods. Who knew you could do so much damage buying a can of beans?

6. Packaging

I remember there was once an ad where every time the checkout chick scanned a product through the scanner, the scanner would make some snipey comment on the display screen to the customer, like “That’s a lot of packaging”. I’m sick of being given so many convenient packaging options, only to be chastised for choosing them. Like those tomatoes that come on plastic trays in plastic bags. Or ham that comes in individually portioned containers. Then all the packaging ends up in a landfill somewhere and strangles a baby seal. So now if I buy packets of tomatoes, I’m a seal hater. Even if they’re organic tomatoes.

5. Milk

It used to just be full fat, 2% fat or no fat. Now it’s all about the calcium too. What the hell is wrong with us when normal milk doesn’t give us enough calcium that we have to start injecting it into our milk? Plus sooner or later we’re going to get slapped with the free-range cow guilt of course. Personally I drink soy milk but then I get guilt-slapped with that too because of the organic soy beans. Organic free-range soy beans with goddamn calcium in them. Just the way nature intended.

4. Wholegrain

I remember when bread used to be good for you. Then there was the whole GI thing. Then there was the whole “carbs are bad” thing. Now bread’s some kind of luxurious treat that makes you fat and hyper. Now there are cereals claiming to be good for you because they’re “wholegrain”. Because if your food doesn’t have seeds in it, you’ll get diabetes and die. The only good thing about this is that Milo cereal now claims to be good for you because it has wholegrain. That’s a good enough marketing scam to justify me eating it every morning, I figure.

3. Low salt

This one hasn’t been as popular lately, but I still see a lot of things proudly declaring themselves to be low in salt. There used to be a big thing where salt was really bad for you, but then people realised that not eating salt makes you retarded. So I think people aren’t so worried about the salt anymore, which is great because once you’ve taken the fat and sugar out of everything and injected it with calcium and wholegrains, the only flavour you’ve really got left is salt.

2. Sugar

See, the funny thing about this one is that we’re so worried about the chemicals that we only eat organic food, but then we’re perfectly happy to substitute chemicals for sugar in just about everything else. Even if you don’t drink diet soft drink, there’s artifical sweetener in just about every other “lite” product on the market that’s still sweet. Especially pay attention to the “lite” hot chocolate range, which has somehow managed to take sugar and fat out of chocolate and still claim to be delicious. Tell me people, what is it about chocolate that’s delicious? If you said “it’s sweet and creamy” then you would be correct. Whatever you’re drinking in that lite drink, it sure ain’t chocolate anymore. But drinking the real stuff is just too “naughty”, so it’s all chemicals from here on.

1. Eggs

Yeah even though the rest of these items aren’t really in a proper order, I still left this one for number 1. See, you might think that eggs are easy because you just grab whichever one says “free range”. But see, you’re not taking the other thing into account. Have a closer look next time and see if the company that makes your free range eggs also makes cage eggs. Ha! You could be giving money to an evil chicken-hating company! Plus are your chickens eating organic food? Is their food wholegrain? Does the plastic sticker on the egg carton make baby seals suffocate? And are the eggs a supermarket-branded product? And here you thought eggs were only dangerous when you threw them at people. Look how much damage you’re doing by buying eggs!

See, this is why I was going to become a subsistence farmer.

When I came home from work today, I discovered that the cats had done something insane to my laptop. I’m not leaving that open again while I go out, that’s for sure. They had managed to achieve the following things:

• All open windows tiled on the desktop
• Google map search maximised to fill entire screen, searching for some long random string
• New Firefox browser window open with 3 tabs, two of them being Firefox help (obviously they didn’t get far trying to work out how to surf the web. Although then again they did load Google maps)
• Page search on an already open Firefox page for the string “GRFE^BY&6BB^N&”

Ever get the impression your pets are trying to tell you something?

Yup, there goes another page of comments. FFS Wordpress, why would I want to mark comments that I’ve already approved as spam? Don’t make it so easy to do this by accident!

Usability at its lowest point.

Picked this up today for $179.00 at JB HiFi. Definitely the prettiest box set I’ve seen in, well, ever. I never actually saw the majority of SATC episodes, so yay, a heap of “new” TV to watch.

Could go on about the special features and whatnot, but basically was just impressed with the packaging. Plus a fair bit of effort went into each of the DVD cases within each of the drawers as well. So yeah, definitely beats the pants off the usual cardboard sleeves or plastic case thingies you get with box sets.

Ever since I began my new job, I’ve been getting about 2-3 calls a week from recruiters trying to sell me more employees. They are all finding me through LinkedIn. I’m not looking to hire, nor have I indicated as such on my LinkedIn profile. In fact, I have unticked all of the “looking for work / employees” boxes, made my profile as non-public as it can get, and even put a note in the “how to contact me” section about how I am not taking calls from any recruitment agencies at this time.

