Archive for May, 2008
HP Pavillion HDX-9200 review
Just a quick note to let you know that I’ve just finished up the recording and editing of my review on the HP Pavillion HDX-9200 notebook computer. It’s in the process of being uploaded now so hopefully it should be live a little later this afternoon.
Head Ache
I woke up this morning with a hangover-like headache, except that I only had water and orange juice the night before. Anyway I cant shake this headache and am struggling to write anything, or pretty well do anything so at this stage don’t expect any blogging from me today.
Figured I would leave you with this teaser image.
New Office
Fro the past month or so I’ve been doing a load of product photography for work, basically they want to reshoot the entire product range so that it looks nice and consistent as opposed to what we’ve been supplied which is all over the place.
Anyway, I’d been moving between my office and the training / meeting room where we had some benches setup with a seamless background, it was becoming a pain to have to set everything up and pull it all back down. We were also having dramas with computers as well.
Basically the boss came to me this morning and said, “how would you like to have the training room setup as your office on a permanent basis, we’ve got no training coming up anytime soon and I’ve got a setup in my office for meetings”
Of course I said, “Yes”
So here’s a couple of quick photos I shot between product setups, now all I have to is get the espresso machine moved up here and I almost don’t have to leave my office……though a window would be nice.
NETTUTS - Check em out
I’ve been a PSDTUTS fan for a while now and read everything that Collis and his team put out into the ether, well recently Collis started a new tutorial website called NETTUTS.
Anyway, rather than re-tell the story I’d rather bring a couple of his / their articles to your attention that I thought are pretty handy things to know, learn, or be reminded of.
Here you go;
- How to Build a Maintainable Site using CushyCMS and Twitter - Recently I came to the realisation that I should really have a personal site. I don’t take design work, but it’s nice to have a place to refer to when I write bio’s and so on.
- Use Amazon S3 & Firefox To Serve Static Files - Hosting services have gotten a lot better in recent times, more storage, more bandwidth, cheaper prices. But there is only so far that regular hosting will go.
- 7 Crucial Tips for Designing and Maintaining a Large Site - Projects vary in scope and size, and the challenges they entail vary likewise. As a lone web designer, the biggest job I am responsible for is FlashDen. Along with thousands of active members all chatting, uploading and buying, the site processes large amounts of money and large amounts of traffic.
- Build a Sleek Portfolio Site from Scratch - There’s nothing like building an entire site to show you a good overview of how a CSS layout should work. Over at PSDTUTS we’ve got a tutorial where you design up a sleek, high end web design. In this tutorial we’re going to take that PSD file and build it with some nice clean HTML and CSS.
- Creating a PayPal Payment Form - Although it can have some issues, PayPal does provide a very simple way to take payments on a website. And with a little tweaking you can easily turn a PayPal “Buy Now” button into a form where the user specifies how much they’d like to pay and what they are paying for.
NETTUTS is regularly updated, they’re after more contributors as well, and their RSS is here.
For Sale - Canon Camera & Lens
You read correctly, I’m selling one of my cameras and one of my lenses on eBay.
In an effort to turn some unused items around the house into some cash I’m going to be selling a few things off on eBay over the next couple of weeks.
Today I’ve just listed a Canon 1DmkIIn Digital SLR Camera and a Canon 24-105mm f/4.0L lens.
Both items are used, but are in excellent condition. The camera is about 2 years old and has shot around 30,000 frames give or take, the lens is only 4 months old and has barely been used as I have other lenses in the focal range and don’t really need this one.
Ideally I’d like around $2,500.00 for the camera, and $1,000.00 for the lens. If you’re interested leave a comment here and I’ll get in contact with you.
Here’s a quick gallery of both items for your reference.
2nd Anniversary, aka ‘Cath-iversary’
Today is our 2nd anniversary, well mine and my fiance’ Cath’s to be precise.
We met on myspace (via mutual friends), we then met again at a BBQ I had at my house (I put some ice down the back of her shirt), we then met again at the Cambridge Hotel on a Wednesday night and I gave her a lift home and put my ‘moves’ on her…..and the rest is history.
Anyway, Happy Anniversary to us!
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Getting my Skribit on
After seeing Skribit around on a few friends blogs, and seeing the sort of interaction it can bring between the readers and writers of a blog I figured I would give it a try out over the next couple of months and give you guys and gals an opportunity to shape the direction of this blog and what I write about.
