Terrified

fear is what i feel

A refreshing break from the now relentless London stoicism, this website perhaps represents the inner-feelings of those average Britons without the prerequisit Photoshop skills to make it to We're Not Afraid .com

...and there's lots of swearing in it too..

A History Of Ajarn.com's Forum

One of the first incarnations of the Ajarn.com Forum

I posted this a little while back on Ajarn Forum, but knowing how easily info gets buried on there I thought I'd post it here too. The above link is the topic list from, I believe the second incarnation of the Ajarn.com forum. There did indeed exist a first but all it seems is left of it is this terse message from Ian.

The Discussion Board

July 2000 - Several months ago I added a message board to the site. The board was unmoderated and I trusted people to use it for it's intended intention - sharing useful information about living and teaching in Bangkok.

That didn't seem like too much to ask but apparently it was. Due to a handful of idiots who regularly posted crap on it I have had to remove it and replace it with a new board that requires users to register to use it. ( It's a relatively painless process that only takes 2 minutes - please try to make the effort )

I know this is a bit of a hassle but don't blame me - blame those who seemed intent on dragging the image of teachers here in Bangkok into the gutter with their inane posts. Don't get me wrong - I don't want a 'serious' board but I'd like posts to be either genuinely amusing, informative and/ or thought provoking.

Damn that sure sounds familiar. Sadly these archives seem to have found the old Ajarn.com several months after the establishment of this second incarnation and so exactly what irked Ian so much seems to have been lost forever along with much of the content in all of these archives, though bits remain of the beige board for example this topic that was posted September 11th 2001, here's another demonstrating the time-honoured ajarn tradition of flaming newbies, and what forum review would be complete without a heated "Which TEFL course is the best?" thread.

This second incarnation (or the beige board as it's become known) lasted until September 2002, and was moderated at this point by Ian, Philip, Khunkru, and Jonathan. Two of them are still moderating today.

The board subsequently move to the third incarnation (just a snapshot of the index) - Ikonboard, the first time that Ajarn Forum became multi-room.

By this time it was called the TIT (This Is Thailand) Forum, and combined Phil's Bangkok Mouth Forums which dealt with life in Bangkok,and the Ajarn.com forums which were teacher centred. It was on this board that the Virtual Pub and Practicalities first appeared and also contained other teaching forums the seeds of what would eventually become the Staffrrom and Classroom.

This incarnation also introduced the ill-fated TEFL course room which later was the battleground for the infamous Thailand TEFL Provider wars between staff at two of the best known schools.

We can also see how the Travel and Out on the Town forums were seperate entities.

Also this era was the one where blogging had first appeared and two valient efforts started out, but as often happens (and I know this well), fizzled out fairly soon after their inception.

A year later in May 2003, around about the time I first joined up the Powder Room (for the ladies) was added, and several new moderators were around such as Grasshopper, Crvenazvezda, Hodd, and of course Markoinbangkok, who had started to help Admin the forum.

At this time there was also a forum called the schools database, which was supposedly a place to

get together and compile a list of schools/universities, and what they pay.

It all ended in farce as information was incomplete or badly organised and mainly featured half a dozen "grey lists" which merely listed schools which people had not got on with for varous reasons.

Membership at this time was reasonably high, but by August 2003 everything had changed, when all the information was lost, and what emerged was a much slimmed down forum from 11 rooms to just 7, with the Bangkok Mouth affiliation dropped. Incarnation 4.

By October 2003, the forum had become blue and I had become a Moderator, the Sports forum had been created, the Jobs Wanted page was started (which got taken down after posters started making sarcastic comments about the resumes posted.) The Visa News room was started following the panic about new visa regulations that started to emerge from doom and gloom-meisters on the Thai Visa. This would lay the foundations for what became Paperwork.

By June 2004 the forum was dogged by controversy. Members had been leaving and creating their own forum following high profile arguments with Marko over his moderating style and other mods for what were perceived as abuses of status.

New forums at this time included "You Can Keep Bangkok" a room for discussion of Upcountry - a nod finally to us boonies dwellers and recognition that the forum was now not just about Bangkok life.
Unfortunately it was set-up with too ridgid a posting format and soon fell into decline.

Shortly after this the board had to be moved to another server after the hosts complained about the bandwidth the board was using, and sadly nearly 130,000 posts and a membership of 3,000 members was gone.

