I woke up this morning with the feeling that I didn’t really want to participate too heavily in today.  I’m tired and my to-do list is full of things I really don’t want to do.

Then I sat at a set of traffic lights and watched in my rear-view mirror as the woman behind me used a set of tweezers to pull out hair from her chin while waiting for the light the change.

It is nice to know that the world still has the power to surprise me, no matter how tired and fed up I may be.

I’m busy.  And impatient.  Consider it a symptom of a Gen-X, child of the 80’s type lifestyle, but I really don’t have time to waste.  So why is it that websites still think that when looking to purchase their software, I’ll want to read pages of text about how great it is and then spend the next fifteen minutes trying to find how much it will cost?

This happens time and again.  Find intruiging software review on a website somewhere, click through to website selling said software to look a little further into it.  Find a page full of the standard sales spiel (the software will change your life/work/outlook/productivity/dress size), a few screenshots that are generally too small for the human eye to casually see and a couple of testimonials from people I’ve never heard of.

The one thing that an awful lot of these websites fail to have on their product pages is the price.  That is an important one for me.  I don’t really want to get all excited about a product that will change my life or my dress size and then find that it is going to cost somewhere in the vicinity of a small country’s GDP to purchase.  I’ve seen it; brilliant pieces of software, fabulous things that will change the way I work, but no clue as to how much dough I need to cough up.

So please, stick a big sign on your product’s home page with the cost; it’ll save me time and will give you a better chance of seeing my wallet. 

Greenpeace have launched a campaign against Japanese Whaling by using Origami. Download and make an origami whale, send it to Greenpeace and they’ll deliver all the whales to the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo.

Whaling has been a personal issue of mine for many, many years now, and I’m happy to continue supporting Greenpeace’s efforts on this front – especially by making something cute.

Get your Whale instructions or jump straight to the pdf.

Technorati Tags: greenpeace, whales, whaling, origami

Well, the semester has unofficially started again, and once more I am up to my eyeballs in extra work.  This year I am much more organised than I was last year (starting a new job in the same week as study commenced was not terribly helpful) so I’m hoping that I can use my newfound organisational ability to keep me focussed and on track with study.

One thing I have already done is input not only my assignments into my to-do list, but the modules that have to be completed as well.  That way, instead of it being something that needs to be remembered every week, I have a constant reminder that my module is sitting waiting for me.  I think this might keep it all a little more fresh in my mind, and stop me wandering off doing other things.

For a while now, Technorati and I haven’t been seeing eye to eye. I’ll post something, ping Technorati from both the inbuilt Wordpress ping system as well as a manual ping via Technorati’s page, and Technorati will completely ignore me. Sometimes the post shows up hours later, and sometimes it takes days. This also used to happen to a wordpress.com blog I had.

Oh Technorati, why hath thou forsaken me?

/random gripe

Technorati Tags: technorati, update, tags, annoying