HMS Noodles

Being on a diet has had a direct effect on the amount of takeaways I am allowed to eat, reducing my intake level from “whenever I can’t be bothered to cook” to “almost never”. I find myself actually cooking almost every night now, and it seems my repitoir is expaning.

At first it started with Microwave meals. These are the next direct step down in effort from takeaways, as they require mininum effort. After eating rubbery chicken and cardboard rice for a few weeks, you crave a little more and naturally try and recreate the good takeaway taste, but still want to keep effort down to a mininum. Luckly, somone thought of this and invented stir in sauces. Put meat in pan on hob, put sauce in pan, wait, meal ready. It’s not a nice as a good curry from the Gulshan round the corner, but its a damn sight better than the cardboard korma you’ve survived on for the last month.

At this point you’ve got a steady meal on the go. The quality of stir in sauces is reasonably high and you can construct a respectable meal out of one. Infact its so easy you almost forget that you’ve also got to boil rice/potatoes/pasta with it. After a good month or two you realise that by the time you’ve choped up the meat, added sauce and done the rice that you’re almost cooking a full meal, so you might as well actually cook a full meal.

So thats where I am now. I’ve arrived at the end of the 4 part takeaway recovery plan and constructing my own food, without a turkey drummer in sight.

Today I shall highlight such a person that has annoyed me. Her name is Suzanne Shell and she is a disgrace to web masters everywhere. Her site, http://www.profane-justice.org/ is worth looking at if you are thinking of building your own web page, as it does an excellent job of showing you what to avoid. I’ve highlighted the worst parts.

Asthetics - She manages to use about 8 different fonts, 16 different colours and background colours and 10 different text sizes, all on the front page. Perhaps her computing degree didn’t include the words “continunity” and “theme”.

Random Small Ads – God damn I hate this. People that plaster paypal donate, get firefox, get adobe, goto amazon and other crap all over the page. It’s a great was to make your page look like a link farm!

Javascript Abuse – Why god why does this site want access to my clipboard when I visit it. Why god why does it give me a copyright notice when I right click and FOR THE LOVE OF JESUS why would somone put Javascript code in to prevent people from highlighting the text.

This woman is so paranoid of people copying her precious work, that she actually sued Internet Archive (Authors of Way Back Machine) for making a copy of her website. Thats like trying to sue Google for seeing your website in Google cache. It’s like holding a copy of a book you have written up to a mirror, then suing Ikea for making the mirror.

 There is a good article on her http://www.westword.com/2005-02-10/news/beyond-contempt/full thats worth reading. Seems that having a bad website is quite tame considering the other things she gets up too.

She’s been ejected from courtrooms by judges and attacked in a hallway by a convicted child molester she was trying to capture on film. She’s been arrested in Wisconsin for refusing to turn over her video equipment to a police officer and detained at the Colorado Springs Airport because she forgot to remove a .380-caliber pistol from her carry-on items. The mere presence of Shell and her camera put a halt to a Colorado legislative hearing on a family-rights bill a couple of years ago. And she still receives treatment for back pain resulting from being run over by a neighbor’s car in her own driveway; at the time, she was dialing 911 on her cell phone, reporting the driver for making threats to her husband in a dispute involving chickens and dogs.

She thinks she is a very powerful woman, using her superior knowlege and skill to fight the causes of the innocent. It seems most of the time she’s actually doing more harm than good.

Lawyers who’ve gone up against Shell say she can hurt, rather than help, her own clients. “Suzanne’s involvement helps me,” notes Rocco Meconi, a Cañon City attorney who represents the Fremont County Department of Human Services in D&N cases. “I get paid on an hourly basis. When she’s involved, we always have contested hearings, and I make a ton of money. But it doesn’t help the families or the kids.”

Just like to make a little addition at the bottom here. I don’t much care for the actual issues Suzanne Shell is dealing with, it’s happening in a different country, with different laws than mine, and I don’t pretend to know anything about the legal side of child protection and family rights. What I do know from spending a couple of years as a professional web developer is that people judge you by your website. Suzanne if you ever read this, I suggest looking for a propper web development company to construct you a professional looking, modern and functional web site. You’ll be amazed at the difference it will make to your image.