NY plane crash-landing on water (video now available!)

January 16, 2009 By Leave a Comment

“In the unlikely event of the aeroplane having to put down on water…”

‘Put down on water’? Disintegrate into a million pieces you mean” I thought every time I heard that line in an in-flight safety video.

I’ve seen planes ‘putting down’ on water, oh yes. Like this one.

Well, from now on, I’ll keep my smart-ass comments to myself because this amazing crew showed us it can be done :-)

It’s a real good-news story.

And what makes me smile even more is these guys did it with less damage to their plane than the one in the Safety Card illustration

Here’s a step-by-step guide how to do this incredible stunt (in case you ever find yourself in the hot seat).

What’s the one thing that would make this story perfect?

A YouTube video, of course.  And here it is – plus another view from FoxTV and even a medley on YouTube. Thank heavens for surveillance cameras!

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Google Earth on a 30″ Mac monitor. Wow

January 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Google Earth on a 30″ Mac monitor.  I won’t even bother trying to show you what it looks like.

Its awesome.  Its about the best thing you can do with the Internet in my book.

The only bad thing about it is that it uses up time and money you should be spending on going there :-)

That said, if you’re in the office and you want to connect with that special place, it’s awesome.

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‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ solo – 9yr old shows how it’s done

December 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

9yr old blows parents away with Guns ‘N Roses classic ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’

This is the opening act at my son Theo’s school concert earlier this month. So good I thought I’d promote it here.  What was I doing when I was 9??  Oh….yeah.  I remember. :-)

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Best mp3 recorder – mAudio Microtrack.

December 12, 2008 By 2 Comments

mAudio’s Microtrack has proved to be the best mp3 recorder for sound, money and longevity

. click to listen

This week, I took our trusty old mAudio Microtrack I to record a Christmas Carol concert at St. Luke’s church in London. There was no fancy set up – just the natural ambient sound and the Microtrack with it’s little plug-in mic.

I recorded this in mp3 format, 44.1Khz at 192 bits. Since then, it’s been edited and recompressed as an mp3 and uploaded.

The machine is over two years old now and still giving great service. Occasionally it locks on saving a file but so far never loses the file it was saving. The battery was never great – so I velcro a 4xAA usb battery pack onto it. That gives me as much battery as I want to match the 33 hours of top quality mp3 recording.

It’s been a seriously good unit. It’s done seminars, conferences, outside broadcasts, podcasts, video soundtracks, panel discussions… you name it. So good, in fact, that I’ve not even been able to find a reason to buy the next generation Microtrack.

Filed Under: review, WOW! Tagged With: , , , ,

Google. Earth. Perspective.

December 9, 2008 By Leave a Comment

This picture puts today’s Google Trends into a kind of perspective.

The Earth pictured from space – as seen by the US Apollo astronauts in the early 1970s (above).

Below is the Earth as seen by Google Trends – the top 100 US Google searches – Dec 9th 2008:

“3. visanthe shiancoe”

“4. visanthe shiancoe locker room”

“5. vishante shiancoe”

“6. shiancoe naked”

“26. shiancoe video”

“27. visanthe shiancoe site youtube.com”

“34. shiancoe penis”

“38. shiancoe minnesota vikings”

“50. shiancoe exposed”

“59. shiancoe towel”

“65. vikings’ shiancoe shown on tv barely wearing towel”

“74. visanthe shiancoe naked video”

“79. shiancoe picture“

Filed Under: history, WOW! Tagged With: , , ,

Lottery results: Sat 6th December

December 7, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Lottery results: 10 12 20 37 39 48 (31)

I won a tenner.  Wow.  How about you?

