Well... that didn't take long. After discovering my website Chrome/Safari (WebKit) woes earlier this week (although only making that blog post last night), I fixed the menu bar rendering issues last night, and then fixed the Twitter script issues just now.

For those technical minded amongst you, the culprit was in the following lines of JavaScript which used script.aculo.us, a JavaScript library for cool effects/animations (like the sliding fade-in effect of the Twitter items on the right-hand side). I use script.aculo.us's Builder class which is handy for inserting HTML elements into a document, like the Twitter feed:

twitterdiv.appendChild(Builder.node('script', {
  src: 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/u1traq.json?' +
       'callback=twitter.callback&count=5',
  type: 'text/javascript'
}));

Chrome just didn't like the Builder.node() function in this case (I use it in a bunch of other places without issues), maybe because it was trying to insert a <script/> node, I dunno. But by replacing it with standard DOM functions, it did the trick:

scriptnode = document.createElement('script');
scriptnode.setAttribute('type', 'text/javascript');
scriptnode.setAttribute('src', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/u1traq.json?' +
  'callback=twitter.callback&count=5');
twitterdiv.appendChild(scriptnode);

Now all those browsers are happy, and so am I.

It's a bright sunny day in my little corner of New Zealand. I'm looking out the window on this lovely Saturday morning and up above are blue skies and white fluffy clouds, the Metservice says it's 22.9 degrees Celsius, and my watch is telling me that now is a good time to go fishing (yeah, something to do with setting my longitudinal position and the phases of the moon, don't ask me to go into detail).

The only problem with this picture is that the window I am looking out of is not any of the ones at my apartment, but rather the ones at my work building. Yep, I'm at work today :(

While I'd rather be anywhere but here, I don't hate coming to work on a weekend. On the rare occasion that I do find myself walking to work, it's usually morning when the streets are pretty empty, and when I arrive at the building it's nice and quiet and there's usually nobody else around. I find that the quiet of the weekend and the feeling that this city's population has magically been cut in half help me sort-out my thoughts for a much more productive couple of hours than the busy office environment usually does.

The office may be empty, but today, and for the last couple of days, the streets are anything but.

There are a bunch of big events going on: 2 AC/DC concerts, a Them Crooked Vultures concert, Wellington Cup Day (horse racing, although the focus of such events is never on the horse racing), next week we play host to the Rugby Sevens, and to top it all off, docked at the harbour are some very VERY large cruise ships with LOTS of tourists.

So the streets are packed, it's hella busy outside, and when I walked around during my lunch break the other day my ears honed-in on several foreign accents, mainly American. Accents weren't the only odd thing that day; a massive line coming-out of the Wellington Cable Car was the other:

I don't think anybody in this line is from around here...

Long lines aren't a very common sight around here. When they do appear, they're usually leading towards an upper-middle-class retail/department store with some sort of epic store-wide sale going on. We don't often get 60 metre lines streaming-out from what is effectively a 7-minute tram ride between the CBD and this city's gardens.

But maybe I'm just being too cynical. Tourists aren't a bad thing - I even enjoyed being one the last time, despite being mistaken for a local and asked which way to the immigration offices - and my lack of enthusiasm towards The Cable Car is probably because for years I used it as one of my methods of transport to/from university, thus relegating one of this city's best attractions to the background of public transport vehicles that help this city function.

Maybe I've just lived here too long.

Earlier this week I finally got to see what my site looks like in Google Chrome. I was just showing someone (the same inquisitive someone who asked me what my mum is like), during our first guitar session/get-together, some of the older space pics I've done (well, they're all old ones since I haven't created anything new on that front since mid-2008) and noticed that something wasn't rendering correctly!

*gasp*

I had a mate of mine check it with Safari on his Mac (since Chrome and Safari both use something called WebKit to render web pages) and got the same result:

This makes me cry

That wasn't the only problem: the Twitter feed on the right-hand sidebar seems to be stuck on 'Loading...' in Chrome/Safari, but otherwise fine in Firefox and IE7/8.

So I downloaded and installed Chrome, attempted to fix these little issues, and only got so far as to fix the layout of the menu. As for the Twitter feed, I've taken it down in the interim.

Continuing the computer-ish theme for the week, earlier tonight I was asked to install Skype by a friend from overseas (the one I called the neck-licker in this old BEDA '09 post, who has unfortunately been sent back to their home country because they couldn't stay in New Zealand). I thought it a bit funny that, before this week, I had never touched Skype - not even with the electronic equivalent of a barge pole - but for the first time this Monday I was involved in a Skype call from inquisitive guitar girl's end, had my friend the hug nazi mention it because her netbook has a built-in webcam, and am now being asked to install it.

