Ios Dance Mix 2009

cocktail in santorini

To me it all boils back to one fundamental change of tact where we followed USA down the path of public liability. This seemingly fair system seems to have long reaching consequences to lifestyle as a whole to everyday people.

First some examples.

I was on a train the other day, a small train that winds its way up into some Spanish mountains to a small Spanish village. The train was an old quaint train that let you completely open the windows to enjoy the ride. I thought this was a great idea so i proceeded to open the window.. stick my head out…and nearly got myself decapitated by a passing pole. Idiot. After calming down i thought it was still great that you can open the windows regardless of the inherent risk involved in doing so. If you were a fucken idiot and lost a limb from sticking it out the window then.. well.. that’s really your problem. The point of relevance is that this would never happen in australia. There aint no fucken way that window would of been open-able so a person could lose a limb. Public liability would say that the train operators were responsible for their patrons (even the fucken idiots) and therefore to cover their asses they would ensure that the train was as idiot proof as possible. Hence… no open windows, and any quaint train rides to Australian mountains would be significantly less enjoyable. Hrmm.

Another example…

There are no fucken bouncers here. I hate bouncers. The reason bouncers are so prevalent at every Australian bar boils once again back to public liability. It is *NOT* because there are more fuckwit drunks in Perth, it is because if anyone is king hit, gets injured, slips over while drunk the establishment could get sued. The bouncers sole job is to remove any patrons that could get hurt out onto the street and out of the realm of responsibility of the bar. The manner and technique they employ to fulfill this goal is usually very distasteful.

I fucken hate bouncers.

This is just two examples but i could rattle of cases all day.

Europe is seemingly far more liberal, far more common sense approach. Far less regulated nanny-state. There isn’t a “family first” political party proposing an internet filter to ‘protect the children’, the idea is the parents should do that job.

It’s refreshing, really. And given time to ponder how we as Aussies ended up in such a shit situation, it’s because we followed the wrong group. The yanks, the founders of public liability.

Everything is running on my Asus 1000HE running Windows 7 RC1. I am so far pretty impressed with Windows 7 and have migrated most machines in the house to use thee new OS. My serious development laptop still uses Ubuntu and will remain that way but at least it feels like Windows 7 is much better step in the right direction compared to the abortion that is Vista.

Windows Live Writer

This is the only Windows Live product I’m going to use. So far it looks pretty good, the ability to be able to write up blog entries while offline is something that has a big appeal to me during the long flights and rail trips. For kicks i also installed Messenger only to immediately uninstall this piece of crap when i saw the rampant advertising used. I normally use an old version of trillian pro. I think version 3, it does everything i want in an IM client while having a minimalistic skin. Works well.

Google Picasa

I absolutely love Picasa for my photo management and don’t use anything else. While I think Google missed the boat with Web Photo Albums due to the Facebook revolution. It is possible to get a Facebook image exporter added into Picasa to be able to quickly update Facebook. I am going to look for a Gallery plugin for my plug and have that update Facebook i think. Need to investigate this further.

Garmin Mobile PC

Armed with this software, a USB GPS receiver and the Europe 2009 maps i should be able to navigate the streets of Europe well enough. Our plan is to hire a car in Nice and drive around France a bit. I will be concentrating on driving on the wrong side of the road too much to worry about directions so this should be helpful.

Microsoft OneNote 2007

Came with my MSDN subscription, this is another MS program that i really like. We have all our travel notes, itineries, e-tickets and what not stored in various folders within one note. The ability to easily do a video/voice recording is pretty cool as well. Also being able to make nifty little ‘To-Do’ lists has really helped with the organising.

Anyways this is my first post from Live writer so it’s more of a proof of concept to see how well it hooks into WordPress. ta ta.

We had a Boronia megastigma in one of my childhood gardens and I can distinctly remember the wonderful spicy smell. I don’t believe I have enjoyed the same aroma since my childhood. Consequently, these were pretty much the first plants that I put in. Hopefully by spring the whole street will be able to enjoy the scent!

The coral gum, with shade at the moment, but this position is mostly full sun.

The Coral Gum is being planted towards the front corner of the garden, on the same side as the existing established Jacaranda tree. My front yard is divided into two pretty distinct sections. Full-Sun, on the western side and part-sun/full-shade on the eastern side under the Jacaranda. From my experience over last summer, the full-sun side gets absolutely baked and i personally worry that even plants labeled for “full sun” wont survive those conditions easily. My plan is to get a fast growing shrub up as quick as possible on the western side to provide some shade.

