The Peasants are Revolting

...and the Wave crashes

2009-10-30T15:19:00.001+11:00

Just when I thought I'd found the perfect use for Google Wave, the surf gods conspire against me. The team I'm on has quickly become what my colleague has deemed "Wilful misusers of technology," with email discussions commonly and rapidly deteriorating to one-line responses devoid of a greeting or farewell remark - even a name or first initial.

So musing that we've all begun to use email as though it were a group text chat (one-line responses and all), I suggested we try using Google Wave instead. After all it nicely and neatly keeps conversations in a lovely, convenient single thread that doesn't weigh down the inbox - and even enables you to engage in nearly synchronous communication. What's not to like?

Unfortunately that surboard may have pearled, with Wave having crashed at least 3 times on me in the last 30 minutes, culminating in the gorgeous and yet equally frustrating outage notification included seen above.

The moral of the story is, while I'm not certainly not ready to turn my back on Wave - it is still in the preview state - I'm now much more reluctant to rely upon it in any meaningful way. Give it time though, Slater wasn't built in a day.

Posted via email from Mike Bogle

Sydney University

2009-10-22T16:58:00.001+11:00

Two people I respect

2009-01-22T14:05:00.001+11:00

This came through Twitter just now. Quite a powerful image if you ask me.

Doctor Who according to a 4 year old

2008-12-30T23:10:00.002+11:00

Maddie asked me today whether Doctor Who was an owl, who the Garlics were (Daleks) and why they were the baddies. Surely there's a satirical comic strip in there somewhere.

Comment Grief

2008-12-28T21:19:00.002+11:00

Arrggggg. Due to YouTube recently bringing in support for wide-screen clips I've changed my template. Previously the clips would spill over into the right nav and looked pretty wonkey. However having just made the changes I've discovered that many of my previous posts have been set to disable commenting, which is not what I want.

It's not the template's fault that comments have been disabled mind you (nor Blogger's for that matter). I was using a 3rd party commenting tool known as Disqus for a while, and they required the native Blogger setting be set to disabled in order to implement the tool properly. Having switched templates though I had to reset the HTML, which removed all the customisation I'd done and reimplemented the comment's disabled option that I'd set. Got that?

Unfortunately the only way to resolve this seems to be going back through each post one-by-one and changing the settings at the post level, which at this point is too tedious to consider.

All posts from here on out should be ok, but this may not be the case for the older posts. Apologies for any inconvenience - not that I get many comments anyway ;)

Beach Safety

2008-12-28T20:53:00.003+11:00

This is a great video that carries an important message regarding beach safety.

I grew up in the beach community in Southern California and spent many, many summers body surfing, boogie boarding, surfing and just playing around in the water. So I'm quite comfortable around the ocean. And yet when I first came to Australia many years ago I made a very important discovery about the ocean - beaches are not all the same.

Different regional, geographic, oceanographic, geologic, and meteorological conditions yield different beach conditions. So just because you grew up in the oceans around Southen California - or elsewhere - doesn't mean you know anything about the beaches in Australia.

My first time out in Aussie waters I was amazed at how chaotic the currents were under the surface. In Southern California the currents tend to flow one direction, but in Aussie waters - at least insofar as I've experienced them so far - these rules don't necessarily apply, and in fact a single column of water can experience currents flowing from many different directions at different depths. Aussie waters are a much different beast.

Initially it seemed silly to resign yourself to only a certain section of beach when there were miles to choose from, but then after venturing out into the water the first time, the concept of "stay between the flags" made perfect sense to me.

Now having children, the significance of beach saftey is even more pronouced. It's critical to respect the waters we swim in, because things are not always as they appear on the surface.

Physical Caffeine Addiction

2008-12-28T17:10:00.002+11:00

Hmmm, interesting epiphany. I go a day and a half without coffee and find myself overcome by migraines and vomiting out the door of our stationwagon in Katoomba carpark. I drink a coffee, migraine disappears.

What to do, what to do...

Sick Fynn

2008-12-11T19:19:00.001+11:00

Sick Fynn
Originally uploaded by acousticdad

Greetings from the realm of phlegm and snot.

