Well, I am now a new ”proud” employee of One Call Insurance Services Ltd. back here in Blighty.

The directors drive DB9′s and R35 GTR’s… and why not? I would if  I owned an insurance company!

Just for the record I prefer the GTR any day, but it has been a regular discussion between my soon to be hubby (who had a GTR at 19 years old – the youngest in the UK ever), that if we won the New Zealand Big Wednesday lottery, he would hold onto the DB9. (The the Porsche KN also in the NZ Lotto can well and truly take a hike)

So, here I am, at One Call ( “… Does it all”) after applying for ‘Marketing and PR Manager’ and quickly adjusting my contract to say ‘Creative Development Manager’. In reality, I am half pegged between the IT / Marketing and Operations departments with employees feeling sorry for me being in the IT room. More »

Found this one on YouTube via a tweet. I think it is absolutely brilliant! (27th Nov 2009)

Heres the Link to the YouTube for it More »

Yes you heard that,

Being a pretty much every day Twitter follower I do have the occasion to notice a few things.

Why do I follow Twitter and what hooks us in? My answer would be that if you look enough, follow enough, you tend to find out MUCH more about what is going on in the world that you normally will never find out about.

If you are a news follower, you will be aware that if you saw something really juicy and then try to send a link to it later, you will find it gone. Heck, my dad, who lived in Florida at the time of New Orleans did not get to see the part of news footage I saw on the TV in NZ that’s for sure, when he said – “NO ONE was seriously hurt or fatally injured” (Thats CNN Brainwashing for you)”.

Back to Twitter. I was hopeful that they were going to make some successful and useful changes to Twitter in the large amount of down time that they have had today. The big Whale being carried by birds is cute saying “Twitter is over Capacity” but it was getting ridiculous.

Go Here to see Collected Twitter Fail Screens

Now that Twittervillie is back after said updates and we have all been for our suggested Ice Cream and been told to “chill out”, things are not that much improved. More »

No service on the internet is perfect and I never would expect them to be. What is always refreshing to see is when a website is well prepared for it.
There are some really well done error and fail screens out there, and from now on, when I see one, the ‘Print Screen’ button is hit straight away.
Here are two that I have gathered from Twitter so far, and actually hope they mess up again to give me more! (I know, that sounds weird). More »

Don't forget the Cats Prezzie!!

This is Tommy my evil sidekick…… All donations to getting him a decent Christmas prezzie this year would be gratefully accepted! Help me, my family is in grave danger – we must appease the cat!

We take Paypal – contact me, cheerz :p

Typical Craptasia

Well, I think you can guess from the post title that I am not impressed with Camtasia.

I truly understand why Camtasia is a very popular screen recording tool. It is $299 USD versus over $1000 USD for the better alternative from Adobe which is ‘Captivate’. What I find most amusing is that Camtasia shows Adobe clearly as if they are a ‘valued’ customer. Unless Adobe own Techsmith I find it highly unlikely that Adobe would use Camtasia and only purchase it to confirm that Adobe / Macromedia are obviously far better equipped to produce Adobe flash movies – don’t you think?! This brings me to question all the other big names that Camtasia push such as IBM on their customer list somewhat!

Not everyone has 300 to 1000 USD to throw away on software so I highly recomend you Google “open source screen recording” and get something FAR better for FREE!

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I have moved back to England since this was written… and I am MUCH Happier!

Welcome to the ‘Winging Pom’

I have now been in New Zealand for over 4 years. I am a UK citizen, and like just about all the British I had my gripes about England.
The high population,
the crime,
the bomb scares,
white English being a minority,
not being able to wear a football shirt on World cup day without getting arrested for it,
no smoking allowed in your OWN car or at a bus stop,
men getting gang raped by men,
letters from school requiring YOU to sign that the school is not responsible for your child finding or getting hurt by hypodermic needles in the playground.
being burgled so much that insurance wont cover you,
burglars throwing concrete slabs through your sleeping child’s bedroom window, and still raiding the house even though you’re in and awake….

