Daily load of crap Awards
Well today is a red letter day in the Australian IT industry with two loads of crap coming at me (and you if you live in Australia).
Load of Crap # 1 - Lack of Talent2
The first is a brief mention in The Age about a report/survey done by (yet another) recruitment firm called Talent2 which takes the Ben Hosken 2003 award for the biggest load of bollocks.....The survey found that employees are "wasting" up to 10 mins a day leaving the office to get take away coffees.....extrapolating that they estimate that $1.84 billion (Australian pesos that is....which by the way will soon pass the American WBack).
WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP!!!!!
1. What idiot at I have a Lack of Talent 2 decided this was worth doing??
2. Have they never taken some paper and got a coffee to think through things in a different environment?
Maybe they have a side company called ChainEm2TheDesk2 selling tools to keep those pesky employees at their desks from 6am until 6pm.
As an aside, what does it take to be a recruitment company these days....a PHP, MySQL web site with a nice bit of I'm hip to the plan type graphics talking about blah blah and a mobile phone to handle those pesky contractors looking for jobs and daring to bother you in the middle of your South Yarra coffee of St Kilda chardy???
Load of Crap # 2 - The Destra Music Service
Its getting close to the end of the year, so it must be time for ehYou, I mean Destra, to launch some new crap service.
As a piece of history, Destra was formally known as ehYou and was one of the early dotCom companies in Australia....basically they were a hosting service until some bright spark saw the success of MP3.Com (now there's another dud) and decided that their share price could jump if they got MP3.com.AU.
They then launched a crappy DRM'd music service which had less than 100 albums (maybe it was even less than 10) each of which cost more than the CD in the store (including the cost of the tram ticket to get to the store)!!!! For the launch of the service they spent their investors hard earned cash to pay for the flights, accom, hookers and coke for I-Cube to appear for their launch. Needless to say, their music system had maybe 100 downloads and really went nowhere Fast.
With the launch of iTunes, Roxio Napster, etc. etc. this year, Destra's strategic thinkers obviously decided it was time to relaunch their music service, this time they have more tracks but still crap drm and only on M$ machines. A great little bunch of band wagon jumpers if I ever saw one! So I played with the service last night (as best I could on my iBook) and have the following thoughts.
THE BAR HAS BEEN RAISED!!!!
Look at iTunes and new Napster....the UI is great, the feature set is great (missing a few things but still great) and what do they give us THIS CRAP. A frame based shit site with crappy navigation and zero value add.
So they digitised 100,000 songs and wacked em in a database and obviously got the Destra coffee boy to build em one of them new fangled web site things.
In the sneaky Destra department, they are still celebrating their little PR exercise a month ago where they got a prominent Melbourne finance reporter to write a nice article about them and their music service in other to shunt their share price north...which it did from 1c to 6c at which point they immediately raised a little more cash to cover the rumored $400,000 left in the bank.
NEXT!!!!
Thursday, December 11, 2003
Its been quiet here
Last week I was off to the US for business and while I was based in San Francisco, I travelled to Vancouver and San Diego within the 4 full days along with long long meetings.
Unfortunately (and surprisingly) I was much wired than I am at home. No wi-fi everywhere etc.. so I've been very quiet with my postings for the last 2 weeks.
Today is Oskar's 3rd birthday!! Happy Birthday son....you are a marvel!!
The high light for him so far has been having the thunderbirds come and visit :-)
Last week I was off to the US for business and while I was based in San Francisco, I travelled to Vancouver and San Diego within the 4 full days along with long long meetings.
Unfortunately (and surprisingly) I was much wired than I am at home. No wi-fi everywhere etc.. so I've been very quiet with my postings for the last 2 weeks.
Today is Oskar's 3rd birthday!! Happy Birthday son....you are a marvel!!
The high light for him so far has been having the thunderbirds come and visit :-)
Monday, November 24, 2003
Delta One Zero
So I'm playing this cool SMS, offline, online combo game called DeltaOneZero...so far quite fun.
I've created a directory of objects from the game at http://www.neuronwave.com/D10/ so if you're playing the game and want to see the two sites we've found which have since been removed have a look.
So I'm playing this cool SMS, offline, online combo game called DeltaOneZero...so far quite fun.
I've created a directory of objects from the game at http://www.neuronwave.com/D10/ so if you're playing the game and want to see the two sites we've found which have since been removed have a look.
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
Here bloggy bloggy blog
Gosh... Its been ages since I sat down to blog and so much has been going on which at the time I thought I should have blogged about but alas, I've been looking after other bits of my life and have forgotten most of those things.
More and more I've been thinking about this whole Mobile, Social, Recommendation space and sparking off new ideas for work and play which I want to progress.
The latest is a finder cum recommendation service for childrens playgrounds which is now going to be a summer project. The elevator pitch is that its a web site and mobile phone service which will help parents find playgrounds when they are traveling be it over the other side of town on interstate. User will be able to upload photos and reviews of the playgrounds and add/edit details as they need to. Because you need a playground recommendation when you are away from your computer you'll be able to print out a handy wallet size playground rec list for you to take around and you'll be able to use your mobile to send a request via wap or sms (at a later date) to the service requesting details of playgrounds.
If you are interested in helping out in some way please drop me an email. We'll need lots of people to add details of their fave playgrounds around the place.
On the work front it looks like we'll be doing some J2ME work to build a music service demo for the nokia series 60 phones which sounds like a bit of fun. Also, we're playing around with the whole IM/Chat/Social Recommendation system to make use of our recommendations technology etc... Not a bad few geeky things to be working on....at least it beats the hell out of being a middle manager working on billing or provsioning systems for a telco/utility company.
We're building up to the usual pre Xmas party season here which is accentuated by Oskar's birthday next month and his friends various parties too. I must say that there is only a limited number of 3 year old parties one wishes to attend so thankfully the mum's in the mothers group have organised one big party for the kids...although it sounds like all we'll be eating is roast chicken and potatoe salad (don't ask!! I think someone may have options in red rooster).
Gosh... Its been ages since I sat down to blog and so much has been going on which at the time I thought I should have blogged about but alas, I've been looking after other bits of my life and have forgotten most of those things.
More and more I've been thinking about this whole Mobile, Social, Recommendation space and sparking off new ideas for work and play which I want to progress.
The latest is a finder cum recommendation service for childrens playgrounds which is now going to be a summer project. The elevator pitch is that its a web site and mobile phone service which will help parents find playgrounds when they are traveling be it over the other side of town on interstate. User will be able to upload photos and reviews of the playgrounds and add/edit details as they need to. Because you need a playground recommendation when you are away from your computer you'll be able to print out a handy wallet size playground rec list for you to take around and you'll be able to use your mobile to send a request via wap or sms (at a later date) to the service requesting details of playgrounds.
If you are interested in helping out in some way please drop me an email. We'll need lots of people to add details of their fave playgrounds around the place.
On the work front it looks like we'll be doing some J2ME work to build a music service demo for the nokia series 60 phones which sounds like a bit of fun. Also, we're playing around with the whole IM/Chat/Social Recommendation system to make use of our recommendations technology etc... Not a bad few geeky things to be working on....at least it beats the hell out of being a middle manager working on billing or provsioning systems for a telco/utility company.
We're building up to the usual pre Xmas party season here which is accentuated by Oskar's birthday next month and his friends various parties too. I must say that there is only a limited number of 3 year old parties one wishes to attend so thankfully the mum's in the mothers group have organised one big party for the kids...although it sounds like all we'll be eating is roast chicken and potatoe salad (don't ask!! I think someone may have options in red rooster).
Sunday, November 02, 2003
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is silly
I've been reading some online stuff and have found this excellent page on Forer, a psychologist from the 1st half of the 1900s.
He gave his students a personality test and ignored the results and gave them all the following paragraph as a description of them
You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.
He then got them to rate the accuracy of the description from 0 to 5. 5 being excellent and 4 being good. The class average was 4.26 since then the test has been done many times and the average is 4.2 (please ignore the fact that with a discrete scale such as 1,2,3,4,5 you cannot validly get averages that are more precise than the starting ratings so 4 should be average).
I've been reading some online stuff and have found this excellent page on Forer, a psychologist from the 1st half of the 1900s.
He gave his students a personality test and ignored the results and gave them all the following paragraph as a description of them
You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.
He then got them to rate the accuracy of the description from 0 to 5. 5 being excellent and 4 being good. The class average was 4.26 since then the test has been done many times and the average is 4.2 (please ignore the fact that with a discrete scale such as 1,2,3,4,5 you cannot validly get averages that are more precise than the starting ratings so 4 should be average).
Secret Purchases
A little over a week I succumbed to my nasty little habit (ok one of many little habits) and bought a new cumpler bag. This means we now have 5 bags between Suze and myself....all needed of course.
My new bag is a little one which I can hang around my neck and store my iPod (i love you iPod) and my phone (you are a utilitarian necessity phone and will be replaced when Steve Jobs creates iPhone). Meanwhile, I can carry my iBook (i love you too iBook) in my crumpler laptop bag and my other stuff in my crumpler messenger bag.
Being a secret purchase meant that at some stage I'd have to show Suzette and incur some anger over unnecessary purchases or something like that. So I used my tried and tested method of showing it to her when we had visitors (Suze's sister in this case) and using/taking-advantage-of Suzette's etiquette gland to not get told off too much....alas it didn't work :-(
The upshot of all this is that I am no longer to purchase any bags or officeworks products or ebay ANYTHING (I'm waiting on my 2 james bond games from this week).
A little over a week I succumbed to my nasty little habit (ok one of many little habits) and bought a new cumpler bag. This means we now have 5 bags between Suze and myself....all needed of course.
My new bag is a little one which I can hang around my neck and store my iPod (i love you iPod) and my phone (you are a utilitarian necessity phone and will be replaced when Steve Jobs creates iPhone). Meanwhile, I can carry my iBook (i love you too iBook) in my crumpler laptop bag and my other stuff in my crumpler messenger bag.
Being a secret purchase meant that at some stage I'd have to show Suzette and incur some anger over unnecessary purchases or something like that. So I used my tried and tested method of showing it to her when we had visitors (Suze's sister in this case) and using/taking-advantage-of Suzette's etiquette gland to not get told off too much....alas it didn't work :-(
The upshot of all this is that I am no longer to purchase any bags or officeworks products or ebay ANYTHING (I'm waiting on my 2 james bond games from this week).
Saturday, November 01, 2003
Big numbers over breakfast
Two big numbers that are flashing at me over my Saturday morning coffee.
- Friendster has taken 53 million US dollars in funding
- Google is estimated to be worth 15 billion US dollars
Its 1999/2000 all over again.
Dear Kleiner Perkins VC man,
Can I get 20 million funding for an online baby food portal site. There are millions upon millions of babies out there and if ibabyfood.com can get 0.1% of them buying 10$ of food a year from the site we'll make 100 million in the first year!!!!
Additionally, we can sell advertising to baby product makers and provide rich deep content which will create "sticky" eyeballs for the parents who will build a deep relationship with the site. And, we can have a community of parents and children online.
As the children grow we'll know their ages and in 20+ years be able to market financial products to them based on their life events such as college funds, buying a house etc.
As for an exit, we can IPO for 40 billion within 4 years
Ben
President and Chairman
iBabyFood.com
Two big numbers that are flashing at me over my Saturday morning coffee.
- Friendster has taken 53 million US dollars in funding
- Google is estimated to be worth 15 billion US dollars
Its 1999/2000 all over again.
Dear Kleiner Perkins VC man,
Can I get 20 million funding for an online baby food portal site. There are millions upon millions of babies out there and if ibabyfood.com can get 0.1% of them buying 10$ of food a year from the site we'll make 100 million in the first year!!!!
Additionally, we can sell advertising to baby product makers and provide rich deep content which will create "sticky" eyeballs for the parents who will build a deep relationship with the site. And, we can have a community of parents and children online.
As the children grow we'll know their ages and in 20+ years be able to market financial products to them based on their life events such as college funds, buying a house etc.
As for an exit, we can IPO for 40 billion within 4 years
Ben
President and Chairman
iBabyFood.com
Thursday, October 30, 2003
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Chad's Photos
About 7 years ago I was very lucky to be able to get transferred, briefly, to the research facility Andersen Consulting had outside Chicago. There I worked many with Chad Burkey who was the resident Intelligent Agents expert.
The 3+ months I spent there and the time around it gave me the first taste of the technology which I have since been fairly heavily involved with.
Chad was a fairly artistic type who would spend hours photoshopping up a copper bar UI component and also ran a B&O fan site.
Anyway...its good to see he has recently moved from tech research into full time photography..best of luck Chad.