As I was downloading the program, at around the 50% mark a realization hit me: I don't have a webcam... or a microphone. I told the overseas neck-licker as much, and they replied in kind:

what kind of ASIAN COMPUTERSPECIALIST are you?

Good question.

As one of the IT guys in my group of friends, I don't even have some of what is now basic hardware that is so run-of-the-mill that many computers and devices come with these things attached or built-in. I have a million cables lying spare, more computer screws than you can shake a stick at, and even more twist ties from all those wires that I could create some sort of contemporary art piece and break a Guinness World Record in the process! But, a webcam and microphone are nowhere to be found.

At least I'm still more feature-complete than the iPad.

A friend of mine, upon learning that I live by myself, made the claim that I either had to: a) lose some part of my sanity, b) develop a coping mechanism, or c) find some strange hobby, in exchange for my solitary living situation. He was of the mind that only eccentrics live by themselves, and that by choosing to live by myself, somewhere along the way I have unwittingly sacrificed a part of my facade of 'normal behaviour'.

Of course I denied everything, distancing myself from his crazy theory, particularly option A, as hastily as I could. That of course left me with options B and C which, if you stretch it, aren't really that far removed from option A.

Thinking about it though and looking back on the things that have happened since moving out (the first time), it turns out that the guy wasn't completely wrong.

Coping mechanisms developed:

• talking to myself
• singing out loud
• blogging more often
• watching Home and Away
• joining, using, Twitter

Hobbies developed:

• baking
• giving-up on baking
• bringing baking back into my life, but in a very reduced capacity
• renewing my guitar playing
• making meals, and having some pride when doing so

So with that last bullet point, I didn't actually develop cooking skills after moving out, but before that moment cooking always felt like a chore. Now though, it feels more like something I need to perfect; a skill I need to improve and which I really enjoy doing so. The dinner I made for myself tonight is one such example.

Motivated by the idea that I could never get everything I always wanted out of a pizza, or that if I could I'd have to fork-out extravagant amounts of money for it (OK, so pizzas aren't expensive, but the combination of all of the things I liked would have made a pizza more than I would be willing to pay for it), I decided to combine all of my favourite parts about the pizzas I have ever eaten, into 1 epic pizza:

• home-made base
• herbs in the dough
• thin base
• cheese-stuffed crust
• toppings all the way to the edge (or in this case, right up to the cheese-stuffed crust part)

My epic pizza prototype: Pizza 1.0

Throughout the pizza-creation process, I read-aloud the pizza base instructions that I've pretty much already memorized, and sang-along to whatever music was playing through my TV/Xbox. And after putting the pizza into the oven, I was so excited about it that I told the world via Twitter.

(Unfortunately, in my haste to try-out my new creation, I forgot to take photos of it after it was cooked. Whoops.)

The verdict? I need to work on the cheese-stuffed crust part of it - I either didn't use enough cheese or the right kind of cheese because what I had inside the crusts melted and thinned-out, leaving a not-very-cheesy hollow crust - but everything else was exactly how I liked it.

A quick internet search has given me some ideas to try for Pizza 2.0 (use mozarella cheese, or cheese strings), but today has really illustrated just how right my friend was about what has happened to me since living on my own... and here I am blogging about it.

*sigh*

So a funny little something happened to me at work just a while ago: somebody sent an e-mail to a mailing list that I shouldn't belong to. Thinking nothing of it, I decided not to do anything.

Somebody else however, decided to do something and asked to be removed from the mailing list. But they didn't reply to the original sender, instead they replied to the mailing list, giving a whole bunch of people the idea that it is a Good Idea to do the exact same thing. And by exact same thing, that means repeating the mistake of the first responder of replying to the mailing list (must be some automatic reflex to click 'reply-to-all') instead of putting their request to the original sender.

This continued for the rest of the afternoon. My 'new e-mail' alert pop-up was going spastic, eventually stopping to give me the details of the incoming messages and instead just telling me that I had "...new items in your inbox." At first I was hoping that people notice the incoming flood and correct their responses, then I kept facepalming at every new message alert, and then I LOL'd.

