Category: Consciousness

Tilting at windmills

May contain traces of Peanuts

What would you get if Peanuts was drawn by Sin City’s Frank Miller? Something like this. Probably.

Back in business

Well, I thought I was gone for a while. But I’m back. Cause for celebration? Perhaps.

Here’s a brief summary of what happened which may be particularly useful if you’ve googled “What happened to Dedicatedhost.net.au” or dedicatedhost.net.au in order to find this post.

My previous host – the aforementioned dedicatedhost.net.au appears to have collapsed – taking client’s money and running, not returning phone calls, having emails bounce and having their own site go down in the process. And leading to a Whirpool thread and Webhostingtalk.com.au thread speculating about the reasons behind the demise.

After spending a fair bit of Friday and Saturday worrying about the hours of work I’d poured down the drain by not backing up my content regularly I had resigned myself to losing all of my content (except the stuff in Google Reader – who’s laughing at me for subscribing to my own blog now hey…). Then, a glimmer of hope, DedicatedHost.net.au shared server space with another hosting provider in Melbourne (HighTek hosting – who have been absolutely fantastic through this “ordeal”) who could access content on the box and transfer it to their plans.

Unfortunately my site wasn’t on the Melbourne servers – but HighTek Hosting were able to initiate a transfer of the content using cpanel. That’s all technical language (not completely but it’s not English either) for saying I have my site back thanks to HighTek Hosting. At a discounted rate on the basis of dedicatedhost.net.au’s stuff ups.

So I’m back. And ready to fill your feed readers or internet browsing time with all the coffee, stupid gadgets and pseudo political commentary I can produce in my spare moments at work.

Unsuggester: find the books you don’t want to read

LibraryThing (my profile) is a web cataloging platform for books. It can pull data from Amazon purchases – and you can manually enter in all the books you own. If you can be bothered.

It will make suggestions for you based on those books. It will now also “unsuggest” books for you based on what people who have a particular book are least likely to have on their shelves. The following is telling:

unsuggester

GraphJam

Sans serif

I just swapped the font on our website from Verdana to Helvetica. It looks nicer already. I don’t know why it was in Verdana to begin with.

Speaking of our website – if you’re from North Queensland and haven’t spammed your local candidates and the party leaders to tell them to fix the Flinders Street Mall – you totally should. Here. Now.

Pillow talk: Gooba

Back in the 90s there was a spreadable product called “Gooba” which was simply premixed peanut butter and jam. By extension these sandwhich pillows are gooba pillows – but only if bought together. They’re sold separately. I don’t think they contain nuts so you don’t need a pillow epi pen.

Little sister number two is a big gooba fan. She even owns this shirt.

Shirt of the day: Nintendo wheeze

This one comes from a site called NerdyShirts – so I’m not sure what it does for my campaign not to be considered a nerd. Anyone who ever played the original Nintendo Entertainment System will appreciate this. Otherwise you need to know that to get the pesky things to work sometimes you had to blow in the cartridge.

Here are some others that I almost liked as much from the same site.

One trillion dollars

Being a supervillain and making demands for ransom ala Dr Evil is much easier now thanks to Google. You’ll be able to make realistic cash demands in proportion to your schemes knowing how much space you’ll need to store the payment just by using Google Sketchup. Google’s 3D modelling software doesn’t look quite as cool as Lego’s – but only because it’s not defaulted to using lego. I’m sure you could. You can provide a visualisation of one trillion dollars with ease (the little speck on the bottom left is a person). I haven’t used it yet, but it looks cool.

900

That last post was number 900. This is 901. Seems like only yesterday I was pointing out number 600. 1000 should be up sometime next week. It’s probably a cause for celebration.

Lawn of the dead

If like me you spent your formative years mutilating plastic soldiers and scattering them all over the yard then this new set of toys is for you. They even come in different colours of zombie. Although it would be cheaper just to melt your own plastic toys into deformed zombie positions. That’s how we did it in the good old days.

Written by man…

According to GenderAnalyzer my blog is written by a man. You probably knew that already.

I guess my predilection for toilet humour probably gives it away. The uncertainty in the result probably comes from my deep, emotionally charged insights. Thanks to Simone and Ben (Vanishing Point) for the link.

“We think http://nathanintownsville.com is written by a man (62%).”

Google sets, lets you match stuff on the net, I love it

So many pieces of tennis terminology. Somewhat ironically I could have used Google Sets to generate them if I wasn’t already using it to generate me a list of movies similar to the Godfather, Goodfellas and Scarface. Which it did.

You can make really big lists. It’s fun. And a nice way to find lists of similar stuff.

Get write on it

Time magazine

The things I create using these online web tools that I keep posting are never that funny. Maybe I should spend more time thinking before I post – but WriteOnIt has so many cool features that you should check out that I just couldn’t wait.

I’m a generator

A while back I posted another online comic strip generator – perfect for re-envisaging airline safety cards. Here’s a different, better, platform that does the same thing. You can even “stripblog” which would be cool. If I had anything funny to say.