Return of the Nightmare on Freyberg Street

It Lives!
Apparently someone at the council said that the myopic design for the house on number 2 was, surprise, surprise, inappropriate.
Hurrah, we cried. The little people have won!
But no. It is not to be.
The decision process at our council seems to work like this:
They devise a series of guidelines that determine the setbacks and boundaries for dwellings on a block. Streetscape rapists come along and pick a design off the internet that is well outside the boundaries and setbacks specified by the "guidelines".
The process is in place.
The council planners correctly flag the design as inappropriate and things are looking good. But wait, lurking around the corner is a planning department superior who flies in the face of the guidelines and returns a positive verdict for the vandals. Why have a guideline? Why have a planning department? Why does the council waste ratepayers' money employing these people if all they're going to do is bend over to the people pushing these out of place home designs?
I can't believe that the developers don't have the resources to employ a half competent architect to come up with a house plan that fits on the block and won't stand out like a sore thumb. But instead they run a quick Google search and come up with a bog standard A.V. Jennings nightmare that has about as much street appeal as a pile of dog shit.
Its the thin edge of the wedge my friends. In 12 years time people will drive into Richley Reserve past rows of soulless A.V. Jennings homes and say to their kids that this used to be a really nice place to live.
Now it looks like any crappy street in Merewether or Fletcher.
Welcome to the future. For a preview, walk down Hooper Street or look at the image of their 'redesign' above.
Note the timber upper bit. According to the council's team of crack development approvers, this makes a lot of difference to the "streetscape friendliness" of the dwelling. It is still an inappropriate kit home.
The council should be renamed the 'Fruit Fly Circus' as they seem to be able to perform multiple back flips in a single conversation.
At one stage they say that the erection of a car port too close to the front boundary in an adjoining property can't be done as it will "affect the streetscape", and before drawing breath, they'll say that relaxing the setbacks so a shoebox can be squeezed onto the block is OK because the guidelines "are only guidelines".
Where does it leave us?
Who the fuck knows! You can't argue against any sort of hideous construction because the council isn't swayed by the character of a street, yet you can't build a half decent car port too close to the boundary because it'll upset the "street scape". I can't figure it out.
There was an on-site meeting yesterday (June 27) with the council's development team, some councilors, the mayor and a whole bunch of disenfranchised residents about a similar proposal in an adjacent street.
The developer guys couldn't wait to get out of there.
The Lord Mayor's response to the proposed building's imposing bulk and its affect on privacy was that these issues can be fixed by "privacy screens"!!!
Stay tuned for an update on that little debacle as well.
I remain,
Your obedient servant
Vomoir.
Check this out. Its Google groups thingy that has a bit more detail (if you're interested).

The Pitfalls of Web Design and a Happy Marriage

To paraphrase Kid Creole:

"If you want to stay happy for the rest of your life, never make a web designer your wife, so for my personal point of view get another girl to marry you"

My wife's not a web designer, she's a face painter and I'm in the throes of trying to redesign her rather pedestrian website which I threw together in haste a while back. Thing is, I want to try and get my web design chops up to some sort of professional level, where net aficionados can look at it for all its web standards compliance and exquisite design beauty, but Lisa just wants a mid '90's style frames and tables horror show "like everyone else has got". Sheesh.
I spent hours of my own freaking time working and reworking a minor masterpiece of css and xhtml and came up with a relatively palatable site that looked OK on Firefox but, as was expected looked like an unmade bed on IE.
I sent the url to my sister who works for the local council where they run computer specs straight out of the 70's. She's a good testing site for low resolution html rendering as a result of the council's PC frugality and the verdict was negative. I had to virtually start again. I can see why most of the web-design community stick to tables and <font> tags. Who needs this css crap anyway. I'll keep chipping away. I suppose the more I do the easier its going to become.
Watch this space.

Ship Ahoy!

Newcastle suffered the worst storm in 30 years on the weekend just past. Some say it was classified as a Category 1 Cyclone, which is pretty far out.
A ship ran aground in the wee hours of Friday morn right smack on one of the city's most iconic beaches: Nobbies.
No one on the ship was injured but there's the ever present threat of fuel leakage if the ship's hull integrity is compromised. So far so good. As of this writing the port authority is awaiting the arrival of tugs from far afield as Singapore and Melbourne.
Our place only got a bit of water in the garage, no big deal. The biggest tragedy for us was that our internet connection was down for a good five (5) minutes.
Others weren't so lucky.

What Does "My Bad" Mean?

Seriously, what does it mean?
My Bad. My Bad what. Where's the verb. Why do Americans insist on making nouns and adjectives into verbs.
As mentioned I was at the Google Developer Day last week and one of the presenters had the word 'incentivize' in his slide.
This is up there with 'my bad'. If you stick 'ize' and the arse end of anything it suddenly becomes a freaking verb. You in effect 'verbize' it.
It's this whole verbization that makes me quite cross. You do it often enough and suddenly you've got a whole bunch of new words polluting the wordosphere. Diarize is a beauty. Monetize is another that Google has introduced into the Geek's lexicon.

Google Developer's Day

Phil the neighbour and I attended the Google Developer's Day in Sydney on the 31st.
Quite a sumptuous affair seeing as they provided lunch, snacks and drinks all day and they didn't charge a bean.
I felt a bit of a hypocrite as I don't use any Google development stuff but did I mention it was free?
Interesting day, with the boffins from Google showing the application of their various apis and javascripty goodness.
Expect to see lots of maps and stuff appearing here soon.
Of particular interest was the new Google Gears api wherein your shiny new ajax application can persist its data locally using a modified version of SQLLite, so if you suffer fomr a network outage, your app will soldier on regardless. Neat.
Also the maps api was particularly interesting. It looks rather straight forward so now I'm going to add maps aplenty to my Hunter Skysailors website. The Google Web Toolkit looks particularly choice: complete ajax applications written entirely in Java. There's a slew of support tools and Eclipse plugins available and you don't get bogged down with all of javascript's inconsistencies. Check it out.

Funky Cat

This is one Funky Cat! Why, its none other than Liam after getting an instant makeover from the dedicated professional staff at Funfaces (actually that's Lisa, the better half and Liam's favourite Mum).
One day he'll grow up and be really embarrassed but at the moment he's the cutest kid ever, except for Maddison (in case she's reading this).