SURE, I have a fair amount of UK Grievances up my sleeve.

I moved to NZ more to rescue my mum from a con artist over here. Yes the place is really pretty, but there is only so much ‘nothingness’ you can take. For all those with the Rose tinted glasses view of New Zealand I thought I would share a few truths about this luscious green land. More »

Travel Sick-Korea

Playlist:

Also got Hong Kong, Czech Republic, Los Angeles, Japan, Germany, Cambodia, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Iceland, Australia, Tennessee, Hong Kong, Turkey, Morocco, Spain, Jamaica ………… click More! More »

As you can see in the post title (and I am going to do it again :p), I Have specifically named a few keywords for people to search for:

Namingly:

MSN SURVEY web page opening up
with Title line “Empowering Your Opinions”
“SafeCount Net”
“Dynamic Logic”
“Millward Brown Company”

In the address bar you will see rubbish like member ids and all sorts. When you first go to the unwelcome survey pop up – you will be presented by various ‘endorsements’ for what they are doing.

This is all very much spam ware, malware or whatever you like to call it.

More »

It’s perfectly ok saying “Valid XHTML and CSS” but it may be nice to say that it is pretty stuffed in all older browsers. An example is IE6 and some of the old Mac browser versions. I am in no way dissing these themes though. What I have been looking for are specifically REALLY nice WordPress themes…. Here is one of them.

Catastrophe.

Absolutely lovely in the fact it is very well designed and will suit a LOT of uses. But it is certainly ‘Catastrophic’ if you view it in IE6.

Let me show you the screenshots of what I am talking about:

'Catastrophe' Theme in older Browsers eg IE6

1024 Crambots  - In the defense of ‘Whitespace’

The idea, when I started this template was to create a site that looks as clean as possible and easy to navigate. A pet hate when landing on anyones blog or website is #1. Google ads all over… a lot give them too much priority, you have limited control over what is displayed, and some flash banners are causing problems on peoples machines. #2 Another pet hate is lack of typographical spacing!…. margins, indents, paddings anyone?

While the typical rule of thumb is to create web spaces that are viewable on 1024 resolution, more and more are using it as license to CRAM pack the 1024 width with as many tool bars as technically possible. A lot of bloggers hunt down any and all bits of info and gadgets as possible to fill that apparently unbearable blank space ( or ‘Whitespace’ in design terms). I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my pages interrupted by a flashy ‘Cycling hobby singles / dating club’ banner or text ads worded in bad English due to either lack of space to get the point across in a Google ad or bad Chinese or Indian translation. More »

More »

Have you REALLY tried to manipulate Comments.php in WordPress.

Half the code is ‘arse about tit’ – I am a ‘Yorkshire Bird’ so I am allowed to say that..Ever heard the jokes about the one most likely to stand up at an MS conference and say ‘B**locks’ just at the right moment that everyone else is thinking it?

All the time I am trying to write this, my partner is getting frustrated that he has to re-listed his item on trademe (Kiwi Ebay attempt) but  as is happening more and more frequently the Trademe site has ballsed up in mid flight. Suprise suprise, it appears that bad management deemed to use MS Server 2008 ed. lol. Did they not know that most of even the biggest financial centers in the world wouldn’t touch it with a 1000ft barge pole? At least Trademe appear to be self aware of this given the effort put into the error page with a big blue bird pooping ‘WHOOPS’

… back on topic…. erm …

oh yes.. The code is back to front and upside down. Why on earth should I have to More »

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As you can see on this website, I am using the sociable plugin.

There are NUMEROUS fixes that need to be made to make it validate W3C XHTML.

Heres ONE:
When you are wanting to display the sociable items on the index page where it will be repeated on every post for the same page. Validation result returns that it already has the ID’s specified.

CSS Basics dictate that you only use ‘ID’ ONCE on a page
‘CLASS’ is the re-usable css.

Go to the plugin sociable directory and find “sociable.php”

Edit the PHP file:
More »