A warm fuzzy feeling

November 28, 2008 · Posted in General · 2 Comments 

It has become relatively commonplace for poor students to club together to get a friend a really nice present that none of them can practically afford on their own. People often continue to organise presents in this way even when they are no longer poor students, because it just makes sense — especially when the gift-givers don’t know the recipient very well. Most people would rather receive one or two nice gifts (which were quietly suggested by close friends in the know) than seventeen pairs of socks and scented bath salts — and most people would rather contribute to a gift which they know the recipient will like than spend a stressful day hunting for something which is original, yet generically inoffensive, and not a duplicate of something the recipient already has.

Gift vouchers have also changed the way people give presents. You can now get someone a gift which fits their interests without knowing exactly what they have in their collection.

Not everyone is comfortable with these recent gift-giving traditions, however. Some people consider participation in shared gifts to be a social faux-pas — they may be concerned that they will be seen as cheap, or not sufficiently invested in their friends’ lives to be able to pick out the perfect gift for them by themselves. Vouchers are also seen as impersonal; not much better than slipping a hundred bucks into an envelope. It has taken me a long time to convince my parents that I really do consider book vouchers to be the best present ever.

Alternative gift-giving is likely to encounter even more resistance. See, it works like this: you donate money to a charitable organisation, which uses it to buy a useful gift for a person who really needs it. You get some kind of card which says “I gave someone a $thing on your behalf”. The present that you give to your friend is a warm fuzzy feeling.

I think the reason that this is taking a while to catch on is that not everyone considers a warm fuzzy feeling to be a real present. I can think of only two or three people off the top of my head who know about this and have said that they think it’s a neat idea. If you don’t know that someone would appreciate receiving such a gift, you probably won’t give it to them — it seems too much like getting them something that you want.

Therefore, just in time for the gift-giving season, I have made a handy icon which you can display on your blog / personal wiki / other online place of habitation if you would like to indicate your support of this idea. If you don’t like cows, or think my icon-making skills suck, please make some more icons.

cow-flavoured alternative gifts icon

I support alternative gift-giving. I have a lot of stuff, and I don’t really need more stuff. If you give something to a person in need on my behalf, you will absolutely be giving me a real present.

Here are some links to alternative gift-giving sites. I don’t have a particular preference. Feel free to donate to a completely different organisation (like TAC, or the SPCA) and make a home-brewed card.

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November media review

November 10, 2008 · Posted in Reviews · Comment 

Movies:

  • Pathfinder — terrible; don’t bother. The premise is kind of cool, but the characters are cardboard and the plot is utterly predictable and spliced together from a hundred better movies. For some reason* I thought there would be an alien in this. There wasn’t.
  • Sunshine — pretty awesome. I didn’t realise how much I love things-going-horribly-wrong-on-an-isolated-near-future-spaceship movies until an hour in. Marred by one moment of inexplicable character stupidity.

Comics:

  • Bone — as good as it’s hyped up to be. Stupid, stupid rat creatures!
  • Stickleback — I dunno, it disn’t grab me as much as Edginton and D’Israeli’s other stuff. Maybe it’ll grow on me.
  • The Complete Nemesis the Warlock volumes 2 and 3 — cheesy eighties goodness. So, so cheesy.
  • Historie manga — slightly gory historical manga set in ancient Greece. Once it got going, I couldn’t stop reading.
  • Twin Spica manga — a young girl goes to a space academy. Slow, but entertaining.
  • Planetes manga — more near-future SF. A bit difficult to get into, but that’s what I thought about Vinland Saga too, so I’ll give it more time.

* Because I was thinking of Outlander! D’oh!

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Get off my side; you’re making it look stupid.

November 4, 2008 · Posted in Rants, Tech and coding · 1 Comment 

Update (April 2009): Holy crap! The IEC really did get their site updated for the elections. I almost fell off my chair. The election results are inexplicably only available as PDFs that you have to download, but hey — baby steps.

So, if you live in South Africa and have The Internet, you probably already know that the IEC website is crap. It has been crap for years. It used to be bizarrely malformed in anything that isn’t IE, and lots of people complained.

Recently the IEC dramatically improved the situation by adding a browser check to their main page, and redirecting any browsers that don’t identify themselves as IE to an apologetic note which explains that the site doesn’t work in anything except IE. Please note that they had time to add Google Chrome to the list of other browsers — but not to actually fix the damn site; something which you might think is not rocket science, or very expensive to do, especially in this age of out-of-the-box CMSes and web development frameworks.

Of course the site still works in Firefox, exactly as badly as it used to — and the browser check is trivially circumventable. All you have to do to see it in its full malformed glory is navigate to any internal page. If you’re feeling energetic, you can make your browser lie in its user agent string. Be prepared to reload frequently — not only is the site atrociously designed and basically unmaintained (how long is that <\table> going to be there?); the server is a bit dodgy.

Now, people have been complaining about this crap for years, to little effect. Nobody seems to be particularly interested in fixing the problem.

Earlier today several people I know posted links to DigitalApartheid.com, a new site created by someone who is fed up with the state of the IEC website. As much as I agree with the purported goals of the site, I am not impressed with the way it has gone about achieving them, for several reasons.

One: the site instructs visitors to email or fax a form letter complaining about the site to various employees of the IEC. Form letters are crap. Form letters say “I’m not capable of articulating an intelligent opinion about this; I’m with that guy, so I copied what he said.” I wouldn’t be surprised if they were forwarded straight to /dev/dustbin at the IEC; I know that’s what I’d do.

Two: the form letter is full of bad punctuation and grammar. Badly written complaints make you look stupid.

Three: the form letter compares the site’s exclusion of non-IE users to apartheid, and states that the writer is contemplating not voting unless the site is fixed. Here’s where we go off the deep end.

Seriously? You really think that the inconvenience that you experience at this site because of your (admirable and sensible) choice to use a browser other than IE is comparable to decades of racist government oppression?

Dude. Maybe you should get some perspective.

Most people in South Africa don’t have access to computers. The IEC website is not the only — or indeed the primary — source of information about the elections. This information is not being denied to you — if you can’t access it in your browser (and you can, really), you have the ability to get it in some other way, just like all those computerless people.

I do want the IEC to fix their site — but bombarding them with ridiculous hyperbole isn’t going to make them do it. There are plenty of intelligent things to say about standards compliance and FOSS, and why they are important. If you’re going to send a complaint, please do it in a way which doesn’t make you — and by association everyone else who uses an alternative browser — look like a raving nutjob.

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