Valhalla Island

On the way to uni the other day I was caught in one of the many traffic jams I get caught on everyday. One sec, I’m going to go on a tangent. These hold ups are always because of road works, the roads never stop getting fixed. But what I noticed is that they don’t rip up the old road, they just lay the new road on top. This is especially noticable when you see traffic islands that aren’t so much traffic islandss anymore because the bitumen has been layered on just as high. I wonder what sort of solution this is, how many times will they layer a new road onto the old ones? How high and thick will the road get before they stop?

Ok, anyway, back on topic. While in this traffic jam I had the pleasure of being caught behind the Renault Megane (pictured). Now what I noticed here is the badge, more noticably the word MEGANE, more notciably again, the letter A. It doesn’t have a crossbar. I asked in #wordpress today what the real name for that little line is but neither them nor Wikipedia could help me so I figured I wasn’t going to find it anywhere.

Let’s get back on topic again. By no means is the Megane a luxury or higher class of car, it’s just your straight forward small sedan. This picture really does it no justice (you wouldn’t believe how hard it was to even find that picture) but on a clean car with chrome lettering it had a certain elegance about it, all revolving around the A’s missing crossbar. Sure the typeface also adds a feeling of elegance with it’s thick and thin combinations but what really makes it is the A. It got me thinking about the smallest details adding a certain feeling to how you might feel about something.

The Angels and Airwaves logo is another example of not using a uppercase A’s cross bar and I think it works beautifully. If you have ever heard A and A’s music you’d know that it suits their music style perfectly. Espeically when used with Vs the A is very effective.

My point is that the slightest details can convey a much larger message and should not be overlooked. I’m sure that when designing a car the badge is the last thing you would want to spend a great deal of time on, which is obvious with many cars but Renault have done a brilliant job at making me look at an average car as something elegant and executive.

Always when writing posts, or writing anything I’ll come across a word I don’t know how to spell. I used to whip open a new tab and type it into Google and well done to Google for indirectly being a very good spell checker but it was still kind of inconvienient.

Yesterday afternoon I was looking for a good to do list widget (I still haven’t found one, suggestions?) and there was Spelling Bee sitting right underneath the spotlight. It was perfect.

The little bee is so cute, it does little circles while you’re typing and it’s trying to find the word. It’s pretty tiny too which I really like. The only other widget I run is the weather and it’s quite large. I like my desktop as unncluttered as possible with a maximum of three icons and the Spelling Bee is as clean as it gets.

The wonderful news I read earlier today is that Wordpress 2.1 will have an inline spell checker. It’s already on wordpress.com. I’ve been wanting a spell checker for a really long time. For now Spelling Bee is doing a great job, he’s been used about 3 times this post.

Why? can be such a personal question. I used to think that there wasn’t a question in the world I wouldn’t answer.

Listening to the latest Binary Bonsai Podcast, Michael Heilemann spoke about 2005 being the year of Wikipedia. He spoke about how amazing Wikipedia really is and how hard it is to fathom that it actually works. 2005 saw Wikipedia gain it’s 1,000,000th English Article. I had never stopped to thinking about how mind-blowing that is.

Wikipedia doesn’t employ anyone to write articles. No one at all. Every single piece of information has been volunteered. Some articles are short but many are very long and in depth. They are often well written as well, which they should be with millions of people proof-reading and editing. The fact that articles are proof read and constantly fixed is amazing.

The way articles are linked together is also very well done. All the information you could ever want to find about anything is all there. Sure you could never use it as a reference in a university paper but for personal interest it’s perfect.

Occasionally you will see stories in the news of people destroying articles but they are often quickly restored with the perpetrator is publically humiliated. Where’s the skill in ruining a Wikipedia article anyway?

“Hey man! Check out the Backstreet Boys Wikipedia article I hacked!”

“Hacked? You mean you pressed the Edit button?”

Congratulations on changing a website you’re openly allowed to. It doesn’t happen often anyway. It’s usually only people trying to change their own entries which is against one of the Wikipedia rules.

On the Vista homepage there is a complete, quite indepth section on the many versions of the future Windows release. I couldn’t believe the message my eyes were sending my brain when I came accross this. It’s a massive mistake. Let’s take a look why.

