Exceptionally Cool

Go here and fly. (Use the mouse to control direction.)

More Bloody Brilliance

I saw this for the first time last night, though I'm led to believe it debuted a year ago.

Bloody exceptional!

Catastrophe!

Photoshop stopped working last night. It just won't load. And before I hear any sniggering behind my back, yes, it is a legit copy.

This is going to put the Aug 24 launch in doubt because there's a mountain of graphics that need to be tidied up to make everything look nice. (And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that looking nice is important.)

Frustrating.

UPDATE: It's now 11:30pm. Photoshop's been off line for more than 30 hours. I've been working on this all day, and finally found the solution buried deep in the web. It seems my Photoshop preferences file was corrupted, though how or by what I know not.

I'm exhausted. Tracking down a failure like this is bloody hard work. Damned computers. Today was a timely reminder of an important axiom... "the problem with computers is that they don't work, so as long as you start from that basic preconception, everything you get from there is a bonus".

The upside... Wroof! is back on track (sort of).
The downside... I've decided to take some pressure off and put the launch back a couple of weeks.

Quality Representation

There's no doubting it... a career in politics is attracting quality candidates in Australia.

This is Jason Wood from the opposition Liberal Party and MP for LaTrobe, who, in June this year, was trying to get his head (and tongue) around whatever benefits GM foods will actually bring to the people of Australia.

Thanks, but I'm happy with mine just the way it is.

Nine Days, Sixteen Hours...

So much to do, and so little time. And, of course, it doesn't help that I've decided to make a few changes, just to make life a little more interesting.

Imagine having a blog, just like this one, where your entires are arranged by category on different pages.

And imagine those different pages having different formats... on one page it's your regular blog, on another a photo gallery, while on another, your own private forum.

It's all possible with Wroof! In fact, that barely scratches the surface.

Wroof! is coming. August 24.

Bloody Excellent

I got me one of these.

It truly is an inspired piece of technology, and I have to admit that I didn't understand what all the fuss was about until I got mine home and started playing with it.

Put the iPhone on Chester's "highly recommended" list.

Going To Hell!

Yup. I'm sure, if I believed in that sort of thing, it would be true. I'd be going to hell. Fortunately, I'm Jewish and we don't believe in hell, so I guess I'm safe.

This arrived in by spambox today...

Hello ,
It is a pleasure meeting you at last for I have waited for this golden moment.I am Roger Bird manager in one of the prime bank in united kingdom.Six months ago ,my late customer died in a fatal accident and was buried at the state cemetry.My late customer (Sir mark jones ) has an accountwith a credit balance of twenty million pounds (20,000,000:00),which has beendormant for a very long time.
All efforts to contact the named beneficiary to late Sir jones's estate,with the supplied information proved futile.My good friend ,am contacting you because i want you to claim this money with me. i have the necessary information and documents that would enable us this claim.Please kindly send me your urgent reply to enable me know which other step to take towards the claim of this money.
Regards,
Roger Bird

I hated it. It's poorly written and unconvincing, and I couldn't help myself. I just had to rewrite it so I sent the following back to the scammer...

Oh come on 'Roger'. If you're going to run this scam, you have to do better than this. There are too many typing and/or spelling mistakes in your email for this to be real.
Seriously... I thought you scammers were more professional than that.
The email needs to look something like this...
-----------------------------
Hello,
I have been given your email address by a former colleague of yours who has asked not to be identified. He has told me you may be interested in a "special transaction" that will significantly benefit both of us.
First, allow me to introduce myself and give you a little background. My name is Roger Bird and I am an Account Manager at Prime Bank in the UK.
About eighteen months ago, one of my Personal Banking customers, Sir Mark Jones, passed away. He had considerable wealth, and left no will.
Thus far, the bank has gone to much effort to locate next of kin, but it appears Sir Mark left no living relatives. In cases like this, the Bank holds deposited funds for a fixed period of time, usually two years, before passing those funds on to Her Majesty's Government, where they end up in Consolidated Revenue, doubtless to be wasted on useless ideology inspired social engineering or some Ministerial junket.
With all avenues of inquiry now exhausted, the file has arrived back on my desk to be closed, which is a shame, because Sir Mark managed to accumulate some twenty million pounds in his less than reputable business career.
Without a validated claimant, all that money will disappear into some treasury black hole, never to be seen again. I have the necessary paperwork to validate such a claimant, but as a bank employee, I'm unable to approve a claim of my own. That's where you come in...
What I'm proposing is that you claim the money. I'll validate your claim, and we can split the account 50/50. Interested?
Please reply ASAP, because I'm not going to be able to hold this file in my top drawer for too long before someone notices it's not been processed.
Warmest regards
Roger.
-----------------------------
It's written in English, it makes sense, and it doesn't try to hide the fact that there's a big scam going on here, which means anyone who falls for it deserves what they get!
Feel free to use it... just remember where it came from and let me know if you get anyone stupid enough to bite.