Did I mention I work for a large corporation with offices all around the world? I was getting e-mails from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, the US, Mexico, Brazil... Here's a timeline of events:

• 1:22pm - initial e-mail sent to a mailing list
• 2:12pm - first reply to be removed from the mailing list
• 2:15pm - more replies to be removed from the mailing list start coming
• 2:20pm - first replies to say 'please don't e-mail everybody', and first angry reply to ask people to stop, saying they 'have enough e-mail to read'
• 2:23pm - first 'stop e-mailing!' message to be sent in capital letters
• 2:26pm - somebody changes the e-mail subject to try get peoples' attention
• 2:52pm - original sender tries to recall initial e-mail
• 2:54pm - first sarcastic reply, saying they love getting to know all these new people
• 2:57pm - comment comparing this incident to 'please forward to X people' chain e-mails
• 3:02pm - I reply to everybody and the chain e-mail guy, saying we've reached 73 messages, mine is the 74th, and that 6 more have come in during me writing my response
• 3:05pm - the network goes down

(At this point I start worrying that the Mailing List Saga has brought down the network, particularly my message since it was the last thing to be sent before it all hit the fan. I'm probably being a bit egotistical there, thinking that I would have such influence on our company's network infrastructure, but it's not the first time I've been jokingly blamed by my workmates for network failures before.)

• 3:34pm - network restored for a moment, I receive 35 more messages (1 of which is an ACTUAL e-mail from a friend), someone decided to add exclamation marks to the e-mail subject, network goes down again
• 3:54pm - network restored, receive the last of the e-mails, including the one where somebody has talked to somebody with mailing list power to get the list fixed
• 4:10pm - straggler requests to be removed from the list

At this point in the Mailing List Saga (which is the moment before I shut this computer off to go home), I counted 121 e-mails - more e-mails than I receive in a normal week. This includes all the replies, several out-of-office messages, one 'inbox too full' message, and the one I sent myself.

I must say, it made my day :D Here are some of my favourite responses:

I have no idea what is it about.
Please do me a favor and take me out of the list i have enough email to read.

OK, enough with the reply all responses.

STOP THE REPLY TO ALL PLEASE......

Lovely teams, I'm glad to know everyone's name but can we stop this?

Its becoming like those "Send this to everyone you know and XXX will donate 1cent to ..."

Please include me in all future emails. My inbox feels loved

jejeje Hope I get all the 1cent soon :0)

And now we've got all these new in-box friends. :)

Update: Just came in to work this morning, and the hours between yesterday afternoon and now have given THE ENTIRE CONTINENT OF EUROPE a chance to respond. We're now up to 201 e-mails, and I got some new favourite replies:

aLL,
PLEASE STOP REPLYING TO DE GROUP MAILBOX.
i AM NOW OVERLOADED WITH "UNSUBSCRIBES".
stop, stop, stop

Does anybody know how's the best way to cook a turkey for next Christmas?

Aaa... it's simply. You need to take a turkey, cut the head, add some salt and pepper... and cook it until everybody send the reply with "remove me too"...

Hopefully this Turkey is almost cooked

Hope that this is the last email sending out . Pray hard.

Then next one pressing "send to all" qualifies him/herself for the next round of [Workforce Reductions].
Reason: having no understanding of IT technology..

Interesting, but It's difficult to find some of this spices here... Sounds tasty, though.

STOP REPLY AND EVERYTHING WILL BE STOP!! PLEASE

Every great super hero has their super power. And for any super villain to stand a chance against their opposite, said super hero or power must be able to be neutralized in some way: a weakness, an Achilles' Heel, their kryptonite, whatever you want to call it.

Now, I'm as far away from being a great super hero as you can possibly be, so I have only the mediocre power of being able to call more than 1 lift at a time. And because my super power is so lame, anything with the strength of a dung beetle might be able to thwart me. But you know what I discovered my kryptonite is?

Braille.

Yes, the alphabet of the blind has the ability to screw with my elevator super powers. It doesn't neutralize it, but rather make the use of said powers very painful.

Every time I manage to call more than 1 lift, a smirk spreads across my face and I my inner dialogue starts saying things like: Yeah, that's right, all elevators bow before me... When I'm in this I'm-the-king-of-the-elevators sort of mood, I press the elevator buttons a bit more forcefully than I need to. I don't usually use the end of my finger to press the buttons. Instead, it's more like a knocking-on-the-door action where I put my knuckles into it.

So how does Braille hurt me? Well take a look at the buttons being used in the lifts in my work building:

See the Braille sticking-out of the buttons? Now, imagine smashing your knuckles into those. Each tiny dot becomes the equivalent of a small spike when I throw my knuckles into them at the speed; fighting back with the bite of a rose thorn and killing my inner dialogue in the same way every time: with capital letters and exclamation points (eg: ...OWWWWW!!!!) while simultaneously wounding my pride.

Like martial arts, Braille has harnessed the power of science and learned to turn my own strength against me.

When I put it like that, I think I'd prefer it if my weakness were dung beetles - Braille can go anywhere, whereas dung beetles can't survive the New Zealand climate.

As holidays for relaxation go, the New Year's one I just came back from would probably top them all.

