ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

I was on the Team Valley ‘Retail World’ retail park the other day, sitting in a coffee shop tucked away in Borders bookshop. I’m presuming it was a Starbucks as they are pretty much ubiquitous but it could theoretically have been ‘Costa Coffee’ or something similar. Not that this is really relevant, but there you go.

Anyway the point being was that I was gazing out of the window when I saw a couple of people heading towards my car, looking around themselves as they were going. ‘What’s going on here?’ I thought to myself but was slightly relieved to see that they were just dumping advertising leaflets on the windscreens of cars in the vicinity and that they had just happened to start with mine.

Anyway, they did a few more cars, and then suddenly seemed to disappear, which seemed odd, as they’d had an armload of leaflets (once I’d figured out what it was that they were carrying).

However when I finished my coffee and went back to the car, I discovered on the way another car which suggested to me exactly how they had managed to get rid of their leaflets so quickly…

Continue reading Interest Free »

I might have mentioned before that my four year old, BTP, is something of a Dr. Who nut. And I don’t just mean new Dr. Who (I’m no longer sure whether his favourite Doctor is David Tennant, Tom Baker or Patrick Troughton…)

I told him that I’d buy him a treat when I started my new job, and he asked for the ‘Bred For War’ boxed set which has just come out featuring Dr. Who and the Sontarans (a Jon Pertwee story, two Tom Baker stories, and one story which sees Colin Baker and Patrick Troughton appearing together).

He’s become quite a fan of Patrick Troughton — despite the fact he keeps wondering what has happened to the colour and what is even more alarming is that I appear to be developing this same Dr. Who-itis.

Continue reading Patrick Troughton: A Warning »

I just thought I’d share with you some tales of my sporting prowess. Remember me mentioning the inter-departmental five a side team?

Well, just look at the trophy I got presented with!

I was presented with this trophy for “services to goalkeeping”, and also picked up another medal. Not bad, eh?

The exact award reads — and I know it’s difficult to see with the light reflecting off it:

Services to Goalkeeping
Girls Allowed
Council 5aS League Spring 2008Trophy

Continue reading Up For The Cup »

Well. Today was my last day at work with my old employers.

It was a bit odd today, as at least half the department weren’t in today anyway, but it’s been a weird sort of week anyway. After all, you don’t work somewhere for nine and a half years without developing some attachments.

And you don’t necessarily want to — or expect to — sever all of those attachments.

Particularly since that’s where I met my wife, for example…

Continue reading So Long… »

Last week, to mark the 30th anniversary of the very first spam message (sent over ARPANET, the precursor to today’s internet), Sophos have put forward a spam pledge. If everyone followed this pledge, there would be no financial benefit to anyone sending spam and so we’d get an awful lot less.

And just as importantly, buying anything from any of the spammers continues to fund their spamming activities. So repeat after me…

I, [NAME], do solemnly promise to you, my fellow internet users, that I will do my bit to fight the problem of spam, resist the temptation of weight loss adverts, fake Rolex watches, pump-and-dump stock market scams, and ways to increase the size of my body parts. And so henceforth, I make this pledge. To not click on links in unsolicited mail and never buy goods advertised via spam.Sophos Blog: Sophos Spam Pledge

[Image used with permission: thanks to Sophos]

Continue reading Repeat After Me »

I’ve been sorting stuff out.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m changing jobs next week and so I’ve had to prepare to take home all the personal crap I’ve accumulated in nine and a half years with one employer — which appears to consist of a family photo, about nine and a half years worth of payslips, a dilbert desk calendar (much to the disgust of my colleagues who were hoping that would remain), and perhaps least usefully, a little device that was embedded in a chocolate advent calendar back in December 1999 that produces a Bart Simpson laugh when you press it.

You know, important stuff.

Continue reading Of Studies And SEPs »

Earlier on in the season, I mentioned Gateshead FC: I could get used to this, in reference to the fact that my local non-league club had won their first seven games of the season, and were flying towards promotion from the Unibond Premier League to the Blue Square North.

(For those of you not up on football stats, the Premier League is England’s top division. Below that, you have the Championship, then League 1, then League 2. Below that is what is referred to as ‘non-league football’ and there you have the Blue Square Conference as the premier non-league division, and the lowest division that is national - as below the Blue Square Conference, you have two regional divisions, Blue Square North and Blue Square South).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it wasn’t possible for Gateshead to continue winning all of their games, and they slipped down the table a bit, eventually finishing in 3rd place, enough to secure a play-off spot (the champions get promoted automatically, positions 2-5 play off for one remaining promotion spot). Although we did manage to finish as the joint highest scorerst in any of Englands top divisions, scoring 93 league goals (and a total of 133 now in all competitions this season).

Continue reading Chasing Promotion »

I believe I may have mentioned before (Knock the F***er down) that I didn’t like Owen Luder’s Brutalist car park in Gateshead’s town centre.

Nevertheless, I was intrigued to see the other week that Gateshead Council were offering one Last Chance to Get Carter — or rather, a last chance to visit the car park featured in said film — by opening up the normally closed parts of the car park to the public on the 26th and 27th of April.

As the building is scheduled for demolition, and it’s been dominating the Gateshead skyline for forty years, and it’s my last chance to visit it, and I think it’s an ugly monstrosity that should be knocked down, and I realise not everyone agrees with that (although most residents I speak to do), and I realise that some people who might have wanted to visit it won’t get the chance, so I decide to pay a visit.

Continue reading Getting Carter One Last Time »

I bought a new phone.

Owing to the fact that my new job won’t involve working in the same office as my wife and the friends I tend to go drinking with, I had a sneaking suspicion that I was likely to be spending more on telephone calls.

So I decided to go for one of those ‘pay monthly’ contract things. This is a little unusual for me. You see, the main reason I’ve been on pay-as-you-go for so long is that I understand exactly how these monthly contract wotsits work.

You know, where you work out how much you currently spend per month on your phone (£12 to £15), add a little bit to cater for the increased usage and then end up with a contract that’s setting you back £60 a month for the next four years because you get a phone with a camera and so many other add ons that not only can you make calls whilst on the lavatory, it will wipe your backside for you.

Well not me, I said. So on thursday I took a half-day off from work and headed across to Newcastle to work out what the best value phone I could get would be…

Continue reading Geeks And Gadgets »

A phrase you might have come across, if you’ve looked into disability issues at all, particularly as they relate to the web, or you’ve looked at the topic of web accessibility is people who are sometimes termed internet disabled.

Now this isn’t an official term (at least, so far as I know), but from the contexts I’ve seen it used in, I understand this to mean someone who has a disability that affects the way they access computers and the internet.

This is to reflect that while someone who uses a wheelchair to get around more easily may not need any special adaptations in order to use a computer (and doesn’t need sites to be specifically designed to be accessible) but someone who can’t see, can’t move their arms, or don’t have sufficiently fine motor control to use something like a mouse are likely to encounter problems without adaptive technology and accessible websites.

And this week I’ve been internet disabled myself, through the most mundane of methods.

Continue reading Being Internet Disabled »