Look for it in your spam box soon.

18 Days 9 Hours And A Handful of Minutes.

I've generally tried to keep business and blog separated by a wide gulf. It's better that way. After all, this blog isn't a subtle advertisement for our latest nutritional products... it's just a bear pontificating, pretending he knows more than he probably does.

Today though, and for the rest of August, I'm going to make an exception. I'm going to bombard you with some unashamed self promotion.

About 6 years ago, I started something... a small web programming task that was supposed to take a couple of weeks. Now don't get me wrong. Those of you who know me will quickly point out that I definitely don't have a pocket protector and that I used to find it too easy to pick up girls to be a programmer. No. I was just dabbling, writing something called a "content manager", mostly because I wanted to teach myself something new.

A "content manager" is software that's supposed to make it easy to create and update web sites by storing the content of the site in a database. You know what I mean because Blogger is a content manager.

We were trying to write an on-line magazine for a little side-project I was involved in back then, and creating the content manager seemed easier than coding a brand new web page each time I wanted to add a story. If only I'd known then what I know now, but there's nothing like a retrospectoscope to clarify one's thoughts and I don't have one.

So when that business was stillborn, I kept the code and continued to work on it, and work on it, and work on it, and work on it. (Six years. That's nearly 20% of my adult life. Fuck! What a potentially huge waste of time.)

My simple project's grown a bit since then, and we use it in my other business every day. (If you want to see it at work, go to http://www.rplus.com.au/, though what you're looking at there is the version before the version before last... what I have now is way more powerful and infinitely easier to use.

So for six years, line by line, piece by piece, sometimes by evolution, sometimes by osmosis and sometimes by blind luck, I've been cobbling this thing together. It's probably been harder than it otherwise might have been because I'm not a really great code cutter, but oh my...

... the end result is brilliant. Really, it is. And if you had the slightest inkling of how it actually works, and the pain I suffered to make it work, you'd think so too.

What's so brilliant about it? Oh. I'm glad you asked.

Wroof! (that's what it's called) is the ultimate in content management. You can create a magazine, with stories, forums, blogs, photo galleries, and comments. You can allocate different sections in your magazine to different editors, and then tie magazine stories into products in the built-in shopping cart, which is then linked to an optional built-in multi-store point-of-sale system. Wroof! even comes with an up-to-date currency converter.

You can put different content on different pages, and control who sees what content via an 8 level security system. You can even sell subscriptions to your site, with different subscription levels having access to different content.

And that's just the beginning.

Wroof launches to the world on August 24... 18 days 9 hours and a handful of minutes away.

Want to see for your self? Go to http://www.wroof.com/ and watch the little clock count down.

Care Factor = Zero

The Olympics are coming. Just days away, apparently. TV's full of stories. Presenters sit in the Peking smog inhaling lungfulls of toxic fumes, trying to get us excited about the world's premier drug trial. "The Olympics this". "The Olympics that". Blah Blah fecken blah.

Does anyone care?

My Dog Needs What?

Regular readers will know how much I love our K9 friends, but even for me, this might be a little over the top. Or maybe not.

Apparently, there are dog opthalmologists in the USA who can determine, from the shape of Rover's eyes, whether he needs glasses or not. Yes. You read that right. Glasses. For your dog. Apparently, the dog opthalmologist prepares a prescription which is then sent to Doggles, better known for their stylish, high quality dog sunglasses and protective eyewear. (The dogs involves in the WTC rescue/recovery mission wore these, so they must be ok.)

I have just one question... no... that's not right... I have a long list of questions, but I'll start with this one... how do I convince Zac to keep the glasses on?