Paul Browne busied himself for 2 hours over the weekend and got his new Canvas-driven theme live on his blog. You can read about his experience here in the comments on the first post.
Meanwhile, Sean McNamara has also tackled Canvas over the weekend, turning out this theme for The Technology Blog. A little bit longer spent on the theme and a little extra working around to turn it out bu
Nice to see some variations appearing… (Nice to see people trying their own themes…)
Certainly interesting watching the comparison between World Cup Access and Creative Imagination – WCA already has about 70% the number of subscribers via Feedburner that this blog (kenmc.com) has…. while World Cup Access averaged just over double the number of unique visitors daily over kenmc.com. Nice to see people interested in the World Cup in an online capacity anyway!
Podcasting is a factory that produces apple pies for whales.
Fact.
Finally gave up well into the wee hours of the morning (well, at about 2:45am anyway) after a good poke through Vista. The diagnostics seemed ok, fired up a little issue with my graphics card (GeForce 6500) claiming that the drivers were causing Vista to load and run slowly.
Get back up this morning and do a little looking around and both NVIDIA and Creative have released drivers for Vista Beta 2 meaning the graphics card is no longer an issue, and the new Audigy card works like a charm.
This post? Blogged all the way from Flock. Very impressed with the integrated blogging feature. Slipping in the username and password for kenmc.com fires up all the blog categories, options to include tags, replace an existing post and more.
The odd little issue here and there with pop up boxes (password prompts, confirmations etc) disappearing behind the browser when they first hit your screen but other than that its like FireFox’s good looking sister…
Useful links for you if you need them…
Windows Vista x86 Beta 2 – ForceWare Release 85 (May 23, 2006)
Creative Worldwide: Support: Downloads: Drivers, firmware and software updates
Note: after the fact… get flock integration with Ultimate Tag Warrior for WordPress and you’re laughing…
technorati tags:flock, browser, software, vista, microsoft, windows+vista, creative, audigy+zs, nvidia, geforce+6500, forceware
Blogged with Flock
Lets see… 1:10am and I’ve finally cracked the whole Vista thing. Gave it a quick lash yesterday, by quick I mean about 4 hours. Bought a second HD during the week (another 200GB) so fired that into the machine, made a primary partition for Vista, installed thinking – ok, so far so good.
No chance.
Out goes any chance of booting XP after 90 minutes of formatting and installation. So I stay up into the wee hours, back the majority of my main HD up onto a portable drive and repartition about 100GB. Now, the install says it needs a primary partition (Vista) but I’ve just gotten away with a logical partition no problem – and it dual boots as well.
With a little bit of exploring done, I have to say I’m highly impressed with the overall interface. If they could release that as a direct addon for XP there wouldn’t be any need to change ;). It picked up my GeForce 6500 and installed a core driver for it which was nice. No problems in picking up my card reader drive bay, though it failed with the soundcard (yes, the Audigy came at long last and its damn nice too).
Time to see if the beta holds up the sound drivers as well as a few other peripheral bits and bobs. And whats this… I’m blogging in IE? Shudder the thought… where’s my Firefox!
(And if you’re wondering how to activate Vista… its hidden in the System options in Control Panel…)
Trouble picking a theme for WordPress? Unsure of writing the stylesheets, or deciding what you want, or knowing how to display what you want?
Might be worth giving Canvas a look if you’re a WordPress user…
Gracing my inbox this evening…
Dear Creative Customer,
Thank you for shopping at Creative On-line Store.
Your order has been shipped from our premises on the date indicated below:14 June 2006
Delivery time may vary depending on the type of product and/or destination for shipping.
No apologies, no ‘sorry we lost your order the first time’, no explanation of the ‘problem with the stock’, no sign of being charged for it after 14 days of waiting (thought that could play in my favour, however unlikely that it stays that way). Last time I order anything from Creative online anyway…. Should send it back out of spite….