And what about that recent ad campaign?  That thinly-veiled ‘positive thinking’ nonsense about people who are optimistic; people who think big; you know, lottery kind of people…

I’d love to make another version of that ad.  One where everybody’s hoping to fix their lives with a vast pile of money that could help them escape from the present moment; that would assist them not accepting who they actually were; one that would enable them to become someone… special… worthwhile… beautiful…

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Oneayearcampaign.com: read this UKBF thread first

December 2, 2008 By Leave a Comment

oneayearcampaign.com puts its reputation on the line in UK Business Forum thread

I’ve long been a critic of online directory schemes promising increased business. I feel like the James Randi of the internet at times, driven to debunk people exploiting other peoples’ ignorance about online marketing. “What Google visibility?” I like to ask. “Why are your site visitors going to come to my site?” I’m partial to enquiring.

One project I wanted to fire these questions at is oneayearcampaign.com – a site that aims to take 10% in exchange for new business it creates for you. Why would you pay to advertise with this untested website? Because the owner claims she will give 10% of her earnings to ‘her favourite charities’.  At first glance, it’s appears to be a sweet idea.

Siobhan Jones of oneayearcampaign.com posted in UKBF offering free advertising to the first 30 UKBF members. The first few people thought it was a nice idea. Then along came Ling with a few tricky questions of her own resulting in this monster of a thread - and a masterpiece of online reputation (mis?)management for all involved.

This thread is so revealing I wouldn’t be surprised if they deleted it soon – so hurry up, put the kettle on and get comfortable; this is worth an hour of your life. You might learn how not to do a lot of things. Your business may even thank you for it.

Filed Under: what do you think?, WOW! Tagged With: , , , ,

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu makes WordPress 50% better in 60 seconds

September 18, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Ozh wordpress pluginThe way WordPress should have been designed in the first place ;-)

WordPress is an awesome piece (family?) of user-friendly, open-source software. It makes web design a practical option for a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise have even bothered trying.

But, like many other non-commercial things, it has ended up with surprisingly ragged edges. Documentation? Only for the geek. Navigation around the Admin ‘dashboard’? Clumsy, clunky.. ugly. Counter-intuitive even. So much ‘sideways tunneling’ to find the functionality you need… So many opportunities to do the wrong thing.

Like changing your permalink structures and losing your entire site in one click.

Like writing a post instead of a page (again)..

This plugin makes using Worpdress 50% easier in my opinion. Thanks!

Filed Under: blogging technique, WOW! Tagged With: , , ,

How do I hide my WordPress blog until it’s ready to go live?

September 4, 2008 By 12 Comments

Maintenance Mode graphicMaintenance Mode plugin is how you hide your blog until it’s finished

Now we’re getting busy with site designs, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to be able to build a site ‘offline’ as it were.

So I went looking for how to do that and found… (yes, you’ve guessed it) – yet another ‘how to’ shaped hole in the Googlesphere.

I was about to give up when a Canadian schoolteacher blogger caught my eye, and led me to ‘Maintenance Mode‘ from German developers Software Guide.

I laughed, I cried, I danced around the room with joy. This is exactly what I need; so simple and yet so bloody invisible. Here’s how it works – and you can have fun and make it look anyway you want!

Thanks, guys, or should I say vielen danke, Ich totally like liebe dich. Go there, don’t mind if you don’t speak German as good me, just press the buttons until the plugin downloads :-)

(BTW, don’t mind that it messes up the Flash image uploader in WP 2.6 – you can just use the Browser uploader instead)

Filed Under: how to, WOW!

StatCounter.com: “Shut that door!”

July 3, 2008 By 5 Comments

It may be free, it may be invisible but reliable it isn’t. At least not yet.

StatCounter.com logoYesterday, our blog stats showed a StatCounter.com page as one of the ‘referring URLs’.

That means someone came to our blog from their StatCounter.com stats page (after I’d visited their site from our site).

In fact, I’d visited their site to get a graphic for our client list. Noticing my visit, they’d clicked backwards to our site. Nothing unusual about that.

What is unusual is what happened when I clicked on the referring URL. I found myself on a StatCounter.com page – logged in to our client’s account!

So, StatCounter.com, if you’re listening: in the words of the legendary Larry Grayson -

“Shut that door!” :-)

Filed Under: feedback, WOW!
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