the what, when and why of Ed

I dislike Revels. They were doing ok on their first outing until I found the coffee flavour one. Orange one too. Now the rest are tainted by their memory. Ah well.

And I was going to post this yesterday, but it will undoubtedly come across as an attempt to move away from the technical posts and avoid further comment battering, but hey.

I thought it was funny

As Jez impersonating Cartman would no doubt say “No kitty! That’s a bad Kitty!!”

So, it’s been noted that the content of this blog over the course of the last few months has verged too much towards the inanely dull and technical. That’s just the way it’s gone recently as I’ve done lots of techie things.

This blog is as much a place to share new internet toys with co workers and those friends that may find them interesting, as a place for sharing the more random, and infinitely more amusing stories.

That said, the balance has definitely more towards the tech recently, and less of anything else.

So, I’ll be sure to make sure I take the time to post other stuff too. Just so happens that I spend a lot of time on the web during the day researching web techniques and the latest trends, and I post what I find as I go.

Never been much for actually using RSS readers. What I really wanted was a way of knowing when new posts had been added to blogs I read. So - I looked, and I found!

http://immedi.at/

Simple bookmarklet which will send you instant messages whenever monitored urls are updated. Very cool.

Chuck - another good reason for sorting your domain out to actually point directly to your own blog (as in DNS, not web forwarding): this will not discover your RSS feeds off the domain forwarding frameset page (but I’ve subscribed using http://themojowire.blogspot.com). Speaking of which, I just noticed my blogroll has disappeared with this template. I will add it back in later.
Geoff - if you never wanted to see the boring stuff, you could always just subscribe to the rss feeds for the categories you’re interested in (e.g. http://www.edgillett.com/blog/category/fun/feed/) See. WordPress is useful!

One afternoon at Cheers, Cliff Clavin was explaining the Buffalo Theory to his buddy Norm.
Here’s how it went:

“Well ya see, Norm, it’s like this… A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members. In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, as we know, kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. That’s why you always feel smarter after a few beers.”

I will start a page on the blog, called “State your intentions”. Or something similar. We’ll see what creative energies are flowing nearer the time.

Anywho - the gist is that it will be a list of things I intend to do. As well as the progress I’m making towards achieving them.

That way I might actually achieve my goals.

Anywho - gotta rush. Off to dinner

Better not file this under the procrastination category just yet. Only just came to me.

Inspired in part by coming across Wil Wheaton’s Wish List (yes, Wesley from STNG. He’s got an awesome blog actually - I feel bad for complaining about his previous character. All is forgiven.)

Anywho - to start the ball rolling:

• I will add a del.icio.us link here
• I will add a link to what I’m reading
• I will add a link to what I’m listening
• I will state long term life goals and indicate expected timeframes with countdowns. It’ll be scary to see my life slipping away before my eyes.
• I will blog important events from last year in retrospect (Wedding, Honeymoon!). Oops.
• I will give back to the Open Source community - I can learn PHP and produce plug ins for WordPress and also work on some themes (some of the ones out there are bugly. I’m sure I can do better.)

This is a “Good Thing” to do. I encourage others to do the same.

Laters!

Hmm.

I’m got mixed feelings about the rich text editor in Wordpress. Even when you go to edit the HTML is the pop up window, it lies to you. Attempting to make some pages validate correctly made me realise that WordPress wasn’t always showing me what was actually there. The HTML pop up window would automatically close a tag for me (gee. thanks), and that upon save, completely forget that it did that, and not persist the change at all.

Grr.

Anywho - I’m now using the excellent K2 theme and all it’s associated goodness, as well as Extended Live Archives. Check out the archives sections for a cool overview of the older content on the blog.

Excellent resource for fixing FAlbum to work with the K2 theme.

I’ve also started using Asides, which should be an amusing addition to the blog.

As you go about through life, whatever be your goal: keeps your eyes upon the doughnut, and not upon the hole.

Whilst I’ve been playing around with trying to get the CSS working attempting to blog photos from Flickr, I came across an awesome lil WordPress plugin called FAlbum. This uses the Flickr API to show you all the images from your Flickr account, including all the sets, tags and descriptions. You don’t get the community comments etc, but you could go straight through to Flickr if you want to see that. Anywho - fun to play with!

My linked photos are here, but you can just Click on the Photo link on the right hand side of this page!

http://www.randombyte.net/blog/2005/11/20/falbum-056/trackback/

Seems I posted quite a few of the old photos on this site directly to Blogger, and you can’t access those externally. Will migrate all the old photos across to Flickr and reindex the old blog posts soon. Cos I know you all enjoy reading the old stuff.

I also promise to correctly categorise all the old posts. Because I’m boring.