Thursday, April 30, 2009

GoodBye Spurl, Hello Diigo

Cliff Notes: Spurl is one of the sites I pull data from for my "lifestream" page and they've been having some woes (for a while now, actually). I'd recently been checking out diigo as a replacement system. The continued downtime for spurl today pushed me into making the switch.

While the rest of the world started using del.icio.us and dig for their social bookmarking needs, I'd always kept using a nifty system from spurl.net for my online bookmarking. The reason was three fold;

1) I didn't care about sharing my bookmarks or finding people who were bookmarking the same sort of sites.
2) It had a kick ass javascript bookmark file that you clicked and it filled in the "create bookmark" form with the url from the previously active page and any text you had highlighted on the page filled in as the description.
3) It had a good rss output feed.

Alas spurl was extremely hard hit by spammers, since it was so easy to actually create bookmarks. The dev team seem to have moved their focus onto other things, so I can't see it getting fixed soon.

Along comes diigo, the new hip web2.0 social bookmarking site. Like the others its packed full of features I don't really care about. However, these guys also have the simple features I love in spurl! So I've switched over to using it to collect my bookmarks and feed its rss output into my lifestream pipe.

Friday, April 24, 2009

Information Control

Early tonight I kicked out a post detailing the recent happenings in my online poker career. After rereading it and pondering exactly who I was posting it for I deleted it. I also got to thinking about the much neglected poker focused wordpress blog I still had laying around. I wound up deciding to take it down from the web too, for much the same reason.

I figured that most of my poker buddies are well aware of how I'm running and what I'm thinking about poker at any given time, since we communicate constantly over IRC. Beyond that I always talk to my Dad about poker when I speak to him on the phone. My work mates realise I'm addicted to poker and I ramble about it from time to time to them. But not many of them are actually aware of the stakes I play or how much I've earned playing poker. So that really only left people who I was playing against online who googled my screen name and wound up finding my blog.

And why on earth would I want to give them more information about how I'm running or what I'm thinking about poker?

So for now I'll just sum up things in vague terms; currently poker isn't my big focus, building my house is. When the house is done and I'm back into the poker grind my focus will be on rebuilding my bankroll :)

Resized Images

Over the last few days I've tinkered with a few things here on my lifestream page. The most significant was haxing in a dynamic image resizing system which creates thumbnails 400 pixels wide to be displayed nicely. Previously I was just uploading pre-thumbnailed images for inclusion in updates sucked in from spurl or elsewhere. This failed when I wanted to upload a higher resolution image on its own (like the pink storm trooper image).

So now I upload to photobucket at the original resolution of whatever the image is and my code downscales it while maintaining the correct aspect ratio.

Onwards - An Animation


Onwards from akqa on Vimeo.

Information Control

Early tonight I kicked out a post detailing the recent happenings in my online poker career. After rereading it and pondering exactly who I was posting it for I deleted it. I also got to thinking about the much neglected poker focused wordpress blog I still had laying around. I wound up deciding to take it down from the web too, for much the same reason.

I figured that most of my poker buddies are well aware of how I'm running and what I'm thinking about poker at any given time, since we communicate constantly over IRC. Beyond that I always talk to my Dad about poker when I speak to him on the phone. My work mates realise I'm addicted to poker and I ramble about it from time to time to them. But not many of them are actually aware of the stakes I play or how much I've earned playing poker. So that really only left people who I was playing against online who googled my screen name and wound up finding my blog.

And why on earth would I want to give them more information about how I'm running or what I'm thinking about poker?

So for now I'll just sum up things in vague terms; currently poker isn't my big focus, building my house is. When the house is done and I'm back into the poker grind my focus will be on rebuilding my bankroll :)

Resized Images

Over the last few days I've tinkered with a few things here on my lifestream page. The most significant was haxing in a dynamic image resizing system which creates thumbnails 400 pixels wide to be displayed nicely. Previously I was just uploading pre-thumbnailed images for inclusion in updates sucked in from spurl or elsewhere. This failed when I wanted to upload a higher resolution image on its own (like the pink storm trooper image).

So now I upload to photobucket at the original resolution of whatever the image is and my code downscales it while maintaining the correct aspect ratio.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Big Rig Hill Climb

I dusted off my logitech force feedback wheel recently and fired up Colin Mcrae: Dirt. The news that Dirt 2 will be out later this year made me very happy and I felt the need to fling some vehicles around corners sideways. I sorted out my online profile and was coimpletely blown away when checked out the world record times. I held no stupid dreams of actually being amongst the fastest in the world or anything, but I was amazed at by how much the top guys had my times crushed. However, I noticed that I was up near the top of the pack when it came to 1 particular type of race: Big Rig Hill Climbs.



Since I had already posted top 10 times for both the full hill climb events I decided to see if I could crack the number 1 spot and claim the world records. I focused on the Pikes Peak climb first, as it was the longest, mostly tarmac and also the race I felt the most comfortable with. It took me a couple of nights of tooling around with the setup on the truck to find something that worked well (I'd never bothered changing anything prior to this) and I was able to grab the world record by a good few seconds.

I moved onto the Windy Point hillclimb, a race I hadn't done beyond the couple of times you do it in career mode. This one took me a lot longer to find a good setup for and learn to string together the best lines of the corners. It was also the one which someone else had obviously put a lot of effort into; a German guy who had the fastest time in the Big Rigs by something like 15 seconds. I managed to get with in 5 seconds of him pretty quickly but then really struggled to find a way to bridge the final time gap. Last night I found 3 seconds and this morning I finally cracked his time, by a very slim 10 hundredths of a second.



So for the time being I can accurately claim to be the fastest Big Rig Hill Climber in the world (in the game Dirt)!

Monday, April 13, 2009

Easter Monday with the Animals

Our home is a house containing and surrounded by animals. A house cat, a tenacious little nugget of a mini foxy, two beautiful malamutes, two not quite so beautiful (but still pretty classy) goats, 5 horses and 8 stable cats. Dull moments are few and far between.



Our Easter Monday afternoon was spent out on the back deck being entertained by our own little circus. The mini foxy was eager to do our bidding and teach one of the horses some manners. The two malamutes were on edge as the stable cats made a concerted effort to over run the back deck. These wolf dogs are learning that the tribe of small black stable cats which appear occassionally aren't for chasing and eating, but they continuously look at us with "are you sure?" eyes.

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Blue Mountain Lager

Poured a glass of the blue mountain lager from the keg today and I'm pretty impressed with it. I'd bought some Boags Draft stubbies to tide me over until the keg was gassed and I was surprised that my blue mt lager was similarly full flavoured. I definitely put this down to using a dextrose, malt and maltodextrin mix rather than just straight dextrose.

I've pumped the pressure back up in the keg and expect that it'll be perfectly gassed in time for the weekend!



I picked up some chillis when we went shopping on the weekend, which I plan on slicing open, wrapping in a stocking and dropping in the fermentor when I brew up this tin of brewcraft mexican cerveza. We used to do this at our old share house and I really enjoyed the after taste. We stole the idea from a micro brewery located up on the Sunshine Coast in QLD.