Cameron

Graphjam. Not quite as funny as Lolcats, but good nonetheless.

Some of my favourites:

So, sweet looking photo from EV, thanks to Daniel Salmond, lets make an avatar/display picture/100×100 image from it. We’ll have me on the left hand side with sky on the right…

Hmm lets get a bit more of the kilt in there so we know I’m not just wearing a pair of shorts…

Actually while we’re here, that watch isn’t very authentic, lets get rid of that then eh.

Hmm well seeing as we’re on a roll, lets darken the zinc cream to make it more woad-like, add a six pack (of rum?) increase the size of my arms… etc. etc. (can’t be bothered/am quite happy with the way I look anyway/wouldn’t say no to the rum though…)

I heart photoshop.

Note to self, don’t release helium balloons around your mirrorball/s.

Also, don’t make Christmas trees with your Jewish Joey.

So Roverball was fair awesome. The week leading up to it was pretty busy, but everyone had a great time on the night. Not sure about the budget as yet though. Some photos are at the GRovers website, and the Flash one.

Also, Paul said he was interested in going to the Chalet = “fuck’n epic!”

The solution? Use an email address you have control over. Ideally, this would involve registering your own domain name and getting yourself some hosting. From what I can tell, Godaddy offers one email address just with a parked domain, so you wouldn’t even have to organise hosting. When you buy a domain and some hosting, you are not tied to one hosting provider as you can move providers and keep your domain name (and data.) You can also change domain registrars if you find a better offer. Unfortunately, “mum” isn’t realistically going to know how to do this, (infact, most people aren’t,) and it also costs a small amount of money.

Personally I registered my domain through Namecheap and buy my hosting from aSmallOrange (yes that is a referral link, if you end up buying hosting from aSmallOrange due to my recommendation, I get some free hosting). They offer the cheapest deal around with SSL access included that I could find - also you get unlimited email addresses, so anything@yourdomain.com They’ve been an exceptional host to me and I would highly recommend them. Anyway…

A less beautiful solution would be using some kind of free email service, since at least in this case you don’t have to pay to continue using it if you decide to use another provider. Gmail even offers the ability to forward your emails onto another email address if you ever decide to leave Gmail, and it will keep doing this until your account expires (I think you can keep it active by logging in ever 6 months.)

So you can continue to use whichever ISP you choose, and change to another as many times as you want, and you can still access Gmail happily for free. You can access it in the way you are accustomed to (probably through a dedicated application using POP such as Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express) however if you’re open to new ideas…

A great benefit of Gmail is its web interface - you can also access it through your web browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.) - this is called webmail. The Gmail web interface is ajax based and contains lots of helpful bits and pieces from the Google developers which make it a pleasure to use (such as importing your contacts from your existing address book and the ability to export them again if you decide to leave Gmail.) The web interface also means you can access your mail wherever you go.

Gmail beats the pants off any other webmail I’ve ever used, especially the kick-ass search. You never delete mail in Gmail, just archive it, and searching for your mail is a cinch.

So what’s the catch of using Gmail? Well if you decide to access it with your web browser then advertising is put alongside your email (not in it, as is done by some other webmail providers)… and of course, you’re still tied to Google, which only solves half of our initial problem. However, for the regular Joe User, it’s a much better solution than buying your own domain.

I don’t usually go in for forwarding emails around - I figure if people are looking for funny/cool jokes/photos/videos, there’s the whole internet out there. In this case I’m making a half exception and posting it on my blog since I don’t force anyone to read it.

Strongly recommended viewing: Some awesome shadow puppetry.

When you sign up to an ISP they generally provide you with a free email address. DON’T USE IT!

Why not? It’s a perfectly good email address right? Wrong! It’s actually a ploy to make you stay with that ISP.

Consider that in a couple of years time, your ISP increases its prices or adjusts their plans and you want to move to a different ISP… you no longer have that free email with your old ISP, and anyone who tries to contact you on it will not be able to. This could also happen if your ISP goes bankrupt or closes down for any other reason.

How much this is a problem depends on how much you use email, but even if you think you won’t use it very much, you’ll soon find that your bank, council, landlord and library are using it to contact you, and you get a bunch of emails from various clubs you’re in, as well as subscriptions to various newsletters and mailing lists. Add to that everyone who you’ve ever sent an email to, and quite a few people know what your email address is. If you use your email for business and have business cards, or your details are published in any contact directories, the yellow pages, or on the web, it’s infinitely worse. Try to log in to some websites and you’ll find that without access to your old email address, you can’t do anything.

So what do you do? Well, you have to stay with your existing ISP and put up with their prices, their downtime and their technical support. This is called Vendor Lock-in, and it’s EVIL!

In the next instalment, I’ll be proposing some solutions to this problem.

I want a bumper sticker for my bed that says “My Other Bed is a Therm-a-rest!”

Just spent a whole long weekend at home due to being sick I got so delirious at one point I was going to go hiking for 3 days by myself, I planned the whole route, looked at campsites, public transport to the start and finish, had all the gear and food I needed, then I rode my bike for about 20 minutes to get a map book off Heather and breathing in the cold air was like PAIN… so I spent the weekend with my hot water bottle plotting other hikes instead

Oh and this bumper sticker, it’s going to be seen by so many people, you know, what with all the ladies I have frequenting my bedroom

I’ve spent the morning whipping up a nifty Heysen Trail Completion Log for myself. I give it the total number of km I have completed and php creates the percentage and adjusts the completion bar for me. I learnt a bit about css clipping and positioning and also how to get php running inside a css file, so the exercise wasn’t completely without merit.

If I was feeling particularly hardcore, I could have it run off a database, but it’s just not worth the effort really.

I bought some chocolates at Haighs today (well, yesterday) and would just like to proclaim to the world that I was thoroughly impressed with the whole process. The fact that I was requested to inspect the goods before purchasing them (ie. the guy opened the box and showed them all to me,) the way he spent a good 4-5 minutes wrapping them despite the shop being absolutely packed with people buying chocolates for Easter (I wasn’t, fwiw) and the line being at least ten people long (this was at the Adelaide arcade store, you feel crowded when there’s four people in there, let alone fourteen!), the way the box was gift wrapped, then put and a protective bag, and in a carry bag, and finally the way in which at the conclusion of the whole process, he asks me “And would you like some chocolate?”

It made being a customer truly pleasurable.

Not showing the location bar hides a very valuable piece of information from the user. There have been recent discussions on making the information it conveys even more visible to the user. Why is it then that Firefox allows websites to hide it? IMHO, the valuable nature of this information from a security perspective vastly outweighs the slight visual improvement this provides for small popup windows.

To disable this:

• Go to about:config
• Find dom.disable_window_open_feature.location
• Double click to toggle it to true

Hat tip to Mozilla Links

PS. See Bug 337344