If you’re like me and always on the look out for stock imagery, or photo ideas, take a look at Open Photo, where all images are released under a creative commons license, under Attribution-ShareAlike as a standard. CC licensing is mandatory and going through their archives this morning there’s so real nice stuff in there…
(Via) In another marketing stroke sure to add a few more 000’s to the MySpace millions, the search engine behind the site is about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder – likely Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. But if you’ve got enough cash – and a search engine – sure there’s no harm in asking.
Anyone care to lay a wager as to who is going to get it? Since MSN already have MSN Spaces in action, will we see Google extend their search empire into MySpace (as if they’re not doing enough already), or maybe see Yahoo creep in, then slowly witness a Flickr integration into the site too?
Either way, they’re about to make another packet…
Second Tuesday of the month and seemingly today’s Microsoft security update for Windows is the biggest one for a long time…. So why are they only getting around to it now?
Picked up a post from Kevin Lim’s blog earlier this morning who had been talking with Amanda Congdon, part of the group behind the daily video blog, RocketBoom. The interesting thing about it?
Eh… hello? €67k? Thats US$85,000 – a week! Given Robert Scoble’s recent jump of ship, perhaps now is a good time to switch to video blogging!
So, I’ve been looking for a soundcard for the PC at home and decided to pick myself up Creative’s Audigy 2 Platinum EX and low and behold on June 1st, some 11 days ago, I placed an order via Creative’s Online Store on eBay (which works out of Dublin).
It was bad enough that they don’t accept PayPal and you have to phone to complete your eBay order, but I let that one slide. So I place the order, wait a half hour and ring Creative in Dublin to process the payment. Wouldn’t you know it that in that timeframe they’ve lost my order, or just can’t find it, and I have to spend 20 minutes on the phone while they track it down, despite me quoting all my eBay details – member name, item name, product name and description etc.
Following the phone call I get my confirmation email along with my receipt of payment. This morning I check with the bank and wouldn’t you know it, there’s no charge made on my credit card. So I phone Dublin again this morning only to be told that there is a “problem with the stock”, “we will ship it tomorrow”, and I can “expect delivery within two weeks”. Would they not care to tell me this by mail or a courtesy phone call since they have all my details anyway!
In fairness. I’d likely walk to Dublin quicker, stop off for some food along the way, stroll into the Creative offices, pull an Audigy out of someone’s machine, and get back to Kilkenny in time for the end of the World Cup before I’d see this card. Who said online ordering is easy?
Thats exactly how Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 stands… branded in Beta. Having not yet hit a strong public release, never mind the forthcoming release of Windows Vista RC1 (several months away yet no doubt), you can now pick yourself up the “hot new look for summer 06″…. a fully Yahoo! branded version of IE7b.
My only question is “Why?”.
He took the South African Entrepreneur Of The Year award and now Irish-born and bred Bill Lynch has been named the 2006 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year.
On speaking about where he gets his drive (about two weeks ago)…
I think it comes from a competitive element, it comes from talking about it, it comes about from making promises, maybe as a young person, as a teenager might say to his or her parents, “I want to do my own thingâ€. Somebody says, “I want to become a teacher or a doctorâ€. And another person says, “I want to have my own little business†or maybe later on in life, they are walking somewhere and they’re not happy and they might say, “I think I’ll do my own thing, I can’t put up with this type of bureaucracy or the way I’m being treated, and I will reach out to do my own businessâ€. So it’s like talking about it.
I don’t think it’s a secretive type of thing that is in you that you are an entrepreneur. I think you become one by articulating ambition and above all, getting down to it and doing something, even though it might be modest. Very educated people often might say, “I have to do something that’s a complete breakthrough†like an Einstein or somebody like Edison, somebody that does something that they are great at – like Bill Gates.
But we are actually talking now about a business entrepreneur, somebody who starts up a small business, that grows the business by entrepreneurship. And I think that arises from discourse with your family and your friends and your colleagues in a business environment, and ideas. Every couple of people that sit down, a new idea almost emerging from it, talking about it. As a person thinketh, so they shall be. I say, as they thinketh and articulate and express themselves, so they shall be.
Lynch built up Imperial Holdings into South Africa’s largest transport group and now employs over 36,000 people across the globe. Its taken him 30 years to get the business to this stage, tip of the hat to him from the Irish I think…. Read the May interview here or check out coverage in the New Zealand Herald.
