stuart test blog

Been trying to catch up with my blogging over the last couple of days… An update to a previous post that I’ve been meaning to write-up is that Craig from the Wildimages blog managed to get his problems with the Flight Centre all sorted out. I posted previously how he had booked tickets with Flight Center, and how some misinformation from them put him in the position of potentially losing out on thousands of dollars of travel for his family.

Well, after a lengthy battle he finally got what he wanted  and he now considers the matter closed. The publicity he received with the NZ blogosphere and the Digg post seemed to definitely help him with his plight. There was discussion over on Tim’s blog about what we should all do with the previous posts that were written, i.e. do we leave them intact, delete them, or modify them to update the situation. I’m not a fan of editing previous posts to tone them down, but I decided to remove the Flight Center logo from my previous post, as well as the individual from Flight Center that originally gave Craig the misinformation. Looks like Craig deleted his original post and that’s his prerogative. There are no rules to blogging and everyone should be able to do what they want with their sites.

I started watching Robert Scoble’s new show today, aptly name the ScobleShow. I like it. I watched the first episode with Jonathan Schwartz, who is the approachable CEO of Sun Microsystems. Jonathan is passionate about Sun and its technology and it comes across in the interview. Heck, I want to build something big just so I can use a Thumper!!

Robert asks for advice on how to improve his podcasts and who to interview next. I don’t know much about podcasting, but I do know what I don’t like – I don’t like it when the presenters laugh too much. I thought Robert laughed too much – not even in response to a joke, but just random laughs during his questions. (The same goes for radio DJs, I hate it when they laugh at their own jokes!) I also thought that the laughing made his questions sound mumbled, but that may be because he only had the one microphone as he mentions in his post-mortem.

Robert’s got a huge long list of business cards, and he lists some of them to ask who to interview next. There’s so many interesting people on there, but I wouldn’t mind getting to know Nick Bradbury a little better. I don’t pay for software that often – I’ve always had access to free software through work – but Nick’s feed reader, FeedDemon, is a bit of software that I was happy to pay for.

Keep it up Robert, looking forward to more interesting interviews!

Link to ScobleShow post mortem (wow, Ask blog search rocks!) « Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger

Regular visitors here would have noticed that the site has been down for the last few days and has also suffered from intermittent delays over the last few weeks. Well, Telstra have finally admitted there is a problem and hopefully it will be sorted out for good soon!

I’ve been using Live Writer for the last couple of weeks and I have to say that it is by far the best desktop blogging tool available today. I had tried most of the others, but none come even close to this. I’m usually quite critical of the Windows MSN Live platform as I think it’s over-hyped, but this tool is definitely worth checking out.

Make sure you grab some essential plugins too. The first two plugins I installed were: “Insert Flickr Image” and, “Insert Tags“.  I’ve now found a couple of other interesting ones which allow me to blog directly from FeedDemon and Firefox.

Tags: windows+live+writer, live-writer, live, microsoft, plugins, feeddemon, firefox

I recently subscribed to the TechNet and MSDN blogs feeds. These two feeds keep you up to date with every blog that’s hosted by both sites. There’s a bit of information overload in doing this, but I’ve already found some good posts which means that I have another couple of feeds to subscribe to.

• Jane Lewis’s Weblog : Repadmin and friends My top Ten Commands
• Eric Fleischman’s WebLog : Another random AD change in SP1
• Mark’s Blog : The Case of the Process Startup Delays

Tags: feeddemon, microsoft, msdn, technet, blogs, feeds, rss

I just wrote a quick post about Stage 6 on the beta @ amanzi site going in to more detail about this, but it’s basically a YouTube competitor but with WAY better quality videos. The downside is that you have to manually install a plugin but it’s definitely worth doing as the quality is amazing!

Here’s the Where the Hell is Matt video that everyone loves.

Continue Reading »

Interesting reading for any current or wannabe bloggers, the blogosphere is not quite what you expected!

A blog-peasant, one of the Great Unread, comes to the wall of the castle to offer a tribute to a royal, and the royal drops a couple of coins of attention into the peasant’s little purse. The peasant is happy, and the royal’s hold over his position in the castle is a little bit stronger.

• http://www.techmeme.com/060816/p8#a060816p8
• http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/08/the_great_unrea.php
• http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=343

I discovered the Traineo site which is the latest Web 2.0 offering aiming to fill a need in the online market place. I’m not sure whether I’ll file this with the other sites I sign up with but then lose interest in, but we’ll see.

Anyway, the aim is to track your weight, diet and fitness so that you can reach your goal weight. I’ve been trying to lose some weight recently and the Body for Life programme definitely helped a lot, but my biggest problem has been my own lack of commitment (and love of food too!)

So perhaps the site will help me reach my goal – I’ve set a reasonably sensible target which is just 8kgs away. You can track my progress here: http://stuart.traineo.com (I though the photo was quite fitting, here it is again.)

Tags: fitness, traineo, weight, body-for-life

By the way, this post and the previous post were both written with the awesome new blogging tool released by the Windows Live team. It’s called (imaginatively) Windows Live Writer, and you can read more details and download it for free from here: http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!…

I haven’t been able to fault it yet – it seems perfect. This is the most interesting product released by the Live team so far IMO. I’ll be using this for all my blogging for the forseeable future – it will also probably encourage me to blog more too.

I came across this link from the GigaOM site this morning with details on Yahoo’s new travel site. I’ve seen a couple of these sites before but as this integrates nicely with my Flickr account, I’m quite looking forward to making use of it on my upcoming trip to London and Amsterdam.

So I’ve set up a trip and will modify it over the next week or so with my schedule: http://travel.yahoo.com/trip?pid=706739&action=view

Update: TechCrunch have also just covered the new, Yahoo site too.