Do you want stabbing int eye?

Right. This post is going to be vitriolic, scathing, potty-mouthed. Think of my pottiest-mouthed post and add an extra pint of potty-mouthness. Why? You want the short list?

Alright then, let’s start at the top of the mountain of things as have fucked me off Big Time:

Blogger. I’m told that if I want to use the new Sergeant Pompous and the Fancy Pants Club Band Layouts jobbie, I, and I quote, “must use Firefox or Internet Explorer 6”. Pardon? Must? Must? How dare you. Now, if you’d written summat like “please use…” or even “only works in…”, then I wouldn’t have stared at me poor monitor like it’d just dribbled on me shirt. Must? MUST? What is this use of external obligation you think you can throw at people about which you know NOTHING? Why do you think that you can tell me what I ‘must’ use? Ooh, here’s an idea: how about ‘fuck a long way off, you bastards’. Just make it work on Safari (and Opera. Let’s not be fascists).

And while we’re ont subject, NOTHING ever works properly on IE anyway, so why bother pretending that if even I wanted to dirty me USEFUL and EFFICIENT Mac by putting some fucking Microsoft shite on it, it’d make my net experience better? Fuck off. If you want ME to continue using YOUR products when there are other ones available, then you’d better fucking pony up and make the damned thing work with up-to-date web browsers. What, do I build a car and then say “you can only drive this on dirt tracks, cos it dunt work on tarmac”? Have a think, and then come back when you can do better.

Now when I post to Blogger, I don’t get a fancy-arsed ‘html’ page, wi little buttons to press to format the post. No, no, no, cos y’see, I’m using Safari 2.0.4, and Blogger dunt seem to support this. It’s Cap’n Mal’s Independence technology in the face of Alliance programming. It’s dirty wee rebels hiding in forests on moons of Endor. It’s Gordon Jackson forgetting to speak German as he gets ont train to freedom. Anyway, the upshot is that I have to write all the html tags meself. I’m used to it. I found a resource ont web and found all the easy ways to do it. It didn’t take long.

But this means that I should fucking well know what’s making the text and/or appearance fuck up once the post has been published. After all, I put the damned tags in int first place. I should be able to trace em back and find the mis-matched tag, or the wrong letter, whatever it happens to be. So I don’t appreciate it when the fucking thing displays text on every single line, instead of the 1.4 spacing it’s supposed to have. It makes yer eyes funny. It gives you a headache reading it. I cite my previous posts on ‘Doctor bloody Who’ as examples. An’ there sure as fucking ‘ell int a good reason for it. I know, cos I’ve looked. More than a few times.

But, don’t worry, where’s there a net fuck-up there’s a solution – and as usual, it’s by outside smarties. If you want to fix that little line spacing horror, do what I did and go here. Sorted mine – see the wee waving Sam Tyler down there in the End Of Life post? Well the text on his right were all bunched up and screwed. Their little recommendation had it all straightened out again.

Also a while back I asked if anyone knew how to add the ‘Previous Posts’ html jobbie back to yer sidebar after ‘upgrading’ to the new Layouts. No-one seemed to know. A quick Google later, and ~ ta-dah! All my questions answered. As you can see, I now have that very widget in me sidebar again. Bloody marvellous.

I thought I were done. But no.
Now I don’t mind people asking me how I made the jump from PC to Mac, cos after all, it’s one of life’s great mysteries how anyone could put up wi a PC fer long. Anyway, I cheerfully tell people the truth: I decided one day, in a fit o rage (no change there then) to junk my fucking piece of noncy-arsed crappy laptop and get a piece o kit that dunt crash or simply re-start itself FOR NO DISCERNABLE REASON. Result? An hour int Apple Mac shop, pointing and asking questions, playing and trying to be perverse and downright obtuse. Didn’t work ~ went home wi a Mac Mini (before the advent of Intel in Macs, I might add). Now I had shitloads o programmes and shite that I really did not want to lose. But here’s the thing: I didn’t know how to use a Mac (apart from the obvious ‘click it and see what happens’ fun int shop) and I didn’t have any clue what I were doing.

Didn’t matter. If you’ve used PCs fer more than MSN, and know which end of a cable goes in a USB port, it really does not take more than ten minutes to work out that all you need is Version Tracker. Need summat to replace Trillian? Get Adium X. Need Bit Torrent fer Mac (even though Transmission is so much better!)? Got that too, as well as about five other kinds of P2P client. Free stuff from all over the ‘Verse, in all shapes and sizes, as well as actual commercial downloads from people like Adobe, an’ all available in one place. I can safely say there is nothing I need right now on me Mac – I have everything I want (and even a few things I don’t). So don’t, fert love of Sean Bean’s arse, tell me I have to go and ‘update my Java’ or ‘download the new version of IE’, cos I’ll stab you in the eye with a blunt pencil.

It just gets on my tits. I can’t be doing wi it. Really.

So when I then get people ask me how I run Windows on me Mac, I have one of them Moments. You know, like in True Lies, when Bill Paxton (support your B-movie actors!) is talking, trying to sell Arnholt a car, and he’s looking at him imagining him dying horribly. Yeah, one of THEM Moments. I want to just grab em and slap them across the face a few times, asking them why the fucking merry hell would I want to buy an Aston Martin and then rip out the hand-made Corinthian leather seats an’ sit on paint cans? Why would I buy a DVD player and try to push VHS tapes in it? Why would I haul Oscar the Grouch out of his bin and replace him with Elmo?

Gaaahhh! I can’t believe I started blogging about this. It’s not helping, it’s just making me worse. I’ve been sick, you see. But like the house, I’m better now. But I’ve not had a single sniff of alcohol or a cigarette in eight days. It’s been the most boring week of my life. I feel like Lindsey in Teachers – when you start to actually care about yer job. And then you get bored, realising that you don’t need to be watching just fert second… and then yer mind wanders. You realise you’ve lost half the conversation, and then a voice says:
“Teacher Sooz, does the Doctor have two hearts? And why?”
And you, still not actually concentrating, go:
“Well the Doctor’s a Lungbarrow Old-Blood, he was only Loomed with one heart to begin with. But Time Lords need two hearts to survive a regeneration, so they –”
There’s a nervous silence int classroom and then I chuckle.
“Just kidding. What do I know about science-fiction, eh? Finished that grammar exercise yet, then?”

Talking o which, must get onto last week’s ‘Doctor bloody Who’ episode, ‘Gridlock’. (Happy birthday to David Tennant, by the way. Hey mate, if yer short on birthday cheer, stop in at my gaff ont way home. I’m sure I could think o summat as would make you feel better.) Been a bit busy round here lately, what wi film awards and such.

Soopytwist.

Tags:
Blogger ~ html ~ Mac ~ IE ~ Safari ~ Opera ~ Trillian ~ Adium X ~ Bit Torrent ~ Doctor Who ~ Firefox