It returned a few days later as ajarnforum.net, the 5th incarnation of the forum, (which for some reason is not in the archives at all). This was the short-lived reign of Adrian Tristom, a cuddly bearded bloke with meek, mild, and considerate ways (which is fact was Marko on an image change mission), the pretence lasted all of 1 month, before everyone finally clicked it was him and that Adrian Tristom was merely an anagram of "Administrator". It was around this time that the ill-fated Plat Club was introduced, if nothing else a good reason not to establish elitist non-moderators rooms which run on cod-democracy. The fallout from the Plat club, Adrian's unmasking and subsequent hacking challenge, meant that within one month the 5th incarnation suffered a hacking.

It was at this point I offered to set up a phpBB board, Marko disappeared and left me to be admin, and the 6th Incarnation began. Since the majority of posts from that era are still available despite 3 subsequent hackings I think we are still in that era.

I've done far more than I meant to here so there we go one potted history with archived links to Ajarn Forum.

Your comments and stories please.

Has Google "Jumped The Shark?"

Second Sight

Is Yahoo finally starting to win the search engine war over Google?

Ben Hammersley writing in the Guardian thinks so.

Yahoo is the new Google. Google is the new Yahoo. Up is down, and black is white. This spring has been very strange. Google, it seems, has jumped the shark. It has been overtaken, left standing, and not by some new startup of ultra smart MIT alumni or by the gazillions in the Microsoft development budget, but by the deeply unhip and previously discounted Yahoo.

Yahoo's 10

Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the Web

Obviously told from Yahoo's perspective, this is a nice flash interface similar to the 10x10 site I featured a couple of months ago.

It's also a nice retrospective, and isn't entirely self-serving featuring as it does Creative Commons, Napster, Open Source, and Blogging.

Ah remember the GMail Goldrush....

Those hazy days back in April 2004 were stange ones to me. On April 1st 2004 we were almost subject to the ultimate April Fools Joke....get this...

Google were offering an Email service giving away..(just imagine...giving it away)1 gigabye of storage space for every email user.

Scoff scoff went the naysayers, but April 2nd either Google had broken the maxim that foolers beyond midday April 1st became the fools by default, or they were really fucking serious.

I was an early adopter, g=having been one of Bloggers active cusomers that month
and I acheive a brief feeling of that zen-like cool that I was slightly cutting edge in geeky technological terms, (though I wish I sold the 2 invites I'd been given on Ebay for lots of money instead of sending them to my wife, who took it for spam and deleted it.

These days I have the 50 emails just sitting there not being used.

I just don't know enough people.

Are you like me?

Then check this

isnoop.net gmail invite spooler

Spend 10 minutes sending a few invites to this address which is aloocating them automatically.

A fine waste of the almost release version of Gmail.....it's probably even part of Googles grand plan. The glorious day of Yahoo/Hotmail status is not long away when you can just sign up to it, but enjoy these final days of gmail mgnaminity in a better way than just letting them sit there.

Ajarn Forum HTML archive

Ok this entry is really just to seed this archive a bit as I don't know how well search engines can read the php pages on the forum, so here it is. This link allows one to view the forum in Google-friendly html wrappers.

The Ajarn Forum Archive

Intelligence Quiz Meme

Blogthings - What Kind of Intelligence Do You Have?

Oh dear LDMA's on the memes today and here's my results. Guess what? It says I should become a teacher!

Your Dominant Intelligence is Linguistic Intelligence

You are excellent with words and language. You explain yourself well. An elegant speaker, you can converse well with anyone on the fly. You are also good at remembering information and convicing someone of your point of view. A master of creative phrasing and unique words, you enjoy expanding your vocabulary. You would make a fantastic poet, journalist, writer, teacher, lawyer, politician, or translator.

Teeny Weeny Appz

TinyApps.Org

A brilliant collection of very small (under 1.44 meg) tightly programmed applications for almost any aspect of computing you can think of. I'll keep it bookmarked...this kind of site can come in VERY useful.

Nice after the stress I had trying to free up 4.5 gigs trying to get Halflife2 running (and then it not working...)

Free Open Source Office Suite

OpenOffice

Fed up with Microsoft Word telling you what you want to do with your word processing?

Here's a radical concept.
Get a new word processor.

Oh but what if I can't open all my Word documents in it?

Good job the fantastic Open Office is 100% compatible with the .doc format, and for that matter all the Microsoft Office formats are compatible with all the programmes in this fantastic free suite..

There's a spreadsheet, a powerpoint equivalent, it's compatable with all decent DBs, and there's load of other little features like an html editor, formulae generator.

Guess what? It's free.

Get it and you'll never use Microshite Office again...I haven't...

Front Bottom

Vagina Danish

Following on from lthe origami vagina, here is the vagina danish, which comes from excellent site Porn Bread.

