Wired Magazine has picked some of the best products for 2006 and posted the results. So if you are looking for something to give or get, you might want to check this out.
I do believe that Toshiba Gigabeat would be a welcome sight in my stocking this year. ;)
There was the annual workplace Christmas party on Saturday night. There was karaoke. This time, I actually sang up in the karaoke group. MUCH better sounding up there where you hear the music louder than your fellow singers. A couple of the group can sing but not all of them.
Animator vs Animation. This is a very very cute animation and the real reason only professionals should ever create Flash animations. Via the Userfriendly link of the day.
Looking through my stats log and found a new referer. The game reviews have a mention in GameRevolution in an article entitled "Mind Over Meta".
The ouch? Here is the paragraph linking to my site "In some cases, half the scores Gamerankings included in their aggregates were from small, unheard of fan sites with terrible writing and ghastly design, and we were certain the opinions of these amateurs were inflating aggregate scores." Yep, I am the example of a small, unheard of fan site with terrible writing and ghastly design.
Now let's see, small - yep that's ok. Unheard of - well, I do get 1500 page views a day - is that unheard of? Fan site - not by my definition of fan site but I'll let it pass. Ghastly design - matter of opinion there but mine is very basic. It's the 'terrible writing' that I object to! In a world where spelling is optional and complete sentences rarely seen, how can they point to my site and say it is 'terrible writing'?
On the other hand, I think their site has ghastly freaking design. White text on a black background is very difficult to read. And they have a set width which looks silly on my nice big monitor.
As a side note, I believe that Gamerankings has never used my site for aggregating scores.
First there is Patrick Stewart describing a script he is writing.. Pretty funny.
Second is Dan Radcliffe (Harry Potter), as a 17 year old interested in any female. Extremely interested.
A report from Wired that iTunes library fails when faced with 90,000 songs. My little Nomad box says it only has just under 4,000 separate pieces of music. I obvious need to build my library more.
Oh, and to the writer of the article, that bloke wouldn't be the only one. I have a friend, Henry G. who would have that much music at least. Your 500 tunes would never do for me.
For those that don't know about the folk singer/songwriter Harry Chapin (I read your comment!), this is a great album to start with. The album has three songs I love to listen to: Cats in the Cradle, Six String Orchestra, and 30,000 pounds of Banana. Mind you, Six String Orchestra - I always see Robin (the nephew of Kermit the Frog) singing because Muppet versions of songs tend to stick well. All of the songs on the album are worth listening to though.
I'm fond of Kate Bush's music and Babooshka is one of her songs I've always enjoyed. But now someone has done a remix. It is just so irritating. Chopping up the song ruins the effect and all you get now is a lot of Babooshka without realising that there is a story behind the song. I hate that.
The last time I had serious problems in the remaking music vein was when Ugly Joe Kid covered "Cat's in the Cradle". After hearing a part of that once, I would turn off the radio if the cover started and bought Harry Chapin's original because that is a great song.
My normal web site has had a feature for years now allowing visitors to post info about their favourite game and why they like it. There are comments dating back to 1999.
Lately, people have suddenly been putting guestbook type comments in it. There may be a few general comments about my web site in previous years, but this is the first time I've ever had multiple comments about the site left here in such a short time frame.
Make me wonder if maybe I should open a guestbook again. I killed it when almost all entries were to advertise someone's porn site. Now that my script a) hides new entries until reviewed and b) doesn't permit urls to be posted, a guestbook might not be too painful.
Witness the thrills and chills as someone adds lots of toolbars to IE 7 and then does a reset to see if the original state of IE is restored. The screenshots of the final stages are just so funny, there is barely room for any web content.
The first is create your own Fire breathing dinosaur. You start with one of the recent robot dinosaur toys and just add a few things. Looks very cool (or is that hot?)
The second is an interesting article on Top mistakes geeks make when starting a business. Nice summary of some of the assumptions a geek can make when starting a business and why they are wrong.
Start here. How far did you get? So far, I've made page 13, but Userfriendly reports that there are 30 pages to do. I'll make it by hook or by crook. :)
In other news, the Google News Reader interface has improved dramatically. If only some day they would let me order news oldest first, I'd be a happy camper.
Alas, this is an under appreciated photo. I suspect that the problem is that the thumbnail doesn't really catch the eye. And catching the eye is the main thing to get feedback or to get added to favs.
So the bird is well defined. There is a baby and few people ever see these. And yet this photo will end up neglected within the Flickr environment.
A Gamers' Manifesto is an excellent article about what gamers really want from games. Things like AIs that can actually act intelligently. Many good points are raised in this article about things that are annoying or destroy your immersion in the game.
A coworker reported that his first grandchild was named Zephyr. The scary memory is to suddenly remember a key line "Zephyr winds that blow on high, lift me now that I can fly" That's scary because it's something that I saw broadcast in the '70's and haven't seen since. Isis. There was a brief spat of live action kids shows during that time frame, I think they mostly failed because the special effects were so noticably horrible. Why did this line stick?