People like the Macintosh and iPod because they’re simple making it easy to make a choice. I wrote about exactly the same thing with Creative trying to take on the iPod with over 100 varieties of mp3 players. I will quote John Gruber again, ‘every decision you force the customer to make you give them another chance to walk away‘. When someone buys OS X you make the decision to buy OS X and then you have it. When someone decides to buy Vista they will then have to choose which version they buy from a list of barely distinguishable versions. Which brings me to my next point.

The versions are barely distinguishable. What’s the difference? I read through the long descriptions and none had any features that set them apart as suiting different needs. All they did was add and remove features. It’s as though the most feature packed version has been created and then incrementally stripped of features while new versions are created. There’s certainly situations where versions or choice is a good idea. Windows Media Centre is a good example, if you’re going to use your computer in your living room to play TV, movies and music then you’d obviously pick it over XP. The same goes for something like a school using XP, Media Centre would be useless.

The problem with Linux is the hundreds of slightly different distributions. It seems as though Vista has taken the best thing about Macintosh and gone completely against it. At the same time it’s taken the worst thing about Linux and ran with it. Linux is constantly competing against itself. Really, what is Microsoft trying to do? What’s easier, having one main competitor or having six? Five of which you have created yourself.

It’s not even obvious which version is best all round. I’m going to bring up the iPod analogy just because it’s best example of a product not doing what MS are and making a killing with it. With iPods it could not be more obvious what each one does and which one is the most feature packed. If you have a small music library and no need for video then the Shuffle is ideal, meanwhile a 60gb video iPod would handle the small collection and lack of videos just as well. It’s obivous you’re moving up a scale. At the moment you’d think that Vista Ultimate should be better than Vista Home Premium but it’s below on the physical scale.

So uh, Bill, if you’re reading this, cut the shit.

Note: I’m still very much looking forward to Vista.

Big.com is stupid. I was so excited when I first found it. The huge form was great when I first arrived, simply because I like big forms. I also like the simplicity of the Google homepage, so when that simplicity was coupled with a massive form field, I was excited.

My great first impressions instantly dried up the moment I actually searched for something. The homepage search field wasn’t the only thing big. The results are huge as well. Trying to read blocks of text at that size is impossible, you have to move your head backwards to be able to read it. Sitting half a metre away from a 19 inch monitor makes it harder again.

From the moment I saw the results I was dying to make the text smaller. I quickley noticed some text-size changing magnifying icons in the top corner and for a split second, breathed a sigh of relief until I found out I was already on the smallest size and my only option was to increase the size. Luckily Firefox allows me to manually resize website text. Even bringing it down to a respectable level with FF still left the results looking ugly. Results have much shorter descriptions because of the bigger size and this adds another level of annoying. Resizing with Firefox also resizes the search field which is the one part that I like to be big.

I don’t know why photomatt likes it so much.

Through last.fm I found out about a comedian named Dane Cook. I was listening to a skit today and he said, “The worst thing in the world would be getting caught under water because of a flaming layer of oil on the surface. You either drown or burn to death.”

That would be horrible.

I’m almost finished a very interesting book named “The Science Behind the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. If you’ve seen the movie or read the books you’ll know it’s filled with many futuristic concepts, things like parallel universes, teleportation, aliens and time travel. Well apparently most of this stuff is actually possible.

They’re all really interesting and I’m going to write a post on each of the different concepts it deals with but today it’s time travel. There is a way to travel back in time but it’s far too complicated for me to understand. It has something to do with building a massive cylinder, about 150 kilometres long, that spins really, really fast. Somehow it turns time back on itself. I might read over that section again.

The part that I do understand is time travel into the future. It’s suprisingly simple, although we don’t and probably won’t have the technology for a long time, once we do, it will be quite simple. It involves going very fast. The closer you get to travelling at the speed of light in a spaceship the quicker time outside of the spaceship passes. Theoretically, travelling at the speed of light will stop time outside of the spaceship.

The best way to explain this is using a clock. Say you’re standing there looking at a clock, the time you see it displaying is the light from the clock traveling to your eyes, it seems instant because it’s so fast over such a short distance that it may as well be instant. Now say you move away from that clock at the speed of light, while still facing it, and still being able to see the time. Because you’re travelling away at the speed of light the change of the clock will never actually reach your eyes and time will have appeared to stop, which it really has in relation to people standing still next to the clock. Do you understand that? I should do an animation. It helps to know that the things you see aren’t actually things, it’s all just different shades of light.

