So, this is what I'm thinking…

A new form of art I re-acquainted myself with is the improved IOGraph. This tracks your mouse movements and pauses on the screen. Get it now from IOGraphica.

There are many, many laws having nothing to do with government that are useful to know because they tell you something about how the universe works. There are Newton’s laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, Boyle’s Law, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, among many. Most of these laws have been known for a long time, but it wasn’t until a mere 19 years ago that Godwin’s Law was written.

Via Geek Dad

I was called as Ward Clerk last week at Mandurah Ward. One of the first things I wanted to implement was to have all leadership using a domain email address rather than a mixture of isp.com.au, hotmail.com and yahoo.com addresses. So I registered mandurahward.net, and have been busy adding aliases for people (name@mandurahward.net) and callings (calling@mandurahward.net) to etc/aliases. Advantages include:

• They look good, and appear united and professional
• They’re easy to remember
• They’re meaningful
• They can be reused when you move ISP
• They can be reused when someone else is called

I might open it up to the general population but for now it’s just leadership. Soon I’ll set up mailing lists for PEC organisations etc. This system worked well at Canning when I was there.

Is it cheating if I forward all my email to Gmail? My domain email all for appearance and vanity, but Gmail is what I use to manage it.

If you’re still using MS Internet explorer, why? Do yourself a favour and start using Google Chrome. Why? Let me tell you:

Google Chrome is an almost complete ground up web browser design, making much better usage of memory management:

With the current versions of Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, individual Web page tabs are hosted in a single process – a model that is efficient (in terms of memory and resource consumption) but also prone to catastrophic failures: A single crashed tab can easily take down the entire browser application. Chrome seeks to eliminate this problem by isolating each tab within its own application process, then leveraging the built-in memory protection capabilities of modern, preemptively multitasking operating systems to keep code and data in a failing tab from stomping on other processes. So now, when that buggy Flash applet on your favorite humor site goes belly up, it won’t necessarily take down the entire browser – the processes running in other tabs will keep chugging along.

Google Chrome is very fast:

On each one of these tests, Chrome clearly trounced the competition. I hope benchmarking experts and developers will weigh in with comments about how well these tests represent true JavaScript performance on the Web–either for ordinary sites or for rich Web apps.

Google Chrome is very secure:

Google’s Chrome was the only browser left standing—and in fact, was completely untested. None of the researchers at the competition even tried to attack Chrome… Google’s sandboxing shouldn’t be impenetrable, but it is sufficient to make the standard harmless exploit payload—starting up Windows calculator—harder to do.

MSIE just doesn’t have what it takes to run Google Wave:

Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5’s offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web’s users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology.

But if you are stuck with uncompromising IT staff or your own ignorance, then you can install the Google Chrome Frame into MSIE for a Wave experience by logging into Wave.

Just for the hell of it, I’m making this blog entry entirely in Google Wave. It’s my little effort to get more of my friends and associates to start Waving. The contents of this wave include discussions and tips on Facebook, and links to sites and useful tools to keep your Facebook data private. Use your Google ID to sign up for Wave, or ask me and I’ll send you an invitation.

Out of the box, my home wireless network was named “Bigpond1234″ or whatever the default was and I couldn’t be bothered changing it. A few weeks ago I wanted a fresh approach and renamed it “Skynet“, although upon reflection “Cyberdine” may have been more subtle.

I want to mess with the neighbors in our street. I could be evil or I could be cool. Possibilities include:

• FreeNetwork but leave a password on it, obviously
• Virus Detected
• Connect And you DIE
• Fed Police Monitor Van just for the paranoid people around us
• 15Mystreet I don’t live at #15 on My Street
• Error:Could Not Connect
• 17MystreetRJerks if my neighbours ever upset me
• UPDOG so if friends come around and they want to connect and they ask “What’s UPDOG?” I can say “Nothing much, what’s up with you?”
• Series of Tubes
• Silence of the LANs