Despite this, I continue to be harassed, as recruiters find me with nothing more than my name, job title and company. Even a “thanks, but no thanks” response doesn’t help, as they still insist on “touching base” in a few months. I could rant more here about my less than pleasant experiences with recruiters in the past, but it’s probably best if I leave it at that for now.

I’m starting to wonder if the inconvenience now outweighs the benefits. To be honest, although I can see the potential usefulness of LinkedIn as a networking tool, I’ve never had any direct benefit from it at all, even when I was actively looking for work.

Has anyone else ever found LinkedIn useful? Or do you think its downside as a marketing tool for recruiters makes it more trouble than it’s worth?

Geek sync is a phenomenon I’ve observed when two or more geeks meet. Everyone gets together for a “catch up” occaisonally, but geeks are the only ones who come back with DVDs and portable hard drives. The first thing geeks do when they’ve established a basic connection, is attempt to sync. The basic drive of a geek is a constant thirst for knowledge. The only thing that makes them happier than getting told about cool stuff is telling other geeks about cool stuff that they didn’t already know about. It’s almost like software updates. Note what happens when someone is “out of date”:

Latest patch not installed:
Joe: That new Apple store is nuts, have you been there?
Dave: Nope. What’s the big deal?
Joe: It’s a big building made of glass with a huge apple logo at the front and it’s full of cool stuff. You have to go sometime.

Out of date:
Joe: The last episode of Doctor Who was awesome.
Dave: Whoa don’t tell me, I haven’t seen it yet. I still have to watch that season.
Joe: You haven’t watched the whole season? I can lend it to you if you want.

Severely out of date:
Dave: Hm somebody took my stapler.
Joe: Haha now you have to burn down the building.
Dave: (Blank stare)
Joe: Office Space?
Dave: Huh?
Joe: You’ve never seen Office Space???
Dave: No…
Joe: (Incredulous look) Whoa really? It’s okay - I’ll bring it in tomorrow for you!

Connection error: Failed to sync. Attempting multiple retries. Process aborted:
Dave: Can I have a cheeseburger?
Joe: I can has cheezeburger?
Dave: Huh?
Joe: You’ve never seen lolcats?
Dave: Seen what?
Joe: Don’t worry, there’s a link from my blog.
Dave: Is that like myspace?
Joe: Umm…no I use wordpress.
Dave: What’s that?
Joe: It’s a blogging software, I’m self-hosted.
Dave: Okay…
Joe: Look it’s okay, I’ll just email you a link. What the best email address for you?
Dave: What do you mean? I only have one.
Joe: Okay…what’s that one?
Dave: dave8591@hotmail.com
Joe: …..
Dave: What’s wrong?
Joe: Nothing, just having flashbacks to 1997. Listen, never mind about the lolcats, I don’t think they’re really your thing.
Dave: No no, I want to see them. Just write down the address to me and I’ll see if I can access it at work. I don’t have internet at home.
Joe: I don’t think I can be your friend anymore.

Literally, of course. We all know how much I hate the environment. Well okay I like the trees and stuff, I just hate the insects and itchy grass.

The new banner is part of a photo I took outside a church in Tuscany, filtered through a picture of shadows on some grass. The Chinese characters are my middle name and I have no good explanation for the circles, they just look cool.

This is the SECOND time this has happened to me, and more devastating than the last time. I was managing the comments for the site, and instead of marking 1 comment as spam, I accidentally marked a whole page as spam. Do you know why? I’ll show you why!

See how the “select most recent comment” checkbox is about 20 pixels away from the “select every comment on the page” checkbox? Your hand is a mere finger spasm away from total comment annihilation! Sure, that’s the biggest problem here, but let’s not stop there. Let’s go through the many, many obvious ways this could have been prevented.

1. The default view for managing comments is the view for all comments, unmoderated or otherwise. To mkae this worse, it USED to be the unmoderated view in previous versions, which means many users, such as myself, are used to seeing only unmoderated comments on the page.
2. The freaking checkboxes. You know, yeah it’s not such a big problem, it only becomes a big problem when you combine it with the next few problems.
3. You click “Mark as spam”. This obliterates the comments. There’s no “Are you sure?” message. Even clicking the back button on the browser doesn’t help you out, they’re gone forever.
4. There’s no “undo”. Seriously, I can’t figure out how to get them back. No recycle bin, doesn’t move it to Akismet’s bucket, nothing.

The stupidest part is that, because number 1 is only a problem in this version, it means the product’s new feature design has made it worse.