About 7 years ago I was very lucky to be able to get transferred, briefly, to the research facility Andersen Consulting had outside Chicago. There I worked many with Chad Burkey who was the resident Intelligent Agents expert.
The 3+ months I spent there and the time around it gave me the first taste of the technology which I have since been fairly heavily involved with.
Chad was a fairly artistic type who would spend hours photoshopping up a copper bar UI component and also ran a B&O fan site.
Anyway...its good to see he has recently moved from tech research into full time photography..best of luck Chad.
Monday, October 27, 2003
Panther Switcher Stolen!
I've been using Proteron's liteswitchx since I got my mac to replicate the Alt-Tab functionality on windows...and it has been sensational!!!!!
Now with the release of Panther, Apple has copied/stolen/leveraged the exact product designed and created by Proteron....shame Apple shame.
Proteron has written an open letter to apple asking for an explanation...and fair enough.
As much as I adore/love Apple I cannot understand why say 300k - 500k paid to Proteron in recognition would be too much.
I've been using Proteron's liteswitchx since I got my mac to replicate the Alt-Tab functionality on windows...and it has been sensational!!!!!
Now with the release of Panther, Apple has copied/stolen/leveraged the exact product designed and created by Proteron....shame Apple shame.
Proteron has written an open letter to apple asking for an explanation...and fair enough.
As much as I adore/love Apple I cannot understand why say 300k - 500k paid to Proteron in recognition would be too much.
Friday, October 17, 2003
And what a big week (or few) its been in Online Music
Get it while its hot...iTune for windows is available for download.
Roxio's relaunched Napster is next week so there is plenty of action.
Get it while its hot...iTune for windows is available for download.
Roxio's relaunched Napster is next week so there is plenty of action.
Thursday, October 16, 2003
Friday, October 10, 2003
The Day eMusic Died
Well folks the gravy train is over. eMusic announced today that they are changing from an all you can eat business model to a 10$ gets you 40 tracks model.
Now I have a conflict of interest in writing about this as I own a substantial part of one of eMusic's main service suppliers so I'd like to see eMusic continue.
My understanding is that a large number let's say over 75% of people download less than 40 tracks a month hence making the $10 for 40 tracks a financial deal no worse than the current one they have for these users.
BUT
What has happened is that ostensibly eMusic has changed its service from offering free music in the minds of their subscribers to charging $10 a month (not 25c per track as it is not a la carte).
Changing from 0$ to 10$ has huge emotional baggage attached to it and I expect (and it is happening) a huge backlash with many many more than 25% of their subscribers (the ones who download more than 40 tracks) leaving in droves. And I expect a massive increase in downloads as the leaving subscribers grab what they can (how long will eMusic's bandwidth last??).
Aside from the $0 to $10 change, there is the perceived/real issue that most of the artists on emusic you have never heard of before. Now this doesn't make them crap...quite the opposite with there being many many great "finds" on the service which the previous all you can eat model made exceptionally compelling to explore and try. So you had a good:bad hit ratio of 1:8 lets say.
Under the new model this will not change and then perceived "risk" you have in downloading a track is that it is one of the 7 dud tracks rather than the 1 good one. Mathematically this pushes the cost of a good track to 8*0.40$ = $3.20 well above any existing model.
Before you all say hold on ben you can sample the songs....this is true But there are only 30sec clips on the service and for an unkown song/artist this does little to mitigate the risk for the majority of users out there...not to mention the fact that the clips don't easily link in with the service as well as itunes.
I think that eMusic in its new for can survive but it needs to do some new things.
What does eMusic need to do (in no real order)??
1) Improve the sampling service. Extend it to 75% of the song for samples.
2) Add user generated reviews of individual tracks.
3) Offer cheaper downloads for those super short tracks out there.
4) Get rid of the download manager and revert to easy click and download links.
5) Finally...hang on...this is going to be a bumpy ride.
Well folks the gravy train is over. eMusic announced today that they are changing from an all you can eat business model to a 10$ gets you 40 tracks model.
Now I have a conflict of interest in writing about this as I own a substantial part of one of eMusic's main service suppliers so I'd like to see eMusic continue.
My understanding is that a large number let's say over 75% of people download less than 40 tracks a month hence making the $10 for 40 tracks a financial deal no worse than the current one they have for these users.
BUT
What has happened is that ostensibly eMusic has changed its service from offering free music in the minds of their subscribers to charging $10 a month (not 25c per track as it is not a la carte).
Changing from 0$ to 10$ has huge emotional baggage attached to it and I expect (and it is happening) a huge backlash with many many more than 25% of their subscribers (the ones who download more than 40 tracks) leaving in droves. And I expect a massive increase in downloads as the leaving subscribers grab what they can (how long will eMusic's bandwidth last??).
Aside from the $0 to $10 change, there is the perceived/real issue that most of the artists on emusic you have never heard of before. Now this doesn't make them crap...quite the opposite with there being many many great "finds" on the service which the previous all you can eat model made exceptionally compelling to explore and try. So you had a good:bad hit ratio of 1:8 lets say.
Under the new model this will not change and then perceived "risk" you have in downloading a track is that it is one of the 7 dud tracks rather than the 1 good one. Mathematically this pushes the cost of a good track to 8*0.40$ = $3.20 well above any existing model.
Before you all say hold on ben you can sample the songs....this is true But there are only 30sec clips on the service and for an unkown song/artist this does little to mitigate the risk for the majority of users out there...not to mention the fact that the clips don't easily link in with the service as well as itunes.
I think that eMusic in its new for can survive but it needs to do some new things.
What does eMusic need to do (in no real order)??
1) Improve the sampling service. Extend it to 75% of the song for samples.
2) Add user generated reviews of individual tracks.
3) Offer cheaper downloads for those super short tracks out there.
4) Get rid of the download manager and revert to easy click and download links.
5) Finally...hang on...this is going to be a bumpy ride.
Saturday, October 04, 2003
Scrabbel
Last week I bought the Scrabble Card Game to play with Suzette. Last night we finally got around to a game...it was close until the end when Suzette pulled away....all this in spite of my inability to spell my first two turns.
Apparently according to the rest of the world farthar is spelt farther and I misspelt Chook...though I can't remember how...and i was finally left with an X which I had no idea what to do with.
Last week I bought the Scrabble Card Game to play with Suzette. Last night we finally got around to a game...it was close until the end when Suzette pulled away....all this in spite of my inability to spell my first two turns.
Apparently according to the rest of the world farthar is spelt farther and I misspelt Chook...though I can't remember how...and i was finally left with an X which I had no idea what to do with.
Search engines, information retrieval and recommendations
Since 1996, I've been working, to various degrees, on recommendation systems; first at Accenture's research labs with the team who create Bargain Finder and since then at AgentArts working on Music and other entertainment recommendation systems. Most recently I built Blog Change Bot which is a little IM Bot which sends you a message when a site you are interested in is updated. Aside - The AOL network has troubles with large lists of buddies (in my case subscribers) so a rewrite of the app is ahead of me this weekend.
In 1998 I attended a conference on Intelligent Agents and did a workshop on Information Retrieval and related topics. Its been interesting how this theme has reappeared consistently over the years. Last week we got called by a company interested in us doing Movie Recommendations for them. This got me thinking about how we could create a database of movie recommendations. I remembered an available database of around 80,000 movie reviews and plot overviews. Traditionally, we have built recommendation databases by data mining people's usage patterns e.g songs downloaded, search terms, movies hired etc. but for this client none of this data was available. So I wondered if we could take the reviews and plots and automatically extract the most distinctive words from the text and match this against other movie's reviews and plots to generate a measure of similarity. So for the last 3 days I've been beaverishly coding what is basically a fully fledged search engine that processes and parses 80,000 XML files, creates and inverted index of them and then matches a query to specific movies. Next week with a few tweaks, we should have a comprehensive database of relationships. As an example, I searched for "nuclear bomb comedy", thinking of Dr Strangelove, and got Space Cowboys which was very accurate.
I'm pretty pleased with the effort so far and the results...not bad for 3 days work. I'll have a demo available in a week or so and point people to it then and hopefully it won't be long before you wander into the local video/dvd store and no longer have to hunt around to find something that you might like.
Since 1996, I've been working, to various degrees, on recommendation systems; first at Accenture's research labs with the team who create Bargain Finder and since then at AgentArts working on Music and other entertainment recommendation systems. Most recently I built Blog Change Bot which is a little IM Bot which sends you a message when a site you are interested in is updated. Aside - The AOL network has troubles with large lists of buddies (in my case subscribers) so a rewrite of the app is ahead of me this weekend.
In 1998 I attended a conference on Intelligent Agents and did a workshop on Information Retrieval and related topics. Its been interesting how this theme has reappeared consistently over the years. Last week we got called by a company interested in us doing Movie Recommendations for them. This got me thinking about how we could create a database of movie recommendations. I remembered an available database of around 80,000 movie reviews and plot overviews. Traditionally, we have built recommendation databases by data mining people's usage patterns e.g songs downloaded, search terms, movies hired etc. but for this client none of this data was available. So I wondered if we could take the reviews and plots and automatically extract the most distinctive words from the text and match this against other movie's reviews and plots to generate a measure of similarity. So for the last 3 days I've been beaverishly coding what is basically a fully fledged search engine that processes and parses 80,000 XML files, creates and inverted index of them and then matches a query to specific movies. Next week with a few tweaks, we should have a comprehensive database of relationships. As an example, I searched for "nuclear bomb comedy", thinking of Dr Strangelove, and got Space Cowboys which was very accurate.
I'm pretty pleased with the effort so far and the results...not bad for 3 days work. I'll have a demo available in a week or so and point people to it then and hopefully it won't be long before you wander into the local video/dvd store and no longer have to hunt around to find something that you might like.
Nokia fun
As some of you may be aware...Nokia invested in my company, AgentArts, last month so now I'm rolling in cash which is rapidly being spent on expensive french champagne and sushi for the developers (thats me).....I WISH!!!
Anyway...part of the deal was the promise of many cool gadgets which have yet to appear but we'll probably get some phones later this month which will be ace. The current phone of choice would be the Nokia 3650 which is tres snazzy AND some people (with far too much time on their hands) have coded Commodore 64, Acorn, and ZX Spectrum emulators for them which is ummmm geeky cool but is it useful...playing Elite maybe??
But the best app I've seen so far (via Rael) is Anti-Mosquito which is an app for your phone which emits a high frequency tone which mosquito's don't like and repels them....perfect for Summer BBQs in Australia!!!
So Nokia...time to bring on the phones!! Oh and the new Nokia Kaleidosciope, Medallion, Image Frame and Music Phone....
As some of you may be aware...Nokia invested in my company, AgentArts, last month so now I'm rolling in cash which is rapidly being spent on expensive french champagne and sushi for the developers (thats me).....I WISH!!!
Anyway...part of the deal was the promise of many cool gadgets which have yet to appear but we'll probably get some phones later this month which will be ace. The current phone of choice would be the Nokia 3650 which is tres snazzy AND some people (with far too much time on their hands) have coded Commodore 64, Acorn, and ZX Spectrum emulators for them which is ummmm geeky cool but is it useful...playing Elite maybe??
But the best app I've seen so far (via Rael) is Anti-Mosquito which is an app for your phone which emits a high frequency tone which mosquito's don't like and repels them....perfect for Summer BBQs in Australia!!!
So Nokia...time to bring on the phones!! Oh and the new Nokia Kaleidosciope, Medallion, Image Frame and Music Phone....
Thursday, September 18, 2003
Happy Anniversary
Suze and I have been married for 4 years today. Still very very very very very happily married (if quite tired due to being parents of young kids).
We were married at the Windsor Hotel on a Saturday arvo and then headed off to Chinois in South Yarra for a most magnificent meal and wonderful cake then back to the Windsor for the night.
My memories of the day
- Smelling of garlic because I used 8 cloves of garlic in my yummy pasta the night before
- Going for a run in the morning and having enough nervous energy to do a marathon
- Voting for the liberal party for the one and only time in my life
- Wearing my brand new $300 shoes bought for the wedding
- Waiting in the room we were getting married in (with 50+ guests) with Handel and Bach being played by a string trio.
- Having the music stop and everyone start to wonder why Suzette hasn't turned up 10 mins after everything was going
- Seeing my lovely bride in a magnificent blue dress with cleavage!!!
- Feeling nervous about correctly saying "I will!" (not I do.)