Snow

2008-11-22T16:39:00.002+11:00

Brilliant!

2008-11-20T20:15:00.001+11:00

Via the SMH: "Saying they were tired of YouTubers "ripping us off", British comedy troupe Monty Python have struck back, launching their own channel on the video-sharing site."

Go there now, quickly: http://youtube.com/MontyPython.

I love you guys - rock on!

Gitmo goes, vows Obama - World - smh.com.au

2008-11-17T13:20:00.000+11:00

This just read:

Gitmo goes, vows Obama - World - smh.com.au: "US President-elect Barack Obama says he will shut down the 'war on terror' internment camp at Guantanamo Bay and rebuild 'America's moral stature in the world' during a major interview aired on Sunday."

About bloody time.

Panic averted

2008-10-30T14:17:00.004+11:00

Just went to my primary blog and to my horror found a large grey page with "under maintenance" in big bold letters.

Problem is, I didn't take down the site for maintenance. So I grew concerned.

So I tried to log into the admin area, and I got the same message. I grew more concerned.

I tried one of my other sites. Same message. Another one of my sites. Same message.

I started to panic.

Then I contacted my Host and was told in a very blunt, unappreciative I-have-to-meet-my-KPI sort of terseness:

"Your server is being updated this process will take another 45 minutes to an hour and then this issue will clear. "

Thanks for the advanced notice chumps.

Hamster Dance

2008-10-11T16:00:00.001+11:00

Maddie's made me watch this 4 times in a row so far and I couldn't let the clip go unshared - or the experience unendured elsewhere...not sure which

Learning Commons on Lively

2008-10-10T10:16:00.005+11:00

A thought occurred after my last post that I haven't mentioned Google Lively here. For that matter I haven't mentioned much of anything here - for ages now. Sorry about that, I've gotten a bit obsessed over at my other blog and have been seriously neglecting this one.

I have no intention of hanging this blog out to dry, as I believe in separating work and personal life. Not that my work colleagues can't and probably haven't found this blog (or that I'm worried about it), merely that I talk work on one blog and non-work on this blog.

Anyway in case you didn't know, Lively is Google's offering in the increasingly crowded virtual environments space. Users create and decorate their own rooms which can then be embedded in websites or blogs - or from the Lively site directly.

I've written up a more indepth post about this here so I won't reiterate. If you're interested in taking a look at the room please feel free to use mine, embedded above. Access is via a Google account, and if you haven't created an avatar yet you can quickly do it using the default options.

Angry Avatar

2008-10-10T00:34:00.001+11:00

Angry Avatar
Originally uploaded by acousticdad

Some days I can sympathise with this poor guy. Fortunately today wasn't one of them.

Greetings

2008-10-05T19:24:00.000+11:00

Identity Crisis

2008-09-19T11:51:00.002+10:00

My unit just hired a new employee named Michael Bogle today.

My place in the universe is now in doubt...

(That's an esoteric thought; my job isn't in jeopardy)

Cry of the Young Footy Fan

2008-07-20T17:22:00.005+10:00

Picture this:

Late Sunday evening. Maddie is starting to get tired and says she wants to watch some ABC Kids. We happen to have some old recordings from several months ago, so I start to put it on. The she sees the Rabbit-Ohs are playing the Warriors and says "Stop Daddy, the Footy's on! Go Blues! I want to watch this."

I had to laugh until she said she's barracking for New Zealand. This comes after wanting Queensland to win State of Origin.

She must get that from her mum...

Why does 'nobody like Manly'?

2008-07-04T21:30:00.002+10:00

Tonight's Friday Night Footy match was just brilliant. Manly played the Gold Coast in Queensland and both teams gave it a fantastic effort.

There is one thing about the match that puzzled me though. During one of the cuts to the crowd the camera focused in on a Manly fan who was holding a sign that said:

"Nobody likes us and we don't care."

Why does nobody like Manly?

Fynn at 13 days

2008-07-01T20:31:00.002+10:00

Just popping in for a quick hello as night-times are always exciting round about bedtime. Lis for example is currently trying to settle both children at once - from experience we've discovered that I'm anything but helpful and best kept away from the action.

