July 29 Hospital

Ok, well I've moved on from the big birthday celebrations into enjoying a week off from my main place of toil (not the Black Stump). Enjoying, momentarily...

First day, I come down with a goddam virus - Ok, it's just a sore throat, headache, feeling lazy, all the usual crap - I'll live, I guess. Two days later....rude interruption - school calls "Your son has dislocated or broken his wrist"...bah, humbug, off the the Casualty department of the nearest hospital for the rest of the day. Eleven hours, waiting, x-rays, waiting, discussions, waiting, surgery, recovery, waiting....eventually go home around 3am, leaving my son in hospital at least overnight, possibly longer. Turns out he made (or someone helped him make) a big mess of his Radius bone and now has plaster from fingers to shoulder.

Of course, the football season at school and with his local club have just completed and finals are just about to start - no, no, no, not for him - 6 weeks minimum, no sport. Happiness, all round...

The Black Stump has Medical and First Aid pages with loads of information if you care to look this, or other medical ailments, up.

Can someone remind me this time next year that birthdays are cancelled from now on?

Happy Medicals!

July 24 Birthday

Sorry about the lack of posts lately but I've been a little distracted with a milestone birthday and, well, celebrating it!

Lots of things happened on my birthday through history and I share the date with Alexander Dumas and Amelia Earhart to name just two. One day they might be as famous as me...

If you want to know what happened on your birthday, or other dates in history, there are a few sites to check out like the History Channel or Famous Birthdays or Any Day in History or maybe Those Were the Days

Don't forget to check the Daily Fun page on The Black Stump for various "of the day/week" type sites!

Happy Surfing!

July 18 Weird

A few sites I run across are rather odd. I post quite a few of them on the Bizarro page but I find more than I can post on that page! Either there are just a lot of odd posters out there or I just happen to gravitate to and across them...

For example...

Ink Blot Tests with Faces in them

Extreme Pumpkins

How long will I live?

Destination Day

Nostradamus Fulfilled

The Excuse-O-Mat

Error Wear

Restroom Ratings

Taos Hum

Moggy Silly Sleeping Pose Olympics

Happy Weirdness!

July 14 Tools Part 3

People often ask me where I find the sites I list on The Black Stump and the answer is "all over the place". Mainly online, but I also scan newspapers for anything interesting as well just to get something a bit different.

Online site scanning is made fairly easy these days with a Software tool called WebSite-Watcher - basically you list the sites you want to monitor and the frequency and it really does the rest. It can watch all or only parts of sites, it highlights all the changes and it's very flexible and highly configurable - it's a great time saver for me.

With a site like The Black Stump where all the sites are personally selected (no auto submissions here!), the link quality is very important. Not just the quality and appropriateness of the content, but the link itself must be valid. Now, with a site of just over 20,000 links it's a rather difficult (in fact, impossible) task to keep everything in order at any point in time so I depend on two link checking tools - LinkBot and Xenu. I don't think LinkBot exists any more but the last version still works OK, but these days I prefer to use Xenu anyway. Xenu works pretty quickly and has some nice little features enabling you to quickly check "down" sites in the Google cache and in the Wayback Machine.

To get back to the opening question about where I find the sites, that's the subject for another day - most of the sites I scan are listed on the Black Stump, most probably in the Cool Sights page. There are probably 20-25 of the sites there which I monitor fairly closely.

Happy Linking!

July 10 Encarta

Quick post today...

A two-hour free pass to the content of Encarta is available. Just follow the instructions contained in the link....

An extract follows...

How to get your free pass
Your Microsoft Encarta free pass is available from any Encartalink on MSN Search.

For example:
Above the search box, click Encarta, or click the arrow next to the Searchbutton, and then click Encarta.
Click any Encartalink on your results page within an hour of running your search.
Click an Encartadirect answer link. Direct answers are identified by this symbol .
When your two-hour free pass expires, you can return to MSN Search, run another search or click an Encartalink. Your two-hour free pass is instantly renewable whenever you click an Encartalink from MSN Search.

Encarta Free Pass Details

Happy Researching!

