REverberations - Net

Phoebe Tests Flickr Video

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:16:48 -0500

Things

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:15:32 -0500

Well, you can probably guess from the slackness in blogging I'm showing here that life has been busy. The most obvious reason is of course the baby who is showing all signs of being healthy, and arriving early December. The midwife thinks possibly earlier, but we'd rather it not because she is away until the end of November.

There's modern cloth nappies galore here now, and buckets for dirty ones, plus of course clothes, wraps, furniture, car seat, pram, you name it. I've heard it described as the biggest consumer spend a couple goes through (after housing), and it's truly scary what some companies tell you that you 'need' to have.

We've been to birthing and parenting classes and spent countless hours reading stuff online so apparently we now know all, true experts in the field. Except it will of course have no bearing on the reality of actually having a child to look after 24 hours a day.

It was interesting to compare out situation to others in the class though - we're much better off and more prepared than several others, so that gives us a bit of hope.

Trying to organise a couple of short holidays before the due date too.

Some other quick point-form news:

Rain. Yay.
I did the Spring Cycle and home again, personal best time. Then we slept most of the afternoon.
We have a new home phone, this one is VoIP from MyNetFone. Pretty amazing deal, recommended.
Renovations are all done, except we need some new blinds now. Thanks to our parents for helping out with bits and pieces.
The car had it's one year (and first!) service, no problems found. We also have some fuel containers to stop us trekking out to Marrickville all the time. It's going to get a lot less use now that Liz has finished work.
Had a fair few gigs with both bands recently, two of which have been the best gigs we've done with the respective bands. There's few more before the end of the year (and my free time!).

Do Not Call Register

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 08 May 2007 11:31:44 -0500

In case you haven't found it yet, Australian citizens are expected to opt-out of receiving telemarketing calls by going to this website and registering phone numbers that they don't want to receive such calls at.

How does the register work?
Under the Do Not Call Register Act 2006, telemarketers can check their calling lists against the Do Not Call Register. If a telemarketer calls a number on the Do Not Call Register, they may be in breach of the Act, and may face penalties.

I firmly believe that it should be the other way around (ie. register if you do want to receive such calls), but that would of course offend big business. As it stands, there's plenty of exceptions on there they can use to call you anyway.

Still, better than nothing I guess.

Google Earth + GPS = Bliss

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 18:08:50 -0600

Google Earth really rocks our world. It is the killer app - especially since I stumbled across a non-official Mac version :)
Before Liz and I left for our trip to Europe last time, my over-kind work mates gave me GPS. This was a fun toy to carry around the place, but the true value has only just been made apparent to me.
You see, anywhere we were, we could make a waypoint, kind of a "we were here" mark in space. Now, many years later, I managed to get my brain in gear enough to work out how to get those waypoints over to the ultra-fantastic tool that is Google Earth.
The results are totally engrossing - witness here the original photo of where Liz and I sat on top of Mount Errigal in Ireland, and as we had enough fore-thought to make a waypoint to prove that we actually made it, here's how it looks in Google Earth (kmz).
Homework for the reader - use that kmz link (which should load in Google Earth), and fly around, comparing it to pictures before and after the one of Liz and I linked above (use the arrows above each picture). Remember that the highest-resolution data isn't even available for this particular location - others look far better.
We can do this for so many places we stayed, climbed, visited or just wanted to remember that it is now amazing seeing this information overlayed on the planet.
Edit: Sorry, comments disabled on this post due to spam. I guess that's the price of being noticed...

Finger Frenzy

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 08:19:03 -0600

Can YOU beat 3.95 at Finger Frenzy? Only 2 seconds faster and I'm in the big league :)

3.95 seconds

Edit: I'm down to 3.13, but Ed fluked a 2.8 and apparently Penny can get 2.2 due to some weird freak keyboard thing. All natural QWERTY-powered here, my friends.

Optical Illusions

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 23:27:51 -0500

This page of optical illusions totally rocks. Lots of time-wasting potential.

Men At Work

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 13:57:48 -0500

From somethingawful.com

Men at Work

Skype

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 21:59:51 -0500

We now have a machine semi-permanently set up running Skype. If you do too and feel like a chat, Skype us at "tim.gould". It's free for both us and you.
Being able to call out to the world for not a lot of money is rather useful also. I'll be playing with that for the while, as I have purchased a bit of SkypeOut credit. This means you can call normal telephones anywhere in the world for very very reasonable rates.

Google Maps

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 21:49:55 -0500

If you love maps and want to loose huge amounts of your free time, check out Google Maps.
Satellite images of the entire world are now online, and depending on where you are the resolution can be good enough to spot the gazebo in your back yard. Like for our house, for example.
Liz and I spent a few hours locating interesting landmarks of our trip, such as the Colosseum, Eiffel Tower, our places in London, Istanbul, etc. There's cars on the road and planes at the airports.
I just keep think it's like SimCity all over again, except it's real out there somewhere. Slashdot has some good finds to get you started.
Or how about all of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites?

Yahoo! Creative Commons search

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 00:05:00 -0600

I noticed that this blog is the number one result for "reverberations" over at Yahoo!'s new Creative Commons search.
Not entirely sure how this works, but as you can see from the right-hand column down there, I have tagged this page as being licensed under Creative Commons, so they must understand that somehow.
If you, however, don't understand what I'm going on about, go have a look at this page which explains that CC is basically a well-defined and easily understood way of defining copyright on my work here. It ends up giving a bunch of common-sense and quite fair rights to anyone else who wants to do things with my work like quoting it or linking to it, and is the polar opposite of people trying to restrict your fair use rights.
It's the first time I've ever come out as the top result for any web search (as far as I know). Wonder if it will ever happen again?

Website outage - over?

