zerosleeps

It’s a smidgen over 18 months since I arrived in Sydney, and it’s been decided that it’s time to stop living with someone else’s furniture and buy our own stuff. So that’s exactly what happened starting about three weeks ago.

An unfurnished unit in the building we’ve lived in since we got here came up for rent, so we took it, went shopping, and are in the process of moving our stuff across the hall from one apartment to the other. Literally across the hall! It’s not as daft as it sounds because we like the building and the location, and the new unit faces in toward a garden in the middle of the building, rather than out onto a noisy road. So there’s that.

The furniture-picked-and-bought-by-us is another obvious plus, and there’s also this business of making our minds up. Maybe now we have all our own stuff, set out the way we want, it’ll feel much more like home and help us feel more settled here in Sydney?

Anyway, that’s what’s happening just now. I’m a bit unsure about posting photos of the place I live on the Intertubes, so here’s a photo of the view from my office instead. Not bad eh? ;-)

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs, 12th June 2005.

You smell that? That’s the smell of fresh pixels.

For those of you with eagle-like vision, you’ll already have spotted that zerosleeps doesn’t quite look the same as it did a couple of months ago. If I’ve done things right though, it shouldn’t look drastically different.

So what exactly has changed then? Well the site is now running on a completely different publishing platform, which gives me complete control over every aspect of what you see (and what you don’t see). For a geek-cum-web-developer like me, that’s a big advantage. Web standards and accessibility are also important to me, and the last platform hosting zerosleeps just didn’t cut the mustard when it came to that kind of stuff. And there was nothing I could do about it either.

The photo galleries in the old pad were also starting to bug me. It didn’t make much sense given the content of this site to write an article, create a photo gallery, and then link one to the other. Now I can combine photos and articles into one thing.

Comments have been disabled. They just weren’t adding anything to the site, and were actually starting to become a pain to moderate: as with all things online, spam comments were by far outweighing actual reader comments.

Still to do: well as I mentioned I’m much happier with photo galleries now, but I’m still not entirely convinced about having each photo open in it’s own page. It feels a bit cumbersome, and navigating from one photo to the next isn’t as intuitive as I’d like it to be. I’m going to try to implement one of those JavaScript light-box things, where photos pop-up over the top of the current page.

So, here we are. New platform, same(ish) look and feel, 100% HTML and CSS compliant, fully accessible, and sans “.com”. That’s right, it’s just “zerosleeps” now, not “zerosleeps.com”. I mean, obviously the URL is still zerosleeps.com, but from this point forward I’m going to refer to this little corner of the intertubes as just zerosleeps.

Welcome. Make yourself at home.

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture has really outdone itself this time.

Update: Tuesday 2 August 2011

Coincidentally, I’ve just arrived home after attending a lecture by Gregory Chamitoff, who was one of the mission specialists aboard STS-134, the last ever space flight for shuttle Endeavour. He was talking about the mission objectives, life aboard the International Space Station, and showed us a stack of cracking photos.

I get the feeling that he could have talked for hours, and he obviously has lots of stories to tell, but he ran out of time. He’s apparently done a lot of teaching at the University of Sydney: I didn’t even know we had a big aeronautical engineering department!

Have you ever gone shopping for a new vacuum cleaner, and looked long and hard at the cylinder cleaners available for purchase? Perhaps they were a little bit cheaper than a more conventional (in the UK anyway) upright cleaner. And just look at the number of attachments you can add to the end of the hose. Plus there’s the compact size and the promise of easy storage.

Well I’m here to tell you that cylinder vacuum cleaners are shite. All of them. The reason they’re cheaper is because they’re useless. Apart from a couple of extra quid in your wallet, all you’ll end up with is a sore back, bashed skirting boards because you have to drag the flecking things around behind you, and dirty carpets.

And the compact size thing is a load of bull as well: they take up more room by the time you stuff the hose and all it’s crappy atachments into a cupboard.

Plus a small vacuum cleaner means a small dust holder thing as well, so you’ll have to empty it more often. Which isn’t actually that big a deal because the two that I’ve had in my life have both refused to pick up any dust or dirt in the first place.

Just another grumble about another home appliance that Australians are obsessed with for reasons which completely escape me.