July 9 Picasa

Finally found some time to check out Picasa and I gotta say it's impressive and its also free. Doesn't get any better than that!

Picasa is photo management software allowing you to organise, edit, and share your photos and it's amazingly simple to use. It scans your PC for grahics files and collates and sorts them into visual albums organised by date and/or the folder name.

You can have it scan your entire system and find loads of things you forgot you had, or you can limit the scanning to directories of your choice. For me, I just used it to scan the "My Pictures" folder. It manages to automatically keep track of changes in the "watched" folders and reflects those updates within the Picasa view. Magic!

I'm also experimenting with Picasa Web Albums which is a neat way of publishing your photos on the Web. I was impressed by the simplicity and ease of use of the software.

Picasa also has a load of powerful editing features and they all seemed pretty intuitive to me.

If you want to store or edit digital photos and/or publish and share them on the Web (easily!), give Picasa a try.

Free, Easy and Useful..what else would you want ?

Happy Editing!

July 4 Bus

Was sitting in YAM (yet another meeting) in the office listening to those who like to be heard and it struck me how often over the years I've heard the expression "If X got hit by a bus tomorrow, what....".

Is it just an IT thing ? It seems to be a euphemism in the IT industry for "you better do what I'm saying (now!), 'cos if something one in a trillion happens tomorrow, you'll be in trouble...." (except, of course, if was YOU that got hit by the bus, then you wouldn't really give a rats, would you ??).
Although, I think I can remember in the olden days (when I was a kid...), mothers always used to say "make sure you have clean undies without any holes, in case you get hit by a bus" - what the ?? Hey, Mum, just gimme the clean undies and we'll be sweet!

But, why a bus ? What if you got hit by a train ? or a tram ? Would that be Ok ? Just avoid those evil buses , I guess!

Anyway, all this reminds me of one my favourite sites on the Internet and that's the Urban Legends - well worth a wander through but, be careful, you might get stuck in there for days!

I'm off to do my laundry, just in case....

June 26 Dumb

Having returned from the land of Chocolate, I finally found time to reflect on something DUMB I did just before I left....backed one of my cars into the other in my own driveway...naturally the bigger car (with the towbar) was quite Ok...the smaller was not, having had a nice, neat towbar-shaped hole punched through its front...and, the creme de la creme of this situation? Neither car is insured against the other because I own them both !! Bah...may as well have thrown $1200 in the street!

Well, I guess I have a few mates out there like these Dumb Criminals and Dumb Crooks. The Law is an ass and does not escape dumb scrutiny - just check out some of the evidence at Dumb Laws out there.

......and finally, here's DumbFind..which actually doesn't appear dumb at all to me, but maybe I'm missing something ??? (maybe I'm just dumb enough not to get it?)

All criticism accepted!

Phooey...

June 20 Football

Well, I find myself in downtown Lausanne Switzerland for the second time in a month - working again, but thankfully the weather is much better this time around (high 20's) and, of course, it's World Cup Football (still soccer to me) fever time.

Lots of coverage on the Net at the FIFA site and Yahoo also cover the situation in a similar vein. Historical information is available at the BBC.

Naturally, being an Australian, I'm keen to see how the Socceroos are performing - the Football Australia and the Age sites cover the Aussie scene well.

Australians are very keen sports people and we even excel at Robot Dogs Soccer !!!

Well, good luck to the Socceroos, and here's hoping for a good result against Croatia, but for me, I'm also looking forward to the Aussie summer where we can get back those Ashes from the Poms!

Go Aussie!

June 16 Rainyday

A rainy day, maybe a day for (big) downloads to while away the time and use up all your excess bandwidth ?

Microsoft has released a beta version of Windows Vista Ultimate which clocks the scales at a mere 3.5 Gb !! This release is available in three languages (English, German, and Japanese) and in 32-bit and 64-bit editions. According to good old MS when you register for the Customer Preview Program you will receive the Beta 2 release plus Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 (RC1) — the next major pre-release of Windows Vista — when it is available later this year. So ....up to you - Windows Vista Beta

Maybe you'd like to fiddle with photos instead and catch up on the millions of digital images you've poked away on that hard drive ? Google has released Picasa Web Albums and you can sign up and wait for an invite - you'll need a Gmail account to do this.

