One person’s experienes with Ireland’s newest mobile phone operator, 3, are less than promising. Missed calls, no dialtone, bad coverage, ridiculous limits on the size of bills for new users. Doesn’t sound good.
3 are offering 5 cent text, picture and video messaging right now but if their service is bad, what use are they, even if cheap? (via)
I wondered why I saw someone visit my blog by searching for this subject. It appears that a tv drama will depict the assassination of US President George Bush! They use, “archive footage, actors and computer effects to portray the president being shot dead.”
Why? They want to explore the effects of the War on Terror on the US apparently. Do they presume that the US President will be shot in an act of revenge? It’s on More 4 on October 9th. I’ll watch it. (via)
While we’re on the subject of wacky ideas, I watched Being John Malkovich tonight. What a crazy film, but definitely worth seeing.
I hope Ryan sees this, but 6 tips for working at home with children lists 2 good work habits that anyone working at home should follow:
I haven’t been able to do either. I usually get up early (sunrise at 6.30 is quite spectacular from my office!), straight to my desk to post a photo, check email, irc, web stats, and then shower, breakfast, back to desk, bring the dog for a walk, work, break, work, quick lunch, work. Suddenly it’s 6pm and I’m wondering where all the time has gone.
That’s a normal day, but sometimes I need to get out and do some chore. Then I can be catching up the hours until late into the night.
Automattic is a 24-hour company. Podz and I are in Europe and the rest of the guys in the US, I wonder sometimes what it would be like to work on hours more closely tied to the other side of the Atlantic? The 8 hours difference between here and San Francisco is unrealistic, but maybe 4 or 6 hours. Then I laugh and think that Jacinta would kill me because we’d never see each other!
Working from home? It’s the best thing I’ve ever done! (via)
mod_gzip, zlib.output_compression or whatever way you compress your web pages is a great way of reducing your network traffic costs but comes at the cost of increased CPU usage. Despite what you might think, it can be more expensive to send data over the network, especially to slow clients than compress it first of all and send a smaller burst.
Unfortunately this little server may not be up to the task of gzipping content at an acceptable rate to make it worthwhile. I’ll leave it run for another few hours and check the stats tomorrow.
Not the cartoon character, but the ex-planet Pluto. Apparently it’s not classified as a planet any more!
Has anyone actually gone to see that Snakes on the plane film? The first I heard of it was woz-is-name reviewing it on Ian Dempsey’s show on Today FM a few days ago, although I remember Damien Mulley saying something about snakes a few times. I just thought he had a new hobby! Internet Hype? I must be on some alternate ‘net!
Anyway, it’s supposed to be crap, so I’m not going!
Funny moment #18472 in the working life of a software developer. What Thunderbird thinks of RSS. So much for those syndication feeds!
Have you got other Spellchecker bloopers?
Gather around, let’s all say it together.. it’s Donncha, not Donna, never have been a Donna, never will be. It’s weird how people reply to my mails or comment on something privately, saying, “Hi Donna” when there’s no mention of such a person on this site or any other I run, well, apart from this post of course.
How do you pronounce Donncha? If you’re an English speaker, it sounds like “dunaka”, not dunka, or donsha or bert or ernie. Err. Not sure how that will sound in other languages but there ya go. Best I can do for the time being.
For future reference, here’s a pic of me with Podz and Andy taken in San Francisco a few weeks back. I’m in front holding the camera with the insanely wide lens. If you see me on the street with my 20D just say hi. I won’t bite (much).
What do you get when you ask a forum to photoshop two guys asleep and reading a newspaper respectively in an airport? Lots of fun photos that’s what! Some of these are so funny I laughed out loud!
If you’ve seen my desktop machine at home you’ll realise I’m a big fan of the Xgl and compiz stuff and now thanks to a Linux Journal article I’ve discovered the CGWD Themer.
Installing it in Ubuntu is as easy as adding a new site to your apt-get repository list and firing up apt-get in the usual way and grabbing the binaries from their repository. Then either launch it from the command line using the command “gcompizthemer” or go to System->Preferences where a new menu item called “CGWD Themer” can be found. The themer does nice things to the borders of and bars of your windows. I love the glow of the min/max/close buttons that spills over the side of the window!
Oh, and just because I bought a Mac laptop doesn’t mean I’m abandoning Linux. I fell in love with my Gnome+Xgl desktop once again when I came home from San Francisco!
Later – two articles features on digg and delicious which might be of interest: