Lucky me! Our ISP just increased our bandwidth. We’re now getting around 11 Mbit/sec down and 1.5 up.
Oooohhh, aaaaahhhh.
But considering some people in our locality are going onto fiberglass and getting — potentially — 60 Mbit/sec Internet connections… to a home address… it proves the old saying — “there will always be someone better off or worse off than you”.
OK it had to happen - so the question is… not the catchy song from the “Ghost Busters”, but the mobile phone manufacturer’s buster from Apple, and it is - “How You’re Gonna Call”? (and do many other things by the way besides).
The answer, very clearly on the 11th of July, for many many people was - via the Apple iPhone 3G.
The original iPhone was ground breaking (evidence the flurry of attempts by established mobile phone manufacturers at copying various aspects of the iPhone) the iPhone 3G with the new version 2 of the iPhone operating system (based on/essentially Mac OS X) is deal breaking.
I was on my way back from a business trip overseas, I wouldn’t be back home in time to be there to queue up at the stores when they opened July 11th! Oh no - what’s a guy to do? Why call up his better half from Bangkok and ask her to help! Wonderful lady that she is she beat off the opposition, and I got one of the (very) few available for sale in my town.
And yes, it is all that they say it is.
I use the ‘Dark’ Wordpress theme, designed by Wolfgang Bartelme from Bartelme Design (great theme, great graphic designer, thanks Wolfgang!) & modified for Wordpress by iLEMONed.
When I setup my site using the ‘Dark’ theme native tag support had not been released for Wordpress. I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1 so I though it was time to include tag support. I found this helpful post on the ThemeLab website. Couple of minutes work and dropped in onto the sidebar using a tags ‘cloud’. Easy!
As can be seen the most popular tag is ‘Wordpress’ - no surprises there. Wordpress is one of the best, and continually getting better, blogging software packages out there.
We have recently got two new Burmese cats. Our previous mother and daughter pair, Tiffany and Gaia, unfortunately both contracted cancers and had to be put down within one month of each other. It was a very sad time.
Shortly after, the rumblings started from the daughter to get a new cat, and not just a cat but “a cute kitten”. Oh dear - so the search started. After some time we found a cattery (Jewel’s Choice run by Henk and Linda Langelaar-Dooremalen) which bred Burmese and signed up for a tortoiseshell kitten with… the father of the kitten coming along as well for good measure!
So we now have Quincy (the father) a very nice creme Burmese (I call him ‘Chunky’) together with his daughter Harlequin who is a tortoiseshell colour.
They seem to have ‘accepted’ us, and are now well and truly entrenched i.e. they have taken over the house! Quincy likes to pretend he is a live fur collar - he jumps up on your shoulder and then drapes himself around your neck.
(Click on the pictures to see a larger image)
This is an example panoramic 360º photograph. The picture is created from a number of photographs taken with a normal camera (a digital SLR is best) using a ‘panoramic head’, and then processed in special software to ’stitch and blend’ the photographs. The pictures give an amazing immersive experience. Click on the picture below to view online (the picture will take a little while to load). I’m still trying out the software as you will see, the sample picture(s) are from one of the panoramic head companies. You can also download and view the picture full-screen in QuickTime on your computer. To move around you click and drag with the left mouse button, left-right & up-down. Shift key to zoom in and Ctrl key to zoom out.
And if you want to get an ideal of just how stunning 360º panoramic photography can be… have a look here. When the window opens make sure you select “high” up in the top right corner to get a high resolution image. Note this high resolution QuickTime source file is only 3.4 MB in size!
If you are a Windows user and don’t have QuickTime (Macs come with QuickTime automatically) then you can download the free QuickTime player here. If you are a Linux desktop user… why don’t you go all the way and get a Mac? After all, the Mac is Unix with a decent desktop - something most Unix/Linux distros have not come anywhere near achieving yet. Ooops - flame wars! Please guys… don’t hurt me, I’m one of you, my web server is running on Gentoo, a real geeks distro - if you’ve ever done “emerge -puv world” on an out of date Gentoo box you’ll know what I mean! Anyway… at least the Mac is not Windows!
Well folks, I was going to hold off commenting on the iPhone, I mean what more could be said that hasn’t been done to death by countless ‘commentators’ far and wide.But this final word I could not resist… Now we really know who was first in line at the Apple store in New York - a closet Apple fan-boy named Steve!
Read all about it here.
BTW - just gotta love that tongue and tummy.
