Diary of an up and coming sociopath

On Wednesday evening I drove back to Oxford. The weather was fine. I decided to take the chance of eating the leftover turkey nan had given me, which I had then neglected and left in the hallway all night. I was mildly worried that it would be infested with bacteria and give me all kinds of food poisoning but a healthy disdain for caution and some extra-heating later, I ate the meat and it was good, and thus far I’ve not suffered any gastric malady. Russian Roulette with cooked meats, does life get any more exciting?

However. Due to a kind of sleep irregularity that occured on Wednesday morning (and, er, afternoon) I managed to get only 4 hours sleep last night before waking up to do a lecture. It was a frustrating time, laying in bed trying to convince my brain to stop working all the while knowing that it would take very little persuasion for me to just read or go back on the PC until I was tired. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation - if I stay in bed, it’s likely I’ll not get to sleep, but if I get up I definitely won’t. So I kind of rolled out of bed at 7:30 and did my best to look like I was awake. The illusion persisted all the way to Wheatley.

Actually, let me whinge about the Wheatley bus ride. I don’t know why, but today on the Wheatley bus there were loads of schoolkids. Year 8 maybe? I would like to persuade anyone reading this that I learnt from them that spraying deoderant liberally on each other is NOT A PLAN FOR THE TOP FLOOR OF A BUS WHEN NO WINDOWS ARE OPEN. Ian and I both arrived independantly at the conclusion that the only way these girls could coax themselves into an acceptable level of slag-ness was to ensure they were surrounded with a fine mist that utterly incapacitated any male within 10 metres. We almost choked on the damn stuff. Then they were doing this weird kind of social hierarchy thing where the chief slagette was whining to no-one in particular “Go and wipe that window for me, I can’t see out of it” whilst roaming freely about the bus. I mean, just DIE already. Wipe your own damn window. Unfortunately, it was way too early for a killing spree.

Even I find it unfortunate when I have to start a day with such metaphorical bile, but the fact that the fucking mist of scented gases was forcing me to gag the literal bile right up, so it seemed appropriate.

But anyway. Our lecture was on “Accessibility”. I’m pretty familiar with the topic, having (*ahem*) made my website in utterly valid XHTML and CSS. It’s totally readable by the relevant applications. Unfortunately, the saga of incompetance continued. We had a big talk on something called “Voice XML” which the lecturer had worked on, and then we got told that it had never actually bee implemented by anyone, and was eventually replaced by something called “Salt” which we were told nothing about save for the fact that Microsoft endorsed it. A prime example of lecturer’s peddling their own brand of crap instead of what’s actually good for us to know.

She also told us about her pet project web browser which she was paid a lot to produce but failed to. Now, I find the idea that (as she said) she hired a bunch of programmers to write something she conceptualised just, deeply offends me somehow. That she doesn’t know how to program but has the idea for something, so she pays people to do it for her… It feels a tad irrational, but I can’t help comparing it to the idea of someone saying “Well, I want to write a song about summer and love, but I don’t know how to write music or lyrics, so I’ll pay people to do it for me and then it’ll be my song at the end of it.” Programming is an art, dammit. I mean, there’s the other side of the coin, like how an architect gets the credit for designing a building when it’s the engineers and builders that actually create the thing, she would be the architect and the programmers the builders, but I dunno… bricklaying is a craft rather than an art. I admit my arguments there aren’t totally well thought out, I suspect they’re influenced by my resentment that this woman is making a career out of telling us stuff that’s blindingly obvious and she’s not even doing it right.

Well, this entry has become a little bitter. It’s not all that bad. However, I may not win many friends with the next bit. Maybe you should skip past this next paragraph if you’re particularly sensitive about the blind or disabled, because .

Now. The web is, for better or worse, inherently multimedia, though it relied primarily on the visual medium. The big problem with accessibility is that it’s unbelievably hard to create a program that can translate the visual into the audible. Soon, it might be illegal for a company to create a website that is not accessible to someone who is blind. Now, I’m not some extreme right wing nutcase, but in this instance I think the organisations for the blind should probably just accept there are some things you can’t do without sight. Until the web is available in braille, I think the emphasis should be on improving screenreaders rather than constraining individual sites to make them available to the disabled. I’m not blaming the blind people themselves, just the organisations pushing for some twisted version of equality that totally fails to account for what, let’s face it, is a disability. Improve screenreaders. Put the research there. Don’t start taking legal action against the government because you can’t figure out how the information in a table is listed on the New Deal site. I’m not saying that the blind are in any way second class citizens, nor that they don’t deserve the same opportunities. Emphatically not. They are humans just like everyone else who have the same rights. I will not be misinterpreted here. It’s more that the organisations representing the disabled are trying to change the wrong thing. It’s like trying to cross a river by diverting the course instead of building a bridge.

Okay, that out the way, let me take the final shot at the accessiblity tool we were shown in the lecture, which has taken the idiotic name of “Bobby.” This helpful site checks through your page and spews out utterly irrelevant messages based on the content of your page. every image and use of colour gets an error message. Let’s be fair here. If the w3C standards are followed, you’ll get an accessible site, and their checking program is actually helpful, in that it’ll point you to an error and often suggest a fix, whereas “Bobby” just about manages to perform the most basic analysis and give you problems so general and superfluous you’d be unable to find the relevant problems on a complex page. Go stick a few URLs in to see how crap it can be, if you’re at all interested. Put something like amazon or hmv in and watch it choke on the barrage of useless errors (every question mark represents an “error.”)

Wow. I haven’t been so passionate about Uni work in years. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong kind of passion.

But still, it hasn’t been all bad. I’ve actually had a pretty good day. We’ve been making homemade muffins recently, which has provided us all with some excellent snackfoods, though this is because Tescos are routinely out of stock of the decent kind. Today, in fact, I went in to find out that the batter mix was out of stock! Damn pancake day bandwagon-jumpers! They just don’t consider who gets caught in the crossfire.

I ended up having a small nap in the evening, which I used to do a lot more but now I have Nikki to, er, protect me from such slothness. Ian managed to sleep for a few hours though, which did him no good, so maybe it’s for the best. I also watched the new Angel, which was an incredibly moving and heartfelt piece of TV that contained the bitter aftertaste of cancellation only because it was so damn good. I can’t believe they killed the program when this is the level of quality it’s showing.

Also today, I posted off a comic to someone on eBay and, finally, received word that the camera had arrived safely with its intended buyer. By god, we’ve had the runaround with this camera, but it’s there now. I also learnt my Angel DVDs are being sent tomorrow. Should be here by Monday, I guess. Excellent news.

And, as if to end the entry on a high note, this morning I woke up to a cheque for £123 from Aqua Pacific. I may not have been able to do the work for them this week, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get paid for what I did last month. Fucking excellent. Tomorrow I bank it, and ride the wave of money into next week.