A good friend of mine recently received a subscription to Xbox Live for his birthday from his good lady wife. As a relatively non-techie computer user, he saught Xbox Live connection advice from the numpty at the local computer store. Which is where, unfortunately, things started to go wrong…
Xbox Live requires a certain understanding of computer networking which, due to uninformative packaging, can come as quite a shock. Needless to say, the bad advice I refered to above resulted in my friend being sold a rather dodgy ADSL modem router at a suspiciously high price, failure to get the blasted thing to connect to the intermaweb and, subsequently, several days of good old English cursing.
Having been notified of the problem (not before another of my good friends had screwed things up further - a great man once said “a man without a clue is infinitely less dangerous than a man with half a clue”), I set about attempting to decipher the intracacies of said crappy router. But alas, to no avail.
Thankfully, Xbox Live presents a number of ways to achieve a connection and it was through explaining and helping to implement one of these (cheaper) alternatives that I solved Dave’s problem this evening.
Needless to say, the router will be taking a swift journey back to the numpty at the computer store. Possibly with some choice words, I should imagine.
In closing, I am reminded of yet another excellent quote from the late, great Douglas Adams:
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
Having been ill over the weekend with some kind of nefarious head cold, I haven’t really done anything worth blogging. For this reason, I am now blogging my lack of blogging.
And with that, I’ll leave you pondering an amusing quote from Douglas Adams:
“First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve realised it’s a brochure.”
This week, I will be mostly listening to the podcasts from Web Essentials 2005.
I can’t heartily recommend them if, like me, you couldn’t get to the web development conference ”Web Essentials 2005” in Sydney.
Ok, for any of you out there that aren’t getting this: accessible forms, written using web standards, are NOT THAT DIFFICULT. However, contrary to your own belief that you are God’s gift to web development, you will need to put in some leg-work to learn the basics.
Here’s a list of the steps you should take to acheive web standards form zen.
If you’re still doing it wrong, you probably need to read that fantastic tutorial on form accessibility again. Lots of times. Until your mind bleeds.
Pet hate of the week: People who ask questions but don’t really listen to the answers.
Coping with stubborn developers is usually something that goes along with the job but, on occasion, you’ll come up against a real “brick-wall” person. These are the kind of developers that appear interested in learning techniques but continue using their own method through bloody-mindedness. Normally this isn’t a problem and you’ll let them get on with things. That is, however, until their method falls on it’s crappy bad-coded arse and their left floundering for a solution…
Then comes the vicious circle of questions and not really listening to the answers.
Over the past month or so I must have told the developer in question to read up about CSS specificity (and supplied Patrick Griffith’s excellent tutorial) at least 4 times. Guess what? I’m still having to tell him that ID selectors are more specific than classes.
And to top it all, I’ve just discovered he’s using old javascript techniques instead of DOM scripting…
I give up - it’s not worth the arguments!
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