Tag Archives: Daily
New Website Progress
Posted on 08. Nov, 2008
The switch to WordPress is going well. The multitude of a quality plug-ins and the ease with which you can hack at all the PHP to get it just right make WordPress an awesome choice - not yet regretting giving up on my old code. I've been writing XML export routines to transfer over 4,000 blog posts and comments going back 10 years, having some problems pulling in rich media posts the way I want them. Also haven't quite figured out how I'm going to show my videos page yet, or how to handle redirects from old perma-links. Loving the Flickr Photo Album plug-in which makes excellent use of the Flickr API to suck all my albums, tags and pictures in from Flickr into my site. To have over 5,000 pictures completely externally managed yet so intricately threaded into my site is a credit to the Flickr API team - Flickr continues to be one of my favourite things on the web. Also very happy with the Media Temple Grid-Server hosting - it feels snappy and the control panels are the best I've seen ever from a hosting company.
What’s new in April 2008
Posted on 04. Apr, 2008
Loving:
- Gran Turismo 5 Prologue (PS3) - gorgeous driving game for the PS3. Definitely the most realistic graphics I've seen in a drving game and more than manageable driving physics when using the handheld controller (rather than a steering wheel)
- Xbox 360 Wireless Wheel (Xbox 360) - very nice gadget, the force feedback really means that it needs to be bolted down rather than rested on you lap. Great for Colin McRae: DIRT (Xbox 360) and Forza Motorsport 2 (Xbox 360).
- iPhone - first gen limitations aside (eg. No umts, hsdpa or gps) the iPhone has grown on me. So nice to have Safari (Flash support please!), and 16gb audio and video podcasts at hand to get through boring commutes. WiFi is gorgeously seamless, hoping on trusted networks automatically. Email client is much better than blackberry, with gorgeous rendering of html emails. Definitely not as quick to type on as BlackBerry, but so much sexier. Looking forward to proper Exchange support in firmware 1.2.
- Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 (Xbox 360) - next release of my favourite 360 FPS. Excellent game, very playable great multiplayer.
What’s new in 2008
Posted on 18. Feb, 2008
Things I'm liking at the moment:
- Xobni - quite possibly the best Outlook plug-in ever.
- Utah Saints Something Good '08 - I must learn the running man!
- Guitar Hero III - on the Xbox360. Loving the wireless guitar.
- Crysis - gorgeous DirectX 10 first person shooter. Okay, so you need a super computer to run it at anything other than medium quality settings, but it's still a great game and very very pretty.
- Philips 9" Digital Photo Frame - received this as a present, would never have thought to buy one myself, but my opinion has changed digital photo frames are great. Must have!
- this isn't happiness., FFFFOUND! and vi.sualize.us - found hundreds of vintage and quirky photos at these sites to put on my digital photo frame.
- GN Netcom 9350 - one at home, one at work. I use them for all my land line and Skype calling. One of my most used gadgets.
- Netvibes - I've been an iGoogle user for several months, unfortunately the product has seen little in the way of upgrades. Netvibes is so much better, I have my entire view of the net world arranged into 20 tabs (and it works mobile too).
- Shuttle XPC SG33G6 Deluxe (Glamour Series) - I'm using one of these as a Media PC running Vista Ultimate on the main TV in the living room. Comes with HDMI, eSATA and Optical connectors as standard.
- Retro Casio Calculator Watches - currently wearing a silver Databank 150
- Family Guy - I may well be the last person on the planet to discover the brilliance of Family Guy. Have been buying all the DVDs.
- Blu-ray - I was fairly neutral on the whole Blue-ray vs HD DVD at the start. The only factor that leans to me Blu-ray, is that my Xbox 360 with all it's cooling fans is way too noisy to be used for movie viewing, where-as the PS3 is whisper quiet - as a result I'll always opt for a Blu-ray disc if I can.
- Saitek X52 Pro Flight System - quality flight simulator controls without going too geeky.