A not quite as useless thing stuck in my memory is that the highest point of the state of Florida is 345 ft above sea level. I got to surprise someone once who was reading a book and asked if we knew it. I said, yep, I know and quoted it. Stunned him fairly nicely.
I have started a new personal campaign against phishing scams. When offered to update my account I go and use a false account number 5*5 and tell them that the password to the account is "iamafraud". Usually after I send them this information, I get forwarded to the real site.
Today, I got forwarded to this page (please note, this is a phishing scam site. Enter at your own risk!) Not satisfied with my online account (faked) details, now they want my answers to security questions, pin numbers, birthdate, mother's maiden name, driver license number and more.
If I filled in this form, they would have enough basic information for some serious identity theft, not merely one bank account. Yet more evidence that it's a dangerous world online. Be very very careful where and when you divulge things like driver license, pin numbers or your complete birthdate. Don't help them steal your soul.
The cafepress experiment as yet another method of marketing as been a failure. Being an Amazon Associate has worked out reasonably well. People regularly buy things from amazon via my site. Adding google ads has worked well. People click those ads regularly and while many of the ads attached to the game reviews earn .01 each, some of the ads on other parts of the site bring in much more money. But the cafepress site earns nothing.
Part of that was that for a long time, you simply could not find my cafepress store from the main cafepress site. You could find it by searching for "Doodle monsters" in google quite easily. But it never came up when searching or browsing the cafepress site.
At some point, this changed. So from here on out, it's simply that no one needs doodle monsters in their life. I'll just have to cope. :)
Your choice of a very wide variety of warning images, and you write your own text.
This is a massive 6 CD collection of classic music that has been used during films. If you've been pondering the idea of purchasing some classic music and have no idea where to start, this is a good sampler. A number of the classic composers are represented in the collection (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc.) Plus newer composers who write classic style music are included. John Williams has a number of pieces on the CDs.
The pieces vary in length from about 2 minutes to 7 minutes. Each cd contains 15 to 18 different tracks. There's one CD that I don't imagine I'll listen that often to, it's Opera and I'm not much of a fan of that.
My copy was under $20 from JB HiFi in Brisbane. Definitely an excellent deal for this much music.
BTW - welcome Friendless, the third regular reader of this blog that I know of.
On the anniversary of Sept 11, Wired News analysed accidental deaths amongst Americans to show how great terrorist threat really is.
So primary causes of accidental death are roads and work. Sounds good, no more driving into work for me!
Apparently some people are hacking tails off stingrays in retribution for Irwin's death. Given he spent much time trying to protect wildlife, he would never approve of this. The news article says his is the third recorded death from stingray in Australia in 100 years.
Treat wildlife with respect, that's what the Crocodile Hunter would say. It was tragic but definitely a freak accident that the ray happened to get the poison to the heart.
Frodocam is a webcam in Brisbane of nesting Peregrine Falcons. They are raising two chicks in the centre of the city.
For a series of screenshots from feeding time, go to my new Flickr account and see the series of pics I saved.
I realised this morning while driving into work that if I wrote a post a week about each music CD we own, I'll have posts for the next 4 years (give or take a bit but we own a lot of music.) Without further ado, let's get this puppy started.
The Eagles music is fairly old style classic rock. This particular album is their final album, and demonstrates their well-established style. I love the tracks "I can't tell you why", "Heartache tonight" and "The Long Run". All of the tracks are enjoyable to listen to for me. Your mileage may vary, if you don't enjoy old style rock, you probably won't enjoy this album.
As a side note, if you really want to get me to sing, The Eagles and Billy Joel songs are good for that. I'll sing along without quite realising that I'm doing it.
I'm fond of music, and in our house, there are a lot of cds. But you still get the occasions when you want to try someone new. Or add more albums of an artist that you like but you don't know where to start.
So it's nice to see top album lists like the Rolling Stones magazine top 500 of all time. We own some of these albums on cd. There are a few we have that are on that old-fashioned large black format... ;) But there are many that we don't own. Some of the list are useful because if you want to try an artist, start with one of their best albums. Others are useful because I want to expand a collection (David Bowie for one) where there are many albums and you want to add more of the best.
It's obvious that the compilers of this list are big Beatles fans. The top 100 has a number of Beatles albums.
Tilt - how good is your sense of balance? I got to level 12 once so far.
And just to make your day brighter, Sandy the Dog has a web site. Just piccies of a cute dog and their human.
| adopt your own virtual pet! |
The Boy From Oz really was a great show. Hugh Jackman can sing and dance with the best of them. The start of the show is Hugh being lowered to the stage lounging on a piano in a mirrored suit (sort of extra large sequins). When you see this you realise that you are in for something different. The cast all gave excellent performances. Peter Allen's most important songs were covered during the performance.
I think that the Virgin Flight from Townsville Friday afternoon was mostly made up of people who, at least in part, were going to see the show.
It was actually a small group of people who used to work together who went. That the four of us made it, three flying down from Townsville, was slightly amazing in itself. We may even decide to go to another show at some point.
It is nice to get out of town and to a big city. We did some shopping in stores with far more variety then you find locally. Bought books, cds and ate lots of food.
