phew! said Daniel

I was smacked in the face today, coming to the harsh realisation that post-graduate study is not even a remote possibility for me, nor anyone short of the rich. This fills me with rage, sadness, disillusionment, homicidal thoughts and apathy, at once.

A couple of years back I was so pleased to find that post-graduate study was a possibility. At the time I was stunned because I thought Howard would have clipped back people like me from having a double dip.

That was then, this is now and holes have been closed.

While there is some financial relief, where the government will loan you money to study, it does not cover the cost of the degree I am interested in. In fact there will be a shortfall of around $40k. One would have to agree that is quite the nice gaping chasm.

Admittedly, I'm looking to study law, a very fee heavy course, but this is beside the point. Whether it were landscape architecture, design, engineering, arts, whatever, I'd be in trouble, because post-graduate study is so heavily penalised. The (often silent) conservative reasoning for this is that if you've done one degree, you've done enough. If you need to do more than one you can damn well fund it yourself, hippy.

The more media friendly explanation is heard in the press all too frequently:

Why should Mr. and Mrs. Jones from Broadmeadows have to pay for some perpetual student to go off and receive degree number 4?

I'm not going to get into the spin behind that kind of statement but it does expose the heart of conservative politics on this matter. Keep them uneducated, keep them deprived, that way they'll never know and never challenge.

Sad, but true. It is made even more disgusting given that most of the politicians sitting at federal level did not even have to pay for their education. I wonder who did? Oh, that's right, the taxpayers.

Wait. I think I can hear some land that needs a freeway built over it.

you're a machine

I have no idea how you all do it. Finding time to write, when one has so many other, essential, things to do, seems a near impossibility to me. Thus the deafening silence of late.

It would be fair to say I haven't been particularly inspired anyway, but nevertheless I still haven't had the time to put that indifference into glyphs for you all to ingest here.

Because this stretch of inactivity continues, the news, and thoughts, will be supplied in brief herein.

Riesling from Alsace really is liquid elegance. Driving is fun, and the 13 years between when I could have gotten it and now will get it have only served to magnify the enjoyment today. Sometimes recipe authors do err, even the ever faithful Tess Kiros (chicken and onion at once - what were you thinking?). Sometimes you have to admit your colleagues suck and there is little you can do about it. Los Angeles is a temptress that I do not seem able to escape, even when given the option. The last swim of the season is both heartening and sad. Woody Allen is not fit to direct anymore, that is if Hollywood Ending is anything to go by. I was not built to write outlets for objects but regardless seem able to cobble together a good class. Malcolm Turnbull will run for PM for the election after next. Bush and Sharon are going to destroy the reactors in Iran some time in the next 6 months. I will change careers altogether inside 12 months.

And there you have it.

maybe when they move to 64 bit

What makes one a Blog of Note?

Unless you author through Blogger you won't know what I am on about here, but for those of you who do, have you ever stopped to wonder whether you will ever be one of the cool kids on this list?

Because you've looked at a few of these links in the past and wondered what all the fuss is about, wondered why your amazing journal isn't up there in lights scoring hundreds upon hundreds of hits when those that are listed are just so often, well, rubbish.

I too have wondered this.

I don't anymore, though. I'm struggling just to deal with the trickle of anonymous folk who pop up in my logs sporadically at best. Fame could completely drown me.

Consider the analogy of my lone tomato plant. I have looked after my tomato plant very well through this fickle season, but only because I have it, and it alone, to look after. If suddenly my family and friends were to be so impressed by my plant that they decided to give me, say, 100 other tomato plants to look after, well, I'd be on a flight and living in another country quicker than you could say Heirloom.

But then, that's just me. I could be alone on this.

backslappers

Well, the Academy Awards are just as irrelevant as ever. Thankfully we can all get on with living again now that the stars have shown us how.



The following are exceptions to the terribly cynical comment above:

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Cate Blanchett for The Aviator (2004)

Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) - Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, Pierre Bismuth

Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published
Sideways (2004) - Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor

Best Achievement in Sound Editing
The Incredibles (2004) - Michael Silvers, Randy Thom

fifty times fifty thousand

Application programming is a most interesting journey.

[For me at least] Designing and executing the functioning code of your application, the skeleton, limbs and muscle if you will, is, while perhaps not easy from a technical perspective, a piece of cake insofar as you know what you want and how you want to achieve it. It may take developing new skills, asking for help, years of your time and what have you, but there is a clear goal at which to kick.

Sit down to design and execute the UI* to your application - the skin - however, and the river doeth often run dry.

Suddenly there are external considerations.

The first hurdle is always the standards, recommended or enforced. These have, in another life, almost driven me to lunacy. In my current workspace, though, I'm not so troubled as they often, or at least sometimes, make sense and are, for the most part, useful in bringing about a unified and accessible interface layer for the user. If you work with a treat of a platform like Apple OS X it's about as easy as can be, perhaps even rewarding.

The second hurdle, though, is the real blocker: personal taste versus mass market accessibility.

I know what I want in an app'. I want speedy interfacing with the relevant components, no clutter and an emphasis on key-strokes and modifiers to execute commands. The problem, though, is the question of whether that suits everyone else, namely, your market. You are writing this for everyone, right?

Taken a look at Word lately? Have a look at the freaking insane number of menu bars and icons. Have you ever even used these? Probably not because you're a clever, blogging, power user. But do you think anyone uses them? It can't be denied there's a possibility they do. The logic then is that if someone might need to click on a disk icon, instead of pressing CTRL-S, then perhaps we should leave it there.

So while you can take this very brutish approach to designing your UI and say well, I'm not going to support this. It's plainly clear what you need to do in my application without this superfluous dogpile and I refuse to cater to the minority of users who want it. you're ignoring a potential fly in your ointment.

What about people with disabilities who rely on aiming for that one icon to save their document? What about those people who genuinely struggle to see their way through the maze of menus to find Page Setup or Styles? You know they're out there. Deep down you know it.

And so you sit down to design your UI and these things come to mind. I went up and down on this roller coaster this evening while working on a draft of a UI for an app' I am working on. The resolution was that I am going to document well, have a decent tutorial and keep my UI minimal. If ever this thing gets out there and I receive a pleasant email from a user telling me that they could really use a little help on the UI-front I've promised myself I'll look into it.

After all, #ifdef LITTLE_HELP should do it.

* User Interface, for the non-software folk.