This is my response to Frank Arrigo and Brian H Masden:

via LOLCat Builder

If you don’t know what the LOLCat craze is all about, Wikipedia has the answers (as usual).

Are you scared yet?

Oh - and the original image is mine - took it in Austria, actually.

Since Windows Live Writer, Beta 2 seems to be chucking a hissy fit about having so many photos on one page, here is part 2.

See Part 1 for more photos, and information.

More than a downpour
Very heavy rains filling up the rail lines, and making it impossible for trains to run. 

Leaky Roof at Civic Train Station. Friday afternoon.
Even being under cover doesn’t mean you’ll stay dry.

Fine Sunny Morning
The garden had very little damage, surprisingly enough.   Saturday Morning (Early)

Robyn & Margaret’s new gum trees.
The base of the bigger tree extended across the driveway and another 5 meters or so.

Someone has a muddy pool.
This house down was only finished about 3-4 months ago.

Interesting location for a tree.
I don’t think this was part of the design specs.  This was, however, one of the worst cases along the point that I saw. Most places were missed.

Scattered Palm Fronds

Fire Department making some downed power lines safe

High-flying Arborist
This guy gets lifted up to the top of the tree by crane, and then proceeds to hack said tree apart with his chainsaw.

The heavy-towing truck come to get the crane out of a muddy driveway gets stuck in the same muddy driveway. 

The crane got out, and now helps the tow-truck out.

The crane and tow-truck together dug someone a new swimming pool - although, I’m not too sure he’s that pleased it’s in his driveway.

Energy Australia guy fixing something.
Hey, you missed our place - come back!

Friday really wasn’t a good day. I missed my bus by about 2 minutes, the taxi I called took 20 minutes to get here, and when I finally got to the train station - they were running 30+ minutes behind schedule.  All up, I got to work about 45 minutes late.

A few hours later, I learned that a ship - the Pasha Bulker - had grounded off Nobbies Beach - about 1KM from work. Apparently it was/is visible from the top floor of our building. That caused a bit of excitement, but apart from the strong winds, and heavy rain - no one was terribly concerned.

At lunch, I ventured out in a brief lessening in the wind and rain to get something to eat. There was bits of tree branches, and… stuff lying on the ground. I (jokingly) described it as a war-zone in a Twitter message

By the time 4:30pm rolled around, I’d had enough, and thought I should probably catch the earlier train home, just incase there were more delays. Normally, I catch a train at about 5:20, which meets the last bus out to Coal Point. Missing that, especially on a Friday night, means a 40 minute or more wait for a Taxi to come from a surrounding area.

(Caution, Long Blog Post - also a few pics too)

(more…)

I’ve been using Gmail for quite a while now, and I’ve grown rather attached to it - having searchable access to my email anywhere I have internet access is great.

Apart from universal access, The other great thing is the spam detection stuff. For the most part, it does a great job. In the last 30 days or so, it successfully picked up nearly 10,000 spam emails. 

GMail’s spam detection is also my greatest annoyance. 

Gmail Needs a “Whitelist” function

I’m subscribed to a fairly high-traffic mailing list.  I’ve got GMail set up to automatically tag the mailing list traffic, and push it into the archive so it doesn’t clog up my inbox.  

However, for some reason every day several of the emails will get marked as spam, for no apparent reason. There doesn’t appear to be a way to ‘white list’ the mailing list address either.  So, every day, I’ll miss out on certain posts in a thread, which will make it difficult to read. Sure enough, if I go look in the spam folder - there they are. 

Gmail also needs a “Blacklist” function

Because of certain choices I made a while back, I need a ‘catch-all’ enabled on my domain (ideally it’d be a partial catch-all, but my host doesn’t permit that). For some reason my host also enables mail on the mailserver domain with the same rules as the primary domain.  This leads to really large quantities of spam being received.

Google catches the majority of it - however there are certain things that I can filter that I can guarantee are spam.  Google however doesn’t let me add a rule to let me push things into the Spam box, so it can learn from these - instead, I have to push them into the Trash.  Which works much the same as the Spam box, but instead of GMail learning from these, it just deletes them.

Just a few photos up, but I only took a few during the morning (being busy listening the rest of the time)

On Wednesday Microsoft released an update to it’s rather cool blogging tool - Windows Live Writer.  Thanks to Frank’s post (and Paul’s IM while I was at the GDD) for letting me know.

They’ve fixed the problem where trying to hilight something in the post header caused either the duplication of the header or throwing errors.  They’ve also made it easier to add title and rel information to a link.   There’s still no way to edit the link template used for images (eg: when you’re linking to a larger version of an image from a thumbnail)

The original three things I wrote about back in March- Image Quality, Dictionary Support, and Integrated Proxy support still aren’t fixed, which is disappointing.

The most noticeable change is the inline spell-checking a-la Word 97. However because live writer uses a built-in dictionary (US-English), and has no way of changing the dictionary - it’s a pain in the backside any time I try and write UK-English words like ‘organise’ and  ’colour’.

Overall - it’s a welcome update to an aging beta.  It’s interesting that there’s still no comparable application for the Windows platform (that I’ve seen).

Having Google Reader available when I’m not connected to the ‘net, is something I’ve wanted for a while. 

Luckily for me (I think) Google released Google Gears the other day - and made Google Reader implement it.

The idea itself is good - Being able to read your RSS feeds when you’re not connected to the ‘net, and have it sync back to the “mothership” (as the Googler’s put it) when you reconnect - marking read items as read, and downloading new content.

There’s a few key things missing though:

#1 - No Automatic Synchronisation.
I was hoping this would be something like Outlook in Exchange mode - i.e, I connect to a network, it realises it’s connected and updates all my items, sends mail that needs sending, downloading new bits, etc.

Google Reader however, doesn’t do this - it requires you to hit the Offline button, whence it takes a snapshot of some 2000 items (read? unread? latest? who knows).  Ideally it should do the synchronisation in the background - i.e when you’re connected, and it’s setup for offline usage - it should just sync in the background.

#2 - Doesn’t download even basic post resources (like images).

I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER without images? ’nuff said. 

PS: Even if you’re actually connected, but that Offline button is pressed, you don’t get images.

#3 - Doesn’t remember previously sync’ed items (I think)

I go online. Then click offline - it pops up this little progress meter:

Once it’s finished syncing - if I hit online again, then offline - it pops up the same sync thingy, and takes just as long to download.

Okay, so Gears is a very very early beta*, and this is just the first implementation of Reader Offline, but I do hope they’ll fix these things and make it a truly seamless experience in later iterations.

* Aaron Boodman said something like “Google Gears is a real beta, not like our usual level of Beta” about a dozen times during his talk.