Awesome Photo

Awesome Photo

I know it is not cool to make light of other peoples plight. And I am certainly not doing that here. 

I do love nature and the raw power that it can display. Recent cyclones and floods in Australia have fascinated me and I always want to be there as it is happening. But for your viewing pleasure I have come across this amazing photo from the NZ earthquake. It is taken moments after the main quake (near as I can tell) and graphically shows the power that a quake can have.

It is simply a great photo

Photo courtesy of http://www.facebook.com/rebuildchristchurch

Automating a Tipping Competition

Automating a Tipping Competition

Being an F1 fan, I started a small tipping competition last year at work. The basis for the comp is that you tip your top three drivers. You earn what ever points they collect – the person with the highest number of points wins the round, and the person with the most points for the season wins that – which is half the money collected over the year. Nice.

So this year I wanted to automate the tipping process to prevent me getting a rush of emails/sms before each race. I figured there’d have to be a web based solution for this problem, but I had no idea where to start. So I looked a tipping competition scripts for Joomla (a CMS I have just started to play with). Everything was for footy – pick a winner from a choice of two. I needed to be able to pick three people from a list of 24. Nothing came close.

Then a mate suggested a survey. That’s a great idea, I thought to myself. Simply ask a multiple choice question from a drop down box three times. Easy. So I start searching via Google. All the big names in surveys who offer free version don’t allow you to export the results. All I could seem to do was copy them from a webpage. Fuck that – I was trying to make this easy for myself!

And this is where twitter comes in. An astute business called SurveyGizmo is busy trolling tweets for the term ‘survey’. Up comes my question to the twitterverse about how to do what I am wanting to do. Quick as a flash (and I mean with 30 minutes or so) I have a tweet from them saying they can do what I want. So checked it out and its great – it does everything I want!

The power of twitter has proven it self yet again!

And if you are interested you can check out the F1 Tipping comp here: http://eepurl.com/cGp86

Corporate Mentality

Corporate Mentality

1. I ask for internet access on my sim card. Denied. I can understand – cost related issue.

2. I offer to take over my sim card so I can get what I want. Denied – not company policy.

3. Fine, I offer to source cheaper alternative and have company pay for cheaper alternative. Denied. Against company policy.

4. Fine – fuck you. I go and get my own sim card and pay for calls under cap and divert work number to my sim

5. I now get a please explain because diverting calls is against company policy

Not sure where I will go from here. Do I argue the point? Do I ignore it knowing it will mostly like go away? Instinct tells me the later will work (it has in the past), but I am also thinking I am spoiling for a fight. I do need to work on my conflict management skills and this could be a good flash point. 

I need to think about it…... 'cause what I want to do is:

Book No. 96

Book No. 96

Just finished book 27 on my list of 100 greatest novels of all time. Now I am not going to bore with a review (and I really couldn't be bothered - this ain't school) - Kane and Abel is a pretty good book. It’s not great – probably why it is no. 96 on the list. I did learn something though – revenge that lasts a life time is not useful. Or helpful. Let bygones be bygones.

And always love your kids no matter what they do.

Good advice, really. Now, on to the next book – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley