Valhalla Island

If you have red hair could you please let me know if you have an outie belly button. Thank-you.

My favourite piece of stationery.

I’ve just finished reading a book named “The Probability of God” by Dr Stephen Unwin. It uses Bayesian Inference to calculate the probably of Proposisiton G being true. That is P(G) = God Exists. The book was quite well written and spoke a lot about things outside just the probability calculation. I don’t want to spoil it but the number he came up with wasn’t very satisfying.

In the calculation he just systematically took evidence into account, deciding whether or whether it wouldn’t exist if God exists. He completely ignored differences in religion and things like the Bible. I’m not a religious person and I have a lot of trouble believing that there is a God. This book made me wonder just why I have trouble believing in such a person or heavenly body or whatever.

The truth is that we just have no idea whatsoever of what is beyond what our telescopes can see. It’s not like we have a good idea that just needs to be proven either, we have no idea, it’s just not possible to know. This makes the possibilty of there being a God outside of all that a real possibilty but at the same time it’s very much a possibility we’re just living within a massive black snow globe that wouldn’t seem so massive to the person that owns it. Because we have no idea, anything is a possibility. So why do so many millions of people choose to believe so whole heartedly in one possibility?

To me is seems as though God is a Santa Clause for the human race. People spend their lives being good so that St Peter will accept them into God’s house when they die. Just like kids won’t get any presents if they’re bad because Santa is watching and he will know, people are good so that they will get into heaven. It manages to keep people with a feeling of right and doing the right thing. A big lie to keep the human race relatively under control? It wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it was a lie, it works and that’s got to be better than an unruly planet. No body’s hurt by the Santa Clause lie.

The argument I always see being made is the one of “How could our planet possibly be this beautiful and this perfect for human life if it wasn’t created by someone?” But that’s looking at it entirely the wrong way, we are on this planet because it’s perfect, not because it was designed with our needs in mind. If there was another planet with the exact same characteristics to ours, in the same place in relation to the rest of it’s solar system, then we’d be there.

Something else that bothers me is blind faith. Science has straight out proven that the Adam and Eve story can not be true. That people didn’t just pop up, we evolved from more primative creatures. Why has this seemed to be ignored? I’m yet to speak to someone religious about this and ask them their thoughts on evolution, I would like to. But a section of a book so many millions of people live by gets proven wrong and they ignore it. I don’t know but it would make me question just exactly what I believe in. If a man in court has evidence against him that proves him guilty, he is put into jail. Are people too scared that it might be wrong they just ignore reasoned contradictions and try to push them out of their mind?

All these thoughts are almost entirely uneducated as I have never read the bible and never been to church, it’s just based on what I think might be the truth. Please prove me wrong if I am.

When I’m writing I’m always extremely concious of using the word ‘I’ and referring to things that I think and voicing my own opinions. I’m not sure when all this started, maybe when my personal opinion started to be shot down I was disheartened or scared of writing what I wanted to.

I can’t remembered where I read it now but it may have been on 9 rules. No! It was on binary bonsai, I think it may have even been in his podcast. Yep, it’s all coming back to me now. Michael Heilmann runs an extremely successful website and wordpress theme so what he said about this really hit home for me.

In his podcast he spoke about kottke and the way that many popular sites these days had lost out on a lot of content due to the introduction of asides. He complained that kottke (as well as others) had just started to link a lot more and write a lot less and that this wasn’t what he wanted. What he wanted was to read about people’s opinions on things. You can get hard information anywhere but you can only get an individual’s opinion from one place. This is why people love reading reviews so much. Each week Crap Filter runs a review of the latest Lost episode, at the start is always a recap of the episode which I always skip to get straight to his thoughts and predictions, the most interesting part.

