cool: August 2007 Archives

I pre-ordered Kathy Reichs' new novel months ago.

I got an email a short time ago politely informing me that not only was it shipping, but that my pre-order had saved me money!

I've been busy over the last couple of days and while I'd love to have had more time to post stuff here I simply haven't had the chance. I don't normally do those "here's a few interesting things I saw" posts, but I guess I'll have to make an exception! Krystian has a very odd looking photo on his blog. When I looked at it first I thought he'd been playing with Photoshop again. Boards.ie seems to have been suffering some serious uptime issues (or downtime issues .. ) over the last few days and I keep finding threads on other boards wondering about it ... A couple of posts on Techcrunch caught my eye during the day. The first one - CIA et al get their own social networking site struck me as bizarre, but interesting - which was followed by Playboy getting in on the act. I know I know. Social Networking is like the latest "thing", but how many of these sites are sustainable? Again on Techcrunch there's mention of Wordpress' Matt Mullenweg giving out about open source developers / projects "profiteering". Interesting, but what about this? I remember it being a bit of a storm in a teacup at the time, but it just goes to show how things change .. or do they? I've mentioned dotmobi in the past both here and over on my domain site so the new mobi sitebuilding service from Network Solutions caught my attention. At $2 / month it won't break the bank, but it's not clear if that price is the base monthly price or if it's calculated on a yearly plan. If you're interested in business blogging, then the new guide from SixApart might be worth a read. They're doing some interesting stuff at the moment with their Movable Type platform (which this site will be moving to very very soon) and don't forget - they invented a lot of the stuff we all use! Tomorrow is going to be an odd day at work as we're actually semi-closing our accounts department for the day due to weddings! And the new "in" word according to those "in the know" is "bacn" - pronounced like "bacon" just spelt wrong! What is it? Well it's a cross between spam and ham obviously! Spam (when talking about email) you don't want ever. Ham you do want. Bacn is that stuff that you want, but probably not this minute. I hope it doesn't take off :)

Although there is an official mobile version of IMDB it doesn't seem to be working and hasn't been working since I first tried it a couple of weeks ago. There is, however, an alternative: Mdog's interface to IMDB It's very functional and is perfect if you want to check some basic facts while watching TV or a DVD (more likely a DVD in my case). Admittedly some of the functions of the "normal" site don't work, but I can live without them. In any case it's better than having to boot up my laptop just to check some movie trivia :)

I don't have an issue with Flash sites if they're interesting and suitable. Someone in A.D.D Marketing & Advertising is currently browsing one of my sites, so I thought I'd see what their site was like and WOW it is cool and funny. It's Flash heavy, but the soundtrack and visuals are hilarious

It seems only yesterday that the guys behind SiteVista let me take a look at what they were cooking, but if you look at my original post it was over two years ago! I gather that SiteVista was successful and I did see its name cropping up all over the place, but for whatever reasons they guys decided to revamp it and rename it - Litmus was born! Paul gave me access to a beta account on the new system a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't get a chance to write about my experiences with it (besides they needed time to iron out some of the bugs). The new interface is very slick and incredibly fast. They've increased the number of browsers they're testing against dramatically to include a number of weird and wonderful combinations, so you too can cater for the oddballs :) (I wish whoever was looking after sites like the CRO would use services like this! ) One of the really nice features they've added is the option to share tests with the public via an easy option in the dashboard. So, for example, you could go here to see the tests I ran on an MT4 install. They've also added an email testing suite, so that you can iron out potential issues across a wide range of email clients. Want to know how your newsletter looks in AOL for example? Now you can. If you haven't got an account I'd heartily recommend you signup for a free 30 day trial. You can then whine at your web designers and back it up with proof! :)

I've mentioned using the mobile web a bit recently, so in true "eat your own dogfood" fashion I pre-ordered Scrubs Season 6 on DVD using my n95!

I've been looking forward to the release of The Bourne Ultimatum for some time and judging by other people's comments I am not alone! It went on general release in the US last week and has so far done very well. It's officially released in Ireland this Friday and I can't wait!

The Nokia N95 is a thing of beauty. It's got all those funky features that every geek dreams of:

• GPS
• Bluetooth
• Wifi
• 3G
• MMS
• SMS
• Camera

And you can make phone calls too !! It's also got a radio and a few other little gizmos that make it a fun piece of kit. Paul and I decided last Friday that enough was enough and that we'd simply buy ourselves new phones, so we did! It's a really neat device. Yes it has got terrible battery life and the memory card isn't the biggest at 1 gigabyte (though I still remember using PCs with less space on their hard drives a couple of years ago ....) Krystian has an older model (not sure which one) so he's been trying to persuade me to load lots of cute bits of software onto my new toy, though I haven't actually got round to adding anything as yet. If you're a blogger you should like the free software that comes with it - "Life blog". I haven't tested it with Wordpress, but Movable Type 4 supports it, as do other SixApart products and services. You can also download a free podcast reader from Nokia, though it doesn't integrate properly with the browser ie. RSS feeds don't get automatically handled by it, which is a pity Paul goes into some detail about the features and their technical specs, so I won't :) The kind of things that really interest me, however, are native GPS support. I spend a lot of my time trying to get to meetings in towns and cities that I don't know too well, so if I have some semi-decent maps installed this will save me a lot of time and headaches (driving in circles round Mullingar brings back "fond" memories). Now I'm off to get more ringtones .....