Saving the environment in 1 easy step...

I've made my first moves toward a cleaner, greener simv and I would like to share with you how you too can help fix the world. It is easier than you think. Alright if you're ready, let me bestow my wisdom.

BUY A WICKED ARSE GOPED SCOOTER.

It is that easy. Seriously it is one of the coolest toys I have ever bought AND every day I ride it I am saving the environment just that little more.

The goped is fun to ride, quick and one charge lasts for ages. If you live within 10kilometers of your work get one. Do it. Do it now.

Good Vibrations

Photos from Good Vibrations are now available at flickr

New Quickflix Office & Project Phoenix

Today marks the end of our first week in the new Quickflix Office. We've finally settled in, I've got myself a bonsai tree and a wall to utilise and everything seems to be going pretty well.

The bonsai on my desk.

For those who aren't familiar with my job I am a senior developer and graphic designer at Quickflix, the biggest independant DVD rental company in Australia. I have been working for Quickflix since its inception, and have been involved with its development from prototype to full blown business.

As with most companies where their entire existance revolves around our technology we've reached a point where we've out grown our current IT offering. We're wanting to do things now to enhance our members experience that are just not feasible in our current environment.

Enter Project Phoenix. This project is about two things. Providing our subscribers with the best possible online DVD rental service through both efficient fulfilment and delivery and becoming the household name in home entertainment by having the best most engaging service available.

I am fortunate enough to be leading the redevelopment of our website from the ground up. In the next couple of months I will be blogging about our progress and you should see notes and info on the development of a new beautiful and dynamic interface, new exciting features and tools to make the Quickflix experience amazing, and ideas I will be using to help my team turn flashes of inspiration into full blown features.

I will be taking photos through the entire process and you can see these and more photos on my flickr page under the "Pix from the 'flix" set.

If you are a Quickflix member and have had some ideas about how you would like to make your Quickflix experience even better please don't hesitate to post a comment on any of posts I make. The more suggestions and ideas you provide the better we can make the service.

Please note: This blog is in no way affliated with Quickflix. I mearly work for them. As part of my contract and NDA, I will not be able to directly comment on new features and things that have not been yet released to public. I cannot comment on the inner workings of Quickflix so don't expect special insights that have not been made public to our users or the market.

EDIT: Fixed Typo

Latest Mike & Mal Video - For real this time

Ok, gootube finally converted one of our supplied videos properly and as such here is the latest Mike & Mal video promoting Quickflix. Enjoy!

Remember: You can see more Mike & Mal clips on youtube

Latest Mike & Mal Video

UPDATE: gootube couldn't convert the video correctly and it ended up all screwy. We're contacting the producers to send us the video in various formats and hopefully we can get something that youtube actually likes. Stay tuned.

PLEASE NOTE: youtube is taking its sweet ass time processing the video below, so if nothing comes up when you try and play it, please come back later. Stupid gootube.

Quickflix has published the next in the series of Mike & Mal Videos. The series has been pretty funny. You can see the rest of the videos on youtube.

FUD: Apple User Style

Some called John Pospisil has written an article on his blog jumping on the Vista bashing bandwagon. His article entitled "Microsoft slugs Mac users with Vista Tax" on the tech.blorge.com blogging site is just a load of uninformed crap. From the article:

Mac users wanting to run Vista on their Macintosh will have to buy an expensive version of Vista if they want to legally install it on their systems.

The end-user license agreement for the cheaper versions of Vista (Home Basic and Home Premium) explicitly forbids the use of those versions on virtual machines (ie Macs pretending to be PCs)

This is misleading, the EULA on the cheaper versions of Vista forbids the installation of these versions as Virtual Machines running under virtualisation software such as Parrallels, VMWare or even Microsofts Virtual PC. This relates to ALL platforms that these virtualisation programs support, not just Macs. It does not stop you from installing Vista on your Apple under Boot Camp.