- Kissing my bride
- Getting photos taken at Pellegrini's
- The limo driver's super smooth acceleration and braking while driving to dinner
- The close-up magician who performed for us all while we had pre dinner drinks
- The most wonderful meal
- Jo stressing that the cake was screwed cause the icing had done strange things...she fixed it all and it was Great
- Adam's super short speech ....lucky if it was 10 words
- My great speech ;-) Lots of laughs
- Waking at the Windsor and realising that Melbourne city on a Sunday morning is Boorrrrring.
- My new $300 shoes bought for post wedding :-)
- Going down to Johanna for a peaceful and relaxing honeymoon
Suze and I have been married for 4 years today. Still very very very very very happily married (if quite tired due to being parents of young kids).
We were married at the Windsor Hotel on a Saturday arvo and then headed off to Chinois in South Yarra for a most magnificent meal and wonderful cake then back to the Windsor for the night.
My memories of the day
- Smelling of garlic because I used 8 cloves of garlic in my yummy pasta the night before
- Going for a run in the morning and having enough nervous energy to do a marathon
- Voting for the liberal party for the one and only time in my life
- Wearing my brand new $300 shoes bought for the wedding
- Waiting in the room we were getting married in (with 50+ guests) with Handel and Bach being played by a string trio.
- Having the music stop and everyone start to wonder why Suzette hasn't turned up 10 mins after everything was going
- Seeing my lovely bride in a magnificent blue dress with cleavage!!!
- Feeling nervous about correctly saying "I will!" (not I do.)
- Kissing my bride
- Getting photos taken at Pellegrini's
- The limo driver's super smooth acceleration and braking while driving to dinner
- The close-up magician who performed for us all while we had pre dinner drinks
- The most wonderful meal
- Jo stressing that the cake was screwed cause the icing had done strange things...she fixed it all and it was Great
- Adam's super short speech ....lucky if it was 10 words
- My great speech ;-) Lots of laughs
- Waking at the Windsor and realising that Melbourne city on a Sunday morning is Boorrrrring.
- My new $300 shoes bought for post wedding :-)
- Going down to Johanna for a peaceful and relaxing honeymoon
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Telstra Bigpond is pathetic
Begin Rant
We ordered Telstra ADSL to be connected to our new offices two weeks ago at the same time we ordered the actual lines to be installed.
I expected around 5 days for the lines to be installed...which was exactly as it was.
Given I have installed the ADSL at home and am quite technical I went with the self install option in which Telstra ship out the modem to you.
Last Thursday the stupid head on the phone said that the modem hadn't let been scheduled to ship and it should ship on Monday. Today I ring and they say it shipped today (Tuesday).
Unbelievable.....two weeks to get a modem shipped is terrible customer service...especially when the damn line was installed in 5 days!!!
NEVER AGAIN....Optus, ozemail, etc you have my business next time...SELL the stupid company Mr Howard and maybe they'll start sacking the people they need to sack to get to a level where they have good people left.
End Rant
Begin Rant
We ordered Telstra ADSL to be connected to our new offices two weeks ago at the same time we ordered the actual lines to be installed.
I expected around 5 days for the lines to be installed...which was exactly as it was.
Given I have installed the ADSL at home and am quite technical I went with the self install option in which Telstra ship out the modem to you.
Last Thursday the stupid head on the phone said that the modem hadn't let been scheduled to ship and it should ship on Monday. Today I ring and they say it shipped today (Tuesday).
Unbelievable.....two weeks to get a modem shipped is terrible customer service...especially when the damn line was installed in 5 days!!!
NEVER AGAIN....Optus, ozemail, etc you have my business next time...SELL the stupid company Mr Howard and maybe they'll start sacking the people they need to sack to get to a level where they have good people left.
End Rant
Monday, September 15, 2003
Old before your time
Today I got a document about items to be discussed with a 3rd party tomorrow morning. The 1st item on the agenda is a service I built probably 3 years ago. In other industries or maybe even in some sectors of the IT industry, one could hold up, as a shining light, "world's first" work done 3 years ago as being a great example of what we could do now.
In this sector and in this industry I feel dread at the prospect of having this brought up as the first item of conversation. I can see it now "Ben why don't you give xyz and overview of our WAP Music service?"....the old, I'll pretend to open the conversation up to you while backing you into a corner trick certain people are very prone to. I'll start given an overview to xyz, all the while thinking I should be saying..."This is what we did 3 years ago. As you know, technology has changed, and what we did 3 years ago really doesn't show any level of expertise in the current environment; and I'd be embarrassed for you and me if it was decided to go forward with something similar."
As I read somewhere recently...what was cool bleeding edge tech 12 months ago is boring COBOL like stuff today.
Today I got a document about items to be discussed with a 3rd party tomorrow morning. The 1st item on the agenda is a service I built probably 3 years ago. In other industries or maybe even in some sectors of the IT industry, one could hold up, as a shining light, "world's first" work done 3 years ago as being a great example of what we could do now.
In this sector and in this industry I feel dread at the prospect of having this brought up as the first item of conversation. I can see it now "Ben why don't you give xyz and overview of our WAP Music service?"....the old, I'll pretend to open the conversation up to you while backing you into a corner trick certain people are very prone to. I'll start given an overview to xyz, all the while thinking I should be saying..."This is what we did 3 years ago. As you know, technology has changed, and what we did 3 years ago really doesn't show any level of expertise in the current environment; and I'd be embarrassed for you and me if it was decided to go forward with something similar."
As I read somewhere recently...what was cool bleeding edge tech 12 months ago is boring COBOL like stuff today.
Saturday, September 13, 2003
Game Dreams
Back when I was at school I was a little bit into Dungeons and Dragons, a lot into Sherlock Holmes and a huge amount into online BBS such that I lead a fairly nerd like life for my final school years. (ha ha I hear you saying....not much has changed).
Around this time I bought a copy of Steve Jackson Games' Killer, basically its a live roleplaying game where you try to kill people without hurting them....all harmless fun back in the 1980's but somehow I feel would get you arrested in certain countries at the moment.
Since that time I've always held a candle for developing the next generation of role playing game in a real world environment.
In 2001, It's Alive, a Swedish company, came out with BotFighters which is a killer like game you play using your mobile phone and some snazzy location based services available through more progressive telcos in Nordic part of the world. BotFighters was very much along the lines of what I had been thinking of for a game for ages.
I contacted Its Alive in 2001 and told them I'd love to work for them if they were ever wanting to start an Australian operation. They responded nicely saying my skills and background would make me perfect for the role but they weren't planning anything in Australia yet.
I also pushed forward with some initial designs for a 007 Spy type game based around a city and using mobile phones and the web for communication. The big stumbling block around here was the lack of location based services for the phones but I now see lots of chances to build something which uses more non virtual location services e.g. addresses etc to base the game around.
Around the same time I was organising the AgentArts christmas party and thought it would be fun to have a treasure hunt type of thing as part of the day. So I planned a game where the staff were split into 6 teams of 2 people and each started at the office after lunch and was sent out with their mobiles and cryptic description of a location to get to. Once they got to the location they called me and told me where they were then got the next clue.
The end result was that they ended up down at the Yarra River ready to hop on a boat cruise for the rest of the afternoon. It was a great success with everyone finding the boat and everyone getting slightly lost at some point.
Yesterday I read Geeks without borders, an article about virtual/rela world games and saw that a company has built a business out of running exactly this game for corporate clients and others!!!!! WOW!!
The article also talks about these immersive online games which are an online treasure hunt with secret messages encoded in images, fake websites, instant messanger bots etc.. Apparently there are some groups out there that band together to solve these puzzles and manage to do so significantly faster than a single person.
Associated with these types of games are the pure online games such as Ultima Online and There.com which are totally virtual worlds in the snowcrash sense.
The REALLY interesting things that are happening with these games is the unintended crossover between the virtual and the real worlds and the marketplaces that are being created for selling online game items (houses, gold etc) in the real world using real dollars. Julian Dibbell's Play money is the blog to start with this stuff if you are interested. He's trying to create a job brokering the onlilne and offline trading.
I still harbor the desire to start or work for an "immersive game" company here in Australia, in fact I feel that with my internet, distributed computing, emergent behaviour, swarming, instant messanger bots and creative game play ideas it would be the Perfect job for me....so if anyone knows anyone doing this type of thing or wants to do it let me know!!
Back when I was at school I was a little bit into Dungeons and Dragons, a lot into Sherlock Holmes and a huge amount into online BBS such that I lead a fairly nerd like life for my final school years. (ha ha I hear you saying....not much has changed).
Around this time I bought a copy of Steve Jackson Games' Killer, basically its a live roleplaying game where you try to kill people without hurting them....all harmless fun back in the 1980's but somehow I feel would get you arrested in certain countries at the moment.
Since that time I've always held a candle for developing the next generation of role playing game in a real world environment.
In 2001, It's Alive, a Swedish company, came out with BotFighters which is a killer like game you play using your mobile phone and some snazzy location based services available through more progressive telcos in Nordic part of the world. BotFighters was very much along the lines of what I had been thinking of for a game for ages.
I contacted Its Alive in 2001 and told them I'd love to work for them if they were ever wanting to start an Australian operation. They responded nicely saying my skills and background would make me perfect for the role but they weren't planning anything in Australia yet.
I also pushed forward with some initial designs for a 007 Spy type game based around a city and using mobile phones and the web for communication. The big stumbling block around here was the lack of location based services for the phones but I now see lots of chances to build something which uses more non virtual location services e.g. addresses etc to base the game around.
Around the same time I was organising the AgentArts christmas party and thought it would be fun to have a treasure hunt type of thing as part of the day. So I planned a game where the staff were split into 6 teams of 2 people and each started at the office after lunch and was sent out with their mobiles and cryptic description of a location to get to. Once they got to the location they called me and told me where they were then got the next clue.
The end result was that they ended up down at the Yarra River ready to hop on a boat cruise for the rest of the afternoon. It was a great success with everyone finding the boat and everyone getting slightly lost at some point.
Yesterday I read Geeks without borders, an article about virtual/rela world games and saw that a company has built a business out of running exactly this game for corporate clients and others!!!!! WOW!!
The article also talks about these immersive online games which are an online treasure hunt with secret messages encoded in images, fake websites, instant messanger bots etc.. Apparently there are some groups out there that band together to solve these puzzles and manage to do so significantly faster than a single person.
Associated with these types of games are the pure online games such as Ultima Online and There.com which are totally virtual worlds in the snowcrash sense.
The REALLY interesting things that are happening with these games is the unintended crossover between the virtual and the real worlds and the marketplaces that are being created for selling online game items (houses, gold etc) in the real world using real dollars. Julian Dibbell's Play money is the blog to start with this stuff if you are interested. He's trying to create a job brokering the onlilne and offline trading.
I still harbor the desire to start or work for an "immersive game" company here in Australia, in fact I feel that with my internet, distributed computing, emergent behaviour, swarming, instant messanger bots and creative game play ideas it would be the Perfect job for me....so if anyone knows anyone doing this type of thing or wants to do it let me know!!
Thursday, September 04, 2003
Divorce, work, qubes, cooking, sleep and dancing
Lance and Kristen getting divorced...its got to have been hard to keep the training and a relationship happening at the same time. I can only think of Ironman triathlon being a more selfish athletic pursuit than road cycling from a partner point of view. I keep thinking about the kids.
Things seem on the up workwise this week despite on of the founders leaving to have an exciting adventure in Kuwait of all places....but not until his band does a tour of syria performing!!!! It looks like our main client is going to be wanting our services for the next 1/2 year and the Nokia deal is starting to kick in so I'll probably have some cool work to get my brain around in the next month. All this AND we have a new office in Chapel street to move into next week....oh and did I mention we're getting iPods!!
Over the weekend I rebuilt ourGateway microserver using the original Cobalt Qube restore software. I followed the reinstall instructions kindly done by Brian at DSL Webserver and it worked first go. Now this is a small miracle for you non techie people (who have probably given up by now), as the install required downloading disk image, burning an ISO CD disk, connecting the PC to the Qube via a crossover cable, booting the cube with a special key command and then starting the PC booting off the CD into a Linuxish reinstall thing. So CD imaging, networking and remote self installing of an operating system all done in 15 mins (excluding download of image)!!!! AMAZING!! So with that done its time to install PHP and MySQL on it and start using it properly.
Here in Melbourne, Jamie "pukka tukka boy" Oliver has a TV show on every night at 7pm (a couple of weeks he had one every night plus a show on Tues for 1 hour and another on Wed......maybe he was trying to out do President Ed.....good luck!!!) and has been inspiring me to try some slightly new twists on current faves, so tomorrow its time for some new indian style yummy things. I also made another panettone this week but it wasn't as good as last times. I've promised one to Suzette for her birthday in a couple of weeks which will be much better and more polished!!