Relaxing views

Around late November 2009, I started complaining about a persistent headache. Now my headaches are usually of the hit-and-run nature; strike me down when I fail to take care of myself like not eat lunch or lack sleep. This this particular headache however stuck with me for about a week before I decided to do something about it.

Firstly, I crowdsourced some answers via Twitter/Facebook as to what medications people take in order to control their headaches. My first stop, a paracetamol-based product, didn't seem to be cutting it. Answers ranged from doubling the dosage to drinking margaritas. I tried the first couple of suggestions (doubling the dosage, using a codeine-based painkiller) before I went to the doctor to see what they would say about the headache.

Funnily enough, the doctor suggested everything my friends did, except margaritas, and also suggested I see an optometrist - since I wear glasses, although very rarely - to see if there's something eye-related that's been causing the pain.

There were no answers at the optometrists either, but some good news did come out of it: my eyesight doesn't suck as much as it used to, and I can get weaker-strength lenses... once I pick-out some new frames to go with them (have had the same frames for a long time, so it's time for an overhaul).

The headache has been trailing me all throughout December. While not a strong pain anymore, it nags at the back of my mind like the feeling you forgot something important to do.

So what has all this got to do with my New Year's holiday? Well, I didn't experience any headaches during it.

More headache-free views

What did I do during that holiday that might have solved my headache woes? Well, I didn't really do much of anything: afternoon naps under the sun were the norm, I read the book I had borrowed from the library, I went for swims in the inlet/ocean, I played my guitar, I went for long walks through NZ bush, I threw a frisbee, I caught a native bird, I slept-in every day save the last, and I just had plain old fun.

Nowhere in my itinerary was there mention of a computer or screen to stare at, or a deadline to meet. Meaning that either my headache is computer or 'staring-at-a-screen'-related (which if it is would absolutely suck because it's what I do for my job and for much of my non-vacation downtime) or just work/stress-related.

Now I'm back home and staring at computer/TV screens again, I think I may have caused a relapse, but it just doesn't feel the same as I remember it. Tomorrow, I head back to work (albeit only 3 weekdays in this working week), and if the headache makes a comeback either this or next week, then I might have some serious work/life balance choices to consider.

Wish me luck.

Finally back from my New Year's holiday, which included something of a technology blackout: no cellphone coverage, so no day-to-day Tweets of the day's happenings, so no receiving or sending of New Year's text messages, much to my chagrin because those on rival cellphone networks did get some modicum of reception and were still able to receive New Year's text message love :(

So, on to the blog post backlog I had in my mind. First-up on the list: my mum.

At a Christmas party a week before Christmas day of good ol' 2009, a certain someone - who I haven't yet mentioned in this blog before, and so doesn't have a witty nickname to which I can attach to them, to which I am surprised considering the contribution this person made to my 2009 which in turn made it so great - asked me a pretty tough question:

"What kind of person is your mum?"

How we got on to the topic of my mother, I can't remember - it might have something to do with a certain button badge I was given prior to this party - but when I was faced with that question my mind drew a blank. After what seemed like minutes of silence from me while my interrogator watched patiently at the cogs turning behind my eyes, all I could respond with was:

"I don't know how to answer that. Give me a day or 2 and I'll come-up with something."
"Good answer." she said, and walked away to leave me to contemplate the sorts of things I could say about my own mother.

One of the holiday season presents I received. I have never worn a badge so proudly in my life

So I gave the thought a day, which then became 2, which then stretched out from however many days there are between a week before Christmas and now...

When thinking about how I describe anybody, I usually look for that 1 trait that sets them apart from the rest; the thing that makes them unique to me. In the case of my mum, it would be that she is self-sacrificing for her children: everything she did, she did for my brother and I.

That trait encompasses many things: unconditional love, support, a level head whenever I asked her about the decisions I was facing (giving me the answer that would benefit me the most, even if the answer was not what I wanted to hear), and an almost embarrassing willingness to go out of her way to make sure my brother and I were as comfortable as we could be (eg: driving out from her work after school hours to take us home, giving us more than our share of food at the table, giving-up the window seat on a plane, etc).

That trait however is a bit of a double-edged sword; as well as being what makes my mum so great, it's also what has annoyed me the most: the unconditional love is often blind to what's going-on with others, the support would often make me think I was right when I was in the wrong, the honest answers might have carried me down the much safer path which could've given me valuable lessons or challenges to face, and the 'out-of-her-way'-ness often became too embarrassing, particularly when around my friends throughout those terrible teenage years.

Despite the good and bad nature of a child-centric focus, it's all the sorts of things I have grown to expect from a mother - and all the sorts of things that compose the yard stick by which I measure every mother I have known or will know.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

"A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie."
- Tenneva Jordan

(http://www.quotegarden.com/mothers.html)