You suck, Wordpress. Somebody tell me where I can get a better blogging system. And send it to me by email because if you comment here it will clearly never work.

I’d like to start out by saying that yeah, I don’t play a lot of DIFFERENT games, so for all I know there are some nice RPGs (and I mean online RPGs, MMO or otherwise) that do fit these criteria. If so, let me know! But this is what I think is lacking.

I recently caught wind of a little game called Diablo 3. Well, okay when I first heard about it I went “squeeeee!!!” and did a little happy dance and eagerly watched the demo like everyone else. But I have to say, I was disappointed. I could go into a big rant about how I expected more of it, but this isn’t a post about Diablo 3. The point is, it made me think about what I missed from Diablo 2 and what was lacking from that in Guild Wars, and most probably from World of Warcraft as well (which I’ve played briefly, but not enough to be an expert on the subject).

So here’s my wishlist for, well, any new fantasy-based RPG that takes the market by storm:

1. More realistic melee. My favourite class in Diablo 2 was the barbarian, but when I tried playing warrior class in Guild Wars I got bored. Why? Because in Diablo 2, the barbarian smashed up the place. When he attacked, there was blood flying everywhere, it was great! In Guild Wars, you basically thwack the guy for ages like he’s a damn rock, then all of a sudden he’ll keel over. There’s no instant gratification. You need to feel like your attacks are having an instant effect on your opponent.
2. Enemies that run away. You know what else was great about Diablo 2? Sometimes the little buggers would run away from you and you’d have to chase them down. I hate it when you’ve got a mob of creatures, you’ve just killed off most of the group and there’s some puny little guy still stabbing at your shins. Why the hell is he doing that? Surely after all his friends have been slaughtered he’d just run off and recuperate, maybe get some reinforcements. It gives you the choice of either running him down and finishing off the mob, or just letting him go and risk a second wave attack for the sake of mercy.
3. No more obvious “danger zones”. I know it makes the game easier, but I think it really detracts from it when you’re spending half your time staring at your mini map making sure your little circle of danger doesn’t overlap the red dots. It’s ridiculous walking through an area and watching enemies flock to you like iron filings to a magnet. I’d rather have an invisible danger zone, so you have to learn to guage the distance yourself in a more “real” way, and have some groups that attack you on sight and some who wait for you to piss them off first. Throw a little less predictability my way.
4. Less cliched enemies. The scorpion, the skeleton, the walking tree, the spider, the pale guy in a robe…I’m a bit over it guys, aren’t you? I know these are all standard things that pretty much define the fantasy genre, but surely we can do a little better. Or at least think up a new twist on these guys that makes us repulsed and angry enough to want them dead, rather than them just being in our way. Maybe a skeleton that beats you to death with the bones of its fallen comrades? Maybe the pale guy whips off his robe and ends up having tons of tentacles? I don’t know, use your imaginations.
5. More tangible spell effects. This is something I really miss from Dark Sun. You’d cast something like “web” or whatever, and it wouldn’t just make the guy stuck with some half-baked web-throwing effect, you’d literally see the web EVERYWHERE. And it wouldn’t go away. And if you wandered into the web, you’d get stuck too. That was damn fierce. If someone casts a fireball, I want to see the damn grass catch fire. I want scorchmarks on the ground. I want to have to stop, drop and roll, damn it.
6. Paying for your mistakes. This is another another thing I miss from Dark Sun. There would be these wacky storylines where you’d make the wrong choice and end up beaten on the head and sold to slave traders who took all your stuff. And you’d have to beat your way out of there. It wasn’t a necessary plot point, yes it was inconvenient, but damn you screwed up and that just meant you had to cop the punishment and fight your way out of there. That’s life, and that’s what makes a game more unpredictable and exciting.
7. Make us walk sometimes. I think a game really loses something when you get the convenience of teleporting all over the place. Occasionally there needs to be times where you have to walk the beaten path back to someplace you’ve already been. Then you get reminded of the first time you were there. That can be nice. It’s not nice if you’re having to hack your way through tedious battles of cliched monsters (see points 2, 3 and 4). But if you can walk through some area that you went through at the beginning of the game, a more hardened warrior, and all your previous enemies run away at the sight of you instead of mobbing to you like suicidal maniacs, wouldn’t that be a rather satisfying moment in the game? Just a thought.

You may never have to use the old “brb” exit from a conversation again.

Trish says: daleks know everything man
Trish says: i have learned so much from them
Trish says: for example, tell me all your latest woes
Trish says: go on, hit me
Dewi says: um
Dewi says: it’s all gone to pot!!!
Dewi says: nothing can save me now
Dewi says: and… it hurts!
Trish says: EMERGENCY TEMPORAL SHIFT
* Trish is now set to Away