For some reason this reminds me of the time we were on Rottnest with Suzanne’s sister and her family. Her sister made the mistake of putting her phone down unattended in full view one day, so I turned it on, went into her contacts list and changed the description for my phone number from “Brian” to “WA Police”. I picked the right moment later in the day and dialed her number from my phone covertly and watched as she picked up the phone. I had this whole thing in my head that I was going to do when she answered about how her car had been recovered from the bottom of the Fremantle docks or something but watching her and her husband freak out about getting a phonecall from the police without even answering it made me laugh too much and I couldn’t keep it going. “Answer it”. “No you answer it” “But it’s your phone” “But it’s the police” “I can’t talk to the police” “But the phone’s in your name, not mine!” Hehe.

Well, maybe it’s a little harsh to call Twitter stupid. At the very least it is silly, borderline idiotic. It’s a strange hybrid of a forum and a blog, but nobody is saying anything useful or meaningful. It’s the world’s largest intellectual toilet bowl. Comparing to other social media sites, it’s hard to find a single redeeming quality for Twitter. I have a personal Twitter account, yes, and I’ve even posted once on it. But I felt dirty afterwards. Also I found that for some reason I had over 20 “followers” until I culled them, but they were mostly porn sites. To try and drive traffic to my other projects, I’ve got other twitter accounts but I’m getting a close to 0.0% ROI for my effort on those.  Does it work for anyone? I can’t find any data supporting this.

All I imagine Twitter to be (if you’re not a celebrity, product or service) is full of young, insecure, immature noobs who take pleasure in how many “followers” they have and waiting for some shred of acknowledgement from other twitterers.

Mind you, I’ve blogged every day for three weeks now and haven’t said anything useful or meaningful yet. So maybe it’s not just Twitter, but the whole Internet is stupid.

I just checked out the Google Analytics stats for my blog for the first time in a while. Google Analytics tells me that my blog has been taking almost 400 unique visitors a day for the last few days. Along with 4.1 pages per visit, that’s over 1500 page views per day. I can’t explain why, but perhaps I’m tapping into the lucrative Star Destroyer Wallpaper market from a few days ago. That’s up from an average of about 100 or so new visitors a day for the last month. At least my SEO-fu is working.

Google Analytics also tells me that the most common searches which lead to my blog were these:

• sexy eyes wallpaper
• brian kerle wife
• mudslide kings park
• funny device names
• worlds without number

Just who is Brian Kerle’s wife? I really can’t explain that one. Brian Kerle was coach of the Brisbane Bullets from (I had to look this up as memory fades) 1984 to 1992 plus a couple other years when he came out of retirement and was inducted into the NBL Hall of Fame in 2006. I can’t find who he married, though, or why there would be such interest in his wife.

Now if I could just drive all this to DarthVaderFigures.com, which is enjoying about 12-15 visitors a day, although it is steadily increasing by 1 visitor a day per month on average since New Year. In fact, if you’re reading this then go there now and see if you can skew my stats.

I call this one “Bett3r, 5trong3r, Fa5t3r” because it looks like the Olympic rings and because I’m techo and hip and edgy and L33T.

I call this one “Dusting Crops”, because traveling through hyperspace isn’t like dusting crops, boy!

You can make one too by visiting Flame. The main tool is the brush with which you paint. You can change the color, saturation and opacity. You can also change the focus of the brush and alter parameters such as chaos and noise. There is a helpful eraser tool, and you can also choose to clear the entire artboard. Working with this tool is a very nice experience.

It was 25 years ago on 15^th March that the first domain name, symbolics.com, was registered. Before we started assigning names to hosts we needed to refer to web sites by a complex string of numbers and dots. This, along with DNS and text-based or GUI web browsers, made it way simpler for users to find their way around the webz. Since then. about 80 million domain names have been registered. I would have had a hand in registering a couple thousand of them while working at iiNet as part of my job. Wow, 25 years. The Internet was a small place back then. It’s hard to believe there was a time when the Whole Internet Catalog was even possible.