I'm sure you've heard this...but Oskar is sleeping through the night much better now. Its still not sleep in time but its better than waking at 4:30. Last weekend to celebrate we got him a lovely scooter like po's. He is very cute zipping around on it.
In other Oskar "Riverdance" Tex news.....I burnt a CD of Riverdance music for him yesterday. Since then every chance he gets he is dancing around saying "Like Michael" or "Like Collin". Its very impressive. Obviously he gets his dance skills from his Mum who was a bit of Calisthenics legend when she was younger (a member of the state champion's team) until she broke her back doing some flip thing. I however am obviously not made for dancing....swimming, riding and to a degree running is my forte. I've filmed him a bit on my little toy camera so I'll make sure he sees them in 20 years time.
Lance and Kristen getting divorced...its got to have been hard to keep the training and a relationship happening at the same time. I can only think of Ironman triathlon being a more selfish athletic pursuit than road cycling from a partner point of view. I keep thinking about the kids.
Things seem on the up workwise this week despite on of the founders leaving to have an exciting adventure in Kuwait of all places....but not until his band does a tour of syria performing!!!! It looks like our main client is going to be wanting our services for the next 1/2 year and the Nokia deal is starting to kick in so I'll probably have some cool work to get my brain around in the next month. All this AND we have a new office in Chapel street to move into next week....oh and did I mention we're getting iPods!!
Over the weekend I rebuilt ourGateway microserver using the original Cobalt Qube restore software. I followed the reinstall instructions kindly done by Brian at DSL Webserver and it worked first go. Now this is a small miracle for you non techie people (who have probably given up by now), as the install required downloading disk image, burning an ISO CD disk, connecting the PC to the Qube via a crossover cable, booting the cube with a special key command and then starting the PC booting off the CD into a Linuxish reinstall thing. So CD imaging, networking and remote self installing of an operating system all done in 15 mins (excluding download of image)!!!! AMAZING!! So with that done its time to install PHP and MySQL on it and start using it properly.
Here in Melbourne, Jamie "pukka tukka boy" Oliver has a TV show on every night at 7pm (a couple of weeks he had one every night plus a show on Tues for 1 hour and another on Wed......maybe he was trying to out do President Ed.....good luck!!!) and has been inspiring me to try some slightly new twists on current faves, so tomorrow its time for some new indian style yummy things. I also made another panettone this week but it wasn't as good as last times. I've promised one to Suzette for her birthday in a couple of weeks which will be much better and more polished!!
I'm sure you've heard this...but Oskar is sleeping through the night much better now. Its still not sleep in time but its better than waking at 4:30. Last weekend to celebrate we got him a lovely scooter like po's. He is very cute zipping around on it.
In other Oskar "Riverdance" Tex news.....I burnt a CD of Riverdance music for him yesterday. Since then every chance he gets he is dancing around saying "Like Michael" or "Like Collin". Its very impressive. Obviously he gets his dance skills from his Mum who was a bit of Calisthenics legend when she was younger (a member of the state champion's team) until she broke her back doing some flip thing. I however am obviously not made for dancing....swimming, riding and to a degree running is my forte. I've filmed him a bit on my little toy camera so I'll make sure he sees them in 20 years time.
Friday, August 29, 2003
eMusic RSS Feeds and lists
The last few weeks, I've been sending part of my working day developing RSS feeds for eMusic along with finalising the lists functionality for them.
The good news is that Lists will go live next week (Tuesday US time) and the RSS Feeds soon thereafter.
If you want a sneak preview of the RSS Feeds you can get all the details at the eMusic RSS FAQ page.
With this being completed and the recent work I've been doing creating Japanese systems for our music recommendations coming to a close, I'll be free to focus on some new things and to get set for our move into a new office here in Melbourne. We will be sharing offices with Momentum Technologies Group, a small startup building some cool tech to webcast standard video cameras.
The last few weeks, I've been sending part of my working day developing RSS feeds for eMusic along with finalising the lists functionality for them.
The good news is that Lists will go live next week (Tuesday US time) and the RSS Feeds soon thereafter.
If you want a sneak preview of the RSS Feeds you can get all the details at the eMusic RSS FAQ page.
With this being completed and the recent work I've been doing creating Japanese systems for our music recommendations coming to a close, I'll be free to focus on some new things and to get set for our move into a new office here in Melbourne. We will be sharing offices with Momentum Technologies Group, a small startup building some cool tech to webcast standard video cameras.
Thursday, August 28, 2003
Mars
So that in 20 years I can look back at this.....I just went downstairs with Oskar and looked at Mars. He was very excited and when Mars was behind a cloud he said "Mars Gone. Wheresit gone?" in his usual cute questioning way.
I also saw it last night 2 mins after it was at its closest.
Maybe its my imagination but the sky looks red tonight and did so last night. I wonder if this has anything to do with Mars?
So that in 20 years I can look back at this.....I just went downstairs with Oskar and looked at Mars. He was very excited and when Mars was behind a cloud he said "Mars Gone. Wheresit gone?" in his usual cute questioning way.
I also saw it last night 2 mins after it was at its closest.
Maybe its my imagination but the sky looks red tonight and did so last night. I wonder if this has anything to do with Mars?
Thursday, August 21, 2003
Interview gameThe Rules
1. Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2. I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3. You'll update your website with my five questions, and your five answers.
4. You'll include this explanation.
5. You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.
Here are my answers to the questions from Phil
1. Tell me about an embarrassing moment.
Hmmm... I must have blocked them all out as I can't think of many. Ok.. a quick call to Dad and I have a suitable moment. I was in Year 10 and Mum took me shopping for a new ensemble at Myer Menswear and I walked out of the store with (oh my god I can't believe I/Mum ever bought this!!!) aqua canvas shoes, aqua pants and an aqua top. I thought I looked pretty cool until the following week when I wore it to a school casual day :-( aqua everything didn't cut it with the "Edwin jeans and black jumper Saturday arvo at the Underground's under 18 disco" crew. Needless to say that was the end of shopping with Mum. Very soon after, I purchased my first pair of Levi 501s (paid for by me), Reeboks (very very very very trendy at the time) and a blue and white striped rugby jumper. Looking back I can see this was the start of my jeans and coloured tops fashion which has continued through to today.
2. Describe the moment you realised you were an adult.
Its been a transition to adulthood more than a step or moment. I think a lot of me is not very adult (just ask Dad and Suzette) if I think of adulthood as loosing my childishness and playfulness. I guess the behavior I consider most defining of my adulthood has been taking responsibility and acting professionally in most of my dealings (while maintaining that fun side), so the two events that I would say were most defining of my adulthood were 1. Learning to look after Oskar Tex when he was very little and 2. Taking responsibility for the my staff at AgentArts especially when we had to close down our Melbourne office and focus on the US.
3. What fashion era or trend do you reject with contempt and why?
Easy! The skater/bmx'er look of boxer shorts with your normal length pants hanging down around your knees. I just hate it!! Its such a cheap and nasty look and I can't imagine it helps you pull a 360 or some other move with ease. Guys....pull your pants up or get some boxer briefs.
4. Favorite Legume?
Another easy one. Suzette taught me to love lentils. I have very fond memories of when we were courting and I used to head over to her flat after work and have yummy lentils with her.
5. What question do you hate being asked?
For the last 2 years I have been fortunate enough to work from home and have been able to watch both my children grow and interact with them all day. Working for the startup I founded 5 years ago has had its ups and downs and a lot of my friends, especially the more conservative and non creative ones think that my job is not real, mainly because I don't have to be in the city in a big building working for the man from 8 until 6. So the question I hate the most is asked by these people each time my company looks like it might be reaching a tight spot and it is "So...you'll have to get A REAL job now?". F%$&@# ignorant idiots!!! I like to think of an 8-6 job in front of a computer being an IT team leader or such a very very average job. Its definitely what I see as selling out who I am if I were to ever go back to that life.
1. Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2. I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3. You'll update your website with my five questions, and your five answers.
4. You'll include this explanation.
5. You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.
Here are my answers to the questions from Phil
1. Tell me about an embarrassing moment.
Hmmm... I must have blocked them all out as I can't think of many. Ok.. a quick call to Dad and I have a suitable moment. I was in Year 10 and Mum took me shopping for a new ensemble at Myer Menswear and I walked out of the store with (oh my god I can't believe I/Mum ever bought this!!!) aqua canvas shoes, aqua pants and an aqua top. I thought I looked pretty cool until the following week when I wore it to a school casual day :-( aqua everything didn't cut it with the "Edwin jeans and black jumper Saturday arvo at the Underground's under 18 disco" crew. Needless to say that was the end of shopping with Mum. Very soon after, I purchased my first pair of Levi 501s (paid for by me), Reeboks (very very very very trendy at the time) and a blue and white striped rugby jumper. Looking back I can see this was the start of my jeans and coloured tops fashion which has continued through to today.
2. Describe the moment you realised you were an adult.
Its been a transition to adulthood more than a step or moment. I think a lot of me is not very adult (just ask Dad and Suzette) if I think of adulthood as loosing my childishness and playfulness. I guess the behavior I consider most defining of my adulthood has been taking responsibility and acting professionally in most of my dealings (while maintaining that fun side), so the two events that I would say were most defining of my adulthood were 1. Learning to look after Oskar Tex when he was very little and 2. Taking responsibility for the my staff at AgentArts especially when we had to close down our Melbourne office and focus on the US.
3. What fashion era or trend do you reject with contempt and why?
Easy! The skater/bmx'er look of boxer shorts with your normal length pants hanging down around your knees. I just hate it!! Its such a cheap and nasty look and I can't imagine it helps you pull a 360 or some other move with ease. Guys....pull your pants up or get some boxer briefs.
4. Favorite Legume?
Another easy one. Suzette taught me to love lentils. I have very fond memories of when we were courting and I used to head over to her flat after work and have yummy lentils with her.
5. What question do you hate being asked?
For the last 2 years I have been fortunate enough to work from home and have been able to watch both my children grow and interact with them all day. Working for the startup I founded 5 years ago has had its ups and downs and a lot of my friends, especially the more conservative and non creative ones think that my job is not real, mainly because I don't have to be in the city in a big building working for the man from 8 until 6. So the question I hate the most is asked by these people each time my company looks like it might be reaching a tight spot and it is "So...you'll have to get A REAL job now?". F%$&@# ignorant idiots!!! I like to think of an 8-6 job in front of a computer being an IT team leader or such a very very average job. Its definitely what I see as selling out who I am if I were to ever go back to that life.
Thursday, August 14, 2003
Nokia, Character Sets and a Sore Back
Yeah!!!! We just received funding from Nokia and eMusic. This means there'll be some pretty interesting work in the coming months as we try and merge recommendation technology, data mining, music content and mobile devices. My mind is awash with ideas of some form of P2P distributed agent-based profile and recommendation system to be used with next gen mobile phones and entertainment devices (set top box things).
I've been learning heaps about Double Byte Character Set issues while we work with some clients in Japan to create a Japanese version of our products.....hours spent fiddling with encoding types have finally paid off with some big wins today.
On Sunday I hurt my back between getting out of bed and reaching the kitchen (5 meters). So hurt that it is still in pain. On Tuesday I did 8km running and I think it just hurt it more. Yesterday I have a fantastic Feldenkrais session which worked wonders. I can highly recommend this form of therapy to anyone who is in tune with their body and needs some work on improving their body's movement. Its sooo different to massage which is about the only thing I usually get. Hopefully running will be back on the agenda this weekend as I missed a Time Trial on Sunday.
Happy Birthday to my Dad who turned 60 on Monday. We (really Mum) threw a surprise party for him which was great...lots of people gooing and gaaing over Jasmine and Oskar.
Yeah!!!! We just received funding from Nokia and eMusic. This means there'll be some pretty interesting work in the coming months as we try and merge recommendation technology, data mining, music content and mobile devices. My mind is awash with ideas of some form of P2P distributed agent-based profile and recommendation system to be used with next gen mobile phones and entertainment devices (set top box things).
I've been learning heaps about Double Byte Character Set issues while we work with some clients in Japan to create a Japanese version of our products.....hours spent fiddling with encoding types have finally paid off with some big wins today.
On Sunday I hurt my back between getting out of bed and reaching the kitchen (5 meters). So hurt that it is still in pain. On Tuesday I did 8km running and I think it just hurt it more. Yesterday I have a fantastic Feldenkrais session which worked wonders. I can highly recommend this form of therapy to anyone who is in tune with their body and needs some work on improving their body's movement. Its sooo different to massage which is about the only thing I usually get. Hopefully running will be back on the agenda this weekend as I missed a Time Trial on Sunday.
