My biggest kodak moment
Originally uploaded by *ice

What happens when you combine the occurrence of the Aurora Borealis with an erupting volcano, and manage to be in the right place at the right time? Flickr user *ice managed to get what can only be described as “a fucking startlingly good photo”, based on these 3 ingredients.
Click on the image, or this link, for larger version on Flickr.  Then stare at it for 20 minutes or so, like I just have been.

I’ve been doing some work on the website for my new co-venture, WhiskySquad – a monthly whisky tasting exercise designed to give enthusiastic amateurs a chance to get their palates around some interesting stuff – and the problem that needed solving in this instance was that of easily setting up a way for people to register their interest in the strictly limited number of spaces for that month.
My initial thought was, “Ah, there are services that do this!” – Meetup.com and Eventbrite.com both provide systems to set up events and …

It’d be fair to say that I know a fairly mobile bunch of people — many of my friends from growing up don’t live in the ol’ neighbourhood any more, though having moved to different parts of Australia, or the world.  I’m going to assume this is pretty normal going by the number of places I’ve been on holiday where I’ve heard an Australian accent pipe up in the background (that is to say — EVERYwhere I’ve been, with possibly the exception of Mississippi).
Every now and again, however, I hear …

We have an arrangement set up here in our office so that in order to work from home we connect to the corporate network using the Cisco VPN (Virtual Private Network) Client – a little bit of software that burrows through the Intertubes and joins up to some servers in the rack/farm so that our home computer now appears to be a node on the corporate network.  The way we set this up is to install the Cisco VPN Client on the machine, then run a little application which sets …

Magnificent, isn’t it?

After a long day out & demanding evening, it’s possible – thanks to the wonders of modern domestic science – to enjoy a healthy and balanced pouch of nutrients, and though the diagram on the front looks terrifyingly wholesome, the preparation method is actually a lot simpler than you might initially suspect!

What could be easier?  There’s no need for junky takeaways any more now that we have the life-giving Orange Pouch – simply squeeze, tear a small hole, then put in the microwave for 2 minutes (or, as …

Was making a coffee in the kitchen at work just now, and for some reason the following sentence popped into my head:
You put snot on the ball?
Stopped me dead in my tracks, that did.  What relevance does that have to anything?  After a moment’s pause, it occurred to me that it was a quote from the 1989 baseball comedy Major League, starring Charlie Sheen, a very non-buff Wesley Snipes, Rene Russo, and Dennis Haysbert back when he was still doing TV bit parts and probably never envisaged playing the President …

Hello Dolly isn’t typically the kind of musical I’d embrace, in my jaded old age – written in the 1960s, it very much embodies the fanciful & superficially wholesome stereotypical thing which kinda irritates me about the entire genre.  You know what I’m talking about.  As soon as the curtain goes up the scene gets set with a certain presentation of class (in this case, middle-to-upper); a beige backdrop against which the protagonist(s) can introduce their distinction.  See Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Fiddler on the …

A comment on my previous post (from Wurst, who I gather breezed in from Stonch’s Beer Blog) brought up the turbulent topic of celebrity lookalike-ness.  He asserted that I looked like “a cross between Jaz Coleman and that singer who was in that show with an American guy from the Mighty Boosh!”.  Thankfully, Wikipedia was on hand to tell me who each of these people are, and a process of deduction helped me arrive at the identity of the latter being Matt Berry.
I guess he’s got a point.  With any …

Following my earlier piece of hastily constructed drivel about the plinth project, I’ve not seen much of interest going on up there.  Of course unless you’re permanently glued to the webcast then there’s not much chance of that happening anyway… assuming anything of interest *does* happen.
Charlie Brooker seems to have nailed the situation quite succinctly in his recent Guardian column — calling it “Britain’s Got People”, and reinforcing my earlier point about one hour being quite a long time to be in the spotlight.  As Brooker notes, Warhol’s observation about …

Inspired by a conversation on Twitter between me, @mooley, and peripherally @neonwombat, here’s a list of my top ten books.  I’ll qualify this by stating that I wrote this list whilst not in front of my bookshelf, or with any attempt at recollection of which books I’ve got stack up in boxes in Adelaide.  Arguments about anything on this list are happily welcomed, particularly on the basis of me having declared something to be in my “top 10 books” list previously and then having omitted it here.

Last Chance To See …