tonywhitmore.co.uk  

Like Aq has for his site, I’ve enabled OpenID for comments on this site. You can now use your OpenID to leave comments, although I’d welcome feedback about any problems you come across. So please try it and let me know! I’ve used the WPOpenID+ plugin for WordPress and there are a few limitations. For example it doesn’t handle redirects in your OpenID URL. However, I’ll keep an eye on development and make sure any bug fixes are applied.

Dear Asics,

1. Do not create your website entirely inside Flash when HTML can provide almost all of the functionality your pages need.
2. Do not require pop-ups to be allowed from your site to let me view it.
3. Do not hide the navigation bar and menus in my browser, preventing me from easily seeing URLs and bookmarking them.
4. Do not use only metric weights in a site designed for the UK. Provide both metric and imperial.
5. When providing a drop-down box for distances, provide units. Are we talking miles or kilometres?
6. Having made people endure this site, do not make one of the two final suggestions “Undefined”.
7. Do not create your website entirely inside Flash so that users have to go through all the questions again instead of hitting the “back” button in a browser.
8. In fact, don’t create your website in Flash at all. Use Open Standards so that anyone can use your site and maybe buy some of your products.

Thanks.

Last night Laura and I went to see Kevin Smith give one of his famous Q&A sessions at the Prince Charles Cinema off Leicester Square. We got up to London in plenty of time and enjoyed a great chinese meal at the Superstar restaurant on Lisle Street. Here we watched the queue grow until it reached back down to Leicster Square proper, which is where we joined it. By the time the doors opened, the queue was at least twice as long again.

For some reason ice cream from the Haagen-Daaz store seemed like a good way of cooling down after the chinese, although the wind howling down Leicester Place soon did that too. Whilst waiting in the queue, chatting to the people around us, I spotted John Prescott approaching the queue. After looking confused for a few seconds, he met up with a blonde woman and went on his way. We did wonder whether he was a fan of Kevin and was going to join the queue. Surprisingly, he looked just like he does on TV (most people look different in the flesh).

The venue is intimate; there were about two hundred people in the stalls, and I’d guess at a hundred more on the balcony. The show eventually kicked off at about half seven with Kevin wandering in from the rear of the auditorium. He then proceeded to talk for the next three and a half hours straight, fielding questions from microphones placed in the aisles. I know from the DVDs that he’s a hell of a raconteur, but keeping it up for that amount of time is impressive. The whole evening was funny, with particular highlights being the descriptions of his dogs sexual relations with each other and the audience trying to convince Kevin to try British dishes like Toad in the Hole and Black Pudding. (”I never realised the English were so obsessed with pigs. ‘What else can we do with it? Let’s cut out its anus and drink its blood!’”)

As we were leaving the theatre we passed Kevin’s party waiting for a cab, so I asked if I could have a photo taken with Kevin, and he seemed happy to pose. Really, really annoyingly I had left the camera configured to use a specific focus point in the frame rather than let it select one. So when Laura took the photo, the camera focussed perfectly on the wall in the centre of the frame, between Kevin and myself. It also metered the flash for that distance. So I now have a slightly blurry, over-exposed photo of Kevin and me standing in front of a wall. Although I’ve done what I can, I wish I had access to the magic tools used on CSI that make any blurry photo better.