Speaking of c*nts, check out the 'so pathetic it's funny' Flash intro off this David Hasselhof site.
Uses every corny flash trick in the book too, but the main point has to be those cheeseypictures of David thundering in to the Prodigy's Firestarter.....

World's Longest Email Address

Abc... Whatever - The World's Longest Alphabetical Email Address

ldma@abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com???

Nah!

Just another pointless slice of net silliness, though apparently a number of people HAVE signed up for this silly e-mail address.

Some Useful Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts

Box Of Chocolates blog gives us his favourite keyboard shortcuts for the lovely Mozilla Firefox browser (wot I use and love dearly!)

Examples of good things include
Control - T which opens a new tab.
Alt - D which selects the text in the address bar for easy copying and pasting.

Very useful indeed.

Girlfriend Arguments

Things my girlfriend and I have argued about

Found this a coupleof weeks ago, but never blogged it. Hillarious catalogue of domestic pettiness, but then again I'm a bloke so I would say that.

Here's an example:

I eat two-fingered Kit-Kats like I'd eat any other chocolate bars of that size, i.e., without feeling the need to snap them into two individual fingers first. Margret accused me of doing this, 'deliberately to annoy her'.

Annoying E-mail Addresses

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: E-mail Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone.

eg MikeAtYahooDotCom@hotmail.com

aarrrgghh

Check your Gmail messages without opening your browser

Gmail Notifier

The Gmail Notifier is a downloadable Windows application that alerts you when you have new Gmail messages. It displays an icon in your system tray to let you know if you have unread Gmail messages, and shows you their subjects, senders and snippets, all without your having to open a web browser.

I love my new Google widgets me....

LOL, SUM1 TOLDED ME U SUXX.

TheCoolKids.Org :: How to Speak Kewl / AND UR MOM 2

A linguist getting sick of Kewl and other internet verbal sub-cultures....nice article.

$87 Billion

$87,000,000,000.00

Visualise $87 Billion in $1 bills. Scarey!

Why Not Having Broadband Sucks

UKNova

This is one of those excellent Bittorrent file posting sites. This particular one specialises in British TV, and is chock full of Eastenders and Corrie Episodes.

I just downloaded a John Pertwee episode of Dr. Who. It took me over 24 hours, but I finally had the slightly strange experience of good classiv Brit TV in the searing heat of a Thai afternoon. Nice.

How big is a googol?

About Big Numbers
Get ready to have your head explode as you explore just what happens when you make numbers bigger and bigger. Just how many atoms are there in the Universe?

Watch out for that cliff....

Worst-Case Scenarios: How To Escape From A Car Hanging Over The Edge Of A Cliff

Say your car goes out of control and it comes to a stop hanging over a cliff. What should you do?

Do not shift your weight or make any sudden movements.

Determine how much time you have to get out of the car.

You might be very glad you read this one day.

Via Grow a Brain

Google Circa 1960

Very Droll! Click for fullsize.

From Fury via MeFi.

Internet or internet?

On Captalisation

I've blogged this, as it reminded me of a conversation I had with Chalinee a couple of weeks back as to whether the Internet deserved a capital I at the beginning of it. I can't actually remember who thought what was right but this article seems to indicate a general trend towards no capitalisation, not just of internet, but also worldwide web.

A few people claim that the internet demands a capital I because it's a place like no other that's been given a name all its own. Actually it's not really a place. It's an invention. And unlike, say, Touchtone or Xerox, it's never had a single company enforcing trademark protection.

Haikus For Geeks

Error Messages as Poetry
Fantastic and beautiful idea generated from the pure frustration of the Windows error message into a calming zen-like artform.

Stay the patient course

Of little worth is your ire

The network is down

No Pen? Never Mind

Bloody Finger Mail.

Read my message then make your own and send them to anyone you can think of who'd like a message scrawled in blood by a freshly severed finger.

Make everything all rude.

Pornolise will make any web page you give it a blue mouthed cacophony of profanity and filth. Just check out the Pornolised Wor Zone as an example.

Thanks to Mr Harry Palmer Esq. for this find.

Fly Guy

FLY GUY - brilliant controllable animation feature. Control a man as he soars through the sky bouncing into all sorts of weird and wonderful characters, and thrying to avoid everyday objects like photocopiers or mobile phones that send you crashing back to the ground to everyday life. Can you reach the beach?

Beautiful monotone animation that defies belief, and really great music.

Songkhla Community Forum

An inspired fumble with a PHPBB board last night let to the fertilisation of a new project called the Songkhla Community Forum. Kind of like a localised version of TIT, I have a few different ideas for it's use, many of which you'll see reflected in my initial selection of forums. I'm seriously on the Ground floor with this as Mo Calo, my first member noted, it just needs a bit of talented posting, such as I can't do alone.

