Grey writing!

I am really annoyed with all this grey writing on websites all over the place. What is the reason for it? All media is printed as black text on a white background. Grey is not a colour that should be  used, and yet more and more international publications are using this stupid colour. Stop this madness now!

Just doing  a quick test, it appears that even wordpress and jumped on the bandwaggon. How stupid. Idiots!

Update: I was able to alter the CSS default font colour but then I realised that wordpress now doesn’t allow you to save any changes you make to the CSS. You used to be able to do it in the past, but they are charging money for it now. Oh well, I’ll just have to do it manually for every post I make. Sigh. It’s not exactly some great feature either! Sheesh. Idiots! And changing the font color of the headers (h3) doesn’t appear to be possible even in preview. IDIOTS!!!!

Of bailouts

Is it not true that in business, the basic principle is that if you are providing a service which is of value to others, you will have customers, your earnings will outweigh your costs and you will make a profit. With that profit, you can grow your business to gain more customers and further increase your profits. The profits are used to reward those who work for you in the form of salaries, and those who invested earlier on, seeing the potential that your business could and did achieve.

Now if this is true, why is it that all over the world governments are bailing out businesses that have gone off course and have found themselves unable to have higher earnings than expenditures and unable to function as a business any longer? Why do they insist on propping up these unprofitable and badly run organizations? Yes, yes, there are all the jobs of the employees to consider. But by maintaining businesses using bailout cash, you are just paying for staff costs, the last part of the cycle of business, without any of the other, vital, preceding stages being present. This creates an artificial “business” which is better described as an “organziation” than a true business.

This is exactly what happened in the dying days of the Soviet Union, and look what that got them. People say that it is “irresponsible” to let big businesses fail, because they are simply “too big” to fail. Well they sure as hell may be big, but they have failed. Let them die peacefully without prolonging their lives by agonizing artificial means, which are destined only to damage the wider economy of the nation itself more in the longer term than a short term loss of jobs.

What is truly irresponsible is not regulating the businesses earlier on when their profits were sky-high, and preventing them from becoming over-inflated unproductive collections of mere worker units. That was the irresponsible action, that was where the failure started, and because of a lack of will to reign in excesses of the good (albeit debt-fuelled) times, most probably because of certain side-benefits to the governments in question, this is the commupance that we reap now.

Time for Rejuvenation!

OK well it’s been nearly 2 years since I last updated. That. Will. CHANGE. (/obama mode off)

Right so as an update, what I will try and do here is to just comment on anything and everything that interests me.

First off, a little bit of news: ANIME IS AMAZING! I just started getting into it properly and I think I can do without a TV quite well! Secondly, more stuff will come soon

News!

Well the project is on hold indefinitely as I’m just not ready. Anyway, I think I’ll just keep this as a short diary type thing. I think this “journal” has now morphed into a photography type thing. Yay. Did some more gardening, got the camera out about half an hour ago and got snapping. I think this is pretty cool, but I can’t think of a surreal enough title. Took me ages to log into this account since I couldn’t find my WordPress password. Stupid Gmail didn’t search properly! It’s too specific! Damn it!

I was going to rush off to House, but I turned it on in the study and it turns out that this episode is crap. I’ll see how it goes and then … OK it definitely is disgusting. Turning it off now.

VonRH

Hmmm

Well, I am still here! It’s just that since the last post I got flooded with far too much work. I really want to keep this going as some kind of diary/journal but it just gets so hard. At least I remembered this and at least I’m back. Right? That counts for something, right? Well, got still got lots of work to do. If I ever get some kind of fanbase/following, I will be rather pleased! OK, VERY VERY pleased! Very happy in fact. Hopefully I will.

Until then, let me just say that I will endeavour to keep this updated and hopefully greatly improve my writing style, and develop it into something that even Boris Johnson would be proud of!

Always appreciate your raf!

VonRH

Of updates…

So the plan to write every day kinda got lost in the abyss that is the work I have to do. I think it will be have to be a weekly type thing. Oh well. (lol I thought of that exact line while coming home on the Tube! And here I am writing it.)

So how goes the Project? Well I did a bit more work on it since my last post. I went back over a troublesome chapter/section and I think I understand it better now. I carried on for a bit exclusively with the Project work, to the detriment of my other work… well not detriment, but just ignoring my other work. Then I realised my official “main” work of this year required another, different project to be due very very soon indeed. About a month from now. And this is huge! So I set about getting to grips with it, which of course meant that my time for the Project is reduced.

I did realise that the small project draft was due in by around mid-February some time ago, but I didn’t quite grasp that it had to be almost complete by then!

Aside from that minor hiccup, I have also become worried because while working on the Project (i.e. before starting the small work) I realised that I spend very little time of my day actually working on the Project! Maybe 2 hours on one day (well perhaps closer to 3) and generally around 4-5 hours. I really need to get 8 hours done. What do I do in the other periods? Well it seems that I’m either relaxing/taking a “break” (more like a hiatus it now seems!) or eating. Oh god how crap!