This article is just pure FUD. I am suprised that a "tech" site would even publish something that is so incorrect and misleading. The ensuing arguements on slashdot and even on the article itself are just so funny. People who obviously know nothing about what they are discussing stating opinions as fact. Oh I love the Interweb.

News just in...

Colin is a wanker! In other late breaking news: The sky is blue and fish swim!

How do you like that for an update Col? Maybe now you wont hassle me about the post frequency on couch-review.com :)

3106 rocked

I don't know what I really expected. Each year we organise 3106, the biggest party on the social calendar, and each year it goes off. This year was no exception.

We had a massive turnout of people, with folks coming from all around to the Queens to join in the fun. I had a great time, didn't get too pissed (though I did get nicely hammered) and saw alot of people I haven't seen for a while, so it was all good.

Unfortunately for safety reasons I didn't take my camera so we have no chronical of the events but take my word for it: if you weren't there you missed out.

Thanks to everyone who rocked up to make this one of the best 3106s ever.

Trouble on the couch

For some reason blogger (the application that powers the mighty couch) and my hosting service (uplinkearth, for all your hosting needs) are having trouble communicating. As such parts of couch-review.com have fallen off the interweb.

I've contacted the technical people around the shop and hopefully something will be fixed soon, but in the mean time, please don't start emailing me saying "where the hell is some random post from 3 weeks ago?", basically: the files gone, its just fucking gone. Hopefully back soon though.

In better news: 3106 is on tonight. ROCK AND ROLL! See ya soon everyone who decides to brave the 41 - 42 degree summer heat.

UPDATE : All fixed now. The couch should be back completely now.

Boot Camp: Windows on the MacBook

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had installed Windows on the MacBook using Parallels, a virtualisation application within OSX. Yesterday I took the plunge and installed Boot Camp. Boot Camp allows you to run Windows natively as a Dual Boot alongside OSX.

Ok, I don't know how good idea this was for Apple. They have made it bloody easy and neat to partition your hard drive and get Windows installed. It was a snap. Once partitioned the Boot Camp Assistant restarted the laptop and the Windows install started. The Assistant even burned a CD of Mac Drivers for when Windows needs to install the strange hardware.

Once all installed I customised Windows to how I like it and I have to say, it runs about 5 times better than OSX running on the same hardware. Firefox starts up in about a quarter of the time, Outlook is practically instant (compared to quite a long wait for OSX Mail). Windows Media Player loads up my entire media library in no time, searching and playing across the network without fault, while iTunes chunks and falters. Photoshop runs BRILLIANTLY in Windows, but is plodding and slow on OSX. All the neat features of the Mac are here: decent hardware, "dual touch" mouse or whatever its called, eject button, function keys and all the crap parts of OSX are gone (Finder is a poor subsitute to Explorer, and the inconsistancy between interfaces on programs).

It runs beautifully. Better than any PC I have ever used Windows on before. I guess all those years of knowing how to write for Intel Hardware really paid off for Microsoft / the rest of the PC community. For those interested the specs of my Macbook are: 2ghz Core 2 Duo, 2 gig of 667mhz RAM, 64mb Intel Onboard Graphics, 120gig 5400rpm HDD.

Will I switch back to OSX? Occasionally, but really: why would I? It offers me nothing that Windows doesn't, I know how to look after my PCs (I don't get viruses / spyware) and there is a much larger software library and better programs for Windows (uTorrent to name but one piece of software brilliance).

Suddenly my laptop is useful.

Officially 25

Yesterday I turned 25. Thats right, a quarter of a century. I feel old, but at least my insurance should be cheaper now.

Thanks to my family for taking me out for a nice meal at the Red Cray, and for Jutto and Johnny K for taking me for lunch at the Belgium Beer Cafe. Also: thanks to everyone who sent messages.

Don't forget the massive shindig that is 3106 is on again this Saturday (3rd of Feb) from 7pm onwards at the usual place.

See you there