- Skype - I have local numbers in Australia, USA and UK into my Skype account, automatic diversion to multiple phones if I don't answer on Skype, plus Pro gives me free calls to certain numbers and super cheap call forwarding for international calls on my mobile. Great call quality. Love using it on the main TV along with the Polycom Soundstation 2 for handsfree and a Creative Live! Cam Optia Auto Focus for video. Using it at both home and work with the GN Netcom 9350 headsets too.
- Opera Mini 4 - barely a month out of beta and already a million downloads. Excellent mobile browser. Have been using the beta for ages, so great to see the final build. Works on both my Sony Ericsson and BlackBerry.
- Behringer XENYX 502 and Tapco Mix 50 mixers - I have the Behringer at work mixing outputs from my Notebook dock and iPod dock into my headphones, and the Tapco at home mixing my Sky box and Media PC in the bedroom. Very handy little mixers and a tiny price.
- Super Mario Galaxy - on the Wii. It's okay. Still struggling to find something other than bowling to justify my Wii.
- Facebook - it's more of a tool now than a daily destination for me now. No matter how much I try and fight all the application spam, SuperWalls, Zombies invites, my feed is flooded with junk. I miss the old days when it purely contained relevant updates from your friends by the core apps: photos, groups and posted items.
- Sky HD - very few interesting channels, far too many ads, nothing on. Same old story.
- Mac Book Pro - it's okay. Thinking I might buy a new Thinkpad and get rid of the Apple (just as soon as I send it in to have all the broken things fixed before the warranty expires - dodgy power switch, sleep wakeup problem etc etc).
- iPhone's lack of 3G or HSDPA support - still waiting to buy an iPhone, but no way for an EDGE device locked in on an 18 month contract. Hurry up and release a device that is good for the UK networks Apple. No wonder the sales have been so dismal in UK compared to the US.
BlackBerry Conference Orlando, Florida
Posted on 16. May, 2006
Long time, no post. I've actually made several blog posts over the past few weeks/months, but they stay as unfinished drafts and never make it onto the site. There's lots of travel posts to cover including recent trips to the Normandie region of France, and The Netherlands. There's also some recent gadget purchases I should review including the new Canon IXUS 800 with optical image stabliser, the Tom Tom Go 910 GPS, and the Canon 10-22mm wide angle lens. I'll get to at least some of those eventually.
I'm currently in Orlando, Florida at the BlackBerry conference (aka Wireless Enterprise Symposium). The conference is more interesting than expected mainly from a market activity perspective to see what other companies are doing with their internal mobile device deployments, and what vendors are flogging in the way of solutions. Anyway - that's about as technical as I'm going to get in this post. I haven't been to a US software conference for years, and it's amusing to see that the Dockers and polo/business casual shirt conference attire continues to live on in American IT (I feel really underdressed walking around in my smart designer jeans and pink/brown vintage polo). The key notes have been good so far, it was interesting to see Reseach in Motion founder, Mike Lazaridis talking. They also filled the "paid inspirational speaker spot" with Jerry Lineger, a former NASA Astronaut who spent five months on MIR and was onboard when they had the fire and all those problems. Lineger was actually very interesting, and his well rehearsed talk was engaging. Florida Governor, Jeb Bush also dropped by to sing BlackBerry's praises. Bush actually came across was quite an astute guy and gave a solid speech, nothing like the picture I had in mind. The conference venue itself, Gaylord Palms is one the many Orlando mega-hotel-convention-centres built to support the large number of conferences that are held in Orlando each week. They have a massive indoor atrium complete with a river, bridges, and several live 1 metre long aligators.
When the conference wraps up on Thursday night, I'm flying up to Baltimore and staying north of Washington D.C. until Sunday. On Friday I plan to do the normal D.C. touristing and then take in some of the Smithsonian, definitely the Air and Space Museums and hopefully another if I can squeeze it in. On Saturday I'm going to the Joint Services Open House at Andrews AFB (yes, another airshow). Highlights will be seeing the F-22 Raptor, the US Navy Blue Angels Aerobatic team, the Canadian Snowbirds Aerobatic team, V-22 Osprey, and a real F-35 (not the mockup). I was going to hang around in Florida and watch a Delta IV rocket launch from Kennedy Space Centre, however the launch has been delayed now until next week, and Andrews AFB should be more interesting anyway.