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:47:55 -0600

My web host had one of his servers hacked on the weekend, and I'm only just back online now.
As you can probably tell, there are a few blog posts missing which I may not be able to recover, about a week's worth.
This is most annoying, as I actually got a Trackback from Democrat Senator Andrew Bartlett's blog, with reference to my Kyoto Protocol post which used to be at this URL. About the most exciting thing that has ever happened on my blog, and now there's no proof! Aaargh!
Well, it could have been worse, but I would have hoped that the backups were being done a bit more frequently than they have been. I'm going to see whether I can find anything in Google's cache.
Also, if you sent me any email since Saturday, please send it again, as I most probably never recieved it.

Edit: I've reconstructed that post below, URL is now this.

Online Forms Nightmare

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 12:10:49 -0600

Let me just check - yes, it is infact 2005. So why is it that out of the four insurance companies I've just attempted to get an online house and contents quote from, I haven't received any yet at all?
First AAMI, whom we have existing business with and as such would prefer to stay with. I actually made it to the end of their process, only to be informed that their computer was unable to give me a quote, and someone would be contacting me shortly. Five hours later, nothing heard. Not good enough.
So, over to the old standby, if expensive, NRMA. They have a six-step process, but at the end of step five, I click Next and end up at a 404 Page Not Found error! Fire of a quick feedback email, and let's try the next.
Next one that comes to mind is Allianz. After four attempts (why did I try that many times? Was giving them the benefit of the doubt), I consistently am told that after page 2:

Error ID: 9999
Error Msg: Null State Code, session may have expired.

Of course, I attempt to debug that by removing associated cookies, clearing my cache, and finally restarting my browser. No joy at all.
So, I head over to QBE. Assuming you are using anything other than IE (which by my site's logs about 50% of you are), let me know how it looks for you. For me, it's complete garbage. Feedback to that effect to the closest email I can find on their site (groupit@qbe.com) bounces. So, I forward the bounce back to webmaster@, sales@ and postmaster@, of which sales@ bounces also. Perhaps Mr or Mrs webmaster or postmaster can attempt to do their job and make their website and/or email system work.

Is this really the standard of our online, connected world?

Oh yes, I am using the "minority" browser Firefox for this, but so is about 10% of the web, climbing rapidly, depending on which figures you choose to believe.

Happy NYE!

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 14:39:00 -0600

I'm being evasive tonight and still don't know what I'm doing. Liz is working which is no fun at all, so we have organised something for tomorrow at the place we are house sitting.
Which reminds me, I'm really missing the broadband - it's weird being out of contact. Not to worry, I've organised to take advantage of Optus' free broadband installation to get cable hooked up to our house we don't even own yet.

Ever use your phone books?

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 21:26:00 -0600

I don't. That's what White Pages Online and friends are for.
If you feel similarly, and are trying to save the world one step at a time, follow the advice spotted in Column 8:

Computer- savvy Adrian Booth, of Northbridge, cannot remember the last time he looked through a phone book. Last week he received all 3.8 kilograms of the 2005 Sydney Yellow Pages and filed it in the recycling bin. To avoid future waste he tried to find out how to cancel more copies being sent to his door. Adrian could not find the information on the Yellow Pages website, but after emailing Sensis he was told he could cancel the books by calling 1800 810 211 then option two and option five, during normal working hours. Give the operator your home phone number and they will take you off the delivery list.

Edit 8/6/2006: So 18 months and several kilos of totally wasted paper later, I finally get around to following this up. Turns out nobody there knows anything about it, but as soon as I mentioned this article they are at least going to follow it up and get back to me. Maybe. Sensis, Making Searching Easy(tm)!

The FTA starts to rear its ugly head

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 14:43:00 -0600

An article over at Australian IT is not the first bad sign about the FTA, but I believe is a warning about lots of really nasty things to come.
It specifically references last-minute rushed through changes which will affect ISPs and in turn all of us who rely on them for internet connections. Wonderful.

Water Water Everywhere, Nor Any Drop To Drink

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 08:41:00 -0600

-- from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

An excellent article over at the UK's Guardian website prompted me to think a little about how we use water. As a quick aside, this newspaper's website is brilliant. There are plenty of great RSS feeds, the layout is nice and clean and the content interesting. It really puts the spartan offerings from our papers like SMH and news.com.au to shame, especially on the RSS front.
But, back on topic. Liz and I consistently try hard to use the smallest amount of water possible. No more rinsing things before they go in the dishwasher. Use the rinse water from one item to then rinse another. Get "grey water" and put it on the garden. Sweep rather than hose, etc.
I was really annoyed a little while back to see a business (businesses are exempt from our present water restrictions) hosing off a mat of the day's mess for no less than about ten minutes of full pressure. Then the next mat, then the other two. I don't understand why some people don't think at all about what they are doing, even if they aren't officially required to.
Can't someone in power grow the balls to put the same restrictions on businesses? There's no need for them to use up the amount of water they do.
And, in the linked article above, you can see that the vast majority of our continent's water isn't actually used by homes, it gets sucked down by agriculture for crops that are fundamentally unsuited to the conditions here. Is it time to re-assess this also?

Gmail Invites

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 09:01:00 -0500

I have 6 Gmail invites available to anyone who wants one. Just drop me an email. First in best dressed an all that.

Changing Web Hosts - bare with us

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 16:16:00 -0500

I've bitten the bullet and am in the process of moving my web hosting to Goulding. The name is nothing more than a coincidence.
Comments aren't re-imported yet, and the entire Europe section is missing, but for the most part everything is moved over. Your DNS may take a while to propagate.
Thus far the technical support has been 110% brilliant, and the array of features available are an order of magnitude better than they were at my old hosting company. Oh, did I mention it is half the price too?