As a restaurant buff (and a fat bastard), I'm always looking to vent my spleen or sing somewhere's praises. So I made an eating out forum, which I will be contributing to. If nothing else we can bash out wheres nice to eat out.

This Is Songkhla is a general forum and a nod towards TIT. Other ideas for this forums name was the Virtual Darkside. Maybe not!

I am looking to have this forum as centered in Sonngkhla and around the South. Whilst I am not anticipating that many restaurant reviews from Pattani, I'll certainly represent all of the neighbouring provinces and districts if I can, as I think that a local job board might just keep that ear to the ground that one based in Bangkok can't do so well..

If anyone has any ideas about what else I could use it for, then do drop me a comment. In the mean time please support me by registering your login, saying hi or posting something cool....oh yeah...I need some avatars posting.

OK......more on this later

Oooh, you gotta nice font!

TypeNow.net Themed Fonts Movie and Music Fonts

Great archive of famous brand name fonts.
See if you can identify the three fonts shown below spelling out the name of my Blog.
Comments with your guesses please below (it's pretty easy with the middle one probably being the hardest)

Light = Seen

Firefox - The Browser, Reloaded

My God! It's like waking up from a horrendous nightmare and being kissed softly by a loved one saying "There, there!"

My life's work from this day forward is to evangelise Moziila's fantastic new browser Firefox. The new version 0.9 is just 4.5 megs in size, takes all of your settings from IE and blows you away with it's brilliance. It's so good that within 5 minutes I had removed all mention of IE from my desktop and start menu.

Gmail Invite Bonanza

Gmail Invitation Prices Crash

Well, looks like Googles been forced to devalue the excellent bit of free enterprise that was bargaining for invites, following the extraordinary demand for Gmail.

Last week I was given 3 invites, and my immediate thought was to cash them in on Ebay as others did when I wasted my first two. However I soon sussed out that it was a trick to devalue the invites. So I just gave them away. I then got 3 more invites yesterday, which I got rid of same day, only to get a further 5 today. Looks like the days of Ebaying Gmail invites is over, though Gmail Swap still might be worth checking out, but the rarity value is slipping away with every day.

Leave me a comment if you fancy an invite...no promises, but I'll stick you on my waiting list.

It seems however that some Gmail users are not very keen on their beloved, new radical e-mail service having competition before the official launch. Enter You've Got Post . These guys have gone one better that Gmail and have offered unlimited space for free. The interface isn't as nice and it's not as fast and lovely than Gmail, but that unfortunately has not apparently registered with a bunch of idiots from Something Awful.com, who leaping to the Billionaire multinational's aid,some have sadly been abusing this new service by conducting a campaign of putting useless data files onto this service to try and make it collapse. Not cool. I think Google is a big enough corporation to stick up for itself.

Meanwhile, Yahoo's laughable answer to Gmail has been to lose it's adverts, and offer 100MB for fee or 2GB for $20. No cigar, sorry!

Finally on today's Gmail-tastic post, here's a nifty little widget (that I can't get to work but I like the idea). It's called POP Goes the Gmail, and it sits between the Gmail server and allows you to receive and send mail through a regular e-mail client like Outlook Express. I'm sure the lawyers will be onto this soon, but should buck Gmail's ideas up a bit.

Panic Attack

Animation Express: Panic Attack

Check out this incredible, strange cartoon. As far as I can make out, a boy on a train has a strange and disturbing hallucination. 846k swf job.

The animation seems jerky and dull at first, but soon had my jaw dropping.

Another silly addictive Google game.

Google War

Enter two opposing or otherwise words into this site and the thing with the most hits wins. Can be viewed by most recent or by most popular. A good 10 minutes distracted by this.

Heres a few of the wars from the popular list. You'll have to check the site to see who won.

bush sucks vs. kerry sucks me vs. superman American women vs. Whores superman vs. a+dishwasher Bush vs. Kerry Me vs. You Islamic women vs. slaves US women are whores vs. US women are saints nikon vs. canon dogs vs. cats penis vs. vagina good vs. evil linux vs. windows red vs. blue google vs. Yahoo gay vs. straight tits vs. ass

Tales From The Mental Hospital

This seven page posting on Something Awful is a fascinating read, and kept me entertained all morning, whilst the Wai Kru activities were taking place at school. Michael's accounts don't exactly endear him to the average person, but his dark and often cruel sense of humour makes this hugely entertaining...provided you're not TOO squeamish or easily offended.