This all got me thinking about the direction Fightingfriend’s has been taking. For a while I have consciously been trying to get FF away from my own opinions and onto more cold hard facts. I think this is the wrong direction to be taking. The most commented on and the most visited posts are those that voice my own opinion with people supplementing or contradicting me. Back on my first site I would write candidly about my life and feelings and it got more page views and attention than anything I’ve ever done since.
I’ve realised that this is the kind of writing that I like to read and if that’s the case I should be writing in the same style, especially when it’s more enjoyable for me. I have a thicker skin now and can take any abuse I might get.

I think we can all safely assume that staying within the boundaries of a web safe colour palette is useless these days. The reason for it wasn’t anything to do with the web but more to do with looking the same on all computers. It’d be hard to find a computer today that can’t display 32 million colours.

When you have 32 million possibilities it’d be a huge waste to stick within only 256 of them. Web safe colours also tend to be harsh and too highly saturated. For the few years that I’ve been making websites I would very rarely use web safe colours unless for a white or black with the occasional grey. Even grey is much nicer when the alpha has been toned down, the search box on fightingfriends for example.

Anything I open in Fireworks today will always use the basic 256 colour palette but then colours will always have their alpha levels modified, not because I want transparency but because I prefer the toned down versions hovering on white. It creates nice pastel and milky looking shades.

Speaking of palettes in graphics applications, Fireworks has it all over Photoshop when it comes to handling colour. Those rolling gradient things are useless to me, I much prefer the boxes. Finding a hexidecimal value in FW is much easier too.

Let’s all say goodbye to the term web safe and never use it again.

Winding down before you go to bed is important. Often after a very long evening working in front of the computer I’ll get so tired that I decide it’s not even worth trying to work any longer and I’ll turn off the computer and go to bed. I would usually read a book in bed for a little while before I go to sleep but often I’m just too tired.

This results in dreams of three dimentional arrays, PHP image resizing and how to beat that wierd Internet Explorer bug. Winding down is really important and I should take more time to do it. It’s been so long since I’ve really sat down at night and watched some TV without feeling horribly guilty about it. But watching an hour or two of TV before I hit the sack would really do me good.

I also think it may be a problem of having my one and only computer in my bedroom. A little while ago I was having a lot of trouble sleeping and I was advised by my girlfriend’s Feng Shui consultant mother that I should cover my computer when I go to bed. That helped a lot. I’d still love to get this computer out of my room but the problem is that it plays my music and it plays movies and it does all those other things that I want it in my room for.

My solution is buying a 20″ iMac as a supplement to this old thing. My birthday’s soon.

Apparently Tom Cruise is going to eat the placenta from the birth of his baby. What an uproar it has caused! They brought it up on Brisbane’s talk radio, 612 and got hundreds of callers in. One lady that had actually eaten it for her two children. She said it was supposed to prevent post natal depression so that was excuse enough to chomp it down.

Recently, before the hype in fact, Internet Zillionaire wrote a humorous article about the placenta. From the post:

Me (rubbing stomach eagerly): �Excuse me, nurse, can you box this up for me? I definitely want to polish this off when I get home!�

It’s supposed to be really good for you. Like a tub of vitamins in every bite. Some people on the radio were calling it cannibalism, nearly all of them thought of the idea as gross.

And then comes the issue of how do you actually prepare placenta, do you stir fry it with some oriental vegetables or gobble it up fresh from the womb? The lady on the radio said that she took it home and kept it in the fridge and would cut it up into bite sized (fun size) pieces and down it with a glass of orange juice. Here’s another quote from the Internet Zillionaire article on preparing the placenta:

If my wife does go to the trouble to make a placenta casserole, I guess I would try it, just so I wouldn�t hurt her feelings. Of course, all of this is a moot point, since I basically eat whatever my wife cooks for dinner without question anyway. For all I know, I could have had placenta last night� And if that were the case, I would have to say that placenta tastes (and looks) a lot like spaghetti.

I asked my Mum if she ate my (or her? not sure) placenta and she told me she heard it on the radio and it was disgusting and that “crazy woman was gross”.

Again, a new design. The last just had too much stuff, too much colour, too much content, too many patterns. Just too much everything.

