Bear Warning!

Weeing game consoles.

Who was the dumb ass that came up with the idea of calling a game console the Wee?

Do we really want kids asking their friends if they want to play with their wee? Or people walking into stores asking for a wee?
“I’m sorry we don’t have public toilets sir.”

“Grandpa, come and look at my new wee.”
O_O “New? wee? I can’t even find my old wee.”

Imagine Santa’s surprise when kids sitting on his knee tell him they want a wee for Christmas.
“What would like from Santa this year little boy?”
“I’d like a wee.”
O_O “Now!? Get this kid off me he’s gonna wee!!.. oh you mean Wii.. Ho Ho Ho.. silly Santa”.

*shakes head*

They call the software for the console wiiware. Wee Ware? The first thing I think of when I hear that is a raincoat and rubber boots.

What a ridiculous name.

Yes I realize that the name is suppose to represent that we all can play it and it’s an easy word to be said in all languages, but come on.. Wee??.. really??

Wouldn’t ALL be a better name to represent that it can be played by ALL people of ALL generations in ALL countries? Imagine the advertising they could get from ALL as a name.

“it’s ALL you’ll ever need.”

“Made for ALL.”

“Even if you combined ALL our competition into one, they still wouldn’t be ALL.”

“Be ALL you can be”

You could have a lot of fun and inspiring slogans with it.

If only they had put some more thought into the name instead of weeing all over it.

Home-made Hockey Stick

home made hockey stick

There’s a couple of reasons I decided to try making a hockey stick…

1. Because ice/inline hockey isn’t very popular in this part of the world, the equipment is harder to come by, and quite expensive.

2. I only want it to skate around on my own up at a local old outdoor roller skate area. (or on week-ends down at the school with my kids)

So I decided that all I really needed was something that resembled a hockey stick which I could dribble and hit a ball around with while I got some exercise on my roller blades.  Skating around in circles is pretty boring; chasing a ball around with a hockey stick is much more fun.

So after doing some research (via my good friend Google); I found the various measurements of standard hockey sticks, and set about looking for suitable materials to use.

I figured it was going to be all wood, and didn’t’ take long to find a piece of long thin wood for a handle and a small piece of compressed plywood for the blade section.

Blade cut out of compressed plywood

First task was to draw out the shape of the blade and lower shaft and cut it out using an electric jigsaw.

The piece of wood used is considerably thicker than a normal hockey blade, but this will (in time) give me the chance of developing a curve in the blade.

Although old hockey sticks never use to have a curve in the blade, it does make for better control of the ball or puck.

metal used to attach blade to handle

My next big problem was how I was going to attach the blade to the handle. Normal sticks are glued, but also made so one section partially slides inside the other to make for a firm attachment. I don’t have the equipment required to do that, so I decided to look at bracing the two pieces together.

I found a piece of angled aluminum from an old dead BBQ I had dismantled last summer; the metal was a bit too wide, but I decided to cut it in half (jigsaw fitted with a hacksaw blade made quick work of this) and use it as a splint brace to join the two pieces.

I was a little disappointed to find that the angled aluminum wasn’t as strong as I’d hoped it would be, so I needed to add a second strip on the other side of the join area for a bit of extra support, which worked out well.

So the end product is understandably heavier than a professional made stick due to the thickness of the blade and I guess the kind of wood used. But in time I’m hoping to get around to thinning the blade down and adding a curve to it, although I’m not sure of the woods strength so I’m a little hesitant to make it too thin.

home made hockey stick

I gave it a good work out this afternoon with a bit of one-on-one roller hockey against my son with his home made stick down at their school. It worked well and stood up nicely to the riggers of the game.

Facebook, a tool of change.

It would seem that some people have finally found a use for Facebook, as a tool of change.

What better way to start a partition or get your case out in the public than doing it where potentially millions of people will see it in a very short time?

That’s exactly what happened to Television New Zealand when they launched a new idea of using TXT styled language in their new promos for upcoming shows.

Some industrious person who didn’t like the idea started a group on Facebook called “I hate TV2’s new abbreviations”, it rapidly gained more than 6000 members and came to the attention of the bosses at the TV station. They said that along with the “dozens of emails and letters” has caused them to stop using the idea.

And so we see Facebook becoming the modern day equivalent of the old underground communications network.

Read the news item here

An inconvenient truth

It looks like Al Gore has half a rain forest worth of paper stored in his office. Or mayby this is his version of recycling.

Either way after seeing that much wasted paper, you have to ask yourself what the real inconvenient truth is.