The plan at the moment is that every day or so, depending on the number of comments I receive on Skribit, I’ll try to answer your questions and write about what you would like to read from me. I’ll try to make them short and succinct articles and see what sort of dialogue we can get going.
Let the Skribing begin!
Now with advertising, sort of
Some of you who regularly read my blog on the site, as opposed as reading it via the RSS, will notice that I now have a bunch of different advertising on here. I figured I should explain what’s happening and disclose it all properly before I have a ‘Scoble’ like debacle where I’m accused of misleading my readership or anything similar to that.
Ok so I used to have a bunch of Google Adsense advertising all over the site late last year, I ended up dumping it all as I found that Google’s Adsense algorithm really wasn’t providing adverts that were relevant to my audience and articles, I also found that I was forever entering urls into the ‘competitive ad’ filter in my Adsense account to get rid of stupid dating sites and ‘get your free marketing report’ sites and other assorted junk.
“I thought it was inappropriate to advertise things that had no relevance to my articles and felt that it diluted the value of what I write”
So why the change of heart?
Well I’ve not actually added what I consider to be advertising per se’. The adverts, for want of a better term, that are currently on the website here are actually companies and / or products that I use in my day to day life so I feel like these are more like recommendations and not just simple adverts. All of them I have purchased items from, and they are all companies / products that I would recommend to my friends, family, and blog audience.
The product recommendations that you see here do not pay me for the placement, none of these companies get any special treatment, and if I have a bad experience with any of them I will no longer recommend them or their services and I will of course tell you guys about it. I have an open book policy with these sorts of things, it bugs me when people promote crap on their site just because they’re being paid for it.
Anyway, I figured that I owed you guys a run down on all of this so you didn’t get the wrong impression on the changes that had been made here.
Got any comments, objections, etc. leave a comment on the blog here as I’d be interested to hear / see your reactions.
Cheers, Matt
Lite n Easy - Week ?
If you’ve been following my blog for a little while you’ll know that I’ve been dieting with Lite n Easy. Well I figured I should probably write a quick update on my progress seeing as the last time I wrote anything about it was going on 2 months ago.
Ok, so how have I been going with the diet? Reasonably well, particularly considering I’ve ‘diverted’ from the diet way too many times in the last month or so. In total I’ve lost 13 and a bit kilogams, that’s 28 or so pounds for my American friends, I think I probably would’ve lost more but in the last month I’ve been a little tempted by other foods, and yeh we’ve gone out to dinner a few times also.
Where to now? Well basically I’m continuing on with Lite n Easy, but I’ve changed my ‘order’ a little by only ordering 5 day a week plan instead of the full 7 day a week plan. Basically this small change will allow me to continue to lose weight, but also it’ll allow me to actually do some cooking and even eat out occasionally without wasting food and money.
“It’s kind of like having a chef organise everything for you during the week when you’re the busiest, and then come the weekend you’re left to your own devices.”
Anyway, today for lunch I had the Chicken and Vegetable Curry for the first time. It was packed full of lentils, chickpeas, carrot, cauliflower and chicken, it even had a nice curry ‘kick’ to it.
Stopping crime, the Mac way
By now you all know I’m an Apple guy, some might say fanboy, but this story just goes to show you that Apple is so awesome that it’s actually stopping crime now.
First reported on The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and later in the NY Times, an Apple Store employee had her apartment robbed by a couple of her so called ‘friends’ at a party she hosted, of course at the time she didn’t actually know it was her friends that had done her place over. Anyway, another friend of hers noticed that she was online, well it was actually her stolen Mac, and told her about it. She quickly used another Mac to connect to it using Apple’s Back To My Mac screen sharing software where she was able to use the Photo Booth application, and the in-built iSight Camera, to snap a photo of the thieves which she of course took to her local police and voila’ her asshat friends were caught.
Seriously with friends like this who needs enemies.
Kind of reminds me of when I turned 21. I had a party at my house the night before and a few ‘friends’ had crashed on the lounge. The following morning, which was my actual birthday, I got up early and went for a surf only to come home to a very empty CD rack, a very empty Video rack, and a whole bunch of other stuff missing. I reported it to the police, and fortunately they notified all the local porn / pawn shops. The following day all my stuff started turning up for sale.
Yep, you guessed it. A ‘friend’ had stolen. On my 21st. Yay for friends like that.
Fortunately I got most of my stuff back, his mother compensated me financially for the rest, and he ended up going to juvenile jail for 6 months.
Moral of the story, Mac’s are awesome and don’t steal stuff!
