Surrealism is..

.. doing up a website in a language you aren't terribly familiar with. especially if it isn't romanised. in particular, the Chinese version of the English site I had recently finished designing for a client. Sure, I've been given a bunch of text and instructions on what to cut-n-paste and where, but my forgotten knowledge of Chinese characters is rather limited to start with and to be honest, I don't know what most of the stuff given to me means, and obviously they assumed i did. (for all you know they're saying "we're never wrong. any errors on this website are the responsibility of the web designer who worked on this Chinese version of the site, who, by the way, doesn't know Chinese".) that's what you get for being a banana*. well at least I know enough about the strokes in Chinese characters to make informed comparisons to ensure consistency within the site.. but I seriously need to re-learn Mandarin, properly...

Speaking of learning. I wanna learn the drums too. (Empress is gonna lecture me for this :-D)

*Person of Chinese origin who doesn't know Chinese (Bananas - white on the outside, yellow on the inside!)

ActionScipt experts.. 'elp!

the hazards of learning advanced design tools as you go along is that you become an expert CPA (i.e. copy & paste artist; term courtesy of my former colleagues in consulting..) and understand only the bits of code you use for that specific effect you wanted to create.

a site i'm working on needs to have certain images rotated (randomly) every time the home page loaded/refreshed. using Flash, i incorporated a bit of ActionScript to get the images to load randomly, based on what was recommended here. that worked like a dream. however, when i added in the bit of script for a preloader like this one here, the randomiser script didn't work no more, i just got a blank space where the image was supposed to be.

yikes.

didn't have time to figure out what the conflict was, so i left the Flash movie without the preloader for now.

any pointers?

(one day.. one day.. i will program an entire site with bells and whistles without having to google "free script" or consult a manual! har har har)

blah, blah

There's a discussion group I'm on where there has been a recent spate of out-of-office emails being inadvertently sent to the group by the respective persons' e-mail systems at work.

Then someone who was probably not too technology-inclined (and probably also in a bad mood that day) posted:

"I get so much of this rubbish coming in telling me who is in his office and who is not! Can we please stop this? I DO NOT need to know who is in or out of his office and this forum is NOT for this sort of info! Have a great break or holiday OR whatever it is you are doing outside your office but please do not tell me about it!"

.. hats off to the long-suffering moderator who had to draft a long spiel after the above outburst about the fact that neither the poor individuals who went on holiday, nor the moderator, could do anything about an automated process found on most groupware/email systems which the poor chap apparently had never encountered ..

"1984"

ever seen Apple's earth-shattering "1984" ad which ran only once during the Super Bowl but which was phenomenally influential?

To quote a description from somewhere on the Net (cos I'm too lazy to paraphrase):

"In the third quarter of the 1984 Super Bowl, a strange and disorienting advertisement appeared on the TV screens of the millions of viewers tuned in to the yearly ritual. The ad opens on a gray network of futuristic tubes connecting blank, ominous buildings. Inside the tubes, we see cowed subjects marching towards a cavernous auditorium, where they bow before a Big Brother figure pontificating from a giant TV screen. But one lone woman remains unbroken. Chased by storm troopers, she runs up to the screen, hurls a hammer with a heroic grunt, and shatters the TV image. As the screen explodes, bathing the stunned audience in the light of freedom, a voice-over announces, "On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce the Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984." "

our Marketing lecturer made quite an impact on the class describing the above ad (which half the class was not really aware of since they were still screaming kids in the year 1984). the guys seemed particularly interested in the description of a leggy Brigitte Nielsen in tight-fitting white t-shirt and red shorts [yes, such detail.. see the impact of the ad?] running in with a sledgehammer. a copy of the ad was downloaded from the Net, and the guys were rather disappointed to find that the 80's perception of a voluptuous leggy 6-foot blonde didn't quite match their current expectations. ha ha. anyway, if you're a george orwell fan AND a mac addict, you might identify with the ad. (there's a streaming version in the above link.)