Daniel's corner of the web
Rambles
Aprils Fool’s
Apr 1st
This blog post is NOT an April Fool’s joke, because it’s not a joke PLUS it’s being posted after midday. This post IS however about an April Fool’s joke I pulled this morning on a work colleague.
Analysing it later, I realised even thought it was put together relatively quickly (in the space of about 15 minutes), how well it was executed. There were a couple of ideas being thrown around between a few people, but all came to the conclusion that he would see straight through them. My idea was what was ultimately used.
The ‘Fool’ is a huge George Michael fan. He flew over to England to see his ‘final’ concert, and recently saw his Sydney concert. Why not tell him he had passed away… thinking more, in the past George has been in the new over drug use, so make that the reason (ie. seems viable). So we were deciding who could walk up and tell him. I know I couldn’t, and neither anyone else here could have done it with a straight face. A throwaway line by someone said ‘unless you could make it a newspaper article’. Instantly I thought of mocking up a news website and replacing the headline with ‘George Michael Dead at 46′ (after quickly looking up Wikipedia to check his age).
I quickly jumped on to news.com.au, took a screen shot from my favourite imaging application, The GIMP, and got to work. I found a picture of George which could be used as an obituary photo, pasted it over the current ‘breaking’ news photo, added the text over the image as the site would look, matched fonts, wrote up quick lead in to the article updated the newest news scroll to include the news and matched all the colour. I was initially going to get someone to send it to him as though someone had taken a screen shot.
Thinking that someone sending a screen show might have been just a little too obvious, I decided to create a quick website. I used the image as a background and made the page title the same as the actual site. I opened it up on his computer (as he was away from his desk at the time) and then overtyped the URL to be http://www.news.com.au (subsequently it’s a site which he visits frequently). Locked his computer and then hoped he got back before Midday… which he did.
As he unlocked his computer, he had Internet Explorer opened like the picture above and his jaw dropped “Oh NOOOOOOO, Oh NOOOOOO” everyone sitting around him were in on the joke and were trying to hide their laughter “I can’t believe it, George Michael is dead”… he reads the lead in I wrote out to everyone in absolute disbelief and saying he was just talking to someone about him. He then proceeds to call this person, she doesn’t believe him “No but it’s on the front page of news.com.au as breaking news, its real”. He finished that conversation and then started walking around the office, telling everyone as he went.
He eventually got around to another colleague who has access to news.com.au. She opened the site and couldn’t see it. The office manager who was in on the joke after he heard about it (after checking with us), quickly covered and said ‘Oh that must be the old one’… subsequently a few seconds later he was told it was an April Fools… who also told him who set it up. Initially I didn’t want to take responsibility for it, but seeing the reaction I wanted to take ALL responsibility for it. When he got back to his desk, all he wanted to know was how I did it.
The ‘Fool’ asked the manager to call up the person he had called to tell her it was an April Fools. As it turns out, she had called an additional 3-5 people and sent upwards of 10 text messages telling people of the ‘news’. It’s truly amazing how fast ‘news’ can travel!
Now, what did I learn from this?
- Choose a subject that is close to the Fools heart
- Make it believable (granted I could have made mine even more believable, however in the short time it worked)
- Don’t make it too unbelievable
- Don’t laugh too loud when you see their reaction
Starting my New Years Goals a little early..
Dec 12th
Since turning 30 last month, and spotting more grey hairs on my head each day, has really got me thinking. I certainly hope it’s not a mid-life crises as I hope to live well past 60!.
- Physically, I would be classed as overweight. A few years ago I was diagnosed with a Fatty Liver, which can be managed/reduced by weight loss. A side effect of a Fatty Liver is fatigue, which I seem to be suffering from more lately.
- Career wise I’ve been talking about getting my MCSE for years now but have never gotten around to actually getting it.
- 3 1/2 years ago I wrote an outline for 2 x 3D animated shorts (to be made in Blender). Thanks to a site I was on, I had a few people interested in helping me out. The site in question was shut down.. politicts etc, but as it goes it now exists at a different domain, the owner is working only on his projects… I don’t believe the site contains any of my data and I’ve still got all my work… that nothing has ever become of.
- Ever since I saw the “Wizards of Winter” Christmas light display video, I’ve wanted to created a computer controlled (synced with music) Christmas light display myself. I’ve found a site which have instructions on how to build a system which will allow me to do this. I’ll have to learn some basic electronics to build the system from scratch. I’ve had a couple of other ideas of how I can control/sync it to music (which to me programming the ‘shows’ would be quite easy).. it’s just finding the time (and money) to purchase all the components and build the control system (which could potentially take a month of my spare time to build).
- Building / finishing a CMS (Content Management System). Following on from my previous post, I want to build, or more continue building the CMS which I’ve written, eventually to the point of releasing it to the masses. I have an idea in my head for the model of it which will make it VERY modular and easy to expand.
- The final thing is my music. I’ve got all the equipment and software to record, it just seems at the moment I don’t have the time (and space) to record. Granted a lack of motivation doesn’t help either.
SOOOOOOOOO…….
I guess the very first thing I have to do and commit myself to doing is to get off my butt and get motivated!
