Alfreido's Blog

Hey Subway, when I order a Meatball Sub, I’ll let you know if I want bones included. Until then, would you mind keeping bones out of the meat?

Through a freak series of circumstances, we ended up with veggie patties instead of hamburgers for dinner last night. And veggies patties taste fucking horrible!

One thing that has really annoyed me lately (among my repertoire of annoyances) is the abundance of intrusive Flash advertising found on some high-profile websites these days. I hate Flash to begin with, the proliferation of what was once a great tool that now is reduced to ugly, useless navigational bars and dressing games, sort of left a bad taste in my mouth over using Flash, so much so that I actively try and find an AJAX alternative before ever using Flash for any navigational or page animation. But these intrusive Flash ads have reached a new low…

Some Flash advertising nowadays employ a transparent background to make it seem like the advertising forms part of the site, or to create an advertisement which actually looks like it plays with the site. I’ve seen some ads where little men jump out from the supposed “Flash barrier” and breach the third wall, dancing around the site in order to grab your attention to some stupid product such as penis enlargement tablets or crappy beer. The fundamental issue I have here is that whilst this advertising technique may wow the average Internet user, web types like me notice that it defeats one of the main pillars of any website - usability.

You see, the Flash movie stretches out its invisible borders over the website in order to make it seem like it is interacting with the website. Within those borders, all normal website functionality ceases to work. You cannot click links. You cannot copy text. You cannot hover over images. Basically, its like a screenshot of the website. It looks real… but it isn’t real, kinda like the ingredients on a Domino’s Pizza.

I’m not sure if the advertising agencies actually intend for this to happen, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Forcing the person to have to hunt down a close button in order to stop the advertisement just gives the advertisement more impression before it is closed. It does seem like a dirty tactic to make Flash advertising more profitable… but it’s going to make users very annoyed when they actually want to use your site and you’ve stopped them from doing that just for a quick dollar. If you run a website and employ advertising like this, you may want to think about how many people you may be turning away from your site by killing your usability.

As with migrating to another OS (and one that was only technically released today, mind you), you’re bound to have a fair share of problems and annoyances trying to restore your computer to almost the same state it was before. If you click ‘Read more’, you can view some of those problems and annoyances… or not.

I saw the first 4 episodes of 24 Season 6, I’m fairly certain that just those 4 episodes beats any other entire series of 24. You heard me right. If it can hold the same momentum throughout the series, I think this will be the pinnacle of 24 greatness.

Also in my binge download spree (I upgraded to a 40gb plan on Internode, I used to be on 20gb, hence the massive download mania), I downloaded the first 4 episodes of Prison Break Season 2 (I might add, both these shows have not been aired in Australia yet). While it didn’t top the excitement of 24, I was equally engrossed in them, and can’t wait to get the rest of the series.

Back to work next week…
But wait, there’s more…

I had a chat to a couple of former Wikipedia Administrators the other day, and I found out some startling similarities between all the Wikipedia Administrators that are currently “employed” to clean up Wikipedia these days. They did not want me to release names because apparently being banned from administrating Wikipedia is one step up from committing ritual suicide to a Celine Dion tune. They needed to keep their dignity, so I allowed them that. Anyways, forget Wikipedia’s ‘official’ guideline to becoming an administrator, I give you the unofficial 10 requirements to becoming a Wikipedia Administrator:

1. You must have reprogrammed your F1 key to automatically edit the article you are looking at. You must have also reprogrammed your F2 key to add ‘{{afd}}’ to any article, therefore setting it up for deletion.

2. You must have had straight A’s during Year 12 TEE. While intelligence is not a prerequisite for editing on Wikipedia (if it was, it would probably stop about 99% of the people visiting the site from editing), having straight A’s means that people cannot play the ‘I got better marks than you so I am right’ card when you edit or delete their article.

3. You must have skipped going to leavers in Year 12, with all the chicks and all the booze, to make sure that Wikipedia was as graffiti-free as possible.

4. Your parents must still be paying for your internet connection. And your food. And your frequent doctor trips due to radiation poisoning from your 20-year old monitor.

5. You are not allowed to have relationships of any kind. Girlfriends/boyfriends distract you from keeping spam on Wikipedia to a low, you have already learned this when you went out to see a movie with your partner, only to come back and find that your user-page has been overwritten by the 1,293,211 people whose articles you destroyed.

6. You must live no further than 100 metres from your nearest library. Since you’ve always gotta verify sources for all information on Wikipedia, you must make at least 20 trips to the library each day, constantly swapping the 12-book limit that is imposed on your account. You must always get furious at the staff when they ring the bell to signal the library’s closing time, since you still have another 250 books to hire out and review sources.

7. You must have your mobile phone set up so that when you must leave the house (which makes you shudder at the thought), you can easily view Wikipedia from your mobile. And make changes to Wikipedia. And destroy Wikipedia’s articles.

8. You must have a life-size poster of Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, on your wall. You must also remember to clean the white stains on his legs every week as well.

9. When your friends tell you some things which are happening in the world today, you must always immediately ask them to cite their sources.

10. You must have the ‘Recent changes’ page on auto-refresh every 20 seconds, so you can make sure to clean up any spam from users before someone else does and steals your job.