Over the falls

Like Simon , I've always kept an eye on Shaun Inman's blog -or if not so much his content, on his designs. His concept of having old posts slowly disappear into nothingness is a really odd, and quite interesting idea. So yeah, another endorsement from me - but the fact that he's currently having a bunch of fun with his new Wii is also close to my heart - in fact, most of his posts kind of mirror what I've been doing since I started my holiday...Yay for Holidays! No Wii for me today though. I need to go and camp out at the DMV , to obtain my Virginia drivers license - besides the fact that American cops tend to freak out when you show them an ACT drivers license, they charge you through the nose for insurance. (Not the cops, the insurance companies.) I'm resolved to just live there for the whole day. If you'd like to share, you can take some sample tests here. Then you could just stand in a queue for an hour or so. Then sit down and do nothing for an hour. Then...

Dear Lazyweb, Is the word 'Bollocks' considered offensive? I ask because I used it in a new upcoming post for the TOWER Software Blog, and I was wondering if maybe it might be deemed 'inappropriate'... I used it because I think it's funny, but the extensive wikipedia entry on the word is just outright hilarious... "In a technological context, the question could be 'Why has the web developer included a three-minute animated intro to this page?', prompting the answer: 'Dog's Bollock Syndrome, Mate. Because he can.'"

Here's an interesting tie-in to the simplicity debate - Four years after the hype, Google has quietly axed the SOAP Web service API to it's search interface. ( full story here ) And nobody cares. Why? The SOAP concept grew out of a great simple idea. The Idea was this: "wouldn't it be nice to do RPC stuff via XML? The first iteration of what would become SOAP was pretty straightforward - XMLRPC . Version 1.0 of SOAP built upon that, and was still human readable, and okay. Som etime after that, the big boys like Microsoft, IBM and Sun jumped on board, and proceeded to complexify , 'standardize' and completely bugger the specification about until the final modern iteration of SOAP was so confusing, that only the most zeal-ridden platform zealots were singing it's praises - and even they didn't actually know how the thing worked anymore. Marketing execs all over the world were so desperate for 'Web Services' that they confused them with 'We...

If you've ever run across an OGG file, chances are you've probably gone - "What on earth is that?" And then you'd find out that it was an open source, slightly superior music compression format that tends to be used by the more 1337 amongst us. Then, you might have wondered how you could listen to something that had been encoded with it. Well, if you wanted to use iTunes , you were previously out of luck - or so I thought, until I found the Xiph .org quicktime plugin . This has been around for a while, but now it seems to work great.

I can remember 'certain' students used to find a modicum of ribald hilarity in scrawling the traditional 'dick and balls' on a plastic high school chair, but these kids have completely taken it to a new level . Tsk, Tsk - Busted by Google Earth - the shame... (The Google Maps link .)

Nearly 100 percent of the time, Cable TV in America dishes up the most inane garbage, very rarely worthy of any comment. And yet, sometimes... well, suffice to say that thanks to Encore, I now have a new favourite movie - North Shore , from 1987. How can this be so? Well, because of the following: Awesome Surf Footage, A ridiculous cheesy plot line about a surfer from Arizona (yes, Arizona) who wins a surfing contest in a wave pool, and then decides to go to O'ahu to surf the Pipeline Classic. Cheesy eighties music soundtrack, that includes Journey and Pseudo Echo, Awesome Surf Footage, A truly terrible love story straight out of a Sweet Valley High book. Lots of gratuitous shots of chicks lying on the beach in ugly eighties bikinis, A bunch of ' Bad Ass ' Hawaiian locals, Actual cameos from amazing real life surfers like Mark Occhilupo , Laird Hamilton and Gerry Lopez ; and Awesome Surf Footage. I mean, really, could there possibly be anything more you could need i...

This is just a reminder to make sure you keep up to date with Harsher Light - Little Headed Simon's tale of a skilled Gothic hero just keeps getting more and more intriguing. Who is this guy? What are these terrifying sexy angels that are trying to kill people? Can you really use crushed aspirin and smoke to detect evil spirits? Some of these questions may be answered, but you'll have to keep your browser (or your RSS Reader) tuned to http://harsherlight.blogspot.com/ .