If that's all too hard, just play a game of Sudoku instead !

By the way, Microsoft announced a whole bunch of security updates yesterday.

Till next time...

June 12 Tools Part 2

Continuing the Tools thread - today the Text Editor and FTP.

As far as developing my sites, I've always used Multi Edit. Originally, they used to have a fairly function rich free/demo version which did most things I wanted in a text editor. They still have the freebie version, which is now called MeLite which is probably only free for thirty days, though.

Anyway, I also fiddled marginally with FrontPage and people have recommended DreamWeaver to me, but I've always stuck with coding things myself and MultiEdit. I guess I prefer to control what I do and I'm not a big WYSIWYG fan. MultiEdit is still a terrific text editor, probably a bit costly now, but I'm in system doing the upgrade thing from time to time so the expense isn't too bad.

As far as FTP is concerned, I've used CuteFTP forever, probably since when it first hit the market (a long time ago). It's just so simple to use and it does everything I need, so I've never seen any reason to change. Like most things, it's probably added a load of new "features" over time so it's probably more bloated than it used to be (and more than it needs to be for me), but I still only use the most basic functions (like drag and drop a file to send it to a server).

I recently heard about a freeware program called WinSCP which is supposedly Ok, but I've not yet had the inclination to try it. Also used WS-FTP way back but didn't like it at the time (can't remember why) although a lot of people use it, so I presume it must be Ok.

Anyway, thats it for now.

Take it easy!

June 7 RIP

Office RIP ?

Coming soon...Google Spreadsheet

Already there...Zoho

Already there...Writely

Where's Powerpoint ?

Happy Days!

June 5 Overflow

Nine new links to check out...the Black Stump overflow....

1. The Web Riddle
2. Anxiety Disorders
3. History of Money
4. Stolen Jewelry Website
5. About Belly Dancing
6. Jesper's Blog ...security
7. Brain Maps
8. Leonardo's Last Supper
9. Magic Gallery ...vintage magic posters

Happy Linking

June 2 Maps

I know Google Maps have been around a while and, of course, there are many other Map and Atlas sites around.

It seems that maps (and satellite images) of most of Australia are now available on Google which you can check out at the Google Maps site. Just to help you a bit, I created a couple of pages for Melbourne and Sydney. Its easy enough to scroll around, but I'll try and add a few new direct links to major cities soon.

Happy travelling!

May 29 Numbers

I mentioned a few days ago about the addiction of Sudoku - about the only antidote known is Kakuro - problem is cure is worse than disease!

As you might expect there are any number of sites where you can try your hand at these:

Do Kakuro,
Kakuro.info,
Kakuro Puzzle,
Kakuro.net

That should do for now!

Mind Bending!

May 25 Tools Part 1

Like many people in the IT industry, I have become the local Tech Support guy for many of my relatives and friends who have a computer problem - not that it bothers me much, and it's a great way to learn new things, it's just the time factor involved. As Murphy dictates, the problems flood in when you have the least time to deal with them!

People often ask me what software I use when I use and surf the Net and I'm happy to run through some of that.

Email - For my personal use, I'm a long time Eudora fan - I'm not sure when it first appeared but I've been surfing around the net since 1994 and I don't recall ever using any other client. It's dead simple to use and the free version is good enough to do most things you'd ever want to do. In my work space, I have to use MS-Outlook which I'm well used to by now as well.

Dealing with spam is probably the biggest problem I have in the use of email. For a while I used MailWasher to filter and deal with the problem but it really didn't solve or reduce the problem for me - it's probably a good product, I may not have invested the effort to use it properly (and I think it become non freeware after a while which made it expensive to use across multiple computers).

In the end, I decided to channel everything to a Yahoo! mailbox and let Yahoo do the filtering for me. I paid up the $20 for the enhanced service which lets me send mail from different addresses and gives me POP access back to Eudora so I can offload and keep my real mail where I want it.

