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 »

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!

More »

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 »

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 »

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 »

You may have seen that I am currently plugging in a few features to the site such as the gallery banner on the index page (will be on others) and the nice popup overlay.

The whole thing is starting to look a bit tidier…. At the moment it is 100% CSS and XHTML Validated with zero warnings and working perfectly in IE6, Firefox 1 etc etc.
………. FOR NOW

I will come back later to sort out the banner and post panels…

I have never met a plugin, widget or JQuery feature that validates and works on ALL browsers out of the box yet…… that includes from Google in some cases!

Validation is a never ending task… good job I love it then isnt it.

Never give up, Never Surrender. Congratulations mum.

Hmmm – I think I may change the Random icon to a beer – coffee doesn’t cut it