I was, I admit, a little ambivalent about making the trip up from DC to New York City. My wife, Ali, was extremely envious of the idea. But, (as a good husband so often finds) , It turns out she was right. New York is an extremely inspiring place. It's like a thousand ideas colliding all at once. Everywhere I walked, I was mindful of New York stuff,( even though I grew up about as far away as you can get -in Australia ) - things like the 59 th Street Bridge , Madison Square Gardens, 42 nd Street, Times Square - Lyrics from the Beastie Boys, those dumpsters from Law and Order episodes, Ben Lee and Grandmaster Flash, and the art-deco style uber buildings that define the megalopolis. Times Square was particularly amazing at night - If you don't pay attention to where you're going, You'll almost certainly be run over by a cab - but if you don't, you'll probably accidentally buy something - the neon assault of advertisements is a wonder to behold. I didn't...

I've spent a few days now with Windows Vista (Ultimate). It is the ultimate many things, but I sure hope that it's not the ultimate operating system. In a way it seems to me that Vista is sort of like a really shallow, hot girlfriend - You have to pay her lots of attention, work hard constantly to keep her happy and in return, she looks gorgeous and drives you absolutely insane with her stupidity and nagging... I'm talking particularly about User Account Control . This one single 'feature' has the potential to make people throw their machines across the room in all their shiny transparent aero glory. Essentially, the way it works is this: anytime you do anything that could possibly affect the configuration of your computer, Windows prompts you to enter your username and password again, to confirm that you really meant for the action to occur. This may seem like a cool idea. I understand the point. The theory goes that no nasty virus or spyware will ever be able...

Wow. It's really really cold here in Newfoundland. And by really cold, I mean really, really cold. The forecast low today was zero, and the forecast high was 1. Now normally, when the weather man is off by a degree or so, nobody really minds. But when it was the only degree we were going to get, I must admit I felt a bit jilted. In the end, the high (and the low!) today turned out to be just zero. There are flurries of snow blowing around, and it gets dark at half past four in the afternoon. My poor bald head is glowing red - I know, bring a hat.. Noted. Meanwhile, my anti-colleague, Simon (I do actually have some friends who aren't called Simon) , just rang me from Miami, where it was 28 degrees Celsius , and he was watching the sun set from his air-conditioned hotel. Nice...

Well, after a bunch of sleeping on the sidewalk in subzero temperatures, we finally managed to secure a Wii . Sleeping outside of a department store has never been on my list of things I wanted to achieve, and I don't think I would recommend it to anyone I liked. But, (and I'm sticking to my story) - I never really planned to sleep outside. Patrick and I drove down to our local Wal *Mart to try and persuade them to sell us one at midnight, to save my other plan of getting up at 6am and trying to find a console. Of course, when we arrived at Fair Lakes Mall, there were people camping out all over the place, at 11:30. The Wal *Mart guy laughed at us, and said - "Maybe if you arrived here at 8 this morning, like the guys out the front!" So, we unwittingly found ourselves in the line outside of Target. "Hang on", I Thought. "This isn't the kind of line that moves. We will be here all night..." But by then, four other people had already sat down ...

It's extremely cold. I feel like I've reached a new level of fanboydom. I'm sitting outside target at 1am, with my son, rugged up in sleeping bags, waiting for the Nintendo Wii, which is released tomorrow morning. At our last count, Pat and I were the 51st people in the line, for the alleged 80 Wii consoles. Blogging via Blackberry hurts my thumbs, so I'll post the outcome later...

Okay, so I'm not exactly immune to picking on Windows vista... But - I just installed the Release Candidate 2, and I have to say - I'm impressed. The installation process was so smooth and so easy - it only asked me two questions - what time zone are you in?, and; what desktop background would you like? These are easy questions. I like them. So far... so good...

Sometimes I wonder which is the more noble pursuit: Providing structured social commentary on the complex artifacts of the human society we live in, This includes things like keeping abreast of new technologies, discussing long-winded and entirely artificial constructs like records management, or: Reporting the simple delights of nature. The things that make me smile, that ring with all of us. The underlying humanist principles that don't need to be hugely detailed, or have whole industries built around them, because they are so built into us all that we appreciate them anyway. I've lost some of the piqueness I had when I set out to write this post, because I have spent the last few hours in a crowded bar in Dallas Airport , watching commercials(in between a game of American Football). Inspired by Wordsworth , and his boundless enthusiasm for the natural world, I idly both wandered and wondered the terminal, which is absolutely massive, and could almost be seen as a monument to...

You know, you have to keep a constant watch on the sneaky blogosphere. Sometimes your friends will just start blogging - without even telling you! Fortunately, there are lots of ways to find them. Technorati knows all (well, some stuff anyway...) Take that, Big Headed Simon! Subscribed :) (You know, six of the top eight hits on google for the phrase " Big Headed Simon " are actually about Big Headed Simon. I think he is the only one in the whole world!)