"During my formerly frequent stays to various psychiatric facilities in NJ, I've met quite a few characters. They've ranged from scary violent psychos, to hilariously deranged schizophrenics, to the just plain bizarre. That statement also includes some of the people who worked there. Sometimes, the staff is just on the wrong side of the desk.

Needless to say, each separate hospitalization was a truly unique experience. That's right, the hospital can be fun."

Link to article
via Metafilter

Please Don't Let this Game Ruin Your Life!!

Really hard game!
What was the name of that annoying bloody game where you have to guide a metal hoop around a metal maze without touching the sides which sounds a buzzer? Can't for the life of me remember. Anyway this game takes that concept, and makes it more futuristic and funky replacing a metal hoop with a spaceman, and the wire maze with all manner of feindish traps. All the same end though; one touch of the sides and it's back to the start.

AAARRGGHH! I got in breathing distance of the second rest zone before it sent me back to the start and annoyed me too much.

Silly Flash Games Part 13

Tontie is an irritating and addictive 'Whack-a-rat' style Flash game played on the number pad of your keyboard. Has kiled at least 30 minutes of my precious Saturday afternoon.

NotCon'04

NotCon '04 is an informal, low-cost, one-day conference on things that technologies were perhaps not intended to do.

Sounds interesting and features many up and coming Brit types, that have been doing some cutting edge, unusual and plain whacky things with technology.

Includes Ian Clark creator of the annonymous Freenet, mash-up producer Lionel Vinyl, and James Larsson who will be "telling the time (not very accurately) using a Marks & Spencer prawn sandwich and a BBC micro", amongst many others.

The last one sold it for me. However, I'm not sure I could make it down to Kensington in time.

Someone Invent a Matayom 3 Shutting Up Engine...Please!!

Halfbakery is a very interesting site, where people come up with whacky and wild ideas and discussions take place to establish whether they've been done, impossible or just good ideas that should happen ASAP. The concept is that if an idea is stuck on the Interweb somewhere then someone might make it.

Take this example for Custard-Filled Speed Bumps.

Custard contains finely ground cornflour and is a 'dilatant' mixture, changing from liquid to solid when pressure is applied. Thus, a benign, rather flaccid bump encountered at low speeds becomes an unforgiving, hardened lump when hit at speed. For blatant speeding > 70MPH, the hump would burst showering the offending vehicle with incriminating custard.

Suicide Techniques Pt 36

Bizarre tale of boy who used internet to plot his own murder

You really can buy anything on the Interweb these days. Even your own death.

The final internet chatroom exchange took place on 28 June last year. "U want me 2 take him 2 trafford centre and kill him in the middle of trafford centre??" said one message. "Yes," came the reply.

Less than 24 hours later, a 14-year-old boy was critically ill in hospital with stab wounds in the chest and stomach. At first it seemed as though a brutal, but straightforward, robbery had gone wrong. But yesterday the young "victim" became the first person in this country to be convicted of inciting their own murder.

Stare Gormlessly at This for 5 Minutes

A few years ago, I got really into those Magic Eye pictures that if you could do them you'd stare in amazement for hours at some higgledy piggledy mess on your wall whilst your non-seeing friends would mock and doubt the images existence. Well, now theres a clever little Java applet called the Online Stereogram Generator, which allows you to input any word and creates instant Magic Eye pics of anything you want...as long as it's text.

Oh yes and you might need to do a screen capture and paste into photoshop if you want to keep the image. Now, who can tell me what the picture below says?
5 baht to be collected personally for the 1st person to tell me in the comments below.

My Wife Deleted Her Gmail Invite!!

Gmail Swap is getting an increasing amount of attention as an easy way for Bloggers to get something nice for giving up their Gmail invites. I got them too, um except I already gave them away. One of my recipients, a colleague signed up straightaway, but the other I sent to my wife, who never got round to reading the invite and deleted it thinking it was spam. Doh!

There's all sorts of cool stuff being offered from 30 dollar paypal payments, to 2nd hand iPods, to new york bagels and lox, and I can see it's going to get more and more frenzied as the Blogger invites get rarer and the product is still not launched. Doesn't look like I'm getting anymore invites that's for sure. This Gmail thing is definately looking like a Hotmail Killer. The sodding Netskys have started finding me already though, as well as a penis enlargement crews, but mostly they've found their way into the spam bin, with only a couple of company virus warnings getting through.

The Worlds Most Irritatingly Addictive Game Ever?

I'm not big on Flash games, but once in a while I click on something that makes me pause for hours on end in some fun but meaningless activity. Panda Golf has to be one of the best, simplest and most maddeningly addictive games I have ever played. I has been likened on the B3ta newsletter to a crack habit, fun at first but goes on to destroy your life. With over 30,000 levels including a level editor it should keep you a gibbering wreck for years to come.

