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November 30 v2.1 of my Travel Photography Website doneThe site should now work in Firefox 5.0 as well as IE7. I've also tidied up the nav links and added captions to the photos. Not tried it in IE6. If you are reading this and you know me, please take 5 mins to take a look at the site, and email me with any feedback, especially if it is not working correctly. Please let me know your broswer version if you do this (you can find this in the main top level browser menu - click Help, then "About"). Feedback about my photography is always welcome too
November 24 My new web site is liveAfter a lot of head butting the monitor and general frustration, I got my new web site live today - check it out - mattwhittingham.com. It looks pretty good. Still a couple of things to iron out; I think I'll change the design of the homepage, and the way the code handles the image titles. But it is a massive improvement on the old site, and showcases my photography pretty well. It works OK in Internet Explorer now, but I've still a way to go to get it functioning smoothly in Firefox Australia has a new Prime MinisterKevin Spud won it by a good margin. A good thing for the country methinks November 23 Crazy Bangkok MarketholdersNever let a small detail like a train going though a crowded market get in the way of commerce.... New web site almost doneAs well as celebrating a big birthday this week, I've also been plowing through the world of Dreamweaver, Spry and Ajax, in order to update my web site mattwhittingham.com. The old site had not been updated for about three years so it is well over due. Frustrating process though, I spent three hours yesterday just figuering out why one component didn't work. But it's almost done now, and is a massive improvement on my old site. Updating the images themselves I've noticed that my photography has improved alot. If I can keep the momentum up in five years time I should have a pretty impressive collection, that may make some kind of book feasible Australian ElectionIt's a big weekend here in Australia, as it's the general election. Howard who has been PM for ten years is almost certain to be beaten and replaced by the more youthful Kevin Rudd. Rudd comes over as a bit of a spud, but he's bright and will almost certainly be more forward looking than Howard. He's already promised to sign up to Kyoto, withdraw Australian troops from Iraq (all 500 of them so I doubt if they'll be missed) and further strengthen relations with China. It's a shame he doesn't have more of a personality, which is probably why the election, while likely to be momentous, does not have the air of excitement as people looked forward to the arrival of Blair afer the Major years. Still, I'm staying up late tomorrow night to watch (on web cam) my mate Jonny get married in London so it should be interesting to see the results come it November 15 The Spice Girls new videoI just clicked onto the Spice Girls new video on You Tube after reading a Times review. One of the more articulate user reviews gives us this gem -
"I'd rather listen to my wife take a shit".
Praise indeed.
November 11 Jumping out of a place at 14000 feetAfter being scared witless doing a parachute jump in NZ back in May, I wasn't really keen on doing another one. But it came to pass that today I did another big jump down at Wollongongong(or something like that), an hour or so south of Sydney. Why do we do these things. I spent most of the 15 minute plane ascent worrying about whether the place was going to crash, whether the harness was on properly, that it was attached properly to my instructor, what would happen if he blacked out etc etc. The moment the door goes back, and you edge off the side of the plane, and then out into the massive void, is truly terrifying (for me at least, some people seem to enjoy it). But the minute of free fall at 150 miles an hour is a truly exhilerating experience, and the calmenss that follows the 'chute opening is sublime. Spectacular scenery too, right on the coast. The Killers in SydneySaw The Killers on Saturday at the SEC. Great band, good tunes. I really like their version of Shadowplay (it's on the Control soundtrack) but it kinda passed over most of the twentysomething audience. Fuck I feel old at gigs these days. Brandon Flowers is a great frontman. November 05 Melbourne CupIt's cup day here tomorrow. Massively popular horse race which the whole country stops for apparently. Doesn't mean alot to me, but a British horse called Deep Purple is running and also a nag called Blue Monday so might have a bit of a wager on those two November 03 Stumble upon Stumble UponHaving a fair bit of time on my hands right now (not working has its benefits), and being slightly fatigued by travel, and bored by the beach, I find that the interweb is a good way of passing the time, usually aimlessly. But I've been getting away from just visiting my usual bunch of Favourites, and one of the coolest new(ish) things I've come across is Stumble Upon. In some ways I guess it resembles Digg. The basic premise is that via a customised toolbar, you cruise to new sites, recommended by other hopefully like minded individuals, whose interests and tastes broadly match your own. It is curiously addictive, but also genuinely useful. So for example, I'm interested in Photography, Photoshop and Dreamweaver. By pressing the StumbleUpon button on the SU toolbar, I can loop through sites that match my interests, and by voting on the sites I like and dislike, the system gradually learns and recommends sites that ever more closely match what turns me on. It's a very different way of Searching. While it's not good for finding a specific site quickly, it is much much better than a general Google search in finding quality content around a topic or theme. One reason for that is Google searches are based just on the power of the algorithm, and the ability of the web designer to arrange his or her content in a way that the Google spider can read and index that content. That's fine for many purposes, but if you're interested in sites that are more graphics driven, or those that feature photography more than spider friendly text, the traditional search engines are not as useful And of course, Stumble Upon is driven by user reviews, not a scientific cold piece of software. The 3.5 m users of SU right now are the internets early adopters, and the sites that you get recommended are high quality, sometimes quirky, surprising and often showcase some cool cutting edge web technology. The service also overlays reviews onto general search engine searches, giving a thumbs up rating against high indexing sites that are also favoured by the Stumble Upon community. Anyway, why not give it a go. Here's a link and you can look at some of the sites I'm interested in by clicking on the button in my blogs right hand column November 02 I like FB, and its cool bolt on apps. It's fun just hanging out there. But boy, it ain't half trivial. I'm not sure that when I log into it I really want to know that someone I used to work with five years ago has just farted in their kitchen And people seem to want to collect "friends" like the Trump cards we used to collect as kids. I've only got a few friends on FB and I'm quite happy to keep it that way. For some reason most of my close friends are not on FB at all. Maybe they've got better things to do with their lives Analysts have forecasted FB will have 200m people on it by 2011. I doubt it. Most people will be bored shitless with it by then and it'll go the way of Friends Reunited (who uses that anymore?). Microsoft only buying 1.6% looks sensible, even if it did cost them 260USD. Tie up the rights to the syndicated advertising and wait and see what happens. Even though that strategic buy by MS values FB at 16bn USD, there is no way anyone would buy it for that, way too risky - it may well turn out to be this years Internet fad. Remember or still use Skype? It's only makes a paltry $90m revenue a year and Ebay forked out $2.6bn for it, making themselves look very dumb in the process Anyway, this is a good Daily Telegraph (not my usual read except for the Matt cartoons) article: November 01 hurrah - Adam 'n Joe are back on t'wireless
The next Australian prime minister (probably) enjoying a tasty snackKevin Rudd, sitting behind the speaker, gets an earful |
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