I'm proud to announce that TOWER Software (my employer) has recently unveiled it's new blog ( the RSS feed is here .) The plan is for TOWER to share some of it's insights and experiences developing TRIM Context, and solving Enterprise Content Management problems from around the world. I know, most of you are probably thinking.."that sounds really, really boring!", but hey - it's my life! You should check out some of the posts before you jump to any premature conclusions - I certainly plan to contribute a post or two, and feel free to drop by and leave a comment. The web is a two way medium, after all :)

I just accidentally pressed Ctrl + Shift + C in my new build of Firefox 2.0 for Windows. Check it out - a separate tab just popped up listing every style used on the page I was viewing, including a direct link to the CSS files themselves. Now, that's extremely cool. Stealing designs from people just got the tiniest bit easier! (Not that I would ever condone such an activity, of course :)

I have to vote in the US Senate Election Tomorrow. Okay, I don't have to vote, but being an Australian American, voting is something we do. Australia has compulsory voting, which I am overwhelmingly supportive of. People often assume that the point of compulsory voting is to somehow educate people about politics - to force them to have an opinion. The reality has nothing to do with voters, and everything to do with ensuring good governance - By forcing politicians to care about every voter, rather than just the ones who can be bothered to go down to the poll both and vote, it means that politicians are consequently forced to address the needs of all the citizens in the country. Under a non compulsory voting system, it's mainly the wealthy and educated who vote. I was a little shocked to find out that part of the aim of the campaign advertisements that have been confusing me for the last month on TV is not to encourage voters to vote for one candidate or another, but to discou...

Despite the traffic and the population, Virginia is really an amazingly beautiful and fertile place. Here's a few fall snapshots taken from my front yard, (except for the last one, which believe it or not was actually taken in my lounge room ...)

My brother Grae just launched his photoblog , at the enviable (well, for some of us), domain of http://taylor.net.au . EDIT: Oh, and speaking of things that are purdy, you should check out: http://www.jonathanyuen.com/main.html for some transcendental web flash magic,..

One startup at a time, I guess... Google just announced the acquisition of one of the coolest little wiki engines ever, JotSpot . I've always been quite a fan of the technology and the approach behind JotSpot . (Any company that has a regular hackathon is okay with me!)It will be great to see what google can do to bring the wiki to the masses. Wikis are definitely my favourite collaboration tools. All those other "big C" collaboration, joint editing instant messagey things (like Groove ) all seem to be a bit intimidating. Wikis are easy to use, and they have instant appeal - people can see the value really quickly. Which is kind of like Google, really...

From the random links department, two things that took my fancy, from opposite ends of the ethical spectrum: The Punk-O- Matic lets you compose a variety of authentic sounding cool punk tunes using Guitar Bass and Drums. Rock on!. mmmzr is an unpronounceable, yet maybe a little bit brilliant site which uses a pyramid style scheme to extract money from advertisers. Right up there with the million dollar homepage and 'wash-your-own-car' for ideas you wish you had thought of.

Parenting is one of those things I never really understood, I just do. I know there are heaps of books you can buy on the subject, and that lots of people must freak out because they're not doing it right, and then go buy those books. Or maybe parents in law buy them as a discreet way of telling their children's spouses that they're not doing it right, or maybe nobody buys them at all... Either way, my approach to parenting is really simple; children are people. They're often really short bizzare crazy people, but they're people none the less. I worry a bit about the supernanny and the baby whisperer training children to regimes and schedules. You can train children to behave according to your rules, the same way you could train a monkey or a goat, sure. But you don't treat people like that. All kinds of organisations from the Third Reich to Heaven's Gate have managed to successfully train people to behave in a particular way. They didn't get their...

I had the pleasure of getting an e-mail out of the blue from an old friend last week - thanks to the inter-connected world of the blogosphere. He'd ran across my blog (from Cam's blog ) and had read up to find out what it was I'd been doing since we parted ways in college. It was kind of weird to talk to someone after such a long time and have nothing much to say that he didn't already know! Dan's been adventuring in Indonesia for the last seven years, and he's finally 'sold out' and started publishing his writings. You should prime your rss readers (I found one that I love - this one !) and head on over to his new blog to get the latest updates on his progress -they'll be required reading around these parts. Welcome aboard, Dan-o!

