Recently, a good friend of mine said,

“You guys are so judgmental.”

If I had been a few years younger, this might have bothered me. I might have spent hours in my room worrying about how to keep my foot out of my mouth, how to please everyone and how to make everyone like me. But now that I’m pretty much 30 and kind of cynical, I just think “meh”. Well, that’s not entirely true - initially, I don’t think anything because I take it as a statement and not an accusation. I know it’s true, and I’m old enough now to not worry about whether or not being judgmental makes me a bad person.

But I did begin to think around the conversation that had led to this statement. It got me contemplating what being judgmental actually means, and what makes us so. To me, it seems as though it’s a desire to paint a perfect world - striving for beauty and acceptance based largely on how society tells us the way things should be, and loosely on our sentiments. It’s an opinion that we feel the need to have when we see or experience something that we believe is out of the norm.

But what is the norm? Where are these benchmarks coming from? They’re completely arbitrary, because they’re all based on opinion and there is no defined norm. Our search for beauty and perfection is never going to be the same as that of somebody else, so we judge them for doing something their way which we think would be better done our way. It’s completely meaningless, and I find it amusing how often humans create conflict between themselves when they are striving for the same goal.

Sometimes, it’s nice to let your ego go and look over from the other side of the fence.

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Here’s my beef with Internet Explorer 6: it’s just not a good browser anymore.

And my sentiments, which in my head look like a friendly message to grandma telling her that her graphics will be nicer and her animation less choppy if she upgrades her browser, somehow always end up vocalised as a campaign against racism or this — which isn’t the case at all, because I care about my users and I want them to have the best user experience possible, no matter what browser they’re using.

But here’s the thing: I don’t like doing things in halves. I’m a closed-fist, table-banging perfectionist. I want everything to be the best it can be, and this is exactly what IE6 is not. I’ll go to great lengths to make a website work on IE6, but there are occasions where no matter what I do, I have to compromise somewhere: an incorrectly-matted GIF image isn’t the same as a transparent PNG, a dashed border doesn’t give the same effect as a dotted one, and choppy animation doesn’t feel as nice as it should. And sometimes for me, this just isn’t good enough.

Maybe my users don’t care, and I’m certainly aware of the fact that some of them couldn’t upgrade even if they wanted to. But maybe the ones that can would care if they know that they could have it better with a modern browser. Sure, it’s only the little things that they’re missing out on, like nicer graphics and smoother animation, but the simple act of upgrading will give them the opportunity to experience modern features on other websites they may have previously been missing out on.

I didn’t know how good HD Television was before we got it, or how much nicer graphics would look on an LCD monitor, or how much better unleaded petrol would be for my car and the environment until I tried all of these things, and I wouldn’t go back. All of these things cost money. Upgrading is free — that’s the beauty of the internet: it allows people to experience the joys of changing technology at little cost. Why don’t we care enough to encourage our less internet-savvy users to make the most of the evolving web when it’s so accessible and easy to do so? It’s not fixing the hole in the ozone layer or bringing world peace, but it’s still a positive change that we can offer someone.

Sure it would make my life easier. I’m no martyr and like most developers, sometimes I wish that I didn’t have to spend hours and hours making something work on IE6. But most of the time I don’t mind, because the internet isn’t just for me. Sometimes, I even quite enjoy it — it’s my job, it’s challenging and I’ll do it the best that I can. I’m not going to discriminate against you because you’re using an older browser (hell, I only stopped testing on IE5 for Mac 2 years ago).

But I’ll be frustrated if I have to make compromises that make me feel like you’re missing out on something (even if it’s an “insignificant” scrolling background effect, it’s beautiful dammit) because the internet is amazing, and I want to share it with you in its entirety.

This isn’t always the case if you’re using IE6. And that’s what my beef with it is.

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The benefit of having a Nosh within walking distance is that I can have sashimi at home, which I’ve been doing quite a lot this week. Although my sisters may have once called me endearing terms to the effect of “bookworm” or “nerd”, I think I’m a practical person at heart: I don’t really “get” something unless I’m doing it myself - and this was certainly the case when it came to slicing sashimi. Sure, I’ve watched cooking shoes and sort of half paid-attention to the technique, but until I started slicing my own sashimi on a regular basis, I wasn’t really that interested.

What I have noticed is that the knife plays a very important role. (Duh say all you sashimi aficionados - but give a lowly home cook a break!). We all know how I feel about raw fish, and this week I’ve decided 2 things:

1. I love having it at home
2. I’m going to get proper sushi/sashimi knife

So I looked, as one does, on the internet for knives in New Zealand and found these Yamato knifes. Okay, I would love these - they have a custom blade forge! But unfortunately I don’t have $1600 to spend on 3 knives right now. Instead, I emailed our good friend Mo, a budding Japanese chef, who was able to offer some very useful advice on buying sushi/sashimi knives for home use. I thought it was worth sharing - thanks Mo!

lol Priya, are you turning Japanese? I think you are!

well, for sushi/sashimi we use a knife called Deba knife and sashimi knife. Deba is mainly for when you are fileting, removing scale&skin,chopping up the bones. Sashimi Knife is for slicing

sashimi knife I personally find useful for home is about 15cm ~ 20cm & slim shaped… This one will be very useful for anything not just for sushi and it is easy to handle. (15cm as in the knife part..not the whole thing)

make sure it’s super sharp at all times. It makes a huge difference to the taste….very important

I think some where around $100 is good price for home use.

did you visit kappabashi here in Japan? it’s a street that only sells culinary good for lower prices.

Kappabashi, here I come! Soon.

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As part of my insurance claim, I have to pick a jewelery store that I want to go to. This part I dislike, because I don’t like buying jewelery, and I don’t like going to jewelery stores. “But I’ve seen you wear jewelery!” You might think - and yes, it’s true, but it’s more than likely that the stuff you’ve seen me wear was picked up at a street market at a festival somewhere, and all of my stolen (worthy) jewelry was gifted to me by my jewelry adoring mother.

So perhaps I should clarify: by jewelry stores, I mean the ones where people go and spend a small fortune on little gold necklaces that look like rockets. I mean, seriously, who buys this stuff?

As part of the good fortune resulting from the bad, I thought that I may as well try to find a suitable item that I would never, under other circumstances, indulge in. Unfortunately, the one that I found that I really liked was slightly over my budget.

I did learn a thing or two about NZ jewelery store websites though: they suck. They don’t work unless you download Silverlight (Michael Hill, seriously? GTFO), open in a pop-up window and play you cheesy music, or are amazingly unhelpful.

Please - I just want to browse through your range. Does it have to be this hard?

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If you ask my sisters to tell you childhood stories about me, they’ll take much joy in retelling the tales of my clumsiness.

“There was never a day that went by when she didn’t spell something on the dinner table,” one will start.

“Oh yeah, she used to spill her milo every day during breakfast!” The other will finish.

I like to think that as I grew older, I grew out of this, but today is one of those days that would prove this not to be the case. And if it were just the one incident of spilling hot takeaway miso all over msyelf and the car, not having a towel and having to drive back home with MisoPants, I might let it pass as as a little bit of bad luck on an off day.

But when, only hours later, I proceed to spill a glass of water over our chest of drawers and bedroom carpet, I have to wonder why life hates me today.

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