More posts soon.
In Sydney Mid-March
Posted on 06. Mar, 2006
I know, I know, not many updates on the blog lately, heck, the past eight months of posts fit on one page. It's a combination of either being too busy or bored (with blogging) to post and not really much worth mentioning, or if it is worth mentioning, it's so long after the event that it's not worth it -- if you get my meaning. Anyway to my friends, I will be in Sydney 11/3 to 15/3 in between work trips to Germany and Singapore. So I might see some of you then! Looking forward to it!
Happy New Year!
Posted on 01. Jan, 2006
Have a fabulous 2006 everyone, make good use of your time. (I'll probably post a year end wrap over the next few days, it has certainly been an eventful year in London)
Brit music festivals and a Greek Islands holiday
Posted on 30. Aug, 2005
I know, not much blogging going on here. Anyway a small update, I've been to my first two English outdoor music festivals these past few weeks. Two weekends ago I went to V Festival in Hylands Park, Chelmsford, Essex. I was expecting it to be a crowded wet muddy nightmare, but Sunday turned out to be a perfect sunny day (not too hot) and the organisation was excellent. It was easy to get around to each of the stages and get a good spot. V Festival was fairly pop, but still good fun. Saw the Body Rockers, Scissor Sisters and a few others. I'll post some pics soon.
Bank Holiday weekend we went to South West 4 on Clapham Common (that's me spotted on the left). The music was definitely more my style, despite being mostly your mainstream celebrity DJ's: Sasha, Digweed, Carl Cox et al. I got there late (4pm), and in my opinion the crowd really didn't get warmed up for the evening until the last 30 minutes, which was a fairly poor effort by the DJ's on the main stage - they really should have just gone hard, rather than doing a build-up in each session. After that we went to an after party held by some friends of friends (the organizers of Twisted Melon) and then after that onto a house somewhere to chill out until dawn.
We're going to Crete in the Greek Islands next week staying at an unnamed 5 star resort which should be relaxing. Need to catch what's left of the European Summer.
London 7/7 bombing incidents
Posted on 08. Jul, 2005
Hi all, thanks for the emails. We're all just fine. There were incidents both close to home and the office, Edgware is up the road from our flat, and Liverpool Street is down the road from my office. I caught the tube about 8:50am where the trains were already being disrupted, but PA announcements still indicated power surges resulting in the closure of Bank and Liverpool Street, so most of us got off at St Pauls and caught buses to the financial district without a further thought. Power problems and random stations closures for various reasons are pretty normal on the underground. Saw lots of police cars heading down to Liverpool Street around 9:05am, again not unusual. Once it was clear it was terrorist attacks, corporate security locked down the building and had everyone stay away from the windows, which is standard procedure by all the companies in the financial district to minimise the number of people on the streets and keep operating. Interestingly a lot of the buildings in the financial district including ours have bomb (proof?) glass from the IRA days. Walking home from the office around 5pm was fine, along with all the other workers, it's a nice 1.5 hour walk through the middle of London from east to west, and of course the streets were very active with police. At Chancery Lane the bomb squad cordoned off a street and sent one of their robots up to checkout a box in front a Ryman's shop, I got a few pics as they prepared the robot and sent it up. They then blew up the box which turned out to be trash. Nasty day.
It’s gonna be a great summer
Posted on 08. May, 2005
Plans for Spring and Summer in Europe are coming together nicely with several big events already locked in covering my usual vices from aviation to music. May sees some big birthday parties, including my 30th. Heading to France in mid-June for Paris Airshow 2005 (fingers crossed for A380 attendance!), and then Austria the following weekend for AirPower05 which promises to be spectacular with a number of European jet aerobatic teams attending. If I've got the energy the following weekend will be spent at RAF Waddington for their annual international airshow. July will be my third year at RIAT, arguably the best airshow in the world. In music the only confirmed tickets are V Festival in August which should be good, there's a few other events I'd like to get to, but all these damn airshows are getting in the way. Looking forward to trying out all my shiny new camera gear.
