August 29 - Still Ugly

Wow, we must be sooo Ugly! - have fought our way right back up the chart to Number 1 position after dropping out of the Top 20 momentarily. Like I said before, happy being ugly!

One of the sites I like to use these days is Bloglines. I mentioned a while ago that I'm a big advocate and user of Web Watcher but Bloglines is a great complement to this for watching your favourite RSS feeds - in fact, I find Bloglines easier to use when "watching" sites like ResourceShelf which gets updated a lot and sometimes hard to track all the changes.

ResourceShelf is a terrific site, by the way, to find out about lots of new things and happenings on the Net. A couple of other good sites for finding new things are the Librarians' Internet Index and the Scout Report.

Happy Surfing!

August 22 Site Advisor

Hi Folks,

Two sites worth taking a peek at today - the first is the McAfee Site Advisor which some of you might find useful. SiteAdvisor is a downloadable tool that works with the browser to help you stay a bit safer whilst browsing. (and I'd appreciate if anyone felt the inclination to rate the Black Stump site, but that's entirely up to you, of course).

The second site is a bit of a fun site (at least I'm taking it that way!) - the Hot or Not Designs site is rating all sorts of sites (sights?) from hot to ugly. I'm pleased to say the Black Stump site has featured quite high on the list (well, Ok, in the ugly section!) - but I can tell you I'm Ok with that as the site is designed for information help and quality resources not to look like every other blogsite out there. And yes, I know it's a bit of an anachronism from the 90's, but there you go!

Happy being Ugly!

August 14 Sites

Oh well, the feedback was a bit light on !!

Here's a random selection of a few more new sites I fell over this week.....

Wildcam Grizzlies ...world's largest gathering of brown bears in Alaska

An Inconvenient Truth ...Climate

The Infamous AOL Data and NYT Locates One AOL Searcher

The BBC News Styleguide ...pip pip

Caddy Map ...next round of golf??

How to Present to Investors

Yodel Anecdotal ...a look inside Yahoo!

The List of Proverbs

Star of Bethlehem

Games, Simulations and Quizzes

Happy Linking!

August 7 Wimps?

Hmmm, well the broken arm needed to be "reset" - don't like to think too much about the word "reset" or "re-align" for that matter in this context - ouch...and they say we might be A Nation of Wimps ? Well, maybe, but if you ask my kids, I don't think they'd agree just at the moment. Three hospital visits in 10 days is way, way too often for me!

Onto matters more useful and interesting....a couple of neat sites for finding out stuff - the first being DNS Stuff - quite a tidy lot of tools. Take a look, you'll be glad you did.

Second site is Karen's Powertools. I use a number of these little freebie programs of which the Replicator is the best - it is a very easy way to backup my *really* important files from one hard drive to another each day. Also take a look at the Whois and URL Discombobulator as well which I also use regularly (but there are a lot more, and sure to be something of interest for you).

Now, a request - what do you you want to see here ? Any feedback ?

Take it easy!

August 2 Mix

Well, the hospital saga continued this week with another child in hospital having his appendix removed - been a week and a half!

Might have to get around the fire and have a game of Monopoly - I see times have moved in Monopoly and new versions can be played with a credit card!!

If any of you have websites, you should probably read Matt Cutts blog. Obviously very Google oriented, but well worth the effort. He's addressed a whole bunch of new questions on video this time around. Interesting!

And, to finish with today, here's information and a newsletter on interactive television when you get bored of playing Monopoly (or max out your credit card!)

Happy playing!

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!