Webmonger

Peddling web wares to occupy oneself with trifles

Alastair Campbell ‘is a tabloid newspaper’

Dec 1

Posted by webmonge in Politics | No Comments

I was thinking about Alastair Campbell and his little rants against the press this week and was amazed at his chutzpah.

I mean here is a man who spent his time in the previous government manipulating the press. I was thinking that as annoying as tapping into a c-list celeb’s voicemail to see how many times she has split up with her boyfriend, that the consequences are nowhere near as grave as 1000s of killed Iraqis. But hey what is the life of thousands of people that you are partly responsible for killing and maiming when you can have a cheap dig at ‘the right wing press’ or the ‘Murdoch machine’.

We watched over years as Alastair Campbell and other spin doctors manipulated the press and the country to further their own political agendas and to have the ability with a straight face to criticize the press for what he has made a career out of takes tremendous ram sized balls.

I was thinking all of this and then read this wonderful article on the daily mash

Repeat after me

“Forty five minutes. Invasion of Iraq. No weapons.”

using the tilde on the mac keyboard

Aug 18

Posted by webmonge in Software | No Comments

If you need to type a tilde on a mac keyboard, you just need to press ‘Option’ ‘n’

This will give you this charachter: ~

NOTE: The ‘Option’ key on the mac keyboard is actually labelled ‘alt’. It has been a source of frustration for me that a company like Apple which prides itself on usabilty of its products would have such a quirk. I so often have to think when I see people write Option key and I look down and think is that the alt key or one of the other ones.

Tilde meaning

From Spanish tilde via the Latin titulus which means superscript.


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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-06-26

Jun 26

Posted by webmonge in Blogging | No Comments

  • testing 'Twitter Tools' from TweetDeck to wordpress widget #
  • testing from Twitter Tools widget on wordpress enabled site to twitter #

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Twitter Updates for 2011-06-22

Jun 22

Posted by webmonge in Blogging | No Comments

  • testing 'Twitter Tools' from TweetDeck to wordpress widget #
  • testing from Twitter Tools widget on wordpress enabled site to twitter #

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New Final Cut Pro X

Jun 22

Posted by webmonge in Software, Video | No Comments

The new Final Cut Pro which was launched yesterday looks like a very different way of doing things when it comes to video editing.

The biggest catch I have seen so far is you can’t yet import Final Cut Pro 7 files into Final Cut Pro X. This is a glaring oversight. You can import from iMovie though! We are looking to buy a copy this week for the new Color matching tools but we have 5 people that currently work on the previous version and the project we are working on is not yet finished. So if we can’t import a Final Cut Pro 7 project, I don’t see this as useful until you start a new project from scratch. Very odd decision from Apple.

See these reviews of Final Cut Pro X

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How to add Google Friend Connect to WordPress

Jun 21

Posted by webmonge in Blogging, Marketing, Software | 2 Comments

Adding a bit of community to your own WordPress blog is easy with Google Friend Connect.

I just completed adding it to this site and it took about five minutes.

Adding Google Friend Connect in a few easy steps

  1. Go to Friend Connect at http://www.google.com/friendconnect/home/ and click on Get Started
  2. Agree to the Terms
  3. Fill in the short form (Website name, Website URL, Website Language) and press continue
  4. Get the code for the “Members Gadget” – tweak the colours to suit your site
  5. Go back to your site and login to – WordPress Admin -> Design -> Widgets (if you are using a widget enabled theme)
  6. Add a Text Widget, give it a good title (I called my ‘Friends’, and insert the copied HTML code from step 4. into the the Widget.)

Job Done.

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Doing the impossible for the ungrateful

Jun 21

Posted by webmonge in Blogging, Design | No Comments

It sometimes seems impossible working on websites. I am sure you know the feeling, the non-existing brief, the ever expanding fixed price brief and then the worst in my opinion is the charity help-me brief.

I think I have done my final favour piece of work. I spent about 4 days all in all helping a charity design a website and due to health issues in the family, I couldn’t do the build. So I received a quote from a developer that I have worked with for years. The quote came in “too high” for the charity. So in the end the charity got one of their own friends to build it.