That’s why today, and especially after having spoken to someone I work with and learning how he works for a long period from end of work to around 8/9pm, even foregoing food, before relaxing and going to bed, I was determined to actually do work before coming on here to write a journal entry and sleep. It took me longer than I hoped to get started, but these delays were essential (toilet (lol) and sending an important email). So I don’t feel too bad about it.

Also, I feel as if I’m onto a good start and on a role now with the Small project, so that’s good Hopefully I will be able to interlace some Project work too as I continue tomorrow. I think if I work at a steady pace on this Small project, then I will be able to finish it, and do it well, by the draft deadline of mid-February, and then I can finish it off before the final deadline of late March. This means that after late-February I will be have this (new) huge weight lifted off my shoulders/head, and be able to get on with the Project work.

Anyway really sleepy, will get up tomorrow early (somehow! unlike in the past) and get down to business!

First Contact

So here we go.

 I did initially plan on setting this up yesterday, the day that I started working on the Project while the school term had started, but, well, it didn’t happen. Admittedly, I did waste a lot of time watching footage of the Macworld conference 2007.

 So what is the purpose of this blog? I never really got into blogging before, but I just love WordPress, so I wanted to make one. Soon I’ll get this up on my very own site. So the purpose: my plan is to use this online blog to document the significant portions of my work-related life. Without a doubt, this will be the hardest year of my life, simply because I am preparing for the Project whilst at the same time continuing with my school work.

 I don’t intend anyone else to be reading this. It is purely for my own records. If someone does find it, I hope you are intrigued at the least and (although this is a bit egotistical) hooked at the most I always wanted to be able to write compelling stuff.

 I managed to get 4-5 hours of work done yesterday. Less than I’d hoped, but not bad nonetheless. I’ve been working on the Project since around the 1st of January 2007. But only in bits and pieces. Yesterday was probably quite close to how I expect most Project days to go in terms of work done, style of working, answering questions, etc.

 Why am I so elusive about this Project? Well, it’s because I don’t want to go broadcasting it to anyone who happens to stumble on this page. More will be revealed in due course, and perhaps once the Poject is complete I will reveal all, but total completion will take a good few years. I will say more once the First Phase is complete.

A little about the Project As I said above, it is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.  In fact, it is definitely going to be THE hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, and I don’t think there will be anything harder that I could do. And the First Phase is the hardest of this. To be accurate, I should say: First Phase will be the hradest thing that I could ever do.

A little about me I’m attending a school currently. No more details than that. My interests include writing, reading, technology, being a general anti-Apple/pro-Microsoft (generally though, not crazily), and commenting on current affairs. I’m not saying any more, except that as I make posts, I will no doubt mention things that will give away little tidbits of information about me and my life. Watch out for them, if you’re really that interested.

 I saw the footage of Macworld 2007. I must admit that I was quite taken-in by Steve Jobs’ excellent showmanship, and got hooked on the iPhone. But then I turned off my PC to get some work done on the Project, and found myself thinking about it a bit more. Then I realised, that in fact, it isn’t all that great. Sure it looks nice and has a nice screen and a cool interface, but my Sony Ericsson k800i does everything a smartphone and the new iPhone does, without any problem. So the screen is smaller on my phone than on Apple’s, but it’s bright and clear. And the camera is almost as good as my stand-alone digital camera (also Sony btw). I just remembered, he didn’t actually show much about the camera, maybe that was because it wasn’t ready yet or wasn’t very good. Disappointing that it was only 2 megapixels (mine camera phone is 3.2Mp). And anyway, are you really going to be sitting there looking at your phone? I think not. I use mine to make calls every so often, check texts, and listen to music when I’m on the Tube. I don’t want to be holding my phone out for all to see it gleaming and luring thieves and yobs with its One Ring type powers while I watch a video or film on it.

 And that’s the other point. To be able to fully enjoy the product, you have to be continually buying films, tv shows, etc from iTunes. I don’t have the money for that. I would have been interested if I could put my store-bought DVDs and home recorded TV (if I had any worth watching) on to the iPhone, but no doubt the machine uses DRM to prevent anything but iTunes-bought content from going on.

 And it sure is nice to have email and cool looking web browsers on your phone, but how much is that going to cost per KB or MB from the service provider? A lot. And why would you want to put your personal pictures on the phone? Are you really going to sit somewhere showing people all your photos? It’s only going to make it much worse when you lose your phone with all your home albums on it! He makes  a big deal about scrolling through lists of contacts and songs with your finger, but he always seemed to use his fingernail to scroll. I wonder what would happen if you scroll with the pad of your finger. I bet the iPhone recognises that as a [selection]. And anyway, if you have a big list, you just use the keypad to select the letter of the alphabet you want. On my phone you can even type in a name buy pressing the required sequence of keys in rapid succession (as if you were writing an old style (pre T9) text message):

 “1″ twice (for B), then
“2″ twice (for E), etc till you get “Ben” or whatever.

We’ll see how it goes, but I don’t think it is as much a must-have as Jobs made it seem. Enough for now I think, I’m very hungry. I’ll post again tonight once I get some more Project done. Keep reading (if you actually are reading). 

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