Blog Marco

Google has been taking photos of streets as a part of their Google Maps project. (I know this is OLD news... this is just for those who aren't aware of it yet) What Google Maps does is drivve a car around and take snap shots which they then stitch together so that instead of viewing a street from above you can view the street from a horizontal viewpoint.

The forex business is an interesting business to be in. Forex is a business solely involved in money. Nothing is being exchanged but money from different countries. I guess Forex can be considered as a "service" business as the brokers and the money exchangers act as a service to help people change money from one currency to another for people who travel and businesses who are involved with international business through imports or exports.

How about the Forex business for traders? Traders can take advantage of the fluctuations of the currency exchange prices and profit from the volatility. Does this help anyone? Not directly. It helps you (that is if you are profitable in trading forex) and it helps the broker turnover money and hence make money off commissions (or trading spreads).

I found a list of the "Types of Websites On the Internet". This list may be useful for research.

• blog
• commercial presence
• forum
• articles / news
• directory
• e-commerce
• social networking
• games
• search engine

According to Hollywood, you shouldn't travel to these places. Repeat. Don't travel to these places. Never ever visit these places.

Don't Travel to:
10. Antarctica, as depicted in The March of the Penguins (2005)
9. Kazakhstan, as depicted in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
8. Colombia, as depicted in Romancing the Stone (1984) and Collateral Damage (2002)
7. Texas, as depicted in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
6. Brazil, as depicted in Turistas (2006)
5. Burma, as depicted in Rambo (2008)
4. New Mexico, as depicted in The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
3. Mexico City (Mexico) and Caracas (Venezuela), as depicted in Man on Fire (2004) and Secuestro Express (2005)
2. Slovakia, as depicted in Hostel (2005)
1. Sierra Leone, as depicted in Blood Diamond (2006) and Tears of the Sun (2003)

Shouldn't USA (especially New York, Las Vegas...) be in the list too? I mean, of all the crime (Law & Order), murders (CSi), gangsters (GodFather Trilogy), disasters (The Day After Tomorrow) and monsters (Ghostbusters) that happen in the USA from the silverscreen.

ARRRRGGGHHHH!!! I hate moving to new hosts. Something always goes wrong. Maybe it's me. So here's a venting blog entry about my recent ordeal with a Drupal Installation on HostGator which I just solved a few minutes ago. Call it a debrief on my experience and see what lessons I can learn from my mistakes. There isn't anything wrong with HostGator. I realise now what I was doing wrong.

I always go about Drupal installations systematically. Actually I wasn't leaving my long time hosting service (MediaTemple). I just wanted another host and wanted to try out another service (and also to use them as a backup, in case anything happens).

So I sign up to HostGator (which was painless except for the hip pocket - although their hosting prices are competitive). I bought a new domain name from GoDaddy and another from a company called IntaServe which offer registrations for *.com.au's. I've had experience with GoDaddy before - so that went smoothly - although for the uninitiated - you'll probably get lost in the jungle of promotions that they have. I'm slightly annoyed with Intaserve. I guess that's where my attitude started down a downward spiral. I came into the new project all optimistic and now this Australian registrar is screwing my workflow. Why? Because their business systems are screwed. I think they need to have a look at their registration systems: just a few tweaks with their wording in their emails and automated systems and they would be really good. But no, it took me a while, emails to Intaserve took a while to get answered. I was emailing HostGator at 11pm on a Sunday night in Australia and I was getting a response from them. So I had to give Intaserve a call to fix things. In five minutes the pain was all over. Thank God I don't have to deal with Intaserve again until the next time I need to renew my domain.

I'm a bit of a bicycle enthusiast. I enjoy riding my bike for exercise and leisure. I did the Spring Cycle in Sydney in 2006 and again last year. The Spring Cycle is a 50km public cycling event in Sydney held annually in October riding from North Sydney to Sydney Olympic Park. It's been a while since I gave the bike a clean: especially the most important part of the bicycle: the gears and the chain. So now I have to learn how to lubricate my bicycle chain. And from my research and asking around (thanks to the helpful guys at the bicycle shop Cheeky Transport.)

So what grease do you use to lube a bike chain?

I've got a silversish problem. I need to get rid of the silverfish! They're simply eating up my paper: my notes and my books. It's annoying. So I'm doing a bit research as to how to get rid of these household pests! Of course the first stop is the Wikipedia page for silverfish. Geez, these guys have been around for 300 million years?!

