Face Off

Posted by stuart as

Gonna be away the next couple of days, taking Mrs. Pimpmypagerank away for a well deserved weekend of luxury.

Thought it might be fun to see who the readers thought would win in a fight:

It’s the fire-breathing, long tongued, guitar smashing rock god versus the gun toting, dope smoking rapper:

A battle for the ages, no doubt!

So go ahead, tell us who you think would win this fight, and give us your reasons: Will Simmon’s fire breathing be a match for Snoop’s Colt 45? Will Snoop breathe his dope smoke all over Simmons, rendering his guitar smashing useless?

The funniest, or most creative response will win a 3 month text link in the sidebar.

Ten things that need inventing

Posted by stuart as Uncategorized

I’m a lay bastard. I try to find the easy way to do everything, and something I can often be heard saying is:

Why doesn’t someone invent ………………

So I’ve come up with a list of things I think someone needs to invent. Some of these fit my criteria of making my life easier, others I think would just be damned cool:

1. A digital camera with bluetooth. If I can FTP the photos from my mobile phone to my laptop using bluetooth, why can’t I do the same with my digital camera? I’d gladly pay a few extra bucks for a camera that could do this. No more fiddling around with USB cables or SD cards.
2. On the same subect, I’d like to see a mobile phone with a decent camera. I don’t expect 7.1 megapixels or anything. The 2.0 megapixels on my Nokia 6280 is fine, I just want a camera which actually takes the picture when I press the button, not 3 seconds later when I’m putting the phone back in my pocket.
3. This would be a big one for me: A cigarette which doesn’t kill you. Surely in this age of DNA and Genetic Engineering, someone could GE a tobacco plant to remove all the nasty toxins. I like my smokes, but hate the fact that they’re killing me.
4. Either a wi-fi Internet Radio which doesn’t cost US$400, or an FM transmitter which actually works and has some range. I love my streaming radio, just hate the fact that I can only listen to it near the computer.
5. A decent open source online news service. I hate having to filter every newspaper / news website I read based on who owns it, and what their political agenda may be - Fox News anyone? I know this probably wouldn’t work, as political agenda would hijack it, but a man can dream, can’t he?
6. A 15″ LCD screen with wi-fi and a web browser embedded in it. No keyboard, except for the touch screen one you could pull up as required (Like on my PDA). Hang it on the wall, and just run your favourite news site on it, refreshing every five or so minutes. Even better, make up your own page with all your favourite feeds. Maybe even chuck a webcam on top of the screen (like in many laptops) and use it to video-conference?
7. Voice Over IP that actually works, so I don’t have to reboot my ATA every day after discovering that it has deregistered itself from the server.
8. An MP3 player with bluetooth headphones. Not one of those crappy earpieces you get for your mobile phone, but a decent, stereo set, which comes already paired to the MP3 player.
9. Flash memory drives which double as extra RAM. I’d love to be able to add an extra couple of Gig when I’m trying to rotate that 100Mb tiff in photoshop.

That’s all I can think of for now. Can you think of any other things that need inventing?

Don’t forget to enter the funny caption competition!

Bloody Australia Dollar - you’re killing me!

Posted by stuart as ,

It’s a given when most of us talk about what income our online ventures bring us, we’re talking about US Dollars.

Most, if not all advertising platforms pay their clients in US Dollars, which is fine for those Americans amongst us, but what about us “foreigners” when our currency gets a run on against the greenback?

Let me give you an example:

This is what, as we like to call it, the “little Aussie Battler” has done oer the last five years against the greenback. It’s currently sitting at a record high of just over US$0.83.

A look at how it’s affected my income over the last year needs to be see in the context of the following graph:

Over the last year, the Aussie Dollar has rise from just under US$0.75, to a high of around US$0.84.

So what does this mean for my income? Let’s say I make around US$100 a month (it’s actually just under that, but for the point of the exercise, an even C-note makes it easier to do the calculations)

So at the lower US$0.75, we divide my US$100 by 75, and come up with around AU$133

At the higher US$0.84, we divide our US$100 by 84, and come up with AU$119

So for doing absolutely nothing, I’m losing AU$14 a month.

No wonder we hear exporters complaining about the Aussie Dollar rising against the greenback. I guess what I’m doing is exporting my content to the world, and being paid in US Dollars for it.

Give us your funny captions

Posted by stuart as Uncategorized

No prizemoney for this one, but I thought it might be fun to see who can come up with the funniest caption for this picture:

I’ll do a three month text-link in the sidebar for the caption I think is the funniest.

I’ll get things started:

“No seriously, Rumsfeld told me it’s this big!” 

English for those who suck at it

Posted by stuart as , ,

(Those of you blogging in English as a second language can ignore this)

In another lifetime, I worked as a proofreader at a printing company. I wasn’t a very good one, but I did learn a few tips, which I’m going to share with you, dear reader.

Those who have been reading here for a while will know that my posts aren’t immune from the odd typo, even the odd spelling mistake, but if there’s one thing that bunches my shorts, it’s the incorrect substitution of one word for another.

So here’s my short tutorial on the three most common of these mistakes:

1) The biggie, which I see in probably half of the blogs I read, is the incorrect use of then and than. This one’s actually pretty simple really:

• I drank twelve beers, then vomited all over my girlfriend
• I’d rathar drink beer than smoke ice

2) Next is the misuse of you’re and your:

• You’re a dickhead
• I think my blog is better than your blog

3) Lastly, we have the triple banger, I can see how blogger might become confused with the choices between their, there, and they’re:

• Whilst playing WOW, I fragged their asses good!
• Look, over there, it’s your mom with the defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers
• I don’t like bloggers, in fact, I think they’re a bunch of wankers.