Black Caviar 22nd win @ Royal Ascot

Operatic sky

Since FX is one of the last great ripoffs in finance, this might actually be a pretty big deal.

The Currency Cloud Secures $4M To Disrupt The Trillion Dollar Foreign Exchange Market The Currency Cloud has developed a Foreign Exchange (FX) payments automation platform which supercharges the tired old world of cross-border business payments, aiming to reduce costs for business and make multi-currency payments more frictionless. Since FX is one of the last great ...

SwipeStudy now with Facebook Connect

You can now register with Swipestudy using your facebook account, less user IDs and passwords to remember … now thats a good thing! Swipestudy is a flash-card study tool for the smartphone age, very useful for studying foreign languages and preparing for exams and best of all its all free. You can see what people ...

Ringmark

Good to see Facebook putting pressure on the mobile manufacturers to standardise their HTML5 implementations Try it here http://rng.it Facebook today addressed three challenge areas that make it hard for developers to build apps on the mobile web: app discovery, browser fragmentation, and payments. As part of the second one, Facebook released Ringmark, a new ...

Summer at last

Social Media explained

This is how I discovered Pinterest… I already new that only google employees post to G+ TheAtlantic: Abysmal Google+ Numbers: Users Spending 3 Minutes per Month on the Site

Amsterdam? Nope Darlinghurst

Good to see a euro splash of colour amongst the usual drab boring inner city Sydney ‘architecture’

Don’t mess with Genovese geese

Upended in Megeve

BestExchangeRates – adds retail UK GBP currency rates

https://bestexchangerates.com now available in 5 countries, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Canada and UK!

Snow monkey king

The Snow Monkeys of Jigokudani near Shiga Kogen, Nagano. After two kilometers of very snowy forest trail we came upon this amazing scene. It’s good to be the king, but judging by the missing finger he’s had to fight for the right to sit in the sauna and been attended to by the gang.

Japanese menus aren’t for the fussy eater

Organic buildings

Hong Kong buildings remind of some type of coral-like organic life form. A good example of the ‘Porosity’ of Asian city living…

Apple’s web-app directory has gone very quiet

Original post from April 18, updated for the 1 year anniversary of apple web-apps going dark! Being a developer of several web-apps for both pc and mobile phones, I read with interest way back in March the brouhaha regarding whether Apple had intentionally hamstrung web-apps performance on the iPhone by preventing their use of its ...

Google Developer Day and My presentation @Creative sandbox

So I was off to Darling Harbour for the annual Geek-fest that is #gdd11, and was pretty impressed with the quality of the lunch boxes…the talks weren’t bad either. Actually the highlights were Timothy Jordan & Julia Ferraioli’s presentation on Using the Google+ APIs and also Eric Bidelman’s Bleeding Edge HTML5. I even managed to ...

SwipeStudy – now available on the Intel Appup store

Swipestudy is a flash-card study tool for the smartphone age, very useful for studying foreign languages and preparing for exams and best of all its all free. If you’re running Windows you can download it as an App here otherwise just goto http://swipestudy.com on your PC or smartphone. You can see what people are studying ...

Hong Kong UX

This Hong Kong street-scene snapped while rolling along up the soho escalator looks like a crazy UX drop down menu design

Why buzzwords like HTML5 are useful

But I think there’s actually a very good reason why we should, in fact, embrace the term “HTML5” as an overarching buzzword for this latest round of web standards and specifications. Our industry has proven on several occasions that we don’t get excited about new, interesting, and useful technologies and concepts until such a buzzword is in place.

Wikileaks Cablegate on HRH Prince Andrew

According to a dispatch in the Cablegate Wikileaks treasure trove, American Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Tatiana Gfoeller attended a two-hour brunch to brief HRH Prince Andrew Duke of York ahead of his meetings with the Kyrgyz Prime Minister. Much of the banter is actually quite amusing and a rare peek into the attitudes of the British royal family.

“The crowd practically clapped. He then capped this off with a zinger: castigating “our stupid (sic) British and American governments which plan at best for ten years whereas people in this part of the world plan for centuries.” There were calls of “hear, hear” in the private brunch hall. Unfortunately for the assembled British subjects, their cherished Prince was now late to the Prime Minister’s. He regretfully tore himself away from them and they from him.”

Social Media; doing good vs making money

Two social media videos…one inspiring, one impressive yet slightly scary

A quick and easy currency converter

Just put the finishing touches on CurrencyConvert.biz – A quick and easy Web 2.0 currency converter. Please leave any comments, bugs or feedback as a comment here. thx David

Very funny/true from Charlie Brooker: Google Instant is trying to kill me

Last week I realised the internet wants to kill me. I was trying to write a script in a small room with nothing but a laptop for company. Perfect conditions for quiet contemplation – but thanks to the accompanying net connection, I may as well have been sharing the space with a 200-piece marching band. ...

Author Nicholas Carr wrote a controversial post on hyperlinks in which he argued that links were a distraction for readers

I agree with the posit that excessive hyperlinking can be very distracting, I’d love to see some scientific data on the effect of hyperlinks on comprehension

Panorama at 48 martin place

Running Extra Mile Sets the Human Apart

While slogging my way to Bondi beach yesterday in the annual city to surf amongst the world-record 80,000 strong throng I was reminded of this article on how the ability to run long-distance had a big influence on the development of the human form and brain. At least it helped keep my mind off the ...

