"Interesting" Things – MichaelHinds.com

10/02/2006

Hmmm. Did I only post one "interesting thing" for 2005?

Found this brilliant page on building logic gates mechanically using Lego Technics. I feel a shopping spree coming on...

02/02/2006

Back in the office today after 3 days at an Oracle seminar - will post a few handy hints in the developer log soon!.

Nima posted a link on OpenACS telling us all how groovy Netvibes is - I agree!

27/01/2006

Paul Graham on Web 2.0 hype (from November). I tend to think posting links to people like Graham and Spolsky is so redundant. I can't imagine that anyone with an interest in the narrow topics covered by mh.com wouldn't have heard of these boys before. But in the same vein of thinking, pretty much everything I publish could also be redundant. D'oh!

21/04/2005

Google is so popular these days I forget that there are other search engine options! But today I noticed that Alta Vista now has an audio search which seems to work very well. You can search various formats including mp3, Real & Windows Media. The search results show file name, format and duration (you can filter out pifling little <<;1 minute files). It seems everyone is using Google's colour scheme for search results these days!

17/09/2004

I needed to create a new Oracle user for OpenACS today, so I lazily called into Lars Pind's website to use his script generator. Unfortunately he's changed the format of the site and I couldn't find it (I'm sure it's around somewhere). Scanning through his blog though, he mentions that he's listening to ITConversations. This is a great website containing audio downloads (MP3, AAC/MB4) of interviews with top IT people. Philip Greenspun is there, and Tim O'Reilly, the animal-loving book dude. Seems like an excellent excuse to replace my stolen iPod. Hmmmm... this is work related - I wonder if I can "expense" it?

12/09/2004

Just sanded my floors with this beasty!
Floor sander pic

27/08/2004

Got my keys! Woohoo! It looks better than the picture now. That was me doing the snag list (well, my mate Enda did it really). Pic of 37 The Rise

18/08/2004

The fun thing about the web is once you post something, it's hard to take it back. Make a fool of yourself and you do it in front of millions! Chances are whatever you say is going to be cached by Google, maybe entered into the Way Back Machine, even plundered by who knows who else. Most of the web pages I read are in English, although this isn't always the author's first or second language. This occasionally makes for amusing grammatical or cultural mistakes and misinterpretations...

Perhaps one day, possibly in the near future, Boris will be a little more in tune with western lingo and will look back on this message with a touch of embarrassment.

15/08/2004

Quote of the day:

"I've recently become a born again christian, which has changed my life a hell of a lot!"

Shane Lynch, former Boyzone member

12/08/2004

This one's doing the rounds...

The curtain rods

She spent the first day packing her belongings into boxes, crates and suitcases. On the second day, she had the movers come and collect her things. On the third day, she sat down for the last time at their beautiful dining room table by candleli ght, put on some soft background music, and feasted on a pound of shrimp, a jar of caviar, and a bottle of Chardonnay. When she had finished, she went into each and every room and stuffed half-eaten shrimp shells dipped in caviar, into the hollow of the all of the curtain rods. She then cleaned up the kitchen and left.

When the husband returned with his new girlfriend, all was bliss for the first few days. Then slowly, the house began to smell. They tried everything, cleaning, mopping, and airing the place out. Vents were checked for dead rodents, and carpets were steam cleaned. Air fresheners were hung everywhere. Exterminators were brought in to set off gas canisters, during which they had to move out for a few days, and in the end they even paid to replace the expensive wool carpeting.

Nothing worked. People stopped coming over to visit. Repairmen refused to work in the house. The maid quit. Finally, they could not take the stench any longer and decided to move. A month later, even though they had cut their price in half, they could not find a buyer for their stinky house. Word got out, and eventually, even the local realtors refused to return their calls. Finally, they had to borrow a huge sum of money from the bank to purchase a new place. The ex-wife called the man, and asked how things were going. He told her the saga of the rotting house. She listened politely, and said that she missed her old home terribly, and would be willing to reduce her divorce settlement in exchange for getting the house back. Knowing his ex-wife had no idea how bad the smell was, he agreed on price that was about 1/10th of what the house had been worth, but only if she were to sign the papers that very day. She agreed, and within the hour his lawyers delivered the p aperwork. A week later the man and his girlfriend stood smiling as they watched the moving company pack everything to take to their new home, including the curtain rods.

I LOVE A HAPPY ENDING, DON'T YOU????

I had to reformat that to get rid of the extra spaces and leading ">"'s from it being forwarded. You'd think people could write mail clients that could handle forwarded text nicer these days, wouldn't you?

11/08/2004

At last, The A-Team is exonerated for the crime they didn't commit. [this has moved to the premium section of The Onion]

22/07/2004

Downloaded the Google toolbar for Firefox, only to find there's no PageRank. D'oh! However, under the comments for the Googlebar extension someone points out that you can go to www.top25web.com/pagerank.php, submit a list of domains and get back their PageRanks. Which is nice. You can't hammer it with a robot or they'll ban you. As of today, mh.com is ranked 3, mh.net is 2. Hence my furious typing in a bid