Backing the Bid
Posted on 22. Jan, 2005
Not a massive amount going on at the moment, a few flicks, a couple of nice dinners, some parties and another 12 weeks of Japanese classes. 2046 was good, and Million Dollar Baby was excellent. Dinner at Gordon Ramsay's restaurant on Royal Hospital Road Chelsea was delicious.
http://www.london2012.org/...
Yep, all that..
Posted on 30. Dec, 2004
Not a massive amount going on at the moment. We had a relatively quiet xmas, the highlight being lunch at Asia de Cuba. Braved the sales at Selfridges (my all time favourite store in London) on Boxing Day, but didn't end up buying anything anyway. Saw House of Flying Daggers and When the Last Sword is Drawn. Daggers was great, much better than Hero - the story line was far more engaging, but still not as good as CTHD. Last Sword was good too, a slow paced Japanese Samurai movie. It jumped all over the place through story telling and flash backs which was occassionally confusing, but the end bit was quite emotional - good flick. What is with Asian action movies always having such sad tragic endings?!
No big plans for NYE yet .. :(
I've finished my second Japanese course which should mean I am at elementary level rather than beginners, but I've definitely been struggling due to lack of study so I'm still deciding whether to pickup the next 12 week course in January, or wait a while to let what I've learnt so far sink in. I definitely need more practice talking to Japanese speakers. While my vocabulary is growing really well, sentence construction is still proving quite challenging. Japanese isn't the best second language to learn when you've never tried to learn a language before. For most of my class this is their third, fourth or fifth language, or they're half-Japanese or have Japanese partners.
Finally got around to visiting the Natural History Museum, mainly to see the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. This was my favourite. We had a quick look around some of the other exhibits at the NHM including their massive life size model of a blue whale. The NHM definitely warrants further visits, lots to see there - the dinosaur stuff in particular.
Kerry Me to the Whitehouse
Posted on 25. Oct, 2004
I've been back in London for a week now, and yet I'm still stuck on EST. I can't seem to get my body back onto GMT. Combine ongoing jet lag with a dose of the flu and I've not been happy. Now all that travel is out of the way, with over 60 hours of the past six weeks spent cramped up in economy class, I can finally get back to normal London things.
For starters I kicked off the next stage of Japanese classes, a beginner's continuation class. This class isn't the nice and easy Introductory Japanese like the first course, it's almost entirely in Japanese (as it should be) and you are required to converse with the teacher in Japanese, who will usually attempt to explain the meaning of the word you don't understand in Japanese rather than English. And it includes reading and writing, not just speaking. Makes for a great learning experience, but it's also a lot of work. Definitely more study required between classes as some of the students have a lot more practice due to being half-Japanese or having Japanese partners/spouses/parents etc.
One observation on the US elections, while in New York last week I was hoping to be bombarded with political ads and people on the streets pushing their respective parties, all the normal stuff you see going on a few weeks before an election. I thought if it was happening anywhere, it'd be Manhattan, unfortunately (or fortunately perhaps) I saw nothing, not one single political ad. Turns out that New York City is such a safe Liberal seat that neither side seems to bother advertising there. Every person I spoke to was pro-Kerry, and was sure he would get in. My tip is still Bush, too many change fearers. Oh wait, I did see some political advertising, a woman walked past me in Central Park with a T-Shirt reading "Kerry Me to the Whitehouse".
The big news of the week in NY was not the election, it was the Boston Red Sox vs. New York Yankees. I was seriously considering trying to get tickets to the first game, but they were going for USD$250 or more. As explained by a New Yorker there's a long rivalry going back between the two baseball teams, and every time they play Bostonites hope this will be the time the "curse" is broken and the Red Sox finally beat the Yankees. It would have been great to watch, I'll do it next time for sure. Loved this headline: "Red Sox Arrive For Annual Beating".
In my spare time particularly last weekend I did a lot of walking around SoHo, East Village and West Village. Checked out lots of shops and did the now mandatory cake stop to Magnolia Bakery on Bleeker Street. I love this area of Manhattan, and it'd certainly be a great area to live.