With the exception of the Boronias, all these plants are pretty hardy and once established shouldn’t require much management, I hope.

B.Megastigma, with a heavy mulch of cardboard, river pebbles and black mulch.

The Boronias on the other hand will be given the utmost TLC. They have been heavily mulched and have even had river pebbles mixed into the soil to help in keeping it cool over summer. A rudimentary “sheet mulching” technique was used with all my spare cardboard boxes flattened out and layered across the existing ‘jungle mulch’. A new layer of black mulch was then thickly layered over the top. Since the Boronias require consistent cool and moist conditions, I hope this heavy mulching approach will pay off come summer.

Boronia patch, having shade provided by either the veranda or the jacaranda most of the time.

*Species marked with an star are exotic and not native.

The is how the property looked when we bought it. The front yard was made 'water wise' as part of the previous owners improvements.

The Setup:

• Vista Ultimate x64
• System/Development Utilities
• Visual Studio 2005 (32Bit)
• Avast for anti virus (32Bit)
• Acronis for backups (32Bit)
• Microsoft Office Ultimate (32Bit)
• General Utilities
• Nokia PC Suite (32Bit)
• MediaMonkey (32Bit)
• Foxit Reader (32Bit)
• Development VMWare Server with a guest OS of: Windows 2003
• SQL Server 2005 developer edition
• mySQL 5.0
• IIS 6.0

My experiences so far:

• things are slow, real slow im only using 2GB of ram and suspect 4GB will be mandatory
• as you can see from the list of “general” apps, there is still not enough native 64bit  native apps out there
• adobe should hang themselves for nothing having flash for x64 browsers making using IE x64 pointless

Bugs / Annoyances

• typing commands in command prompt hangs sometimes
• trying to get the run command up hangs sometimes (2-5mins)
• wireless WPA1 seems to be borked, i have to attempt to connect several times and when i’m lucky it will work
• boot up, shut down is very very slow

Good Points

• it is pretty
• once everything is loaded it doesnt feel that slow (not counting the occasional hangs with run and command prompt)

The problem lay with the XmlDataSource control having the EnableCaching property set to True by default. Toggeling this option resolved the issue. Thankyou .NET for a wasted day of development.

Dim xmlDs As New XmlDataSource
With xmlDs
.EnableCaching = False
.Data = XMLHelper.SerializeObjectToXML(LeadMgmtController.Data.Data, GetType(Leads), True)
.XPath = “LeadViews/LeadView”
.TransformFile = “~/xslt/leadview.xslt”
.DataBind()
End With

Hello Google,

I have much admiration for the power and ease of use of google news and
have been using the application for some time.

I have a single major annoyance with the customization features offered
and that is the inability to remove the ‘Top Stories’ block under the my
news customization. Not only can i not hide the block, i seem to be unable
to even relegate the block to the bottom and unviewed area of the page.

I have faith that the google devs are not forcing users a mandatory
placement of top stories in the centre of the screen as this would be a
major annoyance for people like myself who are not interested in the
‘progress in iraq’, or ‘the looming terrorist nation of iran’, or ‘dick
cheeney shoots a man in the face’.

I am an australian and care little for news outside of my local region. I
would like to place the news stories relevent to me in the centre/top of
the my customized google news view and hide the ‘top stories’ block
completely.

Could i please be advised if this is possible, and if not why the
functionality has been overlooked.

Kind Regards
Galen Parker

Their response unsuprisingly was thus;

Hi Galen,

Thank you for your note. We don’t currently offer a way to remove or edit
the ‘Top Stories’ section, but we’ll keep your suggestion to offer this in
mind. User feedback is very important to us, and we hope you’ll visit
Google News in the coming months to see our additions and improvements.

Regards,
The Google Team

So there you have it. Users who are not interested in what google considers its ‘Top Stories’ (for whatever reasons) are forced through the inability to hide/move the block. I have stopped using google news for this fact. I have worked around the problem by making a customised google home page (Personalised Home) and linked the RSS feeds of the news sources relevent to me. Its a damn shame that this is the only way to avoid what appears really to be a political (propaganda?) restriction on google news.

I have a DFI Lanparty UT board which utilises the nForce3 250GB architecture. To get my onboard ethernet adapter to work I had to use the drivers from the nForce4 driver pack instead of the nForce3 Forceware drivers provided.

Grab the latest nForce3 pack from guru3d here use this for everything except the network adapter.
I then used this nforce4 pack for my network adapter.