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2002-03-21 Entry: "Small Steps"

I exist! Well, okay, I exist as far as people who need to contact me to sort out stuff for Dallas are concerned. I've actually heard something... admittedly it's a lot of contact names, pointers to information, and a hint to fill out some form, but at least it's progress.

The form looks fairly easy. Name, address, date of birth, social security number (national insurance number perchance?), and other obvious things (like whether they need to pay for me to take the wife and seven kids with me). They also pointed me at a flash animation that's supposed to help indicate what my salary is likely to be. Now, I'll freely admit to loathing flash with a passion. It's usually pasted across a web page which then takes twenty minutes to load (even at work), and provides no functionality that couldn't be given with java/javascript. It also breaks the "Back" functionality that browsers are supposed to provide - you navigate through a few pages, click the back key and end up outside the site with the flash stuff (meaning you have to load the damned thing all over again).

But anyway, this presentation comes as an exe file rather than straight flash, so I can save it off and play it at my leisure. It plays in this TV type display, with pointless buttons at the bottom (play, skip forward, skip back, pause, turn off, mute sound), as well as a great "Change TV" button that changes the style of the borders (making the TV look like a different model) - there are about eight different looks; but how pointless is that?! I guess if you get bored of the presentation you can play with the tv...

Talking of TVs, last night saw the return of Susan Lewis to ER (and the departure of a second regular in two episodes... they're going to start running out of doctors if they're not careful). For the life of me I can't see what I used to see in her. Perhaps it's just that she was the only attractive female at the time (as I never found Carol Hathaway attractive). But last night, not a thing. Obviously I've been spoiled by the irritating, but attractive Lucy Knight and the much less irritating Kim Legaspi.

And the West Wing's back on as of Sunday (9pm, so dovetailing nicely with 24/Wolf Lake and the X-Files). Yay!