Geek project wise, I've finally got my new Shuttle XPC AMD system working, it's a beast with an Athlon 64 3500+ socket 939 CPU, 1GB TwinX XMS 128 bit Dual Channel DDR400, 200GB SATA, 802.11g, Bluetooth, FireWire, NEC DVD-RW Dual Layer, Infared Remote Control, etc. The small form factor SN95G5 certainly looks nice. The cause of all my problems was the dodgy Corsair memory that didn't like being run at its advertised settings of 2-2-2-5, so I had to wind it back to 2.5-3-3-6 to get it going, not happy considering I spent the extra to buy the lowest latency memory. Networking wise, I had originally planned to go all wireless along with a Celeron box I've got hooked up in the cupboard acting as a file and printer server for the flat, but after trying to stream video over 802.11b and then reading reviews about likely only incremental performance of 802.11g, I've opted for good old Ethernet for linking everything up, except for my laptop which will stay wireless. I managed to squeeze Cat 5 down the edges of the carpet between the skirting boards so it looks wireless anyway. At some stage I'm going to go the whole hog and upgrade to a gigabit switch as all my machines have gigabit capable NICs.
Anyway.. as soon as I get a chunk of spare time I'll upload all my Japan photos and write up that trip report.. yep one of these months.
Recently
Posted on 18. Oct, 2004
Check out my Recently sidebar. Lots of new gadgets, restaurants and bars in the past couple of weeks. Busy lad. Also continuing on the In-Ear headphone front I took CM's advice and bought a pair Shure's. I picked up the E3c's with a rec. retail of US$179 for US$135 at JR in NYC. They're decent, fairly crisp sounding although still lacking in bass for my liking. Honestly, the standard issue iPod buds still have better bass. It takes me a lot of fiddling to get them properly inserted into my ears. They're certainly good headphones for flying, but are inpractical for office use as they have to be removed so people can talk to you and then take too long to re-insert. I guess I'll get better at inserting them correctly quickly so my opinions on appropriate usage scenarios may change. Tried the uber Bose noise cancelling headphones too, but I'm not sure I like noise cancelling. While it sounds quiet, it feels like there is pressure on my ears from the constant inverse cancelling(?) and therefore found them uncomfortable. I think I prefer the In-Ear approach of just blocking the sound out rather than cancelling. Interestingly the Bose model I looked at is standard issue in Business Class on American Airlines 777's. They go to a great deal of trouble making sure they've accounted for each headset handed out during the flight.
http://anthonyjhicks.com/...
Back in London
Posted on 05. Oct, 2004
That was quite a trip, almost a month away. Caught up with lots of friends back in Sydney and then two weeks exploring Japan (well mainly Tokyo and Kyoto). I love Tokyo, what a fantastic place visit! I'll write up a proper review when my body synchronises with London time. Tokyo is definitely a city I could see myself living in, but the very long stressful hours expected of salary men in Tokyo probably reveals a different a story of how enjoyable living and working in Tokyo would really be.
Back soon..
Posted on 28. Jul, 2004
I've been sick in bed with a nasty case of the flu for the past few days, I should be back on top of things tomorrow. I've got a few things to post including the Prague pictures and a Farnborough airshow review. Nothing else of significance to report. That is all.
I’d like to take on a dragon..
Posted on 24. May, 2004
Not much going on lately. Working, bit of going out, drinkies, restaurants and barbies -- no clubbing :( .. Not much activity on the birthday front last week, as I was a little slack organising something, we had a quick meal at Busaba and then headed home. Had dinner at the Oxo Towers Brasserie on Saturday night, nice food and great views, highly recommended. B's parents are over at the moment, and they've all gone on a road-trip to Southwest England, so I'm home alone. When they get back on Thursday we're all heading to the Chelsea Flower Show, then a week in the Lake District, followed by a week in Ireland. Should be good.
Watched the series finale of Angel last night, nice ending. Also watched the second last episode of Enterprise season 3. I'm really enjoying Enterprise this season since they cranked it up a notch to avoid cancellation. They've got a nice mix of space battles which is always good, especially when the good guys take a battering. They could have been a little more original with the Xindi sphere weapon though -- a total rip of the death star.
