duncanriley.com

Author: admin

  • The extra long weekend and searching for a new lounge: the odd parallels with blogging

    It?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s unofficially an extra long weekend here in Australia, with the Anzac Day Public Holiday tomorrow (Tuesday) many, many people have taken the Monday off work. She who must be obeyed was one of them 🙂

    So we trekked up to Mandurah today to shop for a new lounge suite. The last major purchase I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢ll be making from what?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s left of The Blog Herald money (there isn?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t a lot left now, but what is left goes against the mortgage next week). We visited a number of furniture stores there looking for a lounge suite.

    In the first store, we found some quite nice lounge suites. The ones that looked the nicest didn?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t have recliners (and I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢ve decided I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢m old enough now to want a recliner). Indeed, the nicest looking lounge suites, at least to our liking, also turned out to be the most uncomfortable. We found a few we liked (with recliners) but we didn?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t like the look. We found one 3 seater, 2x 1 seat recliner set which was very comfortable, but we couldn?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t justify it?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s look.

    We then visited a number of other stores. Either too much for what they wanted, or too cheap and nasty. The last store we visited was the premium store (for people in Australia Jason/ Ezeboy). The lounges: really expensive. The best one in the place was twice what we wanted to spend. But it was fantastic. We found one lounge at our limit (ok, a little bit more) which was their base model, but well?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?Ǭ¶..not only was it comfortable, it looked great as well. 1x 3 seater with recliners, 2x 1 seaters with recliners, and these guys make the best recliners in the market.

    We?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢ve decided to save a little then go back later (maybe a month or two) and buy this one.

    But whats the parallel with blogging?

    Sometimes the best looking blogs don?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t feel right. They’re uncomfortable to the reader.
    Sometimes bad looking blogs can be really comfortable.
    And sometimes you can get both.

    Of course, I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢m not a blog snob, like I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢m a lounge snob, so I can take a bad looking blog if the content is right. Ultimately though, it?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s not a bad thing to aim for both good looking and comfortable, or good design and content.

  • Are 25-40 year old parents leading the Web 2.0 revolution?

    Just an idle thought. A lot of people I’m talking to online and offline lately involved in Web 2.0 (including some cutting edge blogging stuff) are 25-40 and have young kids. Am I falling into the trap I was always afraid of when I wrote The Blog Herald where I’ve become insular and naturally refined myself to those similar to myself, or is there something more to this? (in case you didn’t know, my new boss will be 4 in August…and that will be 100 metres of track laid thanks daddy).

    I mean, really, when you’ve got young children, you shouldn’t be taking risks…right? And yet, more and more people I’ve met are! And its like there’s a majority in the field to some extent. I’ve done no hard figures on this, but I’d think that this demographic seems to be quite over represented as a proportion of the general population.

    Share your thoughts. Am I on to something, or do I just need to get out more 🙂

  • Evangalising Australian blogging and Web 2.0: the Perth Blog Meetup

    Having finally got through a backlog of work I wanted to post about my trip to Perth the Wednesday night just gone, and the great people I met at the Perth Blog Meetup.

    Worst thing, I didn’t take notes so I’m going to forget some names, but if I have missed you, apologies in advance.

    A meetup that was suppose to go from 7-9pm finished a bit before midnight. I could have talked to this group for twice as long again.

    I wont give a full run down of everything that was discussed, but I’ll make a couple of points.

    Australian Blogging and Web 2.0 is really amazing. Even amongst the odd 12 people in attendance (the number varied throughout the night, with the last guest arriving at 11pm) there was a group of people doing some amazing things. And I know these guys (and gals) are only a very small sample of what’s currently going on in the Australian blogging and Web 2.0 communities.

    As big Kev use to say: I’m excited. And more now than ever I want to do more towards (time permitting) being a part of the greater community and helping provide ways and means of promoting Australian bloggers and projects.

    Of course I’ve got one semi-secret project that will work towards this (it’s secret in that I’ve posted what I’m doing, but I’ve never publicly really tied together the subject matter previously, but it’s not hard to guess, and certainly most there on Wednesday know what it is). It’s not earth shattering, front page of the news paper sort of thing, but it will hopefully become part of the bigger jigsaw puzzle.
    (more…)

  • Name this city

    It’s 6:15pm at night. All the shops are closed. Gangs are fighting outside the closed shops in the main mall amongst themselves, screaming and kicking. A single police car sits at one end of the mall, two officers sitting inside watching but not acting. The few remaining office workers who dared leave their trip to so late scurry along the edges of the mall, try to make their way to the Cities major rail station without making eye contact with the clearly drug or alcohol affected gangs.

    The City.

    Me, I’ve don’t think I’ve been this sh*t scared in a long time (if ever to be honest). I scurried along behind one of the office workers at a brisk pace and despite initially intending on walking around a bit to find a decent feed, I noticed that the Hungry Jacks (Australian version of Burger King) was open, so I quickly made my way in their, to eat some crap food and wait for the gangs to pass.

    For those of you in Perth, I actually felt safer when I got to the Blog Meetup in Northbridge….and that really says something doesn’t it.

  • Petrol Panic

    Was it Skyhooks with the song “We’re living in the 70s”?.