This can be demonstrated by astronauts on the spacestation over a long period of time. They orbit the earth at around 27,000 km/h. When they get home their clocks are around 4 seconds faster than those on earth. These are no ordinary wrists watches either, these are highly acurate atomic clocks.

Now you might say “so what, 4 seconds, that’s hardly time travel”. Well, the astronauts are going no where near the speed of light. You see the closer you get to the speed of light the quicker time outside your spaceship travels until you reach the speed of light, then time outside completely stops. Even if you’re going 99.999999999999999999% of the speed of light, light will eventually, although slowly, catch you. So it works like this. I’m not sure if these numbers are correct but it’s something like this.

80% the speed of light will get you 200 days on earth for every hour on the spaceship. 90% will get you 200 years on earth for every hour on the spaceship. 99% will get you 1000 years on earth per spaceship hour. 99.9999999% will get you 25,000 years on earth for every hour on the ship. That’s how it rolls.

So this could be pretty handy for doing things like travelling really really far distances because we’d age much slower. There’s problems though, things like our universe being millions of lightyears accross anyway. To accellerate to anywhere near the speed of light may take decades aswell.

Well that’s today’s lesson on time travel. Future titles in this series include: Teleportation, The Number Infinity and Parallel Universes. Really.

For so long now I’ve wanted to release a Wordpress theme. I always wrote it off with not having enough time or it being too much trouble to bother with. Phu Ly’s ‘A Theme a Day‘ blew those excuses away and so one lonely day when my modem broke I started a theme.

The graphics are completely finished and it looks exactly how I imagined it to look so I’m very happy. Now all that’s left to be done is actually turn it into a theme. I have this afternoon and tonight spare to work on it which should be plenty of time considering it tooke Phu only 3 and a half hours per theme, including the graphics!

Now it’s a single column theme (the ideal number of columns), it’s also kind of generic looking. It’s hard to explain the generic look but it’s what I think all themes created with plans of mass distribution should have. Kubrick is definately a generic theme but that’s what makes it perfect as a theme everyone likes. The current theme of fightingfriends is definately not generic and would never make a good theme made for distribution. This kind of theme is the type that you either love or hate and that’s exactly what you don’t want when making one for the people. You don’t mind if they don’t love it but at least everyone will like it and it’s you make it hard for people to hate it.

Anyway, it’s single column and it’s generic looking, since there’s no single column themes featured on Wordpress.com I think that would be a perfect place for it. There’s some real rubbish on WP.com, fauna and girl in green come to mind. In fact, I could write a 5000 word thesis on how much I dislike Fauna. Why the man that wrote the book “Blog Design Solutions” would use fauna I have no idea. But I really will save that for another day.

So yeah, hopefully my new theme will be out in a few days. I’ll email Matt pleading to put it on Wordpress.com and that’ll be that. It has a name but I’ll save that for a suprise too!

Screenshots for Office 2007 to be shipped with Windows Vista have been realeased. I love the look. I’m one of the few still stuck with Office 2000. 2003 was the latest and I think that was a huge impovement but 2007 looks even better.

This is the first post on Fightingfriends being published from a Mac. I’m at university in some spare time in a room split between G5 iMacs, Dell Dimensions and G4 PowerPCs. The Dell’s have 17″ LCDs, the iMacs are 17 and 20″ LCDs and the G4s, the one I’m on right now, is using a fat, ugly 17″ super curved CRT. I think it’s somewhat of a crime to be using a Mac through such a monitor.

Well, I hadn’t used a Mac for about 5 years up until University started three weeks ago. But when I used to use them, I used them a lot, right through my primary school years. In year seven, 2 days out of every week was spent running workshops teaching kids from other schools how to use the computers. I think what I was using back then was a G3 iMac, the type that came in 5 different flavours, back in the day when Netscape and Ask Jeeves were at the peak of their existences. Anyway, picking it up again has been easy as pie. I have not once not been able to find or do what I was looking for. In fact, there’s been things that I’ve had no idea where to find, I would click the thing where I thought it would be and sure enough, there it was. Now that’s intuitive design.