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was trying to come to terms with exactly how to use the Novation Remote Midi Controller in conjunction with Reason... Well, I'm still trying to figure it out - I've thrown away nearly everything that I've created, but today I managed to create a song that was worthy of persistence. If you'd like to hear it, you can download it here . I figure I'm using about 2-3% of the software's features. Not even having the faintest idea how a synthesiser works, I'm viewing the exercise as something of a random knob-tweaking frenzy... So many buttons to push, so little time...

In Software Development Land, there is one kind of project that nobody wants to end up on. Identifying features of these projects often contain wildly unrealistic goals, crazed unrealistic timelines, a lack of adequate requirements or supporting technical infrastructure, and often, a combination of all of those things. These projects are affectionately termed 'Death March' projects. I know the name sounds a little extreme, but that's really what they are called. (Here's the wikipedia link to prove it.) I've just survived a project that has had me working crazy hours, weekends, public holidays, and basically any time that I wasn't asleep in an effort to pull one of these off. It all wrapped up today, and in the end, it wasn't that bad. Well, it was actually pretty bad in some ways. For example, my kids haven't seen me in 36 hours, and my wife hasn't actually kicked me in the balls , (but to be honest I wouldn't blame her if she did), so for the...

This was driving me crazy - here's an easy cut and paste solution to not being able to use the DOM to rename a node for lazy developers like me: public static XmlNode RenameNode (XmlNode node, string namespaceURI,string qualifiedName) { if (node.NodeType == XmlNodeType.Element) { XmlElement oldElement = (XmlElement) node; XmlElement newElement = node.OwnerDocument.CreateElement(qualifiedName, namespaceURI); while (oldElement.HasAttributes) { newElement.SetAttributeNode(oldElement.RemoveAttributeNode(oldElement.Attributes[0])); } while (oldElement.HasChildNodes) { newElement.AppendChild(oldElement.FirstChild); } if (oldElement.ParentNode != null) { oldElement.ParentNode.ReplaceChild(newElement, oldElement); } return newElement; } else { return null; } ...

On Friday the current amorphous collection of cells (and more importantly their digital replication instructions) that make up me passed a milestone: the completion of their 32nd lap around the giant mass of incandescent gas that brings life to the planet Earth. Or, to put it somewhat more concisely, it was my birthday. My Dad and my Congo-family had sent me some money in celebration of this momentous event, and despite my inclination to pay some bills, my Wife insisted that I spend it on something for myself. It's pretty rare for me to have some money that I have to spend on fun stuff. You know what? I discovered that if you check out the shops, there are a LOT of things you can buy. I mean a lot. And they all look really cool. So, after much prowling and perusal, I had narrowed my purchasing field down to the following. a) some kind of digital camera, or b) some kind of musical instrument. In the end, I decided I couldn't afford to buy the kind of camera I wanted, and yet I ...

I have a really sore neck this morning, from the Virgin Music Festival in Baltimore. My wonderful wife bought me two tickets for my birthday, so we found a kind hearted soul who wanted to play with my four kids for the day, and drove up the Beltway into Maryland. After parking the car about three kilometers away, we walked in the direction of the pulsing drums up to the pimlico race track , where the event was held. I felt a little old, hanging out with these kids, but we managed to sort of fit in.. (maybe?) Twenty Dollars for two beers was a bit steep...Old guy whinging at the bar. When I was a kid, me and my brothers would be driven around town in our big red family van, and Dad would blast The Who on the crappy cassette player. We grew up singing along to tunes like ' Boris the Spider' , ' Magic Bus ', and ' Can't Explain '. When I heard that The Who were re-forming and coming to town, I just had to go. To be honest, I thought they would probably suck. ...

Here's a truly special idea - via those crazy Thrashers , I ran into this intriguing article from The Economist, which points to the world of Negative Databases, and how they might be able to help the world of encryption and data security. In a world where sensitive data gets frequently lost, Data security folk are always trying to come up with the most secure way to store data. And it doesn't take a six year old to tell you that the best way to keep your data safe, is to not have it there in the first place. "Pshaw!", I hear you say, "You can't store it and not store it at the same time!", and in a way, you'd be right. But then, in another, more accurate way, you'd be a bit wrong. Consider the following statement: "All Ravens are Black" From here, you could make all kinds of crazy assertions about all black things being ravens, but these are incorrect, despite being amusing. What's not incorrect, is that: "All Non Black-Thin...