Enjoy

Is Aaronious Right About JW?

The Vatican's Astronomer On Life On Other Planets

This link is an interview with Brother Guy Consolmagno, who is the curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory. In this article he discusses his personal thoughts on the Christian take of what to do if extra-terrestrial life is discovered.

Boing-Boing, condensed it nicely into three easy points.

We find an intelligent civilization and there's no way in creation we can communicate with them because they're so alien to us. We can't talk to dolphins now. In which case, we'll never know.

Second scenario: We find the intelligent civilization. We can communicate. We discover that they have the two essentials that theologians talk about for the human soul, intelligence and free will. They know who they are, they're self-aware, and they're able to do something about it. I think dogs are self-aware, but they don't have a whole lot of free will. Maybe computers are the same sort of thing. Human beings have to have both...

A third scenario: We find a dozen civilizations out there, and a bunch of Jehovah's witnesses go up and convert them all. At the end of the day, every civilization is Christian, except the human race is still not too sure about this. I mean, anything's possible.

Methinks Teletubbies are bound to figure in here somewhere.

Whilst on the subject, warm welcomes to my new co-blogger and soon to be ex-teaching colleague Slippery...... um I mean Aaronious, who brings his own blend of dadaism, masterbatory humour, teletubby links (cos he loves them!), and dark dark poetry.

What IS the difference between a duck?

Singhtot Ao Sai Mur

The Left Lion

Today I are mostly be mucking about with Orkut, which is an members invitation only type social networking site (thanks for the invite Chris) It's created by one of those Google cleverdicks. If you fancy a go on it do let me know and I'll hook you up with membership. There are groups that should interest most conceivable tastes, and if theres not you can make your own. There are even groups for Flickr Memebers, and Soulseek users.

Whilst playing on Orkut I stumbled accross a discussion in a Nottingham community group about the left lion. The left lion refers to one of the big stone lion statues in front of the council house in the market square. The very place that I met wifey Kan on our first and very blind date.

Well, according to this discussion, it seems like EVERYONE meets by the left and not the right lion. I can't imagine why...though I pointedly do remember meeting one girl by the right lion. I think that the fact that this relationship went nowhere is testament to the crapness of the right lion. Printed here in it's entirity as I can't seem to quote a URL from Orkut.

I was born and raised in Nottingham for 25 years... I no longer live there but try and get back when I can to see my folks and keep up to date with stuff... It seems such a shame when the fabulous Council House still shines at one end complete with the lions (do people still meet their dates "by the Lions")

Alan 3/14/2004 9:07 AM
I still meet folk regularly by the left lion :)

Martin 3/14/2004 9:36 AM
Dude! It was ALWAYS the left lion! How can that be!!!

Alan 3/15/2004 2:07 AM
It's nearest the bus stops?

According to the museum up at the castle, historically you could tell whether you were going to 'get lucky' depending on which lion your date was stood by - forget which one was the lucky one, suspect the right since I've always used the left :)

There's a website dedicated to the Nottingham on www.leftlion.co.uk - so it's not just us two :)

Polly 3/15/2004 4:16 PM
my dad (60 now) used to meet people by the left lion. i think maybe the right lion comes alive and eats people. Either that, or its just one of those things.

Alan 3/16/2004 3:18 AM
Must admit I always thought it was just a thing my mates did as their bus stops from Arnold were closest to that one - but maybe there is some dark and mysterious mythology pertaining to which lion folk meet by... I shall investigate at some point and post my findings!!

Alex Hmmm 3/17/2004 5:40 AM
WHOIS query result:

No match for "rightlion.co.uk".

Anyway back to the main link. I was really impressed that a cool site dedicated to culture in Nottingham has been set up in the great Leftie's name that it just had to be blogged. Check it out!
I also heard that the trams are finally up and running. I'll be sure to use them next time I want to go to Hucknall...um...

Amazing

Maze Maker

I am absolutely sure this could be useful for something...damned if I know what...let me have a think about this. Meanwhile, to make your maze, you specify the dimensions and colours and length of your maze and the cgi program makes it for you. It's kind of blank and could use some extra bits which you could use photoshop to insert eg a start and finish label.

Ok here's an idea that just spung to mind. It's Friday afternoon, and you want a quick filler. Simply get a suitably sized maze from this site, place letters at various intervals over the maze, making the true path spell out a word or phrase. EG 'shout bananas', and the first person to get it wins something or other.

See told you I could find something

Want Gmail? You aint getting it this way.

