A couple of days ago Heidi and I got on a ferry:
and headed to Rottnest Island:
It was my first time there (apparantly unheard of for someone who has lived in Perth for more than a few years) and very enjoyable.
We spent our time bike-riding (10km on the first day, 20km on the second), swimming, eating (overpriced food), and playing mini-golf (it was a pretty good course).
Conclusion: Yeah, I’d go again 😀
http://webchats.tv/webchat.php?ID=260
A Miyamoto web chat in which he answers questions submitted from web users is now online. Interesting and insightful stuff.
They received tens of thousands of questions and had to cut that list down quite a bit.
Tone informed me that Pure Pwnage episode 10 is out. Checking the purepwnage site confirms this. Yay!
For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, Pure Pwnage is a mockumentary following the life of a professional gamer called “teh_pwnerer”. It’s great for many reasons, two of which are: “it’s from Canada”, and “there is an episode called LANAGEDDON”.
My only gripe with this episode (which I haven’t even downloaded and watched yet) is that there appears to be a typo in the title. It’s called “TEH BEST DAY EVER” when it should clearly be “TEH BEST DAY EVAR!” LOL!
The server was getting hammered with comment spam, so I disabled comments from non-members. This should be a temporary measure.
I don’t know if many of you have been following the whole “Web 2.0” thing, but it’s really starting to irritate me.
Web 2.0 is a catch-phrase that represents the general (predicted and planned) move towards social, user-driven, and services-oriented websites. It includes a general approach to software (AJAX) and information (collaboration).
It means people working together to provide better, more personalised services… or at least that’s how they want to market it. At a more fundamental level, Web 2.0 is this realisation from media companies:
It promotes website scraping and RSS abuse for meta-reviews with long referral chains. How many people will bother to visit the original source of an article? It promotes users contributing to resources that they neither own nor (ultimately) control. What recourse do myspace adolescents have if Murdoch decides to delete their brooding poems?
Rather than turn this post into a long rant, I’ll end with an excerpt from Paul Graham’s write-up on Web 2.0.
And yet, oddly enough, Ryan Singel’s article about the conference in Wired News spoke of “throngs of geeks.” When a friend of mine asked Ryan about this, it was news to him. He said he’d originally written something like “throngs of VCs and biz dev guys” but had later shortened it just to “throngs,” and that this must have in turn been expanded by the editors into “throngs of geeks.” After all, a Web 2.0 conference would presumably be full of geeks, right?
Update: I’d be much happier about Web 2.0 if the “Don’t maltreat users” mantra also included a “Don’t reserve the right to maltreat users” clause. Otherwise it reads like a warning of the “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you” variety.
I caught a bit of the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony and was pleased to see that there are fully integrated events for Elite Athletes with a Disability (EAD).
I’d really like to see this mirrored at larger events like the Olympics. Aside from the obvious “it’s the right thing to do”, I think that it would dramatically increase funding for EAD sports in many countries. Especially if there are EAD events that could potentially win these countries medals.
Is this all wishful thinking?
I thought that I would post about this before I forgot everything I learnt while looking for a rental.
There are a number of websites that advertise rental properties. The Australia-wide ones that we were familiar with (from our rental search in Sydney) are realestate.com.au and domain.com.au. Listings often appear on both sites, but realestate.com.au doesn’t accept independent (non agent) listings whereas domain.com.au does.
We were also fairly frustrated with domain.com.au sometimes because of a few “zombie listings”. We ended up contacting agents for places that were already leased (but still listed on domain.com.au). I suspect that the domain.com.au software requires manual de-listing whereas the realestate.com.au software is an integrated solution for agents.
For Western Australia, the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia (REIWA, reiwa.com.au) is a good resource (although the website doesn’t permit opening listing in new windows for some reason). This website is also a good resource for general information on renting.
Finally, we also found that a few big real estate agents (like LJ Hooker) are not part of the realestate.com.au or reiwa.com.au networks, so we started checking individual websites as well. Then we found that many of the missing real estate agents can be found at homehound.com.
However, after all that we ended up finding our place in the paper. How “ironical”.
So to keep your bases covered, be sure to check out:
Probably in that order.
Update: Just added a bit more information and the list of links.
My mum’s birthday is coming up and we decided to present her with “the gift of gaming”.
She has always been very into Puzzle Bobble (aka. Bust-A-Move), but hasn’t been able to play since I took the consoles with me when I left home a few years back 🙁 Soooo, we decided to get her a portable version: a Cosmic Blue Nintendo DS and Bust-A-Move DS.
I even made a special card. I hope it gives just enough of a hint as to what’s inside the box before she opens it!
Outside:
Inside:
I mosaiced out the signatures (there wasn’t anything lewd!)
I made a late afternoon snack that (for a vegetarian household) looks suspiciously like meat :
It’s grapefruit by the way… and I need to get a tripod.
Does anyone out there know if the “FOR HOME USE ONLY” clauses on some DVDs and video games are actually legally enforcable in Australia?
To me, it seems to be a form of EULA (end user license agreement) and the legality of those is untested in many places and questionably enforcable. If it is enforcable, it makes me wonder about stores that rent games or sell second-hand games. Do they need licenses to do that?
Do I need a license to lend a game to a friend? … hmmm… I think that I’ll write to Sony and ask for authorisation.
Update: e-mail sent