With this new design comes the one, the only, the fantastic AJAX commenting system. That’s right ladies and gentlemen, you can now post a comment without the page refreshing. It even comes with your ‘you know it’s web 2.0′ spinner gif. But really, aside from the hype, AJAX commenting is definately the way to go. It’s just a much nicer user experience on the whole. Go on, try it out. You want to.

Speaking of asides, they’re back inline with this latest work of art. So yeah, asides might start to get read again. Which brings me to my next point of the word ‘read’, I’m always worried people are going to read it the wrong way, I’ve used it the ‘reed’ way and the ‘red’ way in this paragraph.

Oh yeah, pages have been converted to fair dinkum Wordpress pages which explains why they’re not exactly finished yet. Just as I typed that I realised I’ve forgotten an RSS feed link. That’s on the list for tomorrow I think. Now that the sidebar is back it’s not going to be hard at all to add little things like that which were always a single column problem.

On that note, I’m tired and I have a lot to do tomorrow. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Tenyearsofmylife is back after a pretty long hiatus. I guess that’s what happens after you have a baby. I’m a little afraid I’m going to lose Internet Zillionaire for a while now that they’ve had a baby.

Anyway, Tenyearsofmylife isn’t just back, it’s back with a vengeance. There’s a new design that has taken a huge leap back towards simplicity, my new favourite road. The new design is very similiar to slower’s long time, beautifully simplistic layout. Both being almost daily photo sites this is exactly how they should be. Ten years has always been one of my favourites and this new layout is going to make it all that much more enjoyable. It also includes much (much) bigger photos.

It’s been launched with a flurry of huge spring time photos. The latest is breath taking.

After months and months of the dirty and dangerous theme development work, Day Dream 0.1 has finally been released.

It was definately much more difficult creating a theme for public release than it was hacking one together for myself, which I have huge experience in. Anything I’ve done for wordpress previously wouldn’t last a day out in the real world.

I know of one person who is already using the theme. From the Foliage has made it green and done something pretty cool with the navigation. A colour scheme like that is something that I hope to include as an option in future versions. That also means I’d need an options page for the admin section. It’s all on the list.

There’s many things I want to improve on. The CSS is a big one, it’s not really the best it can be when people want to change things. It can get like that when styling WP themes from the ground up, your CSS gets a bit heavy.

It was suggested that I also include gravatar support. Gravatars are a good idea and From the Foliage has included it pretty nicely. It’s all on the list. The list is about 20 features long now and while that kind of sucks since I only released it two days ago it’s good knowing work doesn’t stop on it and there’s many things I can do to make it better.

It’s home lies at fightingfriends.com/daydream. I’m not going to put a permanent link on this site yet until it’s redesigned, which is happening this holidays. I’m tempted to use Day Dream, but I won’t it’ll just be something similar. So if you’re running Wordpress check it out, download it and tell me what you think.

If fixed speed cameras will stop people speeding in dangerous areas then why aren’t they installed? There’s the argument that people will just slow down because they know where the cameras are and they won’t actually catch anyone. But it’s not about catching people it’s about stopping people speeding before they do.

Imagine if toll roads weren’t manned with gates and people were relied upon to do the right thing and pay the toll then it would never be payed. That’s why there’s toll operators there that don’t let you through until you pay. There’s no way that you can not do the right thing. This should work the same way for speeding, if you can’t get away with it you just won’t do it.

South by South West is my internet life, in real life. It’s even the other parts of my life, some of my favourite bands attend and play. Something for Rockets were there with Mark Hoppus this year.

It’s strange seeing all the photos of people I read about every day in the same place. People like Shaun Inman, Paul Scrivens, Molly, Tantek, David Shea, Kottke… It goes on and on. Even though I do get sick of reading about it before and while it’s on, then when it’s over there’s the thousands of SXSW 2006 roundups. It would still be amazing to go.

This year I am going to save all the money I possibly can and go to America for the first time to see SXSW.