World Cup Access is teaching me a good lesson in blogging. Particularly now that I’m live blogging all the games (though the 2pm games might prove a bit tricky in a work environment!). The lesson is the most basic of all blogging lessons.
Original content, and plenty of it, gets people coming back for more – given the way I’ve seen Analytics, Statcounter and Feedburner churning out the results over the weekend. For something thats only been live 2-3 weeks I’ll have to say that I’m quite pleased with the development so far.
We’re only three days into the World Cup and I’m loving every minute of it. Blatant plug : feel free to subscribe to World Cup Access or subscribe to the video highlights (as sourced from Youtube.com and other video hosts).
We now resume normal transmission…
I’m a big fan of american sports. Of course, by that I just mean American Football, so its rare that basketball would take my interest, but when you consider a team owner taking time out during a game to throw a few entries onto his personal blog to let the world know what he’s thinking during the game and warmups, you have to take interest!
Mark Cuban is the team owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and on the night when his team played in the NBA Finals for the very first time, he took a step in firing some interesting entries onto his blog ranging from his ‘vitamin rush’, to walking the floor of the finals, a call to make the blogosphere part of NBA 2.0, thoughts at half time and full time.
You think you’d see Steve Staunton nicking off at half time during the Euro 2008 qualifiers to let us know whats going on behind the scenes?
Mark Cuban, fair play for taking the initiative.
While I continue to educate a few people in the real world about blogging, I’m covering some old and new ground by publishing a few more finds. Novice bloggers or new readers might find this article useful, an awful lot like the ten commandments of blogging…
In summary:
- Have a theme – stick to it
- Blogging obligates you to keep blogging
- Respond to your comments
- Blogging takes time – schedule it
- Be legal
- Keep track of your blog ideas
- Provide links from your blog
- Only start if you like to write
- Be authentic
- Above all – Be patient
Just simple rules to stick to, even as mere guidelines to getting you started into blogging, but useful material all the same.
Out of interest, has anyone tried the PubSub extension for Firefox? I installed it in the office on Thursday evening, shut down the machine, booted up on Friday and you think Firefox would work? No chance!
Several restarts, try safe mode, try reinstalling Firefox up to the latest version – still no go. Solution? Trawl through the Application Data\Mozilla\Default\Extension\Blah Blah Blah depths of the unknown when it comes to Mozilla’s folder naming structure, root out the plugin folder (sorting by date helps here to match up when you messed up) and removing that dodgy extension.
“If you have experienced problems with the sidebar after upgrading to Firefox 1.5, please download the latest version from the link above.”
It LOOKS like it works well with Firefox but after the effort I went through to get the browser back up and running I think I’ll pass… Pity too…
Damien Mulley poses a nice piece in today’s Sunday Times focussing on the splitting of Eircom – a good look at the scenario surrounding a voluntary split of the company, or a government / ComReg forced split and its impact on broadband delivery. Given the way other large companies (thinking quite global here) have handled government forced splits and suits, it would be well in the interest of Eircom to enable the process themselves if we’re ever going to climb out of the hole we’re in when it comes to broadband delivery in the country. Pick up the paper, or read it online here.
In between the football for the weekend I’ve set aside a little bit of time to flex the operating sytem muscles after picking up a copy of Partition Magic.
After downloading a copy of the latest Ubuntu release (700mb iso) and I’m currently in the process of picking up Windows Vista Beta 2. Having refused torrent downloads and cracked offers spread across the internet, it will be interesting to see how Vista shapes up. I know there’s issues with certain Adobe products but hopefully all goes well.
Anyone considering installing either OS I would seriously suggest partitioning your HD, if not for practical hardware reasons, then at least to keep your sanity if you decide to overwrite your existing copy of XP or Linux release.
If you’re interested, pop along to this address at Microsoft, fill out a registration form to pick up your license key and sit back as you wait for a 3GB ISO to download, at which stage you’ll be wanting a DVD burner, or something useful like Alcohol 120% or Daemon Tools to mount the ISO as a virtual CD drive.