Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

RegularJen has a post about funny personal ads: it reminded me of this joke.

[Before I start, some background. Elizabeth is a 'satellite city' of Adelaide, Australia; and it is known for having a high number of unemployed residents. It can easily be replaced by whatever town/city/locality you want to bag.]

The Joke:

A welfare auditor noticed an anomaly in the benefits being claimed by a particular Elizabeth single mother: she was claiming child payments for 19 children. he thought he’d better go and visit her - 19 isn’t a totally unbelieveable number of children for one mother to have, but seems pretty high.

So, he visits her house, and talks to her.

“I’m sorry, but I really need to see all 19 children, and proof that they are yours.”

“Yep. No worries. I’ll jeest git them in ‘ere”.

She then proceeded to stick her head out the back door, and at the top of her voice yelled out:

“Waayne! Geet in here!!!” [Wayne can be said with a very thick 'Ocker' Australian Accent.]

A whole bunch of boys of varying ages then began filing into the house. Confused, the inspector asked “So, if they are all called Wayne, how do you tell them apart?”

“Oh, they’ve all got different surnames!”

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Lists are useful in Template design - for instance, the Navigation links at the top of this blog are done with links, and CSS to position them, and remove the bullets, and so on.

The code that handles it:

#topnav
{
	list-style:none;
	font-size:0.9em;
	margin:0 auto;
	padding:12px 20px 0 0;
	text-align:right;
	font-family:Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;
}
#topnav li
{
	list-style:none;
	display:inline;
	padding:0;
	margin:0;
	font-weight:bold;
}

The important bits are the list-style:none;, text-align:right; and display:inline; clauses. They remove bullets, place the text on the right, and make them appear on the same line.

What I’d really like to be able to do is have the CSS put in the ‘pipe’ symbol (|) automatically. That is, all the template user needs to do is put a list item in, and it puts | between each item. This doesn’t seem to be possible with CSS, or at least, I can’t figure out how to do it.

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Gates Sells 12M Microsoft Shares - Forbes.com

Bill Gates has sold about 12 million shares of the company’s common stock in a series of transactions over a five-day period, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Perhaps Bill Gates has decided Microsoft is in trouble: offloading shares while the price is high, knowing that the share price is about to drop.

Other filings showed that Robert Bach, a Microsoft senior vice president, also sold 30,000 shares on Aug. 2. Other Microsoft senior vice-presidents, namely Kevin Johnson, Eric Rudder and Jeffrey Raikes, sold some shares, but their transactions remained below 1,000.

Maybe all of the Microsoft execs are dumping shares on the unsuspecting public.

Gates still owns more than 1 billion shares of Microsoft, which are worth about $27.8 billion at Friday’s closing price.

Maybe not. Gates sold around 1.2% of his shares. It’s like me selling…no hang on, I don’t own any shares. In anything…

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I use Adsense as a way to try and make a little extra cash off my site: I’m not trying to make it a real business or anything like that, I just figure that I may as well do that. I haven’t seen a cheque from Google yet, but it’s only a fairly low traffic site (2-300 hits per day, and most of them on a few posts, including one Sudoku post I wrote ages ago. Still gets more comments than all other posts combined too…).

Anyway, Adsense seems to think my site is all about blogging, when it’s really not. I have written several blogging related posts recently, but there is more depth to my site than that. Occasionally I get AppleScript Ads, and sometimes some Psychic Ads (!?).

What I think is happening is that many of the posts are short, and Google indexes all of the page, but it looks like most of the page is about blogging, due to the text and links in the Sidebar. I’d like to be able to tell Google that the text that the Google Ad should be about is the stuff inside the <div id="content"> -- </div> tags. Then, Ads would actually reflect what I’m posting about. Instead of always being Ads for the same few blogging companies (especially Square Space…).

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I spent all day yesterday coaching the Mariners, one of the two South Australian Men’s Open Mitchell Cup teams. The Mitchell cup was a new project run by TouchSA (specifically Tracey Frith), and was intended to provide a better standard of games than the State League competition, as a build up to the State Teams. Selection for Men’s Open and Women’s Open teams, as well as a Mixed Open team was made during the Mitchell Cup, and teams were announced at the Presentation Night.
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From my referrer logs, I noticed someone had used Google Translate to translate some of my site into Brazilian, or something (pl-BR, IIRC).-Portugese (pt-BR) [Thanks Bob].

I don’t speak, or read this language at all, but I have done a bit of German and French at school and University. So, I thought it might be fun to translate a few of the pages from my site into these languages on the fly, and see how accurate the translation engine is.

It seems pretty good. Highlights for me were:

• Himmelsbevorzugungen, wo Tugend anordnet. Und was würde dieses sein, aber den Tiger malen und schnitzen den Swan?
• Notenfußball & le football de contact
• Je suis un professeur de conception et technologie, y compris la conception assistée par ordinateur, l’électronique et une variété d’autres choses.
• Comme un biscuit de fortune, seulement sans fortune, et pas un biscuit.

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