Simon has the rules of this blog meme over at Exceptionally Uncaught. I had to seriously look around for the closest book - the first two I found were "Good Night Goz", which I discounted because it only had eleven pages, and the websters dictionary, which I discounted because it didn't technically have any sentences - (well, no full stops, anyway, which I believe maketh the sentence) So I ended up with: Fax:202-333-8308. www.georgeowninn.com. Hotel George $$$$ Capitol Hill Modernistic Posters of the first president adorn the hotel, which attracts lobbyists, celebrities and others who dig hip surroundings and proximity to power. See Map P.102. From Washington DC for Dummies, 3rd Edition. ( I really have no idea how I came to own this book. No, honestly...) So , yeah - you're all 'it' and that...

I was shocked and stunned when I woke up this morning to hear of Steve Irwin's accident . I never met Steve personally - to be honest, for a while I thought of him as a bit of a joke - some hyperactive ocker maniac, giving us Aussies a bad name overseas. (I mean, over here, as soon as you say you're from Australia, it's a matter of time before an American asks you if you know the 'Crocodile Hunter'...) But that all changed the day I took my kids to visit the Australia Zoo , up on the Sunshine Coast, in Queensland. There, built around his parent's original reptile park, is a fantastic and huge zoo that is focused on protecting animals and educating people as to the way the natural world works. My Family and I spent the whole day attending shows and walks, and feeding Elephants and Kangaroos, and by the time I walked out, I felt privileged to have been a part of Steve and Terri's passion and enthusiasm for the natural world, and the way that they managed to m...

Having been living here for a little over three months now, I thought I'd share some of my thoughts about America... As Lindsay remarks , Americans (in America) are great people. I've met some really kind, smart and wonderfully warm people throughout my travels in America. Because there are so many people here, most Americans aren't easily surprised - so they tend to be pretty direct and open, which is a little different to people back home. I find myself much more inclined to make smalltalk with strangers, which is something I've always found awkward. Of course, there's always that element of being a zillion miles away from home, and extremely low chance of ever running into the same person twice... America is kind of a selfish place. There's a real 'hands-off' approach to government here. In many ways, its seems that Americans would rather 'Do-It-Yourself' than let the government help you. For instance, there's no Garbage Collection where ...

I was poring over Slashdot today (as nerds are want to do when they procrastinate), where I found an interesting article about Microsoft working with Mozilla to make firefox work better with Windows Vista. In between all the usual rantings and zealotry, there was an interesting idea raised - "Are Microsoft planning to ship Firefox with Vista?" Initially, I just Auto-Snorted and read on... But then later I came back to think about it... You know, if Microsoft (MSFT) is really serious about being seen as a company that's about innovation - one that is about embracing great ideas, this would be the perfect way to leave all those crazy slashdotters gaping slackjawed in their tracks. To regain a bit of the market trust that they lost. To get people to like the company more - maybe the way they feel about other giant companies... All that anti-trust stuff, lock-in and lock down stuff would just be blown away if they would include, on equal footing, the open-source browser as...

I decided it was time for a new HTML template - thanks to the folk over at oswd.org , makers of fine xhtml chicanery, I managed to piece together this kind of web 2.0 something or other thing using the magic of the blogger markup language. Nothing says 'web 2.0' like those wacky diagonal stripes in the header... I decided I wanted less "busy-ness", and then I decided I had too much whitespace (can you have 'too much' whitespace?) so I added my random coloured squares down the left. Interestingly, through some awesome mind-reading javascript programming, if you click one of the squares that best matches your mood, it will take you to a web page that allows you some insight into your true self. Anyway, I'll leave this in place for a while, and see how things go. There's a brand new version of blogger in beta now, so when that arrives, things will probably get shaken up some more...

Why is this so fun? It has only one button. And yet - I play it...

Well, It's official. Not content with being Australian, American and British, I'm now also an honorary Newfoundlander. In addition to being some of the friendliest and most fun people I've ever met, Newfoundlanders have a ritual that allows us mere CFA's (Come-From-Aways) to join their ranks as honorary Newfies. The process is called 'The Screech-In' and as far as I can tell, it usually takes place in a bar. George Street, in St John's is the proud holder of the Guinness world record for the highest ratio of bars to street - there are around 45 bars in about 500 feet of road. The aim of the Screech-In is to prove you can eat, talk and drink like a Newfie. This involves scoffing something horrible ( I had to eat a chunk of Bologna), drinking a shot of ' Screech ' - which is a pretty rough Jamaican rum (in earlier times, Newfoundlanders would trade saltfish with the Jamaicans for it) and when asked the tradtiional question: "IsyouaNewfunLanderCock...