A Windows guru spends two weeks with a Mac

I just found this interesting article about a “windows guru” who spent 2 weeks working solely on an Apple Mac in order to do a comparision of the 2 operating systems.

As with other articles like this I’ve seen in the past, the “windows guru” came away from the experience impressed, and dare I say, in awe of the Mac.

He did find some things a little hard to get use to, which is understandable. Both operating systems have their own way of working and minor adjustments are required on either system, but overall in his own words “Mac OS X beats Windows.”

I don’t think there’s a better advertising agent for anything than having your opponent admit your better than you, and I read a number of articles over the last couple of years where PC writers (of various magazines) have used a Mac for a couple of weeks and come away really impressed with, and in some cases even become converts to, “Macdom”.

Now if Apple would just lower their prices to actually be competitive with PCs they might actually get a much better market share.

Of coarse there is one thing which Windows has all over Macs, which will probably always hold apple at bay, and that’s it’s non proprietary use. Unlike Mac OS, which can only legally run on Apple hardware, widows can be run on anything, even a Mac. PC’s in general also allow you to mix and match your hardware components, where-as Apple is all propriety and that single factor will always make PC’s more popular than Macs.

SG:1 season 9 is BAD!

Wow! I can’t believe how bad season 9 of Stargate SG:1 is.

It lost it’s way when RD Anderson left.

I’ve just watched the first 4 episodes of season 9 and I’m not sure i’ll get through the rest. It’s like a completely different show and I really REALLY want to slap Daniel every time he starts speed talking.

Why debate dogma?

Can’t help but agree with this guys comments.

Backup your web site!

As the news of the avsim.com website hack and their extraordinary lack of backups ripples around the internet, I’m absolutely flabbergasted at how the owners of that site could think they didn’t need to have an offline backup.

According to the article their backup strategy was simply to make a daily copy onto a second server, a “hot” backup. So if anything happened they could simply switch to the secondary server and carry on while the primary server was repaired.
Nice plan. Except it doesn’t provide any protection against physical disaster, such as if the building catches fire or gets storm damaged. In these cases where both servers (being in the same room) can be damaged, you really need at least an offline backup consisting of a full copy of the site and any associated databases stored on removable media of some kind, be it DVD, external hard drive, or even USB microdrive.

I know only too well how important backups are after losing my forums database and finding (oh too late) that my then hosts backups weren’t nearly as useful as I had been lead to believe.
Fortunately some of my members where able to rally together and restored much of the lost posts through Googles cache, but it taught me a harsh lesson, never take backups for granted, since then my sites been hacked a second time but thanks to full backups, it was easily restored.

The site in the article has a temporary forums site running at the moment, and I was looking around it last night. As you would expect there’s a lot of questions being asked by the members, some of them placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of the owner for not having a reliable backup system in place.
I found it interesting that the admins where being quite defensive about it making comments such as “pointing fingers wont help us get the site back” which is a true enough statement, but completely missing the point that this site was in fact the biggest flight-sim site on the  net, it was 12 years old and had some 60,000 members, and apparently the owner had never stopped to consider what might happen if his house caught fire; Both the primary and backup server would be fried and 12 years worth of information and work provided by all those members would be gone. As it turns out that’s what happened anyway, but not through fire, through a hacker formatting both servers. And the situation is solely because the owner didn’t back up properly.

I think the members have every right to be VERY annoyed at the owner. When you have a group of people providing information and resources for your web site, you, as the owner, have an absolute obligation to ensure that all the work and information those members are giving you (free of charge in most cases) is protected to the best of your abilities.

In this case I would suggest that the owner has failed badly in his obligations to protect his members work and data; I would even go so far as to suggest that if in fact he really doesn’t know anythign about the most basic backup standards, he should probably hand over the reins to someone more site savvy.

Natures fury

I’ve just been out for a (relatively quick) bike ride through the wetlands enjoying the colors of autumn and the show nature always provides at this time of year.

There was an extra feature to this bike ride though, the air has a pre-storm tension to it.

I love being outside when nature starts to build her fury,the feeling of tension that builds before a storm.
The wind picks up, the skies cloud over and darken, the air cools down and fills with electricity and anticipation.

It’s a great time to be out amongst nature, it adds a certain something to the wilderness, an energy that you don’t feel at any other time. But it also makes you appreciate being inside all that much more too.  It’s easy to forget what it is your actually being protected from when your curled up in front of a warm fire with the rain and wind beating against the windows. Being out in it reminds you of what that beating sound at the window really is.