Greg's diary, recent entries

Tuesday, 31 August 2010

Dereel

Topic: general, gardening

Back to winter

Yesterday had a definite feeling of spring, but it was only one day. Today we were back to the cool weather we've been having all winter, and though it didn't snow, it might as well have done so. Did a little work in the garden, pruning, but spent most of the time in the office and watching TV. Thank God it's the last (official) day of winter!

Wednesday, 1 September 2010

Dereel

Images for 1 September 2010

Topic: general, gardening, opinion

First day of spring?

So today was the first day of spring, at least officially. In fact, it was cooler than yesterday, and much wetter; nevertheless, the Ballarat weather statistics for August show that it wasn't quite the wettest on record. There were “only” 161.0 mm, compared to an average of 75.3 mm, and a record of 167.1 mm.

The rainy first day of spring reminds me of other first days: ten years ago I started this diary, and I've been keeping it ever since. And on that occasion too we had rain, and a burst water pump. And 52 years ago I recall the first time I paid any attention to gardening topics: we drove (I think) from Melbourne to Broadford, where my mother grew up, and stopped by a stream with lots of blooming wattles. Then, too, it was raining, and my mother said “It always rains on the first of September”. I asked why, expecting some profound wisdom, but it was just a generalization.

Topic: general, opinion, computers

Joining the Geelong library: the breakage

It seems that the Geelong Regional Libraries have a mobile library that comes by here every fortnight. Took a look at the web site, and discovered that I could sign up online—if I work around the massive breakage. First there's a link to the signup page:

But when I get there, it's a login page, carefully restricted in size to fit in the middle of the screen:

Just for the fun of it, hit Login without entering anything. Success! Well, after a kind:

The registration page itself was typical of narrow-minded web programmers: they ask for BLOCK LETTERS, whatever that's supposed to mean in a web context; I assume they mean capitals. Clearly the web programmers haven't heard of functions that change cases. And they want a street name, but no number, and a “Suburb”, whatever that means. Clearly it doesn't mean town, because one of the choices is “Australian Capital Territory”:

It doesn't ask for a street number, but it did want a post code, something that should be clear from the location. So I selected Dereel and left the Postcode field empty. Bad idea. It complained, and erased the entire form:

I was able to go back and fill out the rest of the form. I stuck to proper use of upper and lower case, and for the fun of it gave a slightly incorrect post code and a PIN pair that didn't match:

And it accepted everything! Things that are obviously wrong are the lack of a street number, mismatching PIN and wrong post code. In addition, it accepted lower case characters, though it appears to want upper case only. It gave me a code (not shown here) with instructions of how to modify it for use:

While I was saving images, it got bored and moved on, before I could write down the code. My attempts to go back failed:

Never mind, I had to give it an email address, so I waited for the notification email. It didn't come. I've seen some broken web sites in my time, but this one really takes the cake. The surprise is that the company who did it hasn't tried to hide their name.

So I signed up again, same name, same address, same email, but otherwise with correct information. Tried to sign in as described, and got an authentication failure. That's enough: it's just not worth the pain.

This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have a horror of reverse chronological documents, so all my diary entries are chronological. I try to leave the pages here for two days; you'll find them all in the archive, so if I fall behind a day or two, you may find more here. Note that I often update a diary entry a day or two after I write it.

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