A thought about leaving this one for a "Because it’s Friday", but decided that it was too cool to wait that long:
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I wonder how many broken iPad’s this will result in.
Unfortunately I think my children are a little too old to justify the expenditure required.
Some fun with pictures and a demonstration of what can be achieved when a bunch of online friends get together:
Pacdog is awesome from Jake Rome on Vimeo.
Although the video is shown on Vimeo this is really a Flickr collaboration.
(Because of the time limit on Flickr video’s you can watch it on their but it’s been shortened so it’s not really readable)
Some illusionary fun with a bunch of iPhones from Marco Tempest; that’s about as much as you need to know:
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Someone once said that there are four ages of man (some have it as five, but four works for my illustration), likewise my experience tells me that there are four ages of remembering a new password:
Age 1 – Typing the old password right up until it’s about to get locked-out before remembering that perhaps there was a reason why the system wasn’t remembering your password.Or is it only me?
I’ve decided to go a bit +1 on this site.
If you read my posts via an RSS reader you probably haven’t noticed, so I’ll explain.
Google is trying to increase the relevancy of its search results by broadening the criteria it uses for importance. This change includes the creation of a new (relatively) capability called +1.
If you use Google at all you’ll have noticed these little +1 icons appearing next to search results:
Clicking on it give the site a recommendation, a bit like giving someone a ‘thumbs up’ or a ‘Like’ with Facebook.
Via a nice little WordPress plug-in from AddThis I’ve made this capability available at the bottom my posts alongside a whole host of other sharing options.
The nice thing about using AddThis is that I also get access to some nice analytics on how many people are using the capability. I also get these analytics, for +1 via Google Analytics which is starting to show the impact of Social Interaction on search results.
So if you feel like you’d like to give me a ‘thumbs up’ on any one of my posts please feel free to click the button below.
Today the Chastney family went out to a local village with the intention of going for a Sunday afternoon stroll and to call in to a recently opened cafe.
It would make the story too long to explain why we ended up at the cafe first without having a walk, and also why we hurried away from the cafe to return home. But that is what happened.
In the car, about half way home I realised that my Blackberry mobile wasn’t in my pocket. I patted my pockets and checked the pockets in the car, but no phone.
It was at that point that Jonathan pointed out that he and I shared Google Latitude information with each other. He checked his Android phone and told me that my mobile was still at the cafe.
Having dropped the others at home I returned to the cafe having spoken to them and confirmed that they had already collected my phone and had it in safe keeping.
A simple story of the value of location based software.
I’ve thought for a while that the way we enforce ‘strong’ passwords was dumb and actually made them easier to crack, not harder.
xkcd sums it up in a way that I’ve never quite been able to:
The conclusion says it all.
I was doing some playing around on Google Image search today and noticed that you can drag an image up to the search box and use that as your search term.
The results are a list of places where the image can be found and also a ‘Visually Similar Image’.
The ‘Visually Similar Images’ for this picture of me:
Are as follows:
An interesting set of images – Eddie Murphy, Stephen Elop and a computer rendered image?
On another image of me the results included Jack Nicholson?
This web site always goes quite around this time of year.
The main reason is that the students have gone home.
The following graphic shows the visitor profile for last month (orange) and this month (blue) for one particular page on this site (on Rich Pictures):
Month on month that’s a 60% drop off in visitors.
As someone who never really excelled in academia it’s quite gratifying to be providing insight to today’s students.
The graph is courtesy of Google Analytics which amazes me every time I use it. If the graph looks a little different to ones you are used to seeing it’s because it has been rendered by the new version which takes another step forward in providing useful information to the likes of myself.
I’ve updated to WordPress 3.2 this morning.
It looks very nice to me as the administrator, but you shouldn’t see any differences.
The upgrade was the smooth process that we’ve come to expect from WordPress. The most difficult part is checking that you have a good backup. The upgrade process itself is as simple as clicking on ‘upgrade automatically’ and letting the code do the rest. I didn’t even need to mess about with any of the plug-ins because they all worked fine.
The new dashboard looks great, and is certainly a lot faster than the 3.1 version.
If you do so some issues please let me know by commenting on this post.
For over 25 years now I’ve worked in an environment that has meant that I’ve regularly seen something new that has got me excited about its possibilities.
I’ve become a bit more discerning about the things that I invest my time and energy in, but I continue to be amazed by the ingenuity of people.
Long may it continue.
Graham Chastney 