Unbelievable. Everyone knew that it was possible now that Macs were running Intel chips and one very smart man even hacked together a way and won a lot of money. But Apple actually releasing software (free software) to let you do it easily? No one would have guessed. It must have been in the plan the whole time though. I can’t imagine anyone at Apple not realising that switching to universal binary would let Macs run Windows.Apple takes a lot of digs at Microsoft on the Boot Camp homepage which is pretty funny, here’s them talking about EFI vs BIOS:

“Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.”

I don’t understand why anyone would buy a Mac solely to use Windows. The Airbag article mentions a long-time Windows user racing into an Apple store to buy the top of the line Macbook Pro. Why would he do that? What’s the advantage of a Macbook running windows over a fast non-Mac laptop? What’s the big advantage? The Macbook Pro is a $4000 computer that you would normally buy because you want a fast laptop able to run OS X.

There’s definately a place for it though. Cross OS/Cross Browser testing for one. There’s not any software I use that a Mac wouldn’t run but for other people there is, games are a big one. I think this is going to do absolute wonders for Apple computer sales.

… unless there’s a colour in between. Whoever said that had obviously never seen these two colours together:

And really, if you put a colour inbetween blue and green it would just add to the colourful mess. I can’t think of one colour I would ever put between blue and green. Unless maybe it was white but then people would say, “white isn’t a colour, it’s the absence of colour”. So that counts white out but Windows has been pulling off blue and green off for years.

One of my classes is named Foundations in Computing and Communication but it doesn’t have much to do with computers at all. Most of my friends really dislike it and dread having to go to lectures but I think it’s really interesting. It’s like a real life Ion Fish.

It doesn’t feel like we are being taught in class, tutorials are just conversations with a very smart man. The latest thing we have been talking about is language and how you can say the same thing different ways and it can convey a very different message. One of the examples he gave was news readers speaking about civilian deaths in times of war. They may say something like “twenty civilians lives were taken in collateral damage”. Saying “collateral damage” almost makes it seem ok but it’s not ok, it’s not ok for 20 innocent people to be killed.

The same thing happens for natural disasters when death figures are greatly exagerated at first. A few days after the Boxing Day tsunami everyone was talking about over 100,000 people being killed. A few weeks later it was realised that it was around 20,000 deaths. At that point journalists were saying “It wasn’t 100,000 as first thought, it was only 20,000″. 20,000 doesn’t seem so much when compared to 100,000 and a lot of everyone’s initial devastation was lost because of exageration. Saying “only” makes 20,000 deaths seem not so bad, but it is bad.

We also speak about the simplicity of language or lack of simplicity where there should be. A quote came out of a tutorial a few weeks ago that hit home for me, “the greater the truth, the more simply it can be expressed”. The more you think about it the more that quote makes sense. Phrases like “I love you” come to mind.

Some of you have probably read about Mark Zuckerberg of facebook.com turning down a $750 million buy out offer. He turned it down saying that he wouldn’t accept anything less than $2 billion. Facebook was created by Mark in his second year of university in just a week, it’s only 2 years old.

It amazes me. It amazes me that someone would be willing to actually pay $750 million for something like that. Of course they’re not paying for the program that runs the show because you could get a better one made in a month for less than $20,000, they’re buying databases full of information. What’s even more amazing is that $750 million could be turned down. I mean really, how could you turn down $750 million? How could you turn it down for anything? Realisitcally I don’t think there’s anything I wouldn’t sell for $750 million, apart from my soul or livelihood or anything like that.

The only reason to not sell a company may be you think you can make more money by keeping it. My thinking is who cares if there’s potential to make more than $750 million? What can’t you buy with $750 million? Just by keeping that amount of money in a bank account you’d be making a large amount of money every hour. In a bank account with in interest rate of 5% per annum you would make over $3 million a month, going up every month.

Word on the street is that Google have raised the $2 billion to buy Facebook (by selling 3 stocks). Some people were saying he’s brave to turn down so much money, I just think he’s greedy.