Happy Birthday to my Dad who turned 60 on Monday. We (really Mum) threw a surprise party for him which was great...lots of people gooing and gaaing over Jasmine and Oskar.
Thursday, August 07, 2003
Magic Finds
Firstly...Happy Birthday little (ha ha ha) brother!!!
This evening SuperSuze was looking at her referral logs and saw ditto.typepad.com....oooh we both thought....a link from a uber cool typepader. Clicking through it is Big-P/Phil/Rubhub/McClusky's new site. Hopefully, he'll have a virtual site warming....with IM web cams etc.
Another slow week this week with lots of small bits and pieces making up work so far, running has been good and sleeping has been short.
Firstly...Happy Birthday little (ha ha ha) brother!!!
This evening SuperSuze was looking at her referral logs and saw ditto.typepad.com....oooh we both thought....a link from a uber cool typepader. Clicking through it is Big-P/Phil/Rubhub/McClusky's new site. Hopefully, he'll have a virtual site warming....with IM web cams etc.
Another slow week this week with lots of small bits and pieces making up work so far, running has been good and sleeping has been short.
Tuesday, August 05, 2003
Media Tart
Blog Change Bot got a mention in today's Age newspaper....brief and to the point....just like the old BCB. View the article online here.
Blog Change Bot got a mention in today's Age newspaper....brief and to the point....just like the old BCB. View the article online here.
Poor Blog Change Bot getting picked on
Check out this IM I had today with someone who has been eviling the poor blog change bot.
07:50
Ben - Please stop eviling the blog change bot
Ben - I am removing all your subscriptions now
Eviler - oh sorry
Eviler - ok
Ben - by eviling the bot it means that all other user (550+ or them) can't use the service
Eviler - oh ok
Eviler - i'm sorry
Eviler - i didn't know that
Eviler - it won't happen again
Ben - shall I leave your subscriptions or do you wish me to delete them??
Eviler - leave them please
Ben - ok
Eviler - thanks
Ben - was there a specific reason/message you were eviling the bot??
Eviler - no
Eviler - i was bored
Eviler - i'm sorry
Why do people do this??? How bored can people be??
Check out this IM I had today with someone who has been eviling the poor blog change bot.
07:50
Ben - Please stop eviling the blog change bot
Ben - I am removing all your subscriptions now
Eviler - oh sorry
Eviler - ok
Ben - by eviling the bot it means that all other user (550+ or them) can't use the service
Eviler - oh ok
Eviler - i'm sorry
Eviler - i didn't know that
Eviler - it won't happen again
Ben - shall I leave your subscriptions or do you wish me to delete them??
Eviler - leave them please
Ben - ok
Eviler - thanks
Ben - was there a specific reason/message you were eviling the bot??
Eviler - no
Eviler - i was bored
Eviler - i'm sorry
Why do people do this??? How bored can people be??
Sunday, August 03, 2003
Thursday, July 31, 2003
Bald Patch
It must be the worry over flaky AOL connections or my tiredness but this afternoon I was a fool!!
I shaved my hair with a #1 and all was good. Then sitting at the computer I realised I had a little tuft that needed trimming. So back to the bathroom I went...proceeding to shave the the tuft off WITH A NUMBER 0 DOH!! Now instead of a tuft I have a bald patch. No leaving the house for a week i guess!!
It must be the worry over flaky AOL connections or my tiredness but this afternoon I was a fool!!
I shaved my hair with a #1 and all was good. Then sitting at the computer I realised I had a little tuft that needed trimming. So back to the bathroom I went...proceeding to shave the the tuft off WITH A NUMBER 0 DOH!! Now instead of a tuft I have a bald patch. No leaving the house for a week i guess!!
Nearly 500 and warnings
It appears someone who has subscribed to BlogChangeBot has decided to respond to the automated notifications with a warning which is reducing the level on AIM which, I think, impacts the speed at which messages can be sent. This shouldn't be a huge issue but its not very nice behavior. Just send an unsubscribe message or send me an email if you want to be deleted.
In related news, we should kick through 500 subscribers tonight having broken through 400 only a day ago so its been a big day and I'm wondering if the flaky connection issues have been due to the volume of "buddies" the bot now has??
I shouldn't worry about it really :-)
It appears someone who has subscribed to BlogChangeBot has decided to respond to the automated notifications with a warning which is reducing the level on AIM which, I think, impacts the speed at which messages can be sent. This shouldn't be a huge issue but its not very nice behavior. Just send an unsubscribe message or send me an email if you want to be deleted.
In related news, we should kick through 500 subscribers tonight having broken through 400 only a day ago so its been a big day and I'm wondering if the flaky connection issues have been due to the volume of "buddies" the bot now has??
I shouldn't worry about it really :-)
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
Baking, cooking, coding
A lack of posts in the last week is mainly due to a fairly busy week focused on otherthings.
Blog Change Bot has been going really well with over 400 subscribers within the first week which is well beyond expectations. As mentioned previously we made it into Daypop's Top 40 and also Top 10 at Blogdex.
Having spent the last few years designing and developing internet based systems some of which have been well used but most have been lightly if at all used. I believe this is because we have been building systems and "hoping they will come" and no one has shown up....much like a party at 10pm :-).
So its been REALLY and I mean REALLY motivating to see all the very kind words people have blogged about this latest creation. I can totally see why people build things for free to get recognition and use of cool useful tools.
Being a month of creativity, I've also created a new web service for work and have been doing some good cooking. A few weeks ago, Epicure had an article on pies with a good, no, make that fool proof, recipe for pastry. I've been using it a couple of times a week for apple pies, pasties, meat pies etc. Never having been much of a pastry (as opposed to dough) maker its been very fulfilling to get my pastry working right every time. I've also finally got my yorkshire puddings rising!!!! The secret has been to stand the eggs and milk in warm water to before making the batter.
So its been a pastry and yorkshire pudding week after some yummy leek soup on the weekend from loobylu and big-p and little aj (even if claire did try to poison us with her so called 'chives").
I've just watched a short video on pizza from I Carusi and have found the recipe for their dough so I'll give that a go this week.
As readers of Oskar's blog would know, his sleeping patterns have taking a turn for the worse recently so we've been trying some advice on putting him back to bed in the middle of the night....the first night we put him back to bed 74 times between 7:30 and 8:30pm and then 40+ times been 4:30 and 6:00. Last night was much better with 17 times around 7pm and then 12ish times around 4am so hopefully things are on the mend and we'll be sleeping better again.
Finally....my love for running is back. After a few weeks of faster running on my longs runs I ran the fastest 10km I have done for a few years in the middle of a long run on the weekend so things are looking flash for the 1/2 marathon in 7 weeks.
A lack of posts in the last week is mainly due to a fairly busy week focused on otherthings.
Blog Change Bot has been going really well with over 400 subscribers within the first week which is well beyond expectations. As mentioned previously we made it into Daypop's Top 40 and also Top 10 at Blogdex.
Having spent the last few years designing and developing internet based systems some of which have been well used but most have been lightly if at all used. I believe this is because we have been building systems and "hoping they will come" and no one has shown up....much like a party at 10pm :-).
So its been REALLY and I mean REALLY motivating to see all the very kind words people have blogged about this latest creation. I can totally see why people build things for free to get recognition and use of cool useful tools.
Being a month of creativity, I've also created a new web service for work and have been doing some good cooking. A few weeks ago, Epicure had an article on pies with a good, no, make that fool proof, recipe for pastry. I've been using it a couple of times a week for apple pies, pasties, meat pies etc. Never having been much of a pastry (as opposed to dough) maker its been very fulfilling to get my pastry working right every time. I've also finally got my yorkshire puddings rising!!!! The secret has been to stand the eggs and milk in warm water to before making the batter.
So its been a pastry and yorkshire pudding week after some yummy leek soup on the weekend from loobylu and big-p and little aj (even if claire did try to poison us with her so called 'chives").
I've just watched a short video on pizza from I Carusi and have found the recipe for their dough so I'll give that a go this week.
As readers of Oskar's blog would know, his sleeping patterns have taking a turn for the worse recently so we've been trying some advice on putting him back to bed in the middle of the night....the first night we put him back to bed 74 times between 7:30 and 8:30pm and then 40+ times been 4:30 and 6:00. Last night was much better with 17 times around 7pm and then 12ish times around 4am so hopefully things are on the mend and we'll be sleeping better again.
Finally....my love for running is back. After a few weeks of faster running on my longs runs I ran the fastest 10km I have done for a few years in the middle of a long run on the weekend so things are looking flash for the 1/2 marathon in 7 weeks.
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Daypop
Last week I launched Blog Change Bot in beta and sent around a couple of emails to people who I thought might be interested in playing with it. Since the weekend, the number of subscribers has been doubling every day. Claire said it would be huge but I didn't believe her, now I'm not so sure. Today it made daypop's top 40
which was something in my wildest dreams I thought wouldn't happen for ages, I even said to Suzette that we'd do something special if I ever made it on the list!
Thanks to everyone who has posted great comments about the bot and is using it. It definitely changed how I surf my blog roll.
Last week I launched Blog Change Bot in beta and sent around a couple of emails to people who I thought might be interested in playing with it. Since the weekend, the number of subscribers has been doubling every day. Claire said it would be huge but I didn't believe her, now I'm not so sure. Today it made daypop's top 40
which was something in my wildest dreams I thought wouldn't happen for ages, I even said to Suzette that we'd do something special if I ever made it on the list!Thanks to everyone who has posted great comments about the bot and is using it. It definitely changed how I surf my blog roll.
Sunday, July 20, 2003
Sushi, sushi, sushi starts with C
Its my birthday tomorrow (2^5 a prime to a prime as Cory says) so we headed out to Kenzan for what turned out to be the best Sushi we've Ever eaten.
We started with a glass of Moet each and then a platter of chef selected sushi which was just amazing. Being a totally indulgent evening we decided to have just a few more pieces and were recommended to try the Yellow fin Tuna Belly which was completely different to a normal tuna sushi. Apparently it isn't available very often and is quite a delicacy.....it totally melted in your mouth. YUMMMMMY
The only bad choice was a yellow fishy thing that in hindsight would have to live in a shell...so of course I was a bit sick this morning but not enough to detract from the night.
The celebrations continue with drinks and Mum and Dad's this arvo, bubbly and toasted brioche with mascarpone and berries for breakfast tomorrow and friends over for dinner. Not to mention a day off as well :-)
So Hippy Birthday to me!!
Its my birthday tomorrow (2^5 a prime to a prime as Cory says) so we headed out to Kenzan for what turned out to be the best Sushi we've Ever eaten.
We started with a glass of Moet each and then a platter of chef selected sushi which was just amazing. Being a totally indulgent evening we decided to have just a few more pieces and were recommended to try the Yellow fin Tuna Belly which was completely different to a normal tuna sushi. Apparently it isn't available very often and is quite a delicacy.....it totally melted in your mouth. YUMMMMMY
The only bad choice was a yellow fishy thing that in hindsight would have to live in a shell...so of course I was a bit sick this morning but not enough to detract from the night.
The celebrations continue with drinks and Mum and Dad's this arvo, bubbly and toasted brioche with mascarpone and berries for breakfast tomorrow and friends over for dinner. Not to mention a day off as well :-)
So Hippy Birthday to me!!
Thursday, July 17, 2003
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
Blog Change Bot - New Project
I've been working a new project in my spare time which will monitor your fave blogs and send you an Instant Message when the blog is updated.
The project page is at http://www.neuronwave.com/bcb.
In the meantime if you use AOL IM you should be able to click on this icon
and be automatically notified when its updated.
I've been working a new project in my spare time which will monitor your fave blogs and send you an Instant Message when the blog is updated.
The project page is at http://www.neuronwave.com/bcb.
In the meantime if you use AOL IM you should be able to click on this icon
and be automatically notified when its updated.
Sunday, July 13, 2003
Sunday, July 06, 2003
AOL IM Robot
This weekend I've spent some time playing with the JAIMBot project. Its a Java based AOL IM interface which uses AOL's TOC protocol to IM enable your applications. Its very cool and worked straight away. The code is very very good. Its got all the bells and whistles I'd need including persistence, auto relogin etc.
So now my mind is running round with ideas on what to build with it that would be useful and teach me a few things. The application has to make sense in an IM environment which is pretty wide in scope, especially if you start to thing of new phones which have a built in IM client which can be more flexible than SMS. So far I've come up with the following ideas - Weather Report, Dictionary lookup, Directions, Server monitor, Music recommender, a Loebner Prize entrant and one related to blogs which I'm going to start on this week.
If you have AOL IM keep an eye out for robotneuronwave which is the account my development bots will run under.
If you have any other ideas please post a comment.
