calm in the chaos

Ok, so it’s actually the international year of astronomy - but I’d like to decree in a fairly dictatorial manner that it should be the year of alternative energy (and that’s not to say that I’ve got anything against astronomy ;-)

In fact, I put it to you that not only should this year be the year of alternative energy, but the year after that, and for the next decade to come. Let me come to my point, which is we don’t have an alternative place in the universe to live, so why are we still referring to alternative energies in all their forms as such?

Alternative energy is an oxymoron; there is no alternative. Unless you enjoy 55 degree days, raging weather and a very wet day at the beach (which is now about 3 km’s further inland than where it used to be).

Perhaps a massive rebranding of the term is required. It seems that people are happy to continue to use the current form of “main stream” energy (or whatever you’d like to term energy that isn’t “alternative”) as it’s too hard to change their ways. Again, I put it to you - what is the alternative to living on this planet?

This post doesn’t offer any solutions. But I do hope it will help raise the awareness of those reading it that things really do need to change, and fast.

I’m a bit late on this one I know (had it in my todo’s to blog about it back when Max US was on) but Adobe have created a very cool Groups website to promote and manage the hundreds of different user groups around the world that deal with Adobe technology.

Here’s my beloved South Oz group (G’day Steven ;-)

The number of groups in London is still a bit thin on the ground, or am I not searching for the right keywords…?

And I love the welcome message, should just about cover everyone I reckon!

Will be interesting to see what comes of the community over the next few months and just how useful the site will be for networking purposes. Hopefully everyone that attends User Group meetings will be encouraged to go onto the Groups site and register as a member of their group (and any other ones they might be interested in). As a bit of a working nomad at the moment that should make it easier to network with your next port of call before even arriving there.

At first my comments below were driven largely by the offence taken (as an Australian) at Daniel Freeman’s post titled Australia. Check out the article, it refers to working in different countries and the opportunity that brings (or not as the case may be).

Now I find over generalising isn’t a great way to make a point.

“I tried to convey the potential of what I was doing. But Australia just didn’t understand technology, and there is no real strategy”

Bollocks. I live in the UK now and I can safely say that the internet infrastructure available to most UK homes is inferior to that available in most of Australia (not withstanding the huge geographic divide). I use the example of the UK as he mentions living in England in his post. Now this doesn’t imply an advanced knowledge of the technology, but surely the fact that it’s there is because of the demand for it to be so. You don’t build incredibly expensive IT infrastructure unless there’s a fundamental requirement do so.

Further to this, what about being specific to the city you lived in. Last time I checked Australia is a fairly big place, so saying that Australia doesn’t understand technology is a pretty big call. Maybe the clients you encountered didn’t understand technology. I know that most of mine do and are more than happy for me to use it when it’s justified.

As for there being no real strategy, I’d suggest this again is a generalisation. There are various Government sites (one of which is http://www.dbcde.gov.au/) that go into great detail regarding future plans and current legislation.

What I will agree on you with is the inability for things to get done in Australia. Finding a consensus on issues can be difficult (involving many points of view guarantees this) but in Australia we’ve made it into a bit of an art. From Federal to local government all facets of the decision making engine are stymied by an inability to act on what (to us mere mortals) just seems like common sense. Have at look at the news items on Whirlpool (the place to go for Australian Broadband news and information) to get an idea of this in action.

And it’s this inability to act that is one of the main reasons I’m writing this post from London, and not little old Adelaide, South Australia. I wanted to see how things get done in a city that seemingly doesn’t stop for anyone or anything.

And although at first I was offended (hey, I’m Australian! ;-) I do agree that there are more opportunities available beyond her fair shores. Though I suspect that has something to do with the sparseness of the population… which is just common sense.

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This morning when doing my normal Googling I noticed two new icons associated with every search result. Here’s a screenshot (click for a larger image):

As you can see there is a new arrow icon (promote) and a cross icon (remove). The purpose of which is explained on Justin Hileman’s site. He went into extensive detail regarding his findings and the operation of the new feature here, here and here.

If you’re not seeing the icons on your Google results you’re either not logged into your Google account or your account currently isn’t selected for the closed test. And there doesn’t appear to be any selection criteria for the test as I haven’t (as far as I’m aware) changed any Google settings or my browser or location recently and the new icons just appeared.

I’ve never really got into the Social Bookmarking scene so it will be interesting to see what Google can make of this.

Here’s the official Google word on the experiment.

As a Firefox 3 user, I was mystified when I upgraded from FF 2 to see that a few sites had some very ugly italic text going on. The number of sites not rendering “properly” has steadily grown to the point where I decided to figure out what the hell was going on.

Well it seems that FF3 doesn’t render “Helvetica Neue” very well… in fact it does a very bad job indeed!

This is a screen shot of the issue I’m talking about.

Shaun Inman posted a comparison which shows how the font should be displaying (it’s displaying like the 3rd font in the list and I’m assuming it should actually look like the 6th line!?)

Now I have lots of variations of Helvetica and Helvetica Neue on my system, but Vista seems to be having some difficulties with the anti-aliasing in Firefox.

Is anyone else seeing the same behaviour in their browser?

More to the point is anyone getting sick of using Firebug to modify the css on the fly to remove Helvetica Neue from the stylesheet!?

PS. for the record this font looks equally as crap in IE7 on my system.



UPDATE: Here’s another fairly popular site that’s using Helvetica Neue and this is what it looks like on my system - tut, tut Adobe.