I WANT GMAIL

Oh dear, it seems like the Gmail beta testing frenzy has led people to sign up for Blogger accounts just so they can be first with a Gmail. I managed to get an account because I had been blogging on Blogger a full 2 months before Gmail was even announced so I guess that counts as an active account. Looks like Google had their bases covered with this one.

Considering the amount of flak Google is getting over privacy issue from people who have never had the pleasure of using this evolution in webmail, I think that it would be in Google's best interest to lauch it as widely as possible as quickly as possible.
Once it has a big army of supporters, these self appointed privacy Nazis re going to have a lot tougher time shutting it down.

Geek-fest Slashdot has an interesting discussion on Gmail also.

I gotta G-mail! I gotta G-mail!

Here's a tip for anyone who fancies having a bash on G-mail, the new e-mail service from Google. If you have an active Blogger account (snigger) just log on and in the window that usually gives your account details, there may be an invitation to join G-mail. Just follow the links, sign up and you're in.

My first impression is of how similar it feels to current web-based accounts like Yahoo though of course the myriad of new options available to search, label and rerieve messages is most impressive though not overwhelming.

Theres something very nice about getting a gigabyte for free, especially when I receive huge attatchments all the time when I'm recruiting. I've lost count of the amount of times I've had to get rid of half of my CV collection because Yahoo is kicking off about mailbox size....well screw 'em!
I'm sick of all the virii I'm getting on my Yahoo, and this represents a perfect oppertunity for a change. I'm going for it.

My first major gripe is that there appears to be no way of importing my Outlook Express or Yahoo address books, and of course it would be nice to have POP3 access, but then of course Google wouldn't be able to serve up its text ads would it?

I think this whole privacy thing is overblown anyway. Let's face it, those all-singing, all-screaming, all-view obscuring skyscraper and banner ads on Yahoo, are generally of zero interest to me, and I NEVER click on them. Google ads on the other hand have a disturbng habit of being of interest to me to the extent that I actually click on them once in a while.

Also, this business about robots "reading" your mail. This is not Bender from Futurama, it's a keyword scan, so they can make a bit of profit in return for that big chunk of space they rather generously gave you. Don't get me wrong, I don't consider it a free lunch, but more of a corporate buffet.

Whatever, Google has given me 5 years of AWESOME free service with it's search, it's image search, it's Usenet search, it's news search. It has eradicated the irritating pop-up ad for me with it's tool bar, it got me started in Blogging, ferchistsakes I've got nothing but respect for these geniuses, and I've nothing against them trying to earn a dollar and a cent in this business, especially if Microsoft are in for a shafting.

The web's cheaper than it used to be

1995 web-hosting rates

I just paid $6.95 for a dot.com, and ukp20 annual fee for hosting that gives me 500mb of space 7gb bandwidth, unlimited e-mail addresses
You can get further details here on my hosting package.

Compare that to: Sun, Dec 28, 1995

Special Offer! WorldWideWeb Precence for only $250 per month ($100 setup)!

* Your own unique WWW address (e.g. w3.1c4.net/www/users/j/jhs/index.html)!
* 1 mail account (e.g. you@mail7.1c4.net)!
* 3Mb storage space! More than enough for a modern information service.
* Unlimited FTP updates and transfers.
* 30 day money-back guarantee and no minimum contract.
* FULL customer technical support during normal office hours!
* Page Design, graphic design, and html authoring and cgi scripting is available from $50 to $125 per hour, domain name registration and maintenance is $100 per year.

Ouch! Merry Christmas

Advanced CSS Layouts

Advanced CSS Layouts: Step by Step - WebReference.com

This splendid page has got me a little more up to speed on the seemingly undecipherable babble that is CSS, and I am now the proud owner of a great template, that is desparately in search of some content...I'll keep you updated as to it's progress.

A gentleman by the name of Filco has been cartooning his way around Thailand, this sketches are doing the photocopy rounds at the moment and as far as I know they are not online. They are pretty well observed, if a little OTT, and they certainly made me chuckle more than the "funnies" in the Bangkok Post (does ANYONE find the Wizard of Id funny?)

Click on the thumbs to see the full-size pics.

The Longtail to Rayley beach, Krabi.

Budget beachside accommodation at Hua Hin.

Testing Gmail

miscoranda: Testing Gmail

Here's some positive news on G-mail, difficult to detect at the moment due to the screeches of horror at the privacy lobby, and the "um...excuse me that's our name" from some smallish British company.

The more I see this service the more I want to use it. Complex yet simple, a taking of all the things that make hotmail and yahoo annoying, and ironing them out. Whatever the naysayers think, this should revolutionise e-mail access. Now if they can just over come that trademark problem.