This weekend I've spent some time playing with the JAIMBot project. Its a Java based AOL IM interface which uses AOL's TOC protocol to IM enable your applications. Its very cool and worked straight away. The code is very very good. Its got all the bells and whistles I'd need including persistence, auto relogin etc.
So now my mind is running round with ideas on what to build with it that would be useful and teach me a few things. The application has to make sense in an IM environment which is pretty wide in scope, especially if you start to thing of new phones which have a built in IM client which can be more flexible than SMS. So far I've come up with the following ideas - Weather Report, Dictionary lookup, Directions, Server monitor, Music recommender, a Loebner Prize entrant and one related to blogs which I'm going to start on this week.
If you have AOL IM keep an eye out for robotneuronwave which is the account my development bots will run under.
If you have any other ideas please post a comment.
Allez Brad
Le Tour began last night with a brilliant ride by Brad McGee giving the Australian the overall lead along with the green points jersey. Aussie Aussie Aussie Oui Oui Oui :-)
Brad's win was a great start to a wonderful day. This morning I raced in a 10km road race with Mum and Dad doing the 5km walk. I had a good race but couldn't compete with Mum and Dad both winning medals for coming 2nd in their age groups! Well Done!!!
On a post race high I zoomed home and played with Jasmine and then went over to Mum and Dad's for a big family roast lunch with Suze's dad down for the day. Lots of fun, jokes, great red wine and lovely food. We realised it must be the first family do in a year or so we could laugh and have a good time and not have to chase and tender to Oskar.
The rest of the arvo was a nice chill out cooking and making pasta finishing with a bit of blogging, stretching and watching the sunset.
An ideal day!!
Le Tour began last night with a brilliant ride by Brad McGee giving the Australian the overall lead along with the green points jersey. Aussie Aussie Aussie Oui Oui Oui :-)
Brad's win was a great start to a wonderful day. This morning I raced in a 10km road race with Mum and Dad doing the 5km walk. I had a good race but couldn't compete with Mum and Dad both winning medals for coming 2nd in their age groups! Well Done!!!
On a post race high I zoomed home and played with Jasmine and then went over to Mum and Dad's for a big family roast lunch with Suze's dad down for the day. Lots of fun, jokes, great red wine and lovely food. We realised it must be the first family do in a year or so we could laugh and have a good time and not have to chase and tender to Oskar.
The rest of the arvo was a nice chill out cooking and making pasta finishing with a bit of blogging, stretching and watching the sunset.
An ideal day!!
and the other a 
.
Wednesday, July 02, 2003
Get well Henk
Some sad news in what is the peak cycling time of year with Le tour starting this week.
Last weekend Henk Vogel's crashed at 107km/h (which is damn fast) into barriers during a race in US. He has a broken ankle and fractured if not broken back. The doctors say if he didn't his helmet on he would be dead.
We've followed Henk's racing for the last 7 years and have seen him in action in the Tour Down Under and I saw him in a race in San Fran a couple of years ago. Suzette even got his autograph a few years ago...this is a big deal for us :-)
From Suze and I "Get well Henk!!!!"
Some sad news in what is the peak cycling time of year with Le tour starting this week.
Last weekend Henk Vogel's crashed at 107km/h (which is damn fast) into barriers during a race in US. He has a broken ankle and fractured if not broken back. The doctors say if he didn't his helmet on he would be dead.
We've followed Henk's racing for the last 7 years and have seen him in action in the Tour Down Under and I saw him in a race in San Fran a couple of years ago. Suzette even got his autograph a few years ago...this is a big deal for us :-)
From Suze and I "Get well Henk!!!!"
IBook Fixed!!
Since replacing my battery a couple of months ago, my iBook would make a popping sound every minute or so when on battery power. Jason has just started having the same problem and got some good responses. One of them pointed to macosxhints which had some tips for zapping prams and nvrams etc.
After completing the proceedure everything is working...no Pops and my battery charge now goes up to 100% rather than stopping at 95% like it has previously done.
I must file the hint away in the useful pile.
Since replacing my battery a couple of months ago, my iBook would make a popping sound every minute or so when on battery power. Jason has just started having the same problem and got some good responses. One of them pointed to macosxhints which had some tips for zapping prams and nvrams etc.
After completing the proceedure everything is working...no Pops and my battery charge now goes up to 100% rather than stopping at 95% like it has previously done.
I must file the hint away in the useful pile.
Monday, June 30, 2003
Wooooooohoooooo
We are blogging super stars...well maybe starlets!!!
This morning Kerrilee sent a link to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald on young children using computers. Totally relevant to me so I'm reading it all over coffee and get to the bottom where there is a list of "5 super sites for children (and parents)" and along Sesame Street online and the ABC kids web site there is Oskar Tex's Wild Rumpus the blog of my wonderful son.
The author, whom I have never met, writes "This hilarious weblog is written by a two-year-old boy from Melbourne with a lot of help from his dad.". This is mostly true, Suzette does more on it than me ;-)
So we were VERY VERY excited and sent the news to everyone so if you're coming to my site from Oskar's....Welcome!!! I'm sure you'll find Oskar's site much more fun than this self-indulgent thing.
Now I'm thinking that with all this Blogging hype happening its only a matter of time before someone in Australia wants to host a blog oriented conference. To this end I think that Claire and Suze should get organised and tout (not tart) themselves around to the conference organisers for speaking positions. I'm also thinking a Bloggie around Baby-blogs is needed!!!
In other news, I've decided to run a 1/2 marathon in Sept rather than the Marathon in October this year...its just a bit too much given other things in my life at the moment.
Finally, I cooked some yummy yummy bread using a bread machine to do the dough (slack I know) and throwing it in the oven to cook; I think I'll try doing it by hand with the bread mix next; and I cooked a mean meat pie on the weekend along with totally homemade (inc. pasta) lasagne so cooking is still a big love.
We are blogging super stars...well maybe starlets!!!
This morning Kerrilee sent a link to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald on young children using computers. Totally relevant to me so I'm reading it all over coffee and get to the bottom where there is a list of "5 super sites for children (and parents)" and along Sesame Street online and the ABC kids web site there is Oskar Tex's Wild Rumpus the blog of my wonderful son.
The author, whom I have never met, writes "This hilarious weblog is written by a two-year-old boy from Melbourne with a lot of help from his dad.". This is mostly true, Suzette does more on it than me ;-)
So we were VERY VERY excited and sent the news to everyone so if you're coming to my site from Oskar's....Welcome!!! I'm sure you'll find Oskar's site much more fun than this self-indulgent thing.
Now I'm thinking that with all this Blogging hype happening its only a matter of time before someone in Australia wants to host a blog oriented conference. To this end I think that Claire and Suze should get organised and tout (not tart) themselves around to the conference organisers for speaking positions. I'm also thinking a Bloggie around Baby-blogs is needed!!!
In other news, I've decided to run a 1/2 marathon in Sept rather than the Marathon in October this year...its just a bit too much given other things in my life at the moment.
Finally, I cooked some yummy yummy bread using a bread machine to do the dough (slack I know) and throwing it in the oven to cook; I think I'll try doing it by hand with the bread mix next; and I cooked a mean meat pie on the weekend along with totally homemade (inc. pasta) lasagne so cooking is still a big love.
Thursday, June 19, 2003
Virtual Worlds, options and eBay
At the moment I am very very interested in the business of being the middleman between sellers and buyers of virtual world items via ebay. Physical market meets virtual world. Apparently there is a business to be had here with people earning 6 figures doing it. I guess I need to take some castle valuation courses ;-)
But seriously, I can easily imagine derivative markets becoming common place in virtual worlds as the technology gets better and better. And for the
The ultimate virtual job really....work at home, make money, no physical sales required, low overhead lots of turnover.
In other news (apparently boring news according to some snobby self indulgent canadian ski bunny type)....running is back on the agenda..I'm enjoying it this week and doing the distances but a little less structure. I've also found getting out first thing is much better than later in the day at the moment, even with Oskar getting up at 5:30 and Jasmine twice a night (tired parents).
Sunday, June 15, 2003
eBaying, running and Plans
Over the last few weeks I've gotten back into the old ebay habit, trying to win numerous Sherlock Holmes and James Bond items. I'm getting better at the set and forget ebay bid but I still get the rush in the last 60 secs when someone out bids me and I quickly bid..login in and confirm.
Since the Sydney 1/2 Marathon my running passion has dropped off a bit; I've had a couple of low level colds and have generally felt a bit sore and tired. I'm now trying to decide if I've bitten off too much in trying to do the Marathon this year given the family life efforts at the moment. I'll make a decision this week. (I'm leaning towards doing it but being less strict in my running and adding more cross training).
Along with the Marathon, I'm thinking lots about what I want to do/learn/achieve this year given AgentArts has (almost) some certainty to run through until August 2004 (touch wood). Having caught up with a friend last week I'm thinking of trying something non technical like wood working or something artistic as a night or weekend course. On the tech front, I want to learn CSS (starting with getting this site validating), Flash (focusing on programming not design) and Python. My aim being to get more familiar with rich internet apps with the aim of building some interesting in the game/immersive space arena. Aside from these things, I'm keen to push forward with the options trading plan as this is probably where my financial future sits.
So at the moment there is lots of thinking about things going on and trying to decide what the plans will be over the next 12 months.
Over the last few weeks I've gotten back into the old ebay habit, trying to win numerous Sherlock Holmes and James Bond items. I'm getting better at the set and forget ebay bid but I still get the rush in the last 60 secs when someone out bids me and I quickly bid..login in and confirm.
Since the Sydney 1/2 Marathon my running passion has dropped off a bit; I've had a couple of low level colds and have generally felt a bit sore and tired. I'm now trying to decide if I've bitten off too much in trying to do the Marathon this year given the family life efforts at the moment. I'll make a decision this week. (I'm leaning towards doing it but being less strict in my running and adding more cross training).
Along with the Marathon, I'm thinking lots about what I want to do/learn/achieve this year given AgentArts has (almost) some certainty to run through until August 2004 (touch wood). Having caught up with a friend last week I'm thinking of trying something non technical like wood working or something artistic as a night or weekend course. On the tech front, I want to learn CSS (starting with getting this site validating), Flash (focusing on programming not design) and Python. My aim being to get more familiar with rich internet apps with the aim of building some interesting in the game/immersive space arena. Aside from these things, I'm keen to push forward with the options trading plan as this is probably where my financial future sits.
So at the moment there is lots of thinking about things going on and trying to decide what the plans will be over the next 12 months.
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Saturday, June 07, 2003
Nullsoft farce
So I have to ask...
What the hell is AOL doing letting a set of developers they own develop products that are so obviously against their best interests.
With the pulling down of WASTE this week and the subsequent tortured artist display by Justin Frankel I am reminded of the Godfather's "How did things come to this?".
Who is looking after this bunch of coders and how did they get a piece of code to a production without anyone in AOL putting up their hand and suggesting that just maybe it wasn't something that is really what they want. Maybe being on the other side of the country to AOL HQ and having a lamma in reception saved them.
Rob comments on it here and I agree 100%.
So I have to ask...
What the hell is AOL doing letting a set of developers they own develop products that are so obviously against their best interests.
With the pulling down of WASTE this week and the subsequent tortured artist display by Justin Frankel I am reminded of the Godfather's "How did things come to this?".
Who is looking after this bunch of coders and how did they get a piece of code to a production without anyone in AOL putting up their hand and suggesting that just maybe it wasn't something that is really what they want. Maybe being on the other side of the country to AOL HQ and having a lamma in reception saved them.
Rob comments on it here and I agree 100%.
Best ever chocolate mousse
It was remiss of me not to mention that this week Suzette (not me) made the best ever Chocolate mouse I have eaten. This is great cause now I can cook a great main and have a sensational desert done by someone else.
Tonight I am going to try and do Mandarin Creme Brulee which should be yummy!!!
It was remiss of me not to mention that this week Suzette (not me) made the best ever Chocolate mouse I have eaten. This is great cause now I can cook a great main and have a sensational desert done by someone else.
Tonight I am going to try and do Mandarin Creme Brulee which should be yummy!!!
Thursday, June 05, 2003
Vacant tiredness
Well it's been over a week since I last posted which is a fair indication of how I've been feeling over the last week. Hint - It's either that I'm really busy or really tired.
Since the race in Sydney I haven't felt like running at all and the few times I have gone out my legs feel tired, tight and lacking spring. Add to that the usual 7 week old baby sleep pattern plus the 2.5 year old boy management effort while trying to work from home and you probably get a good picture as to why I feel like I do.
