Category: Websites

Wrap your laughing gear around this…

Today slashdot mentioned the ending of an internet show which I had never heard of, but which apparently included the handing out missions to it’s viewers, and one of these had been to make an earth sandwich.

Think of it. Placing one piece of bread in one spot on the ground, and then placing (or coordinating with other people to place) another piece of bread on the exact opposite side of the world, thus creating an earth sandwich. I just love the imagery..

Want Japanese Music?

Slate has an interesting piece on buying music from iTunes stores other than the one for your specific country.

It uses the example of Japanese songs that you can’t buy through iTunes America, but can buy through itunes Japan (if you live in Japan), mainly it seems because the author has a slightly unhealthy fascination with obscure Japanese pop and rock bands, but that’s neither here nor there.

It ponders why the music companies cannot come up with some arrangement so that you can buy music from overseas iTunes stores (after all, a sale is revenue for them, and denying it decreases their profit and promotes file sharing to get music), and also has some interesting comments on the various ways people routinely work around these restrictions, which is something I hadn’t read about before (apparently you can easily buy legit prepaid iTunes cards for other countries on popular auction websites, and then just buy songs using those).

Interesting read anyway.

Blog login

Recently I have been having a few search engines etc. reference material from my blog, and this has made me a little uncomfortable.

I tend to fairly free express my political and social opinions on my blog, and while I tend to rant I do so in a manner that I feel my readers (by which I mean family and friends) will understand.

Unfortunately the same implied understanding and tolerance cannot be reasonably extended to general members of the public who may stumble upon my blog, and I am aware of the risk of causing offence, or worse, having my privately expressed political or social opinions used against me at some point in the future.

In addition to this I have some photos of things like my Nephew and Niece (and presumably at some point in the future my own chiddlers) on the site, and while their parents are happy with me sharing those photos with my friends and family I think they may have issues (as I certainly do) with leaving this content accessable to everyone.

As such I am currently looking into methods to change the setup of my blog so that you have to register/login to read certain entries, and access certain photos/video. I will post more information as the project progresses.

In the interim if you are a regular reader you can already register as a user, and I can start setting things up so that you will be able to login when I get this up and running shortly.

If you have any questions drop me an email.

Sometime soon I will also write a Privacy Policy to satisfy those of you who are paranoid like me as to what info is needed for registration (just your email address basically) and what I will do with that information once it is submitted (keep it private, not use it for anything).

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming

Some of you may have noticed that over the last week or so this blog has been changing color, shape and viewability (ie. it’s been on the fritz and offline fairly frequently while I fix it).

It all relates to the fact that I use a program called Gallery2 to display my photos, and a program called WPG2 to display those photos within my blog.

Now WPG2 did a good enough job, but it had a few annoyances, particularly in relation to navigating between different photo galleries, so I was all excited when I found that there was a newer version available, which apparently solved many of my bothers.

The only problem was that it required a newer version of Gallery2 as well.

And there was a newer version of the display theme I used for both the blog and the photo galleries.

So I set about upgrading all of these bits, and is always the way I ran into a few… well shall we say hiccups…

Now computer hiccups are nothing new to me, and in fact for me constitute quite a bit of fun I have with computers, as they present an opportunity for a happy afternoon of problem solving. And this was not a particularly serious problem (all my photos were still there, and all my blog entries were still there. They just weren’t immediately accesible), but because it was a problem with files on the opposite side of the world it took a little while (and a couple of attempts (or 5)) to rectify.

Anyway. Long story short everything is now updated, and working fine (apparently), so it’s back to blogging as normal. Hooray.

What Dave wants (apparently…)

While reading through a friend of a friend‘s blog today I came across a funny and slightly disturbing little internet based game.

Type “[your name] needs” into google and see what comes back.

Apparently Dave needs:

  • DAVE NEEDS VACATION FROM CARRYING HIS FIANCEE’S BAGS
  • Dave needs Firefox and BugMeNot
  • Dave needs plywood
  • Dave needs to have that mole looked at
  • Dave needs a Shave(this at least is true)
  • Dave needs a big hand for what he has done
  • Dave needs to start paying more attention to what Judi does around here

And that was only on the first 2 pages of results…

So that’s what 1200 donuts looks like…

Penny arcade has a bloody funny little story going at the moment.

It all started when they posted a comic where they were giving Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) a hard time and comparing SOE’s games to some rather unorthadox pastry products.

In reply to this Sony sent the boys at Penny Arcade 1200 Krispy Kreme donuts. Gabe and Tycho simply didn’t have any comeback. The photos are on the site at the link above. It’s quite priceless.