I liked this article as well - Google-opoly: The Motivation Behind Google Gmail

The Memespread Project

The Memespread Project

I've been seeing this word quite a lot recently so I did a Google definition search for it and I got this.

a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one generation to another by nongenetic means (as by imitation); "memes are the cultrual counterpart of genes"
www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn

The link at the top of this entry is designed to be blogged as it measures the spread of memes or ideas as they flow through the blogspace. Abstract but cool.

Google's Gmail hits trademark problem

Google's Gmail hits trademark problem

Ooops, The Reg reports that

Google's path to world domination took a turn for the worse yesterday with news that a small British company has already got the trademark for Gmail and has been using it in 80 countries.

How much is this going to cost them?

FREE ONLINE TYPING COURSE

FREE ONLINE TYPING COURSE

Apologies if this entry is brief as I'm testing out my newly discovered touch typing skills, and this much typing has just taken me about 5 minutes already.Is looking at the keys such a bad thing at this stage, or will it make all the difference in the long run?

Absolutely awesome site, starts simply and gets you up and running in no time. Enough, this is starting to drive me mental.

Gmail NOT a Hoax

Gmail NOT a Hoax

Got a bit worried when Memock commented on my excited entry about Googles forthcoming Gmail service. The hoax story arose as it was planted on April 1st. However this itself seems to be another marketing coup. It's now April 2nd and Google are still plotting the destruction of Hotmail, Yahoo, and every online storage company in the world.

Here is the full story captured at Google News...where else?

Google announces free E-mail service!

Google announces free E-mail service!

Well, this sounds awesome. Google have announced a free e-mail service with no ads, popups, and wait for it, 1GB of space!! Makes Hotmail's offering look pretty feeble. Game on!

It doesn't seem right that I'm cheering a corporation on for the conquest for the world, but you just can't help loving Google! It was our first real friend on the web. It said 'I have what you are looking for' and had that honest minimal look about it, which even with today's ads has barely diminished for me. It was the first search engine that really found what I wanted. Friends like that on the internet were unheard of at the time.

The BBC's Bill Thompson is a litle more cynical. He asks "Is Google Good For You?"

I currently have the deskbar installed on my windows tool bar. It is interesting that Bill points out that the underlying technology behind this has been a feature in windows for years as IE can also slot in there and show webpages in a compact format. As Bill rightly says, "Google must have a stronger brand than IE"

Flickr Blog This Button

Well hey this is funky, I'm just testing out top piccy sharing chatwotsit Flickr's new blog this button and if all goes well you'll be able to see Bart writing a slogan very dear to my heart.

bartNgoogle Originally uploaded by LDMA.

Posted by LDMA from Flickr.

Wired News: Honey, I Shrunk The URL

Wired News: Honey, I Shrunk the URL

Wired reports on a handy service for when you get one of those useful but unwieldly URLs that go on forever called TinyUrl.com

"The idea is indeed simple. Plug in a long URL, say the MapQuest page for the White House -

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?
country=US&countryid=250&addtohistory=&address=
1600+pennsylvania+ave&city=washington&state=
DC&zipcode=&submit=Get+Map

-- and you get something short and sweet --

http://tinyurl.com/37ggx.

Gilbertson said he created the site because he wanted to convert postings on unicycling newsgroups into Web pages, since fewer people know their way around newsgroups than the Web. Currently, the underlying database of the site has unique IDs for 2.3 million URLs."

Illegal-art.org

Illegal-art.org

I think I've found this site before before I got into blogging but I'll stick it up anyway. A lot of very good banned artwork (banned mainly because most of the stuff I saw uses corporate images to make its usually political point.)

Speaking of dodgy artwork, here's my latest effort. Slippery Rick at that punchbowl again.

Flickr.com

Just been playing on Flickr.com, where they've managed a save to hard drive function for their pictures rather than the ridiculous print screen method one had to endure previously.
This photo is one I found there that should have been included in The Top 10 Worst Album Covers of All-Time



That's not to say that the ones that did merit the top 10 are quite, quite deserving, such as number 8, the lovely Joyce pictured below.

“Oh, what should I wear?”

“Something with rainbow colors, or whatever you have on. I don’t know what the background is going to be. Those faggots from the 12 top hits album are using the fake living room.”

“Great! I just got new glasses. I think they make my head look less human.”

"err…good. Wear them. Bring a flower or something…to…accentuate your cheekbones”

“*giggle* okay, handsome, I’ll be right over.”

Photo Bucket

Yay, Photo Bucket has re-appeared, and it still has ALL my silly pic uploads like this. Screw UPL.