I'm still aiming for the Marathon in October and need to focus on what I have to do to get there but at the moment the best I can do is think about running and try and get some good rest. Hopefully a bit of easy bike riding and some slow runs for the rest of the week, maybe not following any plan, will help get me back on track.
Aside from running...
The latest James Bond movie (Die Another Day) was released on DVD yesterday and my pre-order from Ezy DVD arrived this morning so its a BIG BIG James Bond night in the Hosken household tonight. I'm trying to convince all involved that sushi would go with the Martini but is 12o and a roast might suit better ;-)
Adding to the 007 feel about today, my James Bond 007 Space Pen I won on eBay a couple of weeks ago arrived today was well. Its one of those pens invented for millions of dollars by NASA to be able to write in zero gravity (funnily the Russians used a pencil), just the thing for noting my appointments in my filofax.
My eBaying has increased again and I've bid on a few DVDs recently and even managed a great deal on a Sherlock Holmes DVD at half retail (the seller made a pricing error) ;-)
On the work front, I've been working heavily on eMusic's backend adding support for user lists, spellign errors in search, and data mining wish lists to create recommendations for albums. I'm also datamining video rental histories (around 60 million of them) to see if we can make something to help you find videos in a new way. Busy but not super busy which is nice.
It looks like we'll be getting some $$ from a large telco based in Finland this month to try and apply some of our analytic techniques on various distributed computing networks, both public and private. This is really cool as I'll get to do some more interesting work and meet some cool people (like the guy who ran Morpheus). Overall, its a pretty damn good job I have...working from home with my iBook and looking at really interesting emerging technologies, something I'd be hard pressed to find elsewhere in Australia.
Well it's been over a week since I last posted which is a fair indication of how I've been feeling over the last week. Hint - It's either that I'm really busy or really tired.
Since the race in Sydney I haven't felt like running at all and the few times I have gone out my legs feel tired, tight and lacking spring. Add to that the usual 7 week old baby sleep pattern plus the 2.5 year old boy management effort while trying to work from home and you probably get a good picture as to why I feel like I do.
I'm still aiming for the Marathon in October and need to focus on what I have to do to get there but at the moment the best I can do is think about running and try and get some good rest. Hopefully a bit of easy bike riding and some slow runs for the rest of the week, maybe not following any plan, will help get me back on track.
Aside from running...
The latest James Bond movie (Die Another Day) was released on DVD yesterday and my pre-order from Ezy DVD arrived this morning so its a BIG BIG James Bond night in the Hosken household tonight. I'm trying to convince all involved that sushi would go with the Martini but is 12o and a roast might suit better ;-)
Adding to the 007 feel about today, my James Bond 007 Space Pen I won on eBay a couple of weeks ago arrived today was well. Its one of those pens invented for millions of dollars by NASA to be able to write in zero gravity (funnily the Russians used a pencil), just the thing for noting my appointments in my filofax.
My eBaying has increased again and I've bid on a few DVDs recently and even managed a great deal on a Sherlock Holmes DVD at half retail (the seller made a pricing error) ;-)
On the work front, I've been working heavily on eMusic's backend adding support for user lists, spellign errors in search, and data mining wish lists to create recommendations for albums. I'm also datamining video rental histories (around 60 million of them) to see if we can make something to help you find videos in a new way. Busy but not super busy which is nice.
It looks like we'll be getting some $$ from a large telco based in Finland this month to try and apply some of our analytic techniques on various distributed computing networks, both public and private. This is really cool as I'll get to do some more interesting work and meet some cool people (like the guy who ran Morpheus). Overall, its a pretty damn good job I have...working from home with my iBook and looking at really interesting emerging technologies, something I'd be hard pressed to find elsewhere in Australia.
Sunday, May 25, 2003
The weekend
Ug...the race has been run. Wet, slow and tiring!! I can't believe that I'm planning a marathon in 4 months!!!
Anyway...I'll write more tomorrow. In the meantime
Time to watch TATU on the Eurovision Song Contest
Meg is thinking of moving to Australia.....yeah!!!! That would mean some competition for Claire for the next bloggies ;-)
Ug...the race has been run. Wet, slow and tiring!! I can't believe that I'm planning a marathon in 4 months!!!
Anyway...I'll write more tomorrow. In the meantime
Time to watch TATU on the Eurovision Song Contest
Meg is thinking of moving to Australia.....yeah!!!! That would mean some competition for Claire for the next bloggies ;-)
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
Monday, May 19, 2003
is from Saturday, May 17, 2003
I am a bag fiend
I have sooooo many bags...Computer bags, courier bags, backpacks, wheely bags, suit bags....I can't get enuf.
I say I'm on the journey to finding the perfect laptop/work/travel bag that fits my needs.
Last year I bought a lovely High Sierra laptop bag which is just perfect for traveling overseas or interstate with when I need to take my laptop, papers, a couple of books; basically when I need to have my work stuff with me away from home.
This week I was traveling to Sydney for a day (not overnight) and decided that I needed a new bag. I could have taken my Crumpler courier bag (as Suzette quite rightly pointed out....several times) but on top of my shirt and pants business look it wouldn't have quite worked out.
I "needed" a bag that would hold the minimum stuff for a day trip and would keep with my image as a not conservative techie without looking like a skater.
So I schemed to get a new crumpler laptop bag. It was purchased on a run this week much to Suzette's disbelief!!
So now I have yet another crumpler bag (we have 5 crumpler bags between 2 people).
The result....well I ended up going to Sydney without the laptop but the bag did take all the things I needed (except a drink bottle). And to finish the day the staff on the Virgin flight complimented me on the bag...thanks ladies!!!!
So bleh to you Suzette ;-)
I have sooooo many bags...Computer bags, courier bags, backpacks, wheely bags, suit bags....I can't get enuf.
I say I'm on the journey to finding the perfect laptop/work/travel bag that fits my needs.
Last year I bought a lovely High Sierra laptop bag which is just perfect for traveling overseas or interstate with when I need to take my laptop, papers, a couple of books; basically when I need to have my work stuff with me away from home.
This week I was traveling to Sydney for a day (not overnight) and decided that I needed a new bag. I could have taken my Crumpler courier bag (as Suzette quite rightly pointed out....several times) but on top of my shirt and pants business look it wouldn't have quite worked out.
I "needed" a bag that would hold the minimum stuff for a day trip and would keep with my image as a not conservative techie without looking like a skater.
So I schemed to get a new crumpler laptop bag. It was purchased on a run this week much to Suzette's disbelief!!
So now I have yet another crumpler bag (we have 5 crumpler bags between 2 people).
The result....well I ended up going to Sydney without the laptop but the bag did take all the things I needed (except a drink bottle). And to finish the day the staff on the Virgin flight complimented me on the bag...thanks ladies!!!!
So bleh to you Suzette ;-)
Thursday, May 15, 2003
Sydney you've changed in 5 years
5 years ago, Suzette and I moved to Sydney for my work. It was a great time with plenty of disposable income and a nice place and we had only been living together for a few months so it was all very exciting. Over the last 5 years I've been up to Sydney many times a year for business (looking for investors, board meetings, biz dev ops, conferences, etc.) but its probably been 9 months or more since my last trip.
Yesterday, Andrew and I went up to meet a few people at Telstra and OZTAM (they do the TV ratings). In a word it was WET. But there were two interesting things I noticed.
1. My old haunts had changed. The restaurant in North Sydney I used to have breakfast and coffee at had lost its old feel, the streets had changed and the overall feel was different, bigger and more transport oriented. Of course, I'd be naive to think things wouldn't change but I was surprised by how different it all was.
2. The people we met actually knew their stuff. Over the last 4 years I've been to lots of meetings with Australian (and US) dot coms where the staff were useless. Yesterday we were meeting with people who work in tech businesses but not dot coms they were sharp, to the point and most of all professional. No KGrind style board shorts and skateboards for the CEO on 500k here.
Back in Melbourne and its wet and cold.....a nice day to stay at home and work quietly....perfect!
5 years ago, Suzette and I moved to Sydney for my work. It was a great time with plenty of disposable income and a nice place and we had only been living together for a few months so it was all very exciting. Over the last 5 years I've been up to Sydney many times a year for business (looking for investors, board meetings, biz dev ops, conferences, etc.) but its probably been 9 months or more since my last trip.
Yesterday, Andrew and I went up to meet a few people at Telstra and OZTAM (they do the TV ratings). In a word it was WET. But there were two interesting things I noticed.
1. My old haunts had changed. The restaurant in North Sydney I used to have breakfast and coffee at had lost its old feel, the streets had changed and the overall feel was different, bigger and more transport oriented. Of course, I'd be naive to think things wouldn't change but I was surprised by how different it all was.
2. The people we met actually knew their stuff. Over the last 4 years I've been to lots of meetings with Australian (and US) dot coms where the staff were useless. Yesterday we were meeting with people who work in tech businesses but not dot coms they were sharp, to the point and most of all professional. No KGrind style board shorts and skateboards for the CEO on 500k here.
Back in Melbourne and its wet and cold.....a nice day to stay at home and work quietly....perfect!
Exo-Stelarc
I saw Stelarc in San Fran last year, which is funny given he is actually from Ballarat which is 1 hour out of Melbourne...much like when I saw the Hoodoo Gurus in SF in the early 1990s, a show filled with VB, XXXX and Australians.
Anyway, Stelarc is showing his exoskeleton this month. If you can get to the show I'm sure it would be worth while.
I saw Stelarc in San Fran last year, which is funny given he is actually from Ballarat which is 1 hour out of Melbourne...much like when I saw the Hoodoo Gurus in SF in the early 1990s, a show filled with VB, XXXX and Australians.
Anyway, Stelarc is showing his exoskeleton this month. If you can get to the show I'm sure it would be worth while.
Monday, May 12, 2003
The Winning Panetone
At easter I won the inaugural Jo-Ben Panetone Bake Off :-)
Here is a photo of my two panetone's resting on a pillow (to stop them sinking) when they came out of the oven.
At easter I won the inaugural Jo-Ben Panetone Bake Off :-)
Here is a photo of my two panetone's resting on a pillow (to stop them sinking) when they came out of the oven.
Sunday, May 11, 2003
Die Puny Humans
Warren Ellis on social software
I like the idea that you flame people who you don't know and that adding images to social environments be that through seeing the person in the flesh or photos immediately and unreversibly changes how you perceive and interact with that person (i.e. Its much harder to flame someone you have to see in person later in the day).
Warren Ellis on social software
I like the idea that you flame people who you don't know and that adding images to social environments be that through seeing the person in the flesh or photos immediately and unreversibly changes how you perceive and interact with that person (i.e. Its much harder to flame someone you have to see in person later in the day).
Wednesday, May 07, 2003
Music EcoSystem Launched
We formally launched Music EcoSystem yesterday. It's a site which shows the Data Mining technology I developed for creating relationships between music items based on a crawler that I build which scours the Gnutella P2P network finding what people are sharing.
Today I added a link from it to Apple's iTune Music Store so you can search for tracks you might like and buy them if you have OS X and iTunes 4 (and live in the US for the moment).
We formally launched Music EcoSystem yesterday. It's a site which shows the Data Mining technology I developed for creating relationships between music items based on a crawler that I build which scours the Gnutella P2P network finding what people are sharing.
Today I added a link from it to Apple's iTune Music Store so you can search for tracks you might like and buy them if you have OS X and iTunes 4 (and live in the US for the moment).
iTunes Internal XML and URLs
Apple's iTunes 4 comes with the built in Apple Music Store application/browser. Basically, the store uses a REST interface with quite complex XML, by that I mean it contains data and detailed rendering information, which is transformed by iTunes to display as it does.
A few people have debugged/hacked the url for the search page so I decided to take it a little further to see what else could be gathered from the underlying data which might be useful for some projects.
Using Safari, telnet, iTunes and the excellent TCP Flow Recorder, I've managed to determine the following...
All requests can be made using either http:// or in OS X itms://. itms is iTune Music Store which basically forces iTunes to handle the request rather than the browser.
The base server for the requests is phobos.apple.com which will generally be handled via the akamai network.
The requests
Search Requests
http://phobos.apple.com/ ...
WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?
The parameters are:
songTerm - song title
artistTerm - artist name
albumTerm - album name
composerTerm - composer name
term - all fields 1
so a search for New Order's regret track would be
itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/ ...
wa/advancedSearchResults?songTerm=regret&artistTerm=new order
View Artist
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/ ...
wa/com.apple.jingle.app.store.DirectAction/viewArtist?artistId=xxxx
where xxx is the artistid. This can be gathered from the search or possibly via the browse function (see below).
View Album
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/ ...
wa/com.apple.jingle.app.store.DirectAction/viewAlbum?playlistId=xxx
where xxx is the album id. Note that the field is playlistId not albumId.