On those languid hot summer days, I’d listen to the children shriek with mock annoyance, recalling the delightful pangs of irritated adults carried from my own childhood. The sun was hot, and it beat down on the tin roof of the Dalmeny House known to us as ‘Sea Eagles’. This place was as defining for me as holidays themselves. Sand in floorboard cracks, abandoned hand-me-down china and an expanse of green lawn strewn with eucalypt twigs that splayed awkwardly, giving way to the gravel that would hurt your toes on the way to the ever present even blue of the Pacific ocean. My major focus should probably have been on re-capturing the exuberance of a forgotten summertime with my children. In truth, it was on surfing. My mind was filled with transient snapshots of waves, frozen toppling into clear blue crystal arcs, or foaming lash-like streaks of spray blown up from the perfect off-shore winds. My mission that week was to catch another wave. It didn’t matter how big it was, or what shape ...

I don't know about you. But when I read my web fiction, I'm looking for one thing . And that one thing is neo-gothic post modern thriller, mystery action stories with undertones of historical religious zealotry, and slight Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy twinges that collide with Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a very Frank Miller, existential, harsh metropolitan, red, black, white and steel kind of way. So naturally, I'm pretty glad that Simon started writing Harsher Light: The Story of Dante Harsher. I wonder if Tornado Glory will get to make an appearance...

I think that Mikal's post on ' A day at the shooting range ' might have angered my Inner Hippy. Not that I want to prolong any talk of politics, but... You know how people often come out as 'politically opposed' to things, when in reality, they're frightened of them? (Of course, I'm generalizing, but most of the prejudiced xenophobic or pro-life or otherwise moralising politics seems to always stem from a fear of strangers, or homos, or God, or whatever...) Most of the time I can recognise that. And I'm able to set whatever personal prejudices I have aside and try to deal with the facts alone. But on the gun front, I'm just like the Fred Niles and Rush Limbaughs of the world, in the sense that my fear overcomes my judgment. Truth be told, I find the concept of applying human ingenuity and brilliance in engineering towards the 'science' of killing people to be absolutely terrifying. I'm afraid of guns. I'm also afraid of Death Adders....

Dean over at Thrasherville has been chronicling the story of TOWER Software's SDK wiki , which has, as of today, returned to the fold as being available to all (and more importantly, indexed by everyone's second brain .) The underlying principle of a wiki is that it is quick to publish. The word "Wiki-wiki", for which the modern wiki is named, means 'hurry-quick' in Hawaiian. (Not surprisingly, wikipedia has a great article on the subject...) When you create or edit a wiki article, there are no approvals, no hoops or editors involved - any change made is immediately visible to all visitors to the site. This very feature is what makes a wiki so scary, and so extremely valuable. You see, despite the fact that people invented bureaucracy, most people hate it. If I have to fill in a form just so, and then wait for a human to approve/edit/reject my article, chances are high that I just won't bother. Which means that everyone misses out on the knowledge I keep...

Okay, I know you're not supposed to click on your own ads, but I found this link to Cambrian House quite intriguing. Remember those guys who bought Mikal lunch? well, this is them, so they obviously have a pretty smart marketing team. It turns out that they also have a pretty neat idea, too. Or rather than just one, about a squillion... You know, If I had a dollar for every time someone said to me: "Hey, you're a computer nerd. You know what would be really cool? [insert some random weird person specific software idea] Now I'm sure that would make you a million dollars!" Well, then I'd have at least seven dollars. Which isn't really that impressive, but when you consider that there are at least 3 hundred thousand computer nerds out there, each with at least seven different [insert some random weird person specific software idea], Then that old longtail large number theory starts to kick in... Cambrian House are offering a battle ground where ideas can p...

Well, it's been a few weeks since my family and I arrived here in America - during this time, so much stuff has happened, and I just haven't had much time for updates. So, here's the highlights of the last few weeks as they stick in my head. I'll try harder to post regularly, but I'm not making any promises... My family settles into our new home for the next few years- an old, almost condemmned vinyl siding house with a faint smell of mold, and a backyard the size of a regulation soccer field, surrounded by giant green maple,oak and cherry trees. Yes, That's the lawnmower. I already hate it. I remember what it was like to move out of home, with borrowed furniture, mattresses on the floor, and never quite being able to find the exact implement you want to cook with. Our house is still very sparse, and has the unique, University-Student-two-minute-noodle Group House feel. Home, sweet home. Two Australian Software consultants walk into a crawfish bar in ...