Rabidgremlin’s Soapbox

Oh the cuteness. This web feed shows a bunch of Shiba Inu puppies at sleep & play.

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

Here are some more animal cams for you…

Fantastic chart showing what the last 12 US presidents did in their first 100 days in office:

Pretty inspiring stuff ! (sorry about the 30 seconds of ads, but this was the best video clip I could find):

Watch CBS Videos Online

I was slightly alarmed by the “cultish” “yes we can” chanting.

Its a great pity our own NZ politicians are so blah. BTW if you are still not sure who you are voting, why not take this quiz: http://www.pundit.co.nz/content/election-quiz it will match you with the political that best shares your views.

I’m quite pleased with this bit of work: mPass allows you to download your boarding passes for Air New Zealand flights onto your mobile phone. It generates a bar code that you can then scan at their kiosks to check-in or at the gates to board. Pretty cool if I must say so my self.  Its all part of Air New Zealands new domestic travelling experience.

If you want to download mPass then visit http://airnz.mobi using your web browser on your mobile phone and click on the “Download mPass” link.

Here are some screen shots of the application running that captured off my Nokia N73:

Also if you are at the airport and use the new gates try and get a look-see at the application with all the pretty coloured cells (which show the status of passengers on a flight) that is attached to the gate, I worked on that one too :)

If you are an Airpoints member then check out http://myairnz.com this was put together by some of my team mates. It gives you instant access to your bookings, airpoints info, weather, news, arrivals and departure times, events and much more.

In my last post I joked about see games on billboards in games, turns out that EA already does this and Obama is using them to spread his vote-for-change message.

Obama has ads in 18 different games including Guitar Hero 3 , The Incredible Hulk, NASCAR 09, NBA Live 08 , NFL Tour and Burnout Paradise.

In Burnout Paradise the ads simple appear along the side of the road as you go whizzing by, all very sneaky and subliminal:

This isn’t the first time Obama’s campaign has used non-traditional media, earlier this month, his campaign placed VoteForChange ads on users’ home pages of the social networking site Facebook.com.

Two interesting bits of news from Google today. The first is adsense for games which allows game developers to place Google ads inside games.

Only flash games are currently supported and there are some fairly hefty entry requirements for early adopters:

• Game plays: Minimum 500,000 per day
• Game types: Web-based Flash only
• Integration: Must be technically capable of SDK integration
• Traffic source: Must be 80% US & UK Traffic
• Content: Family safe and targeted at users age 13 and up
• Distribution: Must be able to report embed destination and have control over where games are distributed

I’m having visions of playing Counterstrike and seeing dynamic ads on bullet-ridden billboards in the future…

The second bit of Google news is their first images from the new satellite GeoEye-1 which will be used to update Google maps and Google Earth imagery. Apparently GeoEye-1 is the world highest resolution commercial sattelite with a resolution of 50cm ! Google sightseeing should get really interesting now and those naked sunbathers better have satellite position timetable handy.

I really struggle to wrap my head around economics sometimes and the US (or is it a global) economic crisis is all pretty confusing (and crazy with the $700 billion dollar bail out bill getting the go ahead).

Newsweek has an good article on who is to blame, basically it highlights that there is no one specific but rather a number of guilty parties:

1. The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
2. Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
3. Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
4. Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
5. The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
6. Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
7. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
8. Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
9. The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
10. An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
11. Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

No’s 2 and 11 are interesting in that we see some of this in the New Zealand housing market particularly in Auckland.

I wonder how this will all pan out? Not well I suspect given some of our local headlines:

• How the financial crisis is hitting mortgages
• Credit squeeze robs economy of its lifeblood
• National could have trouble over tax cuts (I have always been suspicious of exactly where National was going to find all that extra cash to give such big tax cuts)

Perhaps the only “good thing” is that cheese is going to become cheaper :)

“Beached as Bro”

And techno styles

Urrggh, its that time of the year again when daylight savings kicks in. Unfortunately my very clever N73 has the wrong change over dates so for the next few weeks it will think that New Zealand is at GMT+12 instead of GMT+13 !

For most people this will not be a problem, you just set clock an hour early, but if you synchronise your phone with PC (for instance with Outlook) then all your appointments will be an hour out.

Nokia did put out a patch at the start of last year but unfortunately it still gets the NZ switch over wrong :(

I tried taking the installer for the patch apart and it seems to just copy a new timzone database (a .dbz) file onto the phone but try as I might I cannot find any documentation on this file, so a quick hack looks to be out of the question.

In the mean time I have found that the best way to solve the problem is set the timezone for the phone to be Tonga which is GMT+13. This solves any synchronisation issues and in a few weeks you can set the timezone back to Auckland.

Its really annoying that Nokia doesn’t just issue a new patch, I suppose they just don’t care about us in little ol New Zealand (sniff) but since this issue will affect all their high-end phones (N70, N73, N95 etc) which are used a lot by business users you would think they would get off their butts and do something. Sigh.

It’s Googles 10th birthday and they have put together a neat little timeline showing major milestones during their history.

I was particularly impressed with how their home page has evolved over the last 10 years, nice and simple all the time with just minor tweaks and content changes along the way, all hiding more and more features.