stuart test blog

I’ve been catching up on some local blogs recently and found a discussion on which cafes in Wellington are good for meetings – i.e. you need to be able to have a conversation without feeling like you’re shouting.

I haven’t yet found the perfect cafe for this yet. We often go to Legato as it’s quite roomy and the tables aren’t on top of each other, but they often have the music too loud which makes conversation a bit difficult. Pod is similar too – nice and comfy, but often the background music takes over. The library cafe is ok, but don’t sit near the kids play area… I haven’t been back to Katipo since the smoking laws were enforced – I used to avoid it because it got really smoky upstairs, but now that indoor smoking is banned it may be better.

Anyway… the last suggestion in the discussion was to set up a geek cafe, where there’s good CafeNet reception, good coffee, and provides a good meeting environment – sounds good to me.

inner.geek » Blog Archive » Late night conversation-friendly cafés in Wellington

Not many people know about the free software virtualisation tool available from Altiris or what it’s capable. This review details how to use it and what can be done with it, with lots of screen shots.

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Another superb article from Mark Russinovich on the Sysinternals website, detailing how power users can elevate their privileges to administrator level on Windows machines.

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firefoxgurl

Originally uploaded by x4d41.

Firefox girl! Another good reason to use Firefox…

I am now the proud owner of a FeedDemon 2 license! I’ve been trying to decide on a feed reader recently and with so many cool online readers available I thought I didn’t need an offline version. But at the end of the day, nothing beats a full, desktop application for speed and functionality. And the great thing about FeedDemon is that it synchronises with NewsGator Online which means I can always stay up to date even if I don’t have FeedDemon installed. I’ve also been experimenting with some of the interesting FeedDemon features, like the keyword searches that use one of several blog search tools to present you with a feed based on what keyword you enter. I’ve set up three for microsoft, apple, and google for the time being and I’ll see how that goes before playing with it more.

I also picked FeedDemon because the parent company, NewsGator, seems to integrate nicely with other software too. They recently demoed their online service synching with IE7, but the coolest thing is that I can add any feed to my account by using the Google toolbar in Firefox. A subscribe button on the toolbar is highlighted every time I visit a site which has a feed available, and all it takes is a click on the toolbar and I’m redirected to the NewsGator site where I can choose what folder I want to keep the feed in – very handy indeed!

Some of my favourite technologies at the moment are RSS/Atom/ICal – I’m really enjoying how I can synchronise data across all sorts of platforms and applications. The only thing that would make it perfect is if I could subscribe to my Plaxo calendar through ICal – I’ve raised this as a request on their forums.

I use Netvibes as my home page, and I highly recommend you check it out. I’ve been using it for the last six months and it has grown from strength to strength. I have also tested out all of the other home page services available and none of them compare to Netvibes. I use it to aggregate all of my data in one easy to use view. I can access my Gmail, my Icals (not Plaxo yet), my del.icio.us bookmarks, as well as a handful of my favourite feeds, such as Digg, Engadget, and TechCrunch. If this is what Web 2.0 is all about, I love it!

We went to see the Rolling Stones in Wellington yesterday, and what a concert it was!!! They are definitely still the greatest rock band ever – the concert rocked from Jumping Jack Flash opening track, right through to the encore of Satisfaction.

I first saw them in 1995 on their Voodoo Lounge tour and I was very impressed that the same supporting band had stuck together too. Not sure if I’ll get to see them again so I’m glad that this concert was such a banging one.

I just noticed this on the Microsoft Connect site – Virtual Machine Additions for Linux. Previously these additions have only ever been available for Windows guest operating systems, so this is a big deal that Microsoft is now working on the Linux versions.

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OK – so this may be getting a bit boring… but I have heaps of different invites available to give out to interested people. I have the following:
* 100 Google Gmail invites
* 5 Windows Live Mail invites
* 10 Windows Live Messenger invites

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My previous post about Plaxo joined in with the blogosphere’s opinion that Plaxo needed to apologise for their spam they had knowingly sent out. This morning I discovered that Plaxo’s CEO had made a full, public apology – even to the point of making a dig at themselves with a picture of flying pigs in the post.

This apology is greatly appreciated from someone who has both been the receiver and unintentional sender of such spam. I’m sure this will be good for Plaxo’s business. Thanks.

Links:

• My previous post.
• Plaxo’s original post
• Plaxo’s CEO, Ben Golub’s apology

Blog post from the beta @ amanzi site looking at the new co.mments service which allows you to keep track of blog posts and comments.

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