Now this is great for me. The thing that really niggles though, is the guy who built the site has now credited himself with designing the site. In the standard bottom right hand corner of the website, he has put a link to his portfolio site. I would be deeply embarrassed to do such as thing. His words are:

“Working from an initial colour scheme and rough front page layout plan I put together a website to meet their requirements with social networking links and a live twitter feed.”

The rough front page layout was a fully designed site with more than one template provided in a photoshop PSD file you little dork. The site was updated and there were some tweaks but on the whole the layout is exactly as I provided. The reason this irks is for many reasons.

  1. In general if you do ‘free’ work for people, it is less appreciated. Also the cheaper a piece of work is, the less it is appreciated in my opinion. Just don’t do it unless it is for your wife/family etc.
  2. Actually claiming something is your work when it isn’t is such a strange thing to do. Sure we all look to others for inspiration, sometimes a little more but to pass off work that you didn’t do as your own, it a strange form of self deception.
  3. We went back to the guy who set up the charity and his response was “The design came from lots of place”.  This is true and often is, he proved me with a paper and pencil sketch of what he wanted on the homepage and I used that. I think he thinks therefore he designed it.

So in future when someone says “can you just do this for me…”, think hard about it before hand.

I have held off naming the charity as I feel slightly petty about this but somehow it really narks me. I am tempted to load up the paper sketch I received, my final design and a screen shot of the final website but I don’t want to name the charity.

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Parrot joke

Feb 17

Posted by webmonge in Humour | No Comments

A young man named John received a parrot as a gift. The
parrot had a bad attitude and an even worse vocabulary.

Every word out of the bird’s mouth was rude, obnoxious
and laced with profanities. John tried and tried to
change the bird’s attitude by consistently saying only
polite words, playing soft music and anything else he could
think of to ‘clean up’ the bird’s vocabulary.

Finally, John was fed up and he yelled at the parrot.
The parrot yelled back. John shook the parrot and the
parrot got angrier and even more rude. John, in desperation,
threw up his hands, grabbed the bird and put him in the
freezer. For a few minutes the parrot squawked and kicked
and screamed.
Then suddenly there was total quiet. Not a peep was heard
for over a minute.

Fearing that he’d hurt the parrot, John quickly opened
the door to the freezer. The parrot calmly stepped out
onto John’s outstretched arms and said “I believe I
may have offended you with my rude language and
actions. I’m sincerely remorseful for my
inappropriate transgressions and I fully intend to do
everything I can to correct my rude and unforgivable behaviour.”

John was stunned at the change in the bird’s attitude.
As he was about to ask the parrot what had made such a
dramatic change in his behaviour, the bird spoke-up, very
softly, “May I ask what the turkey did?

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Still prefer youtube over vimeo

Feb 17

Posted by webmonge in Humour, Video | No Comments

Vimeo is still much lovelier in look and feel and we would prefer to use it for all our videos but youtube supports playback on the iPhone/Ipad. This makes it a much better option currently for playing back your videos.

Dalahäst horse (Dala, Dalecarlian) Time lapse video

Hedgehog in the Fog by Yuri Norstein

Feb 17

Posted by webmonge in Design, Video | No Comments

Hedgehog in the Fog by Yuri Norstein

Russian Animations from the 70s

We have started viewing short films while we eat lunch instead of the mindless violence of Half Life 2 deathmatch. Today’s viewing was the 11 minute Hedgehog in the Fog by Yuri Norstein from 1975. We are all Miyazaki fans in the office and he has said that Hedgehog in the Fog is one of his favorite films which lead me to dig it out. I managed to track it down on a Masters of Russian animation DVD.

If you get a chance to watch it, it is beautifully animated and the fog was made using paper and bringing it closer and closer to the camera lens frame by frame.

You can watch it on vimeo

Yuriy Norshteyn – Hedgehog in the Fog from S?NDAY on Vimeo.

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