Right now there is no doubt that I’d rather be using the iMac but the internet is broken on them. Maybe it’s not so much the internet as Safari being broken I think. They do also have Firefox installed but it has a problem with that too, actually, even IE5 for Mac is installed but won’t run. Even though Safari won’t run on the iMacs for me (it does for other people) I love it. It’s the best internet browser there is, full stop. I wish it was available on the PC but chances are it wouldn’t be as good on the PC. What I love so much about it is the borders, there are none, content goes to the absolute edge of the window. I think only screen shots could describe this, I think it would be difficult for windows users to think of content stretching to the complete edge. The interface is dead simple, IE’s menu is a joke (that you can manually simplify), Firefox’s is good out of the box and Safari’s is the epitomy of simplicity, it’s not even coloured. Beautiful!

Minimal desktop items is the way it should be. A menu of applications down the bottom is also how it should be. It’s how I had my Windows set up even before Apple came out with the dock. The magnification on the rollover is brilliant! I love it. There is a big difference in that respect, there’s lots of animation on a Mac where there’s nothing in Windows. Even minimizing a window is lavishly animated. Usually I’m not the kind to like excessive animation but Apple do it in such an elegant and non-intrusive way that it just makes using a Mac all that more pleasurable.

Not everything is that wonderful though. Not being able to make windows full size is annoying. Manually extending a window to fit as big as it can is annoying and time consuming. I’m not sure if there is a way to make it full screen? I think it may be because of the presence of the dock. In windows it’s nice to have full screen windows open flicking between them with the touch of two buttons. I’m sure once I learn the short cut keys I’d be able to do something similar in OS X but I’m not there yet.

So the primary use of Macs and OS X is in the graphics industry and it’s now very easy to see why. The Macs in this room are loaded with just about every image and video editing product avaiable. I can have them all open at once and it’s plain fast. You just don’t have to wait for things.

I really should get the specs of this computer, it’s kind of old. One sec and I’ll see if I can find the information in the first place I look…. Well well well, I couldn’t find them, haha. Minus one Apple.

So will my next computer be a Mac? I don’t know. There’s certainly a lot to think about. If it’s a laptop, there’s no doubt, it would definately be an iBook. Whether I’d rather use a PC or a Mac for my normal everyday computing I’m not sure either. The Mac definately provides a more visually pleasing experience, it feels warm and inviting. The price factor is the one of the only things that would turn me away.

When you turn the car off, the lights are turned off too. Genius.

At University everything that isn’t a lecture or tutorial is done on the internet. Either Through the many different websites or through email. Absolutely everyone has an email and they’re all used. You know how sometimes you’ll be told that something is a really good idea and it’s going to be used all the time but then it never happens. It’s the opposite at University.

Generally the Griffith website is poorly designed, uses old technology and isn’t intuitive at all. There are separate parts to the website that I hadn’t realised. As each one of my lecturers went through all our things that will be available online (and no where else) I was getting worried. As well as having notes, notices and audio, some courses provide a forum.

I was really excited about the idea of a forum exclusively available to Griffith students studying that course. Wanting to check them out I got on the section of the site for all your course resources called Learning@Griffith (they do the @ thing with everything Wireless@Griffith, Sport@Griffith, it’s annoying). After logging in with my usual student number and password I was greeted with a different, well designed, well layed out website. I could find what I was looking for very easily. All the courses I’m enrolled in were listed together to their home pages. The home pages we also good looking with elegantly designed notices on the index.

Only a couple of my courses use the available forum feature and only one of those has taken off. There’s been lots of discussion on the Multimedia Authoring board, the lecturer has answered a lot of questions and seems to hang out there often. So far people have been finding out where to get software we need, asking how to make certain shapes in flash and trying to find groups for the major project.

Forums are a good idea anywhere but using them for University Courses is a great idea! The software they use is called Blackboard and I think it’s been developed by someone on campus. I think there’s other, much better, third-party, forum software out there but how easy it would be to intergrate with the Learning@Griffith login system I don’t know.