Browsing
To get the list of genres use
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/ ...
wa/com.apple.jingle.app.store.DirectAction/browseStore
The result currently has the following genres (associated ids included)
id="20" Alternative
id="2" Blues
id="3" Books & Spoken
id="5" Classical
id="6" Country
id="17" Dance
id="7" Electronic
id="10" Folk
id="18" Hip Hop/Rap
id="22" Inspirational
id="11" Jazz
id="12" Latin
id="13" New Age
id="14" Pop
id="15" R&B/Soul
id="21" Rock
id="16" Soundtrack
id="23" Vocal
id="19" World
Once you have a genre you can then browse it using
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/ ...
wa/com.apple.jingle.app.store.DirectAction/browseGenre?genreId=xx
where the genreId xx matches a genre above.
Now the issue here is that the data is returned with the following http response header
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Darwin)
Last-Modified: Wed, 07 May 2003 02:28:14 GMT
Content-Encoding: gzip, x-aes-cbc
x-apple-crypto-iv: 40d2096e571bd518af88b1bd7ec1f1d8
x-apple-protocol-key: 2
x-apple-asset-version: 182
x-apple-max-age: 3600
x-apple-application-instance: 8
Vary: Accept-Encoding
From this I gather that the content has been compressed using gzip and the encypted using an AES (Rijndael) algorithm so the response is not yet readable by me. The crypto key looks to be included so if anyone is able to break this down into steps for decrypting and viewing it would be great.. The response should again be XML.
You can also browse an artist to see what albums they have, but again, the response is encrypted and compressed. The request to browse an artist is
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/ ...
wa/com.apple.jingle.app.store.DirectAction/browseArtist?genreId=8&artistId=xxx
where xxx is the artistId for the artist you wish to browse.
As for other info such as images and clips they are all contained in the album detail page and in the search response page, the m4p file can be downloaded and played allowing you to save away the clips if you wish.
Finally, if someone was a XSLT guru you should be able to make a working web version of itunes with obviously cut down user interface for others to use.
Apple's iTunes 4 comes with the built in Apple Music Store application/browser. Basically, the store uses a REST interface with quite complex XML, by that I mean it contains data and detailed rendering information, which is transformed by iTunes to display as it does.
A few people have debugged/hacked the url for the search page so I decided to take it a little further to see what else could be gathered from the underlying data which might be useful for some projects.
Using Safari, telnet, iTunes and the excellent TCP Flow Recorder, I've managed to determine the following...
All requests can be made using either http:// or in OS X itms://. itms is iTune Music Store which basically forces iTunes to handle the request rather than the browser.
The base server for the requests is phobos.apple.com which will generally be handled via the akamai network.
The requests
Search Requests
http://phobos.apple.com/ ...
WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?
The parameters are:
songTerm - song title
artistTerm - artist name
albumTerm - album name
composerTerm - composer name
term - all fields 1
so a search for New Order's regret track would be
itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/ ...
wa/advancedSearchResults?songTerm=regret&artistTerm=new order
View Artist
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/ ...
wa/com.apple.jingle.app.store.DirectAction/viewArtist?artistId=xxxx
where xxx is the artistid. This can be gathered from the search or possibly via the browse function (see below).
View Album
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/ ...
wa/com.apple.jingle.app.store.DirectAction/viewAlbum?playlistId=xxx
where xxx is the album id. Note that the field is playlistId not albumId.
Browsing
To get the list of genres use
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/ ...
wa/com.apple.jingle.app.store.DirectAction/browseStore
The result currently has the following genres (associated ids included)
id="20" Alternative
id="2" Blues
id="3" Books & Spoken
id="5" Classical
id="6" Country
id="17" Dance
id="7" Electronic
id="10" Folk
id="18" Hip Hop/Rap
id="22" Inspirational
id="11" Jazz
id="12" Latin
id="13" New Age
id="14" Pop
id="15" R&B/Soul
id="21" Rock
id="16" Soundtrack
id="23" Vocal
id="19" World
Once you have a genre you can then browse it using
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/ ...
wa/com.apple.jingle.app.store.DirectAction/browseGenre?genreId=xx
where the genreId xx matches a genre above.
Now the issue here is that the data is returned with the following http response header
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Darwin)
Last-Modified: Wed, 07 May 2003 02:28:14 GMT
Content-Encoding: gzip, x-aes-cbc
x-apple-crypto-iv: 40d2096e571bd518af88b1bd7ec1f1d8
x-apple-protocol-key: 2
x-apple-asset-version: 182
x-apple-max-age: 3600
x-apple-application-instance: 8
Vary: Accept-Encoding
From this I gather that the content has been compressed using gzip and the encypted using an AES (Rijndael) algorithm so the response is not yet readable by me. The crypto key looks to be included so if anyone is able to break this down into steps for decrypting and viewing it would be great.. The response should again be XML.
You can also browse an artist to see what albums they have, but again, the response is encrypted and compressed. The request to browse an artist is
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/ ...
wa/com.apple.jingle.app.store.DirectAction/browseArtist?genreId=8&artistId=xxx
where xxx is the artistId for the artist you wish to browse.
As for other info such as images and clips they are all contained in the album detail page and in the search response page, the m4p file can be downloaded and played allowing you to save away the clips if you wish.
Finally, if someone was a XSLT guru you should be able to make a working web version of itunes with obviously cut down user interface for others to use.
Monday, May 05, 2003
I think I can, I think I can
Yesterday I raced Puffing Billy. VERY VERY Hilly. Nope, I didn't beat it. It did 53 mins and I did under 61. 200 people beat it this year vs 500 last year (when Puffing Billy broke down in the first few hundred meters). Well done to those who did manage to beat PB.
It was the fastest I've run in many years and my heart rate was very very very high for the entire time so I was very pleased with the result. I hitched a ride on the train back which was wonderful.
Saturday we had Phil, Claire and AJ over for coffee and pastries....yummmmmmmmmy. AJ has such cute hair!!
Yesterday I raced Puffing Billy. VERY VERY Hilly. Nope, I didn't beat it. It did 53 mins and I did under 61. 200 people beat it this year vs 500 last year (when Puffing Billy broke down in the first few hundred meters). Well done to those who did manage to beat PB.
It was the fastest I've run in many years and my heart rate was very very very high for the entire time so I was very pleased with the result. I hitched a ride on the train back which was wonderful.
Saturday we had Phil, Claire and AJ over for coffee and pastries....yummmmmmmmmy. AJ has such cute hair!!
Thursday, May 01, 2003
Deliveries
For those of you who don't know, I work from home. This has its ups and some downs but being able to work in jeans and tshirt and slippers each day with a great view and quiet surrounds is just wonderful.
Today I got a visit from the delivery/courier man and it made me think how much I love getting deliveries. There is something very special and joyful about getting a buzz at the gate and having to get a box...I guess it generally means a present or something fun has arrived but I love it.
It seems to make working at home all that more special.
Wednesday, April 30, 2003
iLove my iBook
For the last few months my ibook battery has been dead, resulting in me having a small desktop ;-) instead of a portable. Finally I took it back for a replacement battery on Monday...after two days its back and working like charm.
I really really love this machine!!!
Apple also just released iTunes 4 with a new music store built in. Given that I have a bit of experience in music services I must say I'm amazed with how good the service is. 200,000+ tracks from name artists, great interface, quick etc.. and integrated with the player is just wonderful for listening to clips.
All it needs are negative recommendations in the search and more recommendations on the artist pages (this will come).
Well done apple.
Friday, April 25, 2003
It happens to the best of them
Ted Codd has died. His book on Relational DBs was/is a work to treasure alongside Knuth and has had an equal impact on my career/interests since university.
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
Wish I was here
If only Australia was closer to Santa Clara. The emerging tech conference is "the" of the year.
Without being able to visit I'll have to monitor the online happenings. Due to the Alpha Geek nature of it all....this can be done at ET Con Wiki.
Sunday, April 20, 2003
bwwaa haa haah!!!
I agreed to a panetone cook-off with my sister-in-law, the chef who graduated top of her year in practical and theory classes...yes boys and girls she is a sensational chef.
So its rooky Ben with the knack (thanks Granddad) for baking vs super chef. As I said on the phone to her...when you are at the top of the mountain you only have one way to fall!!
After making two doughs with sponges and soaking fruit in booze and many risings my masterpieces are ready for the comp.
The family-in-law arrives in 15 mins so we'll see how I go. Needless to say I'm pretty pleased with my effort for a 1st timer.
Update - I won. My panetone has a truely wonderful texture and great fruit. Only improvement for next time is getting some more depth of flavor in the dough....with more booze.
I agreed to a panetone cook-off with my sister-in-law, the chef who graduated top of her year in practical and theory classes...yes boys and girls she is a sensational chef.
So its rooky Ben with the knack (thanks Granddad) for baking vs super chef. As I said on the phone to her...when you are at the top of the mountain you only have one way to fall!!
After making two doughs with sponges and soaking fruit in booze and many risings my masterpieces are ready for the comp.
The family-in-law arrives in 15 mins so we'll see how I go. Needless to say I'm pretty pleased with my effort for a 1st timer.
Update - I won. My panetone has a truely wonderful texture and great fruit. Only improvement for next time is getting some more depth of flavor in the dough....with more booze.
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
Speedy Safari
Apple have just released the latest Safari Beta with TABS and AUTO FILL!!!! Goodbye IE, Goodbye Moz, Goodbye Opera.
Apple has now released a fully featured super fast low footprint uber-browser in around 6 months. Without a doubt this is the Best browser around.
It makes me wonder why Mozilla took so long to develop or why IE is still bloated, slower and under featured.
Amazing effort and makes my iBook a wonder!!
Saturday, April 12, 2003
Jasmine Aurora
Last night I became a Dad again!!!
My lovely new daughter is super well as is her mum,babyolder brother is taking it ok for a 2 year old.
I guess I'm a total geek if the first thing I do when getting home from the hospital at 2am is manipulate the digital photos of the birth, register jasmineaurora.com, start a blog for her and put some photos on the web.
Last night I became a Dad again!!!
My lovely new daughter is super well as is her mum,
I guess I'm a total geek if the first thing I do when getting home from the hospital at 2am is manipulate the digital photos of the birth, register jasmineaurora.com, start a blog for her and put some photos on the web.
Wednesday, April 09, 2003
Monday, April 07, 2003
Amusing Kofi Moment
I'm watching Sesame Street with Oskar and on comes Kofi Annan to help Grover, Elmo and others sing the alphabet song Together. After the song, the monsters all want to hug Kofi, so one suggests they "Do it the United Nations way; all together.". I laughed.
I wonder if this episode is brought to you by the letter W.
Sunday, April 06, 2003
Another lovely sunny weekend
Cooking filled the 1st half....Rack of Lamb Friday night, Yummy scrolls Saturday morning, Beef stock Saturday arvo, Veg. Dim Sums, Sweet Potato Curry Puffs and Cardamom Orange Creme Brulee for Saturday evening.
Unfortunately I've been a complete blob today....too tired to run or play too much.
Hopefully this week will be a bit easier than last, finishing off work for The New Project, enjoying resturant week here in Melbourne and some running of course.
Then its baby time !!!!!
Cooking filled the 1st half....Rack of Lamb Friday night, Yummy scrolls Saturday morning, Beef stock Saturday arvo, Veg. Dim Sums, Sweet Potato Curry Puffs and Cardamom Orange Creme Brulee for Saturday evening.
Unfortunately I've been a complete blob today....too tired to run or play too much.
Hopefully this week will be a bit easier than last, finishing off work for The New Project, enjoying resturant week here in Melbourne and some running of course.
Then its baby time !!!!!
MAC Address and Telstra
Every so often, Telstra's ADSL service spits the dummy. The problem for me is that I'm connected via a router rather than Windows which means zero support.
Generally this is ok as I try connecting with OS X but today OS X worked and Router didn't. After some stuffing around.....I changed the MAC address on the wired side of the router...bingo....connected.
It seems that my router's MAC address must have been locked or such. Anyway...if someone find this useful. Bonus is that everything seems HEAPS faster which I'm not going to argue with.
Friday, April 04, 2003
Squid's Alive
I'm always amazed by these huge squids. Apparently with the slight increase in water temp due to green house blah blahs the squids have a huge amount more to eat and are coming closer and closer to the shore. Additionally the world's squid population now takes up more mass than the entire land.
Thursday, April 03, 2003
Bubbly Pop Music
It's amazing what a bottle of bubby and some newly recommended pop/dance music can do for ones mood.
It's amazing what a bottle of bubby and some newly recommended pop/dance music can do for ones mood.
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