One of other real bonuses with this approach is access to my email from anywhere - as I travel a lot I can use Internet kiosks in airports and other places and read and retain the mail I want for later download to Eudora and heave-ho the rest as I go. Think I'm getting somewhere between 200-300 non-work emails a day now (add another 50 or so for work related email), so the thought of not accessing it for a week is rather daunting!

I'll also admit to having a GMail account which I haven't really got into yet - it just auto-forwards to Yahoo - but, like Yahoo, it will be accessible from anywhere in the world.

Browser - I generally use Internet Explorer both at home and at work mainly because it's what most other people use and it's just easier developing web sites in the most common browser.

It hasn't always been that way - I was most certainly a Netscape Navigator bigot in the early days starting (I think) with version 0.9 beta. IE simply didn't exist or was pretty woeful in those days for quite a long time - I think I made the switch around version 5 of IE. These days, FireFox looks Ok and I use it a little bit as well as IE, but mainly just to check web page layouts. Occasionally IE won't load a page properly, so FireFox can be handy then as well.

More coming a later time - if anyone has questions, please comment!

By the way, the Software and Browser pages are good place to take a look.


Happy Surfing!

May 22 Phunnies

As an IT guy, one of my favourite cartoon strips is Dilbert and I guess like a lot of people I seem to gravitate to Google for searching on the Net. Seems like theres been a bit of convergence lately with Scott Adams featuring Google in recent Dilbert strips.

Unbeknownst to me (head stuck in sand?), there seems to be a bit of history there. The Xooglers blog annotates some of that history with more to come soon, it appears. I also managed to find the Dilbert and the Google Doodle which I'd never seen before. If you want more of Scott Adams and Dilbert, you could always check out the Dilbert blog.

Must say though, given the name of this site I probably should promote my namesake (not associated) which is a good old Aussie, non-IT cartoon.

You can find more humour and funny things on the Black Stump Giggle page.

Have Fun!

May 18 Brainbusters

One of things I managed to do on one of my recent flights was to finally engage in Sudoku. I like numbers and I like puzzles but somehow I'd managed to ignore (well, from a playing point of view) the Sudoku craze.

Boredom flying between London and Hong Kong encouraged me to buy two books in Hong Kong airport for the the coming 9 hour flight down to Melbourne. I was sick of the movie channels and I already read the (huge!) Steve Waugh book my daughter gave me for Christmas. Anyway, no problem with one star and two star games - three star had me thinking but still scrambled through. Those four star games are tough, especially without a darned pencil and eraser, I have to say.

Ok, I'm hooked - I'm now ripping the Sudokus out of the two daily newspapers and I just gotta do them! Help...

If you want to test yourself with some different Sudoku puzzles or find some hints, just try looking on the Black Stump Sudoku page.

Have Fun!

May 16 Cycles

Maybe it's the jet lag, and I'm really not sure about this, but I signed up today to do the 210km Around the Bay bike ride. The Bay is Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay and the cycle ride is punctuated by a ferry ride roughly in the middle. I'm rather hoping I don't punctuate it with a ride in an ambulance, and I just know my butt is going to kill me for days afterwards...why am I doing this ?? At least I have until October to get ready or bail out! Not to say I'm not fit, I am.

If you're looking for more cycle information try the Bike Victoria site and the Exploratorium's Science of Cycling is also very informative. The aptly named Bike Website has a good deal of repair and maintenance guides.

Ride On!

May 14 Watchings

Just having come back from Switzerland, one thing that intrigues me is all the watches and the fascination for time - I'm not a big fan of expensive watches and I must admit to having worn only black faced Swatch watches for a long time (god forbid, I could never buy a Rolex now after all the spam I've received on them over the past few years!!!) However, I found a new watch which I really like - the Swiss Railway Clock watch (pictured) - I find it really neat.

Anyway enough of that, I found a nice site which has what it considers to be the Top 10 Strangest Watches. Think I'll stick with my plan to buy the Railway watch!

There's also a free clock for your website if that interests you.

Time's Up!