I would like to get a tattoo or tattoos. My primary reason is that I think they look really good, it’s that simple. When I first told Mum her first questions were “Why? Who else has a tattoo?” Expecting me to want one just because someone else has. I told her that no one else does and so her next question was “Why can’t you just be like everyone else then?” Completely turning around her argument. Firstly she doesn’t want me to be like anyone else, next question she does. It made me realise that she doesn’t have a valid objection. She doesn’t even know why she’s objecting.

I don’t want people to get me wrong and think that it’s some sort of rebelious act, I’m not a rebelious person at all. I have great parents and never felt or feel the need to.

Secondarily I see it as a shallow person filter. If someone is going to treat me based on colour in my skin before and over the things I say, the way I act and the way treat people then that’s not a person I want to know. I guess the problem is that sometimes people with tattoos are assholes and it’s true, of the few young people I do know with tattoos, some of them aren’t very nice people. On the other hand, the others are some of the nicest people I’ve met.

But maybe it’s not so much judging you on the actual tattoo more on being a person that would get a tattoo.

The disadvantage is that you’ll have it forever. If you really like it then this isn’t a disadvantage at all though. The challenge for me would be to get something that has some real meaning, seeing as though it’s going to be on me forever. It might be useless trying to find something that’s going to be meaningful to you your entire life. It might be better to just choose something that looks good.

I’m curious what other people think?

After two days of orientation last week and three days of lectures this week I’m going to talk about my first impressions of University. If you don’t know, I’m doing a dual degree of IT and Multimedia at Griffith University, I want to major in internet computing and do an extra year with honors.

So far, I love it. It’s an amazing place. I went in with a fear that with being an IT degree, courses would be outdated and what I learn might be irrelevant by the time I leave. That fear is gone now. Many of the lecturers told us from the start the difference between university and a technical school. At a technical school they will teach you how to program with ASP, PHP, C, etc. At a university they teach you how to program.

The courses I’m doing are a great mixture. They’re everything I’m interested in. Foundations in Computing and Communication is even bordering on philosophy and cognitive psychology, what I’d be doing if I didn’t choose IT. It’s very interesting, most of the other students don’t think so though. The lecturer for Introduction to Information Systems was so knowledgable and spoke with so much sense. Everything the lecturers say is so valuable, it’s great to hear them speak about the exact things I want to know about.

The multimedia doesn’t seem quite as exciting yet, but in Multimedia 1A we get to analyse a multimedia product, that’s a website or a CD-ROM. I already think I’m going to do A List Apart or something like Digg. It’s something I’d love to be doing if I had the spare time anyway. The other multimedia course we are doing some flash/actionscript things. But the lecturer was constantly emphasizing that it wasn’t a flash class, we’d be learning things that can be used accross the board.

Programming 1 will hopefully be my easiest course and the least work, all the others are going to be work intensive. We’ve already been told about 6 or 7 assignments.

The facilities at Griffith are amazing too. I hadn’t seen inside a lecture theatre or a computer lab before I started and I was amazed at how good they were. The labs are a mixture of Dells, Apple G4 PowerPCs and 20″ iMacs! I was so excited to see a mixture like that. The library is huge and just so cool. There’s this strange thing hanging from the roof in the middle of the library foyer, I had no idea what it was at first. Someone showed me that if you stand directly underneath it you can hear the radio playing. If you step one metre either side of it you can’t hear a thing!

There’s also places all over the place so just sitting around. It’s like a small town with a post office, cafes and things like that everywhere. The gym is amazingly cheap, $180 a year.

I also had doubts about the website from before I actually got in. Some sections are still horrible but Learning@Griffith is really well designed and very usable. Everything in there is grouped nicely and easy to find. There are also student forums for a few of the courses and I thought that was such a great idea. It feels very open source having a forum to get help, the lecturer also hangs out there which is nice.

On top of all that, I’ve met so many people! So many interesting and nice people. Some that I hope I’ll be friends with for a while. It feels good so be around people with similar interests that want to learn as much as I do. I really want to meet someone that I can work on a project with. Microsoft and Google were both started by university students while they were at university.

There are a thousand different clubs and associations. I’d really like to start a web standards group. I’d have to find guest speakers and things though, maybe it’d be too much work. Actually no, I am going to start one. The other idea me and Courtney had was a spoons club. Just playing the spoons card game for an hour a week. That could really take off.

In conclusion, I like university a lot.