    Yesterday I had to fill up on my way back from Perth. I made the mistake (well I think it was a mistake) of stopping at the Caltex Woolworths outlet in Mandurah. It took me 40 minutes to get to the pump, fill up, pay and leave, all because with the discount voucher you get from shopping at Woolworths the price of the petrol was $1.27, where as everywhere else the price was $1.34. I felt sorry for the poor checkout attendant in the station. As I walked in an eldery customer was abusing him. It wasn’t his fault. People were panicing, rushing to save 7 cents a litre at the pump, and the local papers are predicting petrol will rise to $1.50 a litre….nuts. I can still remember when I first had a car griping when petrol got to 50c a litre. I can still remember filling up for 29.9 cents a litre, and I’m only 30. By the time my son gets to 17 and gets his first car, he’ll probably be paying $50 a litre!.

    And then I caught some of the news last night. The Federal Treasurer is saying we are basically entering a similar stage to the fuel crisis of the 70s. Not good, not good….

  • Digging a bloody great big hole.

    Digg is in strife. Big time. Despite some unfortunate comments from Jason Calacanis which I think were totally unhelpful, For those of you who haven’t been following the whole thing, I’ll try to surmise it (some parts may be missed, comment if I need to add anything).

    1. Jacob Gower (good bloke by the way) from Forever Geek posts here about suspicious activity at Digg, in particular 17 people Digging 2 items at A List a Part in the exact same order. I’d note that Jacob neither accused Digg, or Digg Founder Kevin Rose of doing the wrong thing, but did ask whether it was more than a coincidence, a not unreasonable question in the circumstances.

    2. Other blogs pick up on it, and they get Dugg. Then mysteriously their stories are manually removed, and in some cases their accounts are suspended. Digg responds to these bloggers it was because their posts supported accusations of wrong doing at Digg.

    3. Forever Geek is suspended from Digg according to Kevin Rose, for spamming Digg

    4. Now its on Slashdot, tech.memeorandum, and all over the place. Jacobs follow up post is here that fills in the rest of the story.

    5. Digg results start going wonky. Posts with 44 diggs make the front page. Something is going on at Digg, something very strange.

    OK, so thats the short version. I don’t have any evidence that Kevin Rose or others are doing the wrong thing here, but I do know that the odds of having 17 odd people digg an item in the same order for the same blog in a short time frame are astronomical if we were to presume that they were all done legitimately. If these diggs were blogs everyone (including Jason Calacanis) would be yelling spam blogs from the tops of the tallest buildings.

    Reality is: it smells, and it smells big time.

    Digg also now has a pretty big PR disaster on it’s hands, and its founder is totally compromised because it would appear, is some respects, that he may have been involved in the matter. For him to rule that nothing was untoward and then accuse Forever Geek of spamming has absolutely no credibility.

    I like Digg, and a frequently visit the site mainly because of the interesting things I can find there. Now that I know that potentially the content delivered is potentially no reflective of the interests of the greater blogging community….well I’m not going to stop using the site, but I’m certainly not going to hold it in the same esteem anymore, and I would suggest, neither would a whole lot of other people.

  • How to remove Spyware Quake

    After digging through Google, reading forums advocating all sorts of bizarre and long winded ideas, there is only one way I could remove Spyware Quake: by downloading Ewido anti-malware, software from the same people who write AVG. Effect a full scan then a memory scan as chances are there will be multiple related bugs with Spyware Quake as well. Its a 14 day free trial then you pay after that, but I’m so impressed with it that I’m seriously tossing up paying the $30 US to continue to use it, particularly as it runs all the time like Virus Protection does.

    Only thing I don’t like about it: it keeps telling me my Alexa Toolbar install is malware. Not sure why, but its a little annoying.

  • Going down the Full Feed path.

    Inspired by Darren, and also because I forgot to do it earlier, I’ve turned on the full feed here at duncanriley.com. It’s going to hurt what little traffic reads my personal rants, but to be honest….I don’t really care. As they say in the for love or money stakes, I’m blogging here because I want to (love) and I’m not really all that concerned in terms of traffic and dollars from this site. What I do have to do now is pull out the proforma DMCA notice because I’d guess it will take no more than a few days to start getting all the content ripped now 🙂

  • I must be unwell…I recommended TypePad last night

    I had the opportunity of speak to a local Rotary Club last night about blogging, and interesting experiment in itself given I had no laptop or audiovisual support so it was a matter of trying to explain the whole blogging thing to people who didn’t know anything about it…without pictures.

    Afterwards I was talking to some people: I’d apparently made some people interested in blogging. One person asked me the best place to start a blog for his business at low cost. I talked roughly about free blogging services (such as WordPress.com, Blogger) but after recognising that he’d need a fair bit of support, I recommended TypePad as his best option…..god dammit! Anil would be proud. I even went onto explain how by paying the little bit of money to Mena and friends meant that he’d get a lot of support which would be useful should he get stuck………ok, someone buy me a bullet :-). Who knows, I might even get back on the SixApart Christmas Card list yet!

  • WordPress.com down

    SEJ has more here yesterday. Looking like Matt and the team are still having problems:

    Once More

    We had a pretty bad hardware failure yesterday, and though it took longer than we liked everything was restored and has been running the past 6 hours or so just dandy.

    We did some proactive maintainence whil the site was down, but we need to take things down one last time and do one more bit. Everything should be done by roughly 1:30 AM PST.

    ?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Ǩ¬ù Matt (still working)