Flaming Mongrel

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A (slightly drunken) rant: Why I like Instagram

disclamimer: i’m a bit drunk, and kind of angry

Here’s why I like Instagram: It’s fun.

It encourages people to play with their camera. To experiment with the photos they take and the images they produce in a simple, playful way.

Its sole, joyful purpose is to encourage a bit of extra fun around the humble practice of taking a happy snap on your phone. Frankly, any piece of software which asks nothing more of its users than to take pleasure in an act of creativity gets my admiration and approval. Continue Reading →

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What was the first album you bought?

Last Friday, I put up a tiny little Google form asking a simple question: What was the first album you ever bought? 30 people responded View the results at http://flamingmongrel.net/lab/firstalbums/

My List of Demands

All episodes of MASH directed by Alan Alda to be destroyed immediately.
MasterChef will fuck right off and not return. Ever.
Marshmallows. A steady supply of them delivered fresh daily. White, not pink.
A letter from the Queen. I don’t care what’s in it, but ideally she’d use the C-word.
Vodafone Arena to be renamed Tina Arena Arena.

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Meeting Notes

I’m pretty obsessive about taking notes during meetings. But, I have to admit, the notes I take aren’t always very useful.

How to sell a motor vehicle

This week I wrote some advertising copy for a certain car company which will go unnamed. This is not that copy.

Hark, gentles, and ready your spirits to soar. Advancing with haste upon the third chapter of our Gregorian dodecagon, I am pleasure-puffed to declare a generational enhancement of substantive note. Continue Reading →

The three stages of getting older

This is the closest I can get to writing an Australia Day post.

You know most of the songs in the JJJ Hottest 100, but think the majority of them are shit. You bemoan the fact that this year isn’t as good as previous years.
You don’t recognise most of the songs in the JJJ Hottest 100. This saddens you, and you vow to listen to more new music in the year to come. This is vow which you know you will break, but you’re not going to admit it.
You don’t know any of the songs in the JJJ Hottest 100 and, frankly, couldn’t give a fuck.

The seven stages of greif Christmas

Stage 1: Shock and Denial

Stage 1 is characterised by such statements as “It can’t be Christmas already.” and “Where did the year disappear to?” Christmas denial is linked to a superstitious belief that every successive calendar year is in some way shorter than the one which preceded it. Continue Reading →

Five things I like about cheese

Even when it smells like feet, it tastes great. In fact, the more it smells like feet, the better it’s likely to taste.
It goes with anything. Pasta. Pickled Onions. Bread. Fruit. Beer. Wine. Crackers. Salad. Chances are, if you can eat it or drink it, there’s at least one type of cheese to go with it.
It has varieties and styles which range from the humble to the decadent.
Cheese, like wine and beer, is crafted with equal parts science, art and alchemy. The process which begins with milk and ends in cheese is deeply, richly magical. People should write songs about it.
When it’s mouldy, you don’t throw it out. You rejoice.

The man, the car, the sneeze

The carpark nearest my work has a small handful of hotly contested all-day parking spots, and a much larger collection of 2 hour bays. Yesterday I arrived in time to see the last of the all-day spaces being rudely invaded by a brutish 4WD. Resigned to my fate, I gently eased my trusty Hyundai into a 120 minuter and set my alarm for a reminder. Continue Reading →

Sunday night rambles

A confession: I think I have an unhealthy addiction to narratives.

I have filled my life with other people’s stories. I’ve been an avid reader from a young age, and a movie fan for almost as long. When I learnt to play guitar I devoured countless tales told in three minute bursts of verse-chorus-verse.

These were amongst my most formative passions. They have patterned the way I think to the point where I now filter great slabs of my daily life through a library of templates and genres without even realising, for the most part, that I do it. Continue Reading →

Office Phone Prank #19

I was reminded today of an office telephone prank I used to play when I worked for the corporate arm of a noted Australian university. It was a simple enough jape, but always good for a giggle on a slow afternoon.

It relies upon a rather specific setup for the office telephone system. While it’s possible that other workplaces I’ve enjoyed have also had systems capable of the following, I’ve never been able to re-master the all important third item on the list below. Continue Reading →

Twitter would be a better place if only Limerick's could easily be written within the 140 characters limit

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Twimericks

It started with a tweet from @GregBriggs

Well now. That’s a cry for help that cannot go unanswered. And so dear friends I give you: The Twimerick. Continue Reading →

I was wrong

It can happen with song lyrics and quotes, be they popular or obscure. It may be the mis-heard name of somebody you met last week or an old wives’ tale which years ago took erroneous root in your mental filing cabinet of Things That Are Correct™.