For those that follow this blog, know that I like to collect a very vast variety of information. I like to collect snippets of information which depict the Internet as the Wild West of today. Laws are simply trying to catch up to this wildly popular "thing" we call the World Wide Web (WWW). Here's another proof of that concept: Craigslist Crime.

I'm not talking about the coaxers and the get rich quickers, I'm talking about real Criminals, real robbers that are into Craigslist Crime. These bums post up bogus classified posts on Craigslist which advertise to the world that anyone is welcome to anything in the house (furniture, lawn mower and even the kitchen sink...) since they were moving out - a house which they don't own. The criminals are indeed creative in the way they conduct crime, but please, use that creativity in a positive manner.

Did you know that a lot of our news are produced from News Releases? Some are pure news like reports from government and things. Some are commercial. You may be being sold a product without your knowledge. I was reading through the paper and I found probably the most unconvincing story which most probably originated from a press release. I thought they were going to talk about cycling around Vietnam but really they're selling some tech gear. Screw them. (Although for disclosure I do own a FreeAgent drive which does a pretty good job, but I own a JVC HD Camera and not the Sony HD cam as advertised by the article)

In March last year, documentary filmmaker David Smith had no intention of following 30 cyclists from one end of Vietnam to the other perched on the back of a motorbike.

But two weeks later, armed with a digital high definition camera and no script, that's exactly what he and his son Denby were doing.

Did you know that between 3 to 13 minutes is the best length of time for sex? How could there be an optimal time for sex? Hang on... there's a "Journal of Sexual Medicine"? "Dr Irwin Goldstein, editor of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, cited a four-week study of 1,500 couples in 2005 that found the median time for sexual intercourse was 7.3 minutes." I wonder if there were any correlations with their ages or eating so called "aphrodisiacs" before having sex...

A survey of sex therapists has concluded the optimal amount of time for sexual intercourse was 3 to 13 minutes.

The findings, to be published in the May issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, strike at the notion that endurance is the key to a great sex life.

Okay, after watching a string of sucky movies (Jumper, lately, here's one that's worth watching. "In the Valley of Elah" stars mainly Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron with brief appearances by Susan Sarandon. I didn't know anything about the movie when I watched it, so I had no preconceptions of what it was about or how good or bad it was. But it was good.

Don't read further down if you don't want to read spoilers about "In the Valley of Elah". I found the movie to be a bit slow. Two hours to get the point across could have been done in one and a half a hours. The movie was well made, good plot, good filmography, good acting. I thought the movie was simply a mystery crime drama sort of movie, but it was interesting how the story was written to convey a deeper message about wars - especially about the current installment in Iraq with the American troops.

Don't watch "Meet the Spartans". It's a waste of time. I wonder how this piece of crap got funded? I know its a spoof movie, but there have been spoof movies of a better caliber like "Robin Hood: Men in Tights" and "Scary Movie." It was okay in the beginning, then it started to become ridiculous. It started losing momentum about 5 minutes into the movie when they started throwing everything that was "trashy" into a bottomless pit. (i.e. Britney Spears, American Idol winners and co.) I'm not going to write anymore about "Meet the Spartans". The movie simply sucks. Don't watch it.

Found this one while surfing around: "Piracy Stops Global Warming" - Instead of driving to get CDs, buying pre-packaged software from megacorporations and wasting energy; you can help Global Warming by using P2P. Help save resources, fight pollution and save the environment. - It's what Jesus would do.

I was reading a forum discussion when someone mentioned the word "automagically". I thought that was a brilliant typo - but I was wrong. It's actually geek speak:

A computing slang term to mean something that is done by a computer program that cannot necessarily be seen happening, or which intelligently simplifies things of great complexity. For example if you had an application that loaded up a Microsoft Word document and turned it into a PDF file before displaying it on screen, you might say that the application loads a document and automagically turns it into a PDF; or one could say of a garbage-collected program that it automagically handles all issues of memory allocation and de-allocation.

--from an old page at Wikipedia

This is a calendar of the main annual events in Sydney. If you are looking for specific events in Sydney this page from the City of Sydney will be helpful to you.

January

Sydney Festival
Art, open-air concerts and theatre performances.
Various venues
Website: www.sydneyfestival.com.au

February - March

Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras
The world's largest gay festival, climaxing in a costume parade and an all-night party.
Various venues, parade on Oxford Street
Website: www.mardigras.org.au

Tropfest
February/March
The world's largest short film festival.
The Domain
Website: www.tropfest.com

Royal Easter Show
March/April
Traditional farm show held over 12 days.
Sydney Olympic Park
Website: www.eastershow.com.au