Using Closures in Javascript to pass parameters to setTimeout()

For the home page of my site I wanted to cause certain divs to fadeIn using jQuery after varying amounts of time. In javascript we can use setTimeout() to schedule an arbitrary function call for some point in future. However the function works differently between Firefox and Internet Explorer (MSIE). In FireFox, you would do ...

iphone irrationality

I’m glad I don’t work in a phone shop…

Planning for “long-fuse, big bang problems” in an age of uncertainty.

Scenario planning derives from the observation that, given the impossibility of knowing precisely how the future will play out, a good decision or strategy to adopt is one that plays out well across several possible futures. To find that “robust” strategy, scenarios are created in plural, such that each scenario diverges markedly from the others. ...

Power in the Networked Century

Interesting thoughts on hierarchies vs networks in this influential paper by Anne-Marie Slaughter, America’s Edge: Power in the Networked Century. In this world, the measure of power is connectedness. Almost 30 years ago, the psychologist Carol Gilligan wrote about differences between the genders in their modes of thinking. She observed that men tend to see ...

Social Networks – a Darwinian Perspective.

Interesting application of Darwinian theory to social networks from Justin Milne until recently head of broadband at Telstra.

The net in all its forms, wired or wireless, fixed or mobile has become the greatest contributor to the spread of memes the world has ever seen. Never have so many people been able to share so many ideas or concentrate their intelligence so rapidly.

Digital Diplomacy

Looks like the u.s. state department is ‘getting IT’

The underpinning philosophy of 21st-century statecraft is that the networked world ‘exists above the state, below the state and through the state’

Christopher Hitchens on the Grape and the Grain

A Short Footnote on the Grape and the Grain

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—​the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—​is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea.

What the internet is doing to our minds

HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey” the machine is being dismantled, its wires unplugged: “My mind is going,” HAL says. “I can feel it.”
For Carr, the analogy is obvious: The modern mind is like the fictional computer. “I can feel it too,” he writes. “Over the last few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.”

Average cow makes enough manure a day to power a 100-watt light bulb

Don’t forget to add the additional bull$%^* factor…

London Bridge

Hidden behind a non-descript hole in the wall was this cavernous venue

I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The Internet

Their new three social plugins, Open Graph, and Open Graph API, make Facebook’s intentions very clear: they want to be the fabric of the web.

Mobile is the future according to google

Eric Schmidt: Mobile Is The Future, And There’s No Such Thing As Communication Overload

Is Google’s Eric Schmidt scared of Apple’s Steve Jobs?

Eric Schmidt Is the Nicest Guy in Tech…does that mean Google is doomed to lose to Apple?

trying out the iPhone OS4.0 beta

Am enjoying the Multi-tasking and folders but my beloved nytimes app is crashing boohoo

Microsoft vs Google vs Apple

It’s hard to grasp the breathtaking scale of the epic war between Microsoft, Google and Apple. Billions upon billions of dollars. Entire industries at stake. This is the board. These are the pieces.

Whats the deal with Iceland?

As if on cue, Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted in the same week as the release of a long-awaited report from the investigation into the country’s financial collapse.

Twitter as History: Library of Congress Will Save Tweets

Perhaps maybe we should put more thought into our tweets now that they’ll be history

With the brotherhood

Discovering the AGNSW collection of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood art

Martin Place autumn sunset

Amazing winter storm sunset along Martin Place Sydney

Murdoch hails iPad as saviour of news

Could this be the end of ‘freemium’?

Achilles Statue London: 19th century recycled French Canons

The 33 ton bronze statue was erected in Hyde Park 1822 by the swooning “Women of England”

Gough!

Clifton Pugh’s portrait of Gough Whitlam in Parliament House in Canberra.

The Cricketers Arms – Sunglasses required

The Cricketers Arms, Foveaux St, Surry Hills, Sydney

Master artists (mini versions)

National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Red fluro possibilities

Cricketers Arms, Fouveaux st, Sydney.

Governor Macquarie’s Rum Hospital

My daily walk into town through some sydney history

Thankful Atheists

Saw this interesting quote attributed to Dante Gabriel Rossetti,

Pre-Raphaelites and Ruskin

  Just discovered these guys… a very interesting bunch! Proserpine, 1873-1877, at Tate Gallery, London. Painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti  

A very English garden

Westminster abbey College garden …u can’t get much more English than that. College Garden occupies a site that has been under continuous cultivation for more than 900 years. It was here that the Abbey’s first Infirmary garden was established in the eleventh century.

Val Thorens 3200 metres

3200 metres from Cime de Caron peak, Val Thorens French Alps.

Spiegel Tent by moonlight

Shanghai tunnel under Bund

A slow-moving tram, through a comically low-tech tunnel of antiquated 80′s era rope lights, lasers and car dealership ilk inflatables — narrated only by a psychotic stream of random words. Something that might have been interesting at the 1964 World’s Fair, or a quarter-operated Chuck E. Cheese, but would bore even the most provincial child ...

Dusty sydney

Woke up to this view! Thought it was a great sunrise, then perhaps fog…then i saw footprints… http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/23/2693643.htm

Oriental Pearl TV Tower Pudong Park, Shanghai

The Pearl tends to polarise opinion; most people either love it or hate it. In all fairness giant pink balls tend to generate a response… well  some kind of response either way! I have to admit despite its gaudiness…I love it!