In my defense it's not from lack of trying, she's just a bit more popular than me at bedtime. I wonder what she has that I don't...

Watercolours & wee

2008-06-21T20:26:00.001+10:00

The stork has arrived

2008-06-19T05:10:00.005+10:00

Finny was born the morning of 18 June just before 7 am. He was born at home in a birthpool in the sunroom just after dawn after a speedy 2 hr 52 minute labour - though if you tack on the 2 weeks worth of prelabour it brings the entire event out to more like 14 days :)

As far as the details go:

Griffynn Riley Bogle
Born: 6:52 am on 18 June 2008
Weight: 4.380 KG / 9.6 LB
Head: 37 CM
Length: 55 CM

[Note: at this point we're still deciding on how Griffynn is going to be spelt, so this may not be the final version :) The nickname of Finny has well and truly stuck (though the spelling of that may change too).]

Maddie awoke around 5 am and was present for the entire thing. She was a dedicated and helpful member of the birth team who helped cut the cord and held her baby brother only minutes after birth. She was quite excited about the experience overall and has been singing songs to him and giving him kisses constantly since then and he seems to find her voice really soothing.

Since then Fynn has been having a bit of trouble getting turned around to normal night-time sleeping. That's not really surprising really - there was no bedtime and no curfew in utero, so we expect it to be a while before anything resembling a normal sleep routine emerges.

Take last night for example...

Disqus wierdness

2008-06-17T14:22:00.002+10:00

For some reason my last post - sent from Flickr - reverted to the native commenting tool as opposed to Disqus. This is just to confirm Disqus is still configured. Something strange going on here...

Fire and Brimstone in SecondLife

2008-06-15T23:45:00.002+10:00

Fire and Brimstone in SecondLife
Originally uploaded by acousticdad

I've historically not done too much experimentation with SecondLife, largely because of the massive learning curve required to acclimate to the virtual realm. However after a friend expressed interest in exploring all the oddities this realm has to offer I decided what the heck.

Based on what we ran across tonight, odd is indeed a good way to describe it - because we saw some STRANGE stuff.

First there was the giant space creature dueling with a spaceman (not pictured here), followed by a black wizard and his pyrotechnic displays, and then last but not least, a Sith Lord smoking a 4 foot-long joint and accompanied by his pet spider.

In the case of the above picture, I have no idea who this guy/girl is, but I shudder to think of what was involved in designing the pyrotechnic display here. There are flaming walls and bolders falling from the sky for God's sake. Earlier he had lightning and thunder shooting from the sky. Weirdness.

I have to say I'm still at a loss as to what you do in SecondLife - though I'm told some organisations have begun to use it for meetings and even educational exploration. Given the sheer immersion that's possible in all this I can see where people would perceive opportunities in the realm. However based on my own experiences I think the learning curve could pose some substantial barriers to uptake.

Still, when you've got tigers, flames and wizards to watch in the meantime, I think people might be willing to put up with the early learning process.

What's the deal with Rugby Union?

2008-06-14T21:29:00.002+10:00

Hanging out in the lounge room watching the Wallabies play the Irish in Rugby Union and I'm seeing some really odd plays going on. I've been an NRL fan exclusively since moving here, so there's a lot I don't know. Can someone please explain the differences between the two?

Links for 2007-05-02 [del.icio.us]

2007-05-03T00:00:00-07:00

Links for 2007-03-21 [del.icio.us]

2007-03-22T00:00:00-07:00

Arkansas Traveler (Bluegrass) PDF File
ArkansasS2M1.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Flatpick Jam Tabs
PDF files
The Bluegrass Guitar Home Page
Arkansas Traveler - The Bluegrass Guitar

Links for 2007-03-20 [del.icio.us]

2007-03-21T00:00:00-07:00

Blackberry Blossom (1) Tab Page - The Bluegrass Guitar Home Page

Links for 2007-03-19 [del.icio.us]

2007-03-20T00:00:00-07:00

Playground - Make and Do - Print and Colour - Peppa Pig

Links for 2007-03-18 [del.icio.us]

2007-03-19T00:00:00-07:00