Addressing each point above:
- My health comes before everything, so first to address is weight loss! I believe I’ve improved my diet recently and I admit I do have servings on the larger size some times (such as 5 Wheetbix for breakfast.. my excuse.. stops me snacking). The way I can reduce my weight the most is through exercise. An easy start every day is getting off the bus first stop in the city and walking to my office. Aside from it being faster some days, it’s a good 10 minute walk (at my pace). Next would be stepping on my exercise bike at home which I hardly use or going for walks with my Wife and Son. I wouldn’t get the same work out going on those walks purely because I’d be walking at a much slower pace not raising my heart rate. This will be ongoing during the year (average weight for the start of December 138kgs).
- MCSE. Motivation.. being a self study course and not having time restraints for sitting exams I believe is where I’ve failed in obtaining this in the past. Compared to my other projects, his should be a priority. How do I do it… set aside time, read my books and set dates as to when I will be sitting the tests. I’ll post my progress on this.
- 3D movies.. Whilst they are fun I think they will be my lowest priority. Reason being a) it’s just for fun, b)it’s going to take a lot of time and other things should come before them. In saying that.. I might spend some time here and there and blog my updates with that.
- Christmas Lights.. Well the deadline for this is Obvious… ideally lights up for first week of December. I’ll need to prototype this first (and write the code to be used late), which I can do earlier in the year, then mid year start to build the hardware, after that more testing, then designing the actual light ‘show’ during November, installed for December. In the next week I’ll put up my idea as to how I will achieve the final product.
- CMS.. The website I manage goes live in August, so I guess getting the code up to the next version by then would be the best idea. In saying this, I’ve recently discovered an established CMS which looks promising and expandable, so I don’t know if I might look in to creating ‘modules’ for that instead.
- Music.. I go through stages of motivation.. I actually played guitar for the first time in a long time the other night. I recorded a couple of tracks for a friends song. If that comes about I’ll post the final mix up here. But I do want to write and record. Do I set a goal of 1 song per month, as opposed to the write and record an album in February (or do I just do that?) I think as long as I ‘Noodle’ occasionally to keep the juices flowing, recording will come naturally.. and I’ll post the results here of course.
Well that certainly was a mouthful :-S But it now exists and I’ve said it, so I’ll come back in 12 months and see where I’m at.
Sydney Lindy Exchange Website
Dec 7th
Well it has been a while. I’ve actually been quite busy the past few months.
Outside of work a fair chunk of my time has been devoted to a rewrite of the core code of the Sydney Lindy Exchange website. I’ve been it’s Web Admin for 5 years now. What started as a few HTML pages the first year with a simple form mailer for registration has now progressed to an (almost) full CMS.
The rewrite allowed me to break the code in to easier to manage chunks/modules of code. I didn’t achieve everything I wanted to this year as I just ran out of time. Early on whilst re-coding the site, I wanted it to be developed around a ‘Form builder and manager’ interface, as the main purpose of the site is registration for the event which is a form.
I did make quite a bit of headway with the form builder, however it was starting to get clunky and the deadline approached faster than I realised, so I ended up rehashing the rest of the code.
I did also remove all tables out of the layout this year thanks to css, however realised after the event when I was showing the site off to a collegue that the site didn’t display correct in IE6 thanks to it’s wierd and wonderful way of processing CSS :-S.
The other big challenge I had with this site was a mailing list. In the past I had a script which bulk sent all the email messages at once. This worked the first year, however second year not all recipients got the messages. I found out after the event had ended the reason for this was that a limitation of the host was 200 email messages (or more recipients) per hour. So this year I wrote a script which a cron job runs every 5 minutes to send a number of emails. I need to do more work on this so all email from the site (registrations etc) need to be run through the mail queue, plus better management of that to ensure that 200 emails per hour is not met.
I still have all the code for the Form Builder, so in the new year I hope to look at that again.
(And yes this post did take a month to write :-S)
Flying
Aug 11th
Well in my current job I’ve done a fair bit of flying. There was a time for about 1 1/2 years where I didn’t go anywhere, however in the last couple of months I’ve been to Brisbane, Melbourne and this morning I’m flying down to Canberra. Today is different in the fact that it’s just a day trip and all I’m doing is packing up the office as we are closing it down.
I enjoy flying, so on that side I’m lucky. However being very much a familiy man, I don’t like being far away from my wife and son.
I haven’t posted much (as I always seem to say) because I’ve been too busy or I just haven’t had much to say.
I made a goal at the beginning of the year to record an album…. I want to get that done, however I don’t know if I will. I set a goal last month to write a song for a competition… I didn’t end up writing it.
I don’t know if it’s because i keep making excuses or if I dont’ manage my time right or if I’m not confident in what I do.
Anyway, QF803 is boarding for Canberra now so I had better end this post and jump on board.
Literally a pain in the back
May 12th
On Sunday in Brisbane, I started to get a back pain in my lower back, just off to the left hand side. Monday it was still there and started to make me walk funny almost as it if was in my hip. Monday I hobbled around the Zoo after I flew back from Brisbane. I was in the office on Tuesday and planned on leaving about midday… got out at 7pm due to some mail problems at my company. I worked from home Wednesday, had Thursday and Friday off. Wednesday morning it had moved up my back slightly and was a constant pain. The pain has gradually been getting better… it’s still not right..
The doctor put it down as ‘musculoskeletal back injury’ on my medical certificate. It’s now the following Monday and I’m still in some pain… Stretching and pain killer are pretty much all I can do… I’ll give it another week and hopefully it should fully recover… ready for Melbourne at the end of the month (which will be organised soon).