Why Me?

It always happens like this. Every time I think I’m sorted, that I’m paid up on all my bills and with no more due in for a month or so, one always turns up. Completely unexpected, and a total pain in the arse.

This time, it was my old battlepals, British Gas. The motherfuckers. Apparently I’ve managed the impossible, and have two electricity accounts for the same property. I paid one electricity bill about six weeks ago, which they conveniently have no record of. This account has been overdue for about three months, so it’s snotty letter time. It’s paid now, and I’ll keep on looking into how they’ve managed to get two accounts, only one of which is traceable.

Of course, British Gas themselves are about as useful as condoms in a nunnery, and can’t trace payments, can’t list payments coming from one account (“That might break Data Protection” “I authorise you to do it” “No, it still might break Data Protection” Cunts) and are basically as un-fucking-helpful as it’s possible to be. So I pay twice for a cockup from British Gas – and they’ll do cock-all to try and find out why it’s happened. When I find out, I may just swear lots, and be rather unpleasant.

Document Structure

Over the last couple of years, one of the big buzzwords when it comes to web page design has been “document structure”. Because of the rise of technologies such as CSS and XHTML, the actual HTML in a page has finally become more about the content, instead of primarily being involved with the layout of the page. As this has happened, the structure of the content, the actual text, has become more important.

Headings are now one of the major parts of document structure – for instance, a page title should be an <h1>, the next heading should be an <h2>, the next one an <h3> and so on. Having the correct structure like this helps with bookmarking pages, with producing tables of contents, and many other odds and sods.

Here at work, Stinky® is supposed to be the evangelist for all things to do with accessibility, page structure, CSS, etc. While he’s been on holiday, I’ve been working on a couple of sections I don’t normally touch. These sections are – to be polite – an utter sack of shite, don’t have any document structure, the CSS is abominable, and in fact it looks like the Legoland® version of a website. Total bobbins.

I guess what annoys me is the double standards of it all. In a way I’m in the same boat, because d4d™ doesn’t adhere to those standards of document structure etc. either. However, I’ve never claimed it does. The CSS validates, but I’ve never claimed the pages do. (Which is fortunate, as they don’t even validate to HTML 4.01 – Ooops) When I redesign d4d™, I’ll be looking at making sure that it does exactly what it says on the tin, but ’til then I’m not going to make false claims about its accessibility. However, Stinky® is forever bleating on about how sites don’t adhere to standards, aren’t compliant with various definitions, yawn, yawn, yawn. And yet the stuff he’s written for the council actually is some of the most nastily broken stuff I’ve seen in a long time.

Frustrating.

Organise, Pissup, Brewery

We regret to inform you that the CD which was enclosed in the product packs at the LAWs dissemination event in Manchester yesterday contains a virus despite having been scanned before production.

The virus does not affect Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, but can have severe effects on Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me.

We would request that you do not place it in your CD drive but that you destroy it immediately. However, if you have already opened the CD, please contact your IT team and tell them that you may have W95.Spaces.1445.

Words fail me.

Meeting – Aftermath

A Lyle Semi-Sweary® Production. © 2004.

Well, fucking hell, what a waste of time/effort/a day. I’ve heard more corporate-speak bullshit in the last ten hours than I have in the last ten months. People from local authorities all over the north of England, and most of them actually look like they’re eating up this guff like it’s caviar.

APLAWS, LAWS, GCL, LACL, XML, XSLT, SOAP, D4D, HP, FLOB, ODPM, OeE, ESD, and many more. All utter utter bollocks. Do you remember Gus from Drop the Dead Donkey? Management guff of the “I’m not here” variety. He had a shedload to learn from the cunch of bunts today.

More to the point, it wasn’t even an informative or useful seminar. In fact it was shit – pure, unadulterated, shit. Nothing of relevance about how all this stuff really works, just about “what we’ve done in the last year with all these TLAs”. It was like the first day back to school after the summer holidays. Attending events like that drives me fucking barmy – such a complete and utter waste of taxpayers money. Grrrrrrr.

This post was brought to you by the ‘words’ (and I mean that in the loosest possible sense) “polyhierarchical” and “productisation“, both of which were bandied about repeatedly throughout the day.

Meeting

Kill me now. Today is not going to be a day where I update much. I’m stuck in a meeting all day about APLAWS (Accessible & Personalised Local Authority Websites), LAWS (Local Authorities Websites – National Project) and the GCL (Government Category List).

As you can probably tell from that little lot, I’m likely to be bored out of my brain, and wearing my world-famous “Oh, Who gives a fuck?” face. There may be ventage later.

Note to Self

Vent about Document Structure later.

Charm

“Hey, Mister, you know drinking Diet Coke’s bad for you, don’t’cha?“
“Yes, and so’s being an interfering mouthy little gobshite. Now fuck off.“