I’ve never been a fan of the Australia Post website, and not just because it’s pig ugly. In any website design, attention to detail is important — and every time I’ve used this site I’ve run into attention-to-detail problems.
Continue reading “Australia Post’s lousy website”Redesigning the Platypus
Rantings of an Insane Platypus blogs about women’s basketball in Australia and the US. Written by a good friend, it pulls 3300 human visitors a month — plus an indeterminate number of monotremes.
I mention this because we finished the redesign yesterday — thanks to Andreas Viklund for the original layout — and because it’s an excellent example of what I’ve been calling “micromedia”.
Everybody’s Blogging (Not)
“In August 2009, the number of known blogs will more or less equal the population of the world,” says Tim Bray. What a daft thing to say!
Continue reading “Everybody’s Blogging (Not)”Slack Sushi at Bondi
A sushi bar on Bondi Beach will pull punters without effort — and Sushi Train on Campbell Parade is the proof. The standard is way below its stablemate at Chatswood, the fast and convenient Sushi Train Express outlets in the Sydney CBD, and the superb Sushi Train Newtown.
On the evening of 21 February 2006 the sushi rolls lacked symmetry, as if the maker simply didn’t care. The wasabe bowls were stained with a pale brown scum. The lemon slice accompanying the deep-fried squid was dry, flaccid and unappealing, and the lettuce was so tired it was actually black at the edges.
And yet the punters rolled in. Obviously they always roll in. But this was not the tightly-run ship we expect from Sushi Train.
We ate only because we were hungry and short of time. While we weren’t poisoned, we won’t return.
Addendum: I also published this review at Eatability, only to be told:
Thank you for your review, Stilgherrian. Please allow 2-3 weeks for your comments to appear on the site. Note: Reviews may not be published in order of submission.
Two to three weeks? How slack is that!
Can Muslims use Emoticons?
Islam bans the pictorial representation of the human form, part of its fight against idolatry. So are Muslims allowed to use emoticons? The :-) smiley is a human face — and very pictorial.
Are Islamic nations doomed to second-rate communications because they can’t text as fast as Christians and Jews, for whom “:-)” instead of “I’m smiling” is as natural as “etc” instead of “and the rest”?
We Are At War!
“We are again locked in war,” says Roger Bell. “Locked in an ideological battle, locked in the language — very exaggerated language — of ideological conflict.”
Roger Bell, Professor of International Studies at the University of New South Wales, isn’t surprised that the debates and contexts of McCarthyism have resurfaced.
[These debates are] particularly about free speech, and in a broader sense also about — in the American case — about Americanism, and un-American activities, about traitors within, about evil enemies etc.
So when Bush speaks in my view in very exaggerated terms, about the evil of Islam, or the evil of terrorism, he, as it were, takes the political rhetoric to another level. And when acts such as the Patriot Act are invoked domestically to repress or to limit freedom of expression at home, then it’s to be expected that many of those traditional debates in a democratic society will re-surface.
Part of a much longer conversation in ABC Radio National program The Media Report last week. Worth a listen. (transcript) (podcast)