I’m talking about those little nuggets of non-facts, of false data, which you have long believed to be true. They lie dormant in your mind, sometimes for years or even decades. Some of them may never surface into the shiny light of day to be exposed, and you may well live with them until the day you die, blissfully ignorant of your blissful ignorance. Continue Reading →

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Euphemism Generator

www.notaeuphemism.com

A quick spot of fun whipped up over the weekend, the euphemism generator was a tiny project mainly intended as an excuse to fiddle around with JQuery – something I should have done a long time ago. The result is pretty basic, but it’s amusing enough (at least to me) to warrant it’s own little place on the web. Continue Reading →

Waiter, there’s a soup in my iPad

I’ve long harbored a desire to have a meal at Pearl, a house of noms widely regarded as being a bit of alright by those who ought to know. It certainly looks like the kind of place i like – creative, contemporary cooking which draws from a variety of styles in a schwanky, but not wanky, setting.

But my enthusiasm dropped several notches last week when I read that proprietor Chris Lucas intends to supplement printed menus with Apple’s new plaything, the iPad*. In an article in The Australian, Lucas enthuses about a specially written app which will allow diners to read about each dish in his restaurant, plus the wine list, and delve into great detail about specific aspects – presumably cooking styles, ingredients and their origin or some such thing. The app will also recommend wine matches and provide tasting notes on all things drinkable.

What I want to say to Chris, if he is reading this, is: Do not be a dick. Continue Reading →

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Hype

Joshua Davis and Branden Hall have released a fantastic ActionScript 3 library for visual programming. Not be be confused with a tween engine, Hype is a collection of tools which greatly simplify the task of programming and combining complex visual effects and behaviors. Continue Reading →

Modern Ideas Are Bullshit

Idea #17: Crowdsourcing

There’s this thing all the kids at work are talking about. It’s called crowdsourcing, and apparently it’s the absolute fucking business. In the tradition Lady Midler’s finest, crowdsourcing provides unparalleled opportunity for the unwashed interwebby masses to offer up the substantive wind of content beneath one’s bloggy wings.

Let’s say that again, shall we? The substantive wind of content. Yes, it’s that great. Continue Reading →

Stay out of my phone

Sorry. This one’s a rant. I’ve had the flu, so think of the following as a kind of therapeutic blowing off of steam. You have been warned.

I don’t like getting unsolicited junk mail from people, no matter whether it’s delivered to my real world letterbox, one of my email in-boxes or to any of the various accounts I hold online in this brave new 2.0 world. What’s more, I don’t care if it comes from somebody I’ve purchased things from in the past. Unless I have specifically given you my details for the purpose of trying to sell me more of your shit, I don’t want to hear from you about your big sale, hot new product, or cool new upgrade.

I’m sure this a common sentiment. Continue Reading →

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Talkin’ about Shoes

For reasons both complex and stupid, I recently composed a few paragraphs for the ever charming legal-eagle @gabfran on the subject of footwear. Check it out at http://lawandshoes.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/guest-shoe-blog-post-by-gilfer-the-wedding-shoes/.

My humble thanks also to the anonymous twitter friend who found some very kind words to say about me by way of an introduction. You know who you are.

Flash CS5 Will Be Able to Create iPhone Apps

’nuff said, really.

With Flash CS5, ActionScript programmers will be able to create native iPhone applications and sell them on Apple iStore.

I got chills.

OSX Terminal – Drag and Drop

This is one of those things that gets all my geeky bits tingling. Apple, in defiance of the age old* command-line-vs-gui debate, have snuck in this wonderfully elegant point of integration between the two worlds. Because really, why should you have to be one or the other when you have the best of both? Continue Reading →

XML Node Name – AS3 Gotcha

Just a quickie, but one that stumped me for about 20 minutes (admittedly because I didn’t RTFM properly).

It turns out that the name() method of the XML class in AS3 returns an object not, as I was assuming, a String. I have a simple switch statement which was taking specific action depending on the name of the XML node it encountered. Continue Reading →

Zen Coding

I linked to the Zen Coding plugins from my Twitter account a couple of weeks ago. Since then I’ve become so completely enamored with them that I wanted to rave on in a bit more detail. Continue Reading →

Goodbye, Mr Salinger

In a brief, pointless and probably offensive tribute to the recently passed J D Salinger, I present you with my review of Catcher In The Rye, first published some years ago on the now sadly extinct Lorne Book Club blog.

Boy, this book just killed me. I really mean it. It’s all about this poor bastard, Holden Caulfield. He has a really crummy time after he gets kicked out of his goddamn school. He goes to New York and meets all these phoneys. Continue Reading →

So, There Was This Guy…

…and he had a bunch of websites, some dating back almost ten years.* Most of these sites came and went over greater and lesser periods of time, generally reflecting for the the changing tastes, enthusiasms and MTV-style attention span of their author. Some them only existed as vague ideas, because if there’s one thing the author found hard to resist, it’s the temptation to purchase a domain name just because it sounds cool.*** Continue Reading →