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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘Conrad Johnston’
26.03.2020
During the 2011 ‘snowpocalypse’, my friend, the drag queen Olivia St Redfern, produced a series of streamed video programmes called Leisure Lounge. If I recall correctly, the intent was to give people, who had not experienced snow in our city (it’s a once-in-70-year event), some light entertainment. I called in as ‘Charlie’ (with apologies to John Forsythe) with the catchphrase, ‘Good morning, Angels.’ We didn’t have a ton of viewers—they were in the double digits—but those who did watch were loyal.
Now we’re in a national lockdown for ‘coronapocalypse’, Olivia’s started again with Leisure Lounge, but this time as a podcast, where you can follow her progress each day. It’s quite fun to share the experience, and she welcomes responses. However, I found the Anchor recording method terrible (it messed up a five-minute response I sent to her yesterday), so I redid it for her today. You’ll need to listen to the second episode for context, and, if it’s of any interest, here is my reply.
After all that, I may as well continue doing the odd podcast as well—something I had the opportunity to do 20 years ago. Better late than never.
Tags: 2020, Anchor, Aotearoa, Conrad Johnston, COVID-19, entertainment, humour, life, New Zealand, Olivia St Redfern, podcast, Spotify, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara Posted in culture, humour, interests, internet, New Zealand, Wellington | 1 Comment »
11.02.2012

A final postscript on my IE9 blank-window bug, again solved, as so many technological matters are here, by not following the advice of a self-proclaimed “expert”.
Hayton at the McAfee forums—which seem to be populated with polite people—mentioned the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer earlier today. This checks for what updates are missing, etc.
As I was told that my missing Windows 7 updates were a direct cause of my ‘injudicious’ use of System Restore by the man from Microsoft—who then proceeded to say that the only way to fix my blank-window issue was to format my hard drive—I wanted to confirm that he was wrong about everything.
You see, he was wrong about the cause of the bug. He missed the basic fact that before my System Restore, IE9 was already not working. And I suspected he was wrong about the updates, since they should have occurred before the System Restore.
This is what you get with some of these experts: they’re never right.
And lo and behold, what did I discover?
Just as I expected: Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer reported that all my updates were up to date and I wasn’t missing a thing.
Lesson: believe polite people. Disbelieve snarky people. Especially if they tell you to format your hard drive.
Speaking of experts, Conrad Johnston found gold today for our Font Police site. In Whitby, there are some Experts in property—that’s right, with a capital E. If you’ve been to our Font Police site before, you’ve never seen anything this bad yet. One façade, countless offences—it’s the funniest one we’ve ever had.
Finally, here’s a Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 thread that’s even weirder, as one user finds that the browser is incompatible with Helvetica and Neue Helvetica. Mine works with these families, but it looks like the only way William La Martin got his IE9 going was to delete them.
Based on recent experience, the IE developers at Microsoft really have a problem with handling fonts.
Tags: Conrad Johnston, customer service, Font Police, fonts, McAfee, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, software, technical support, typefaces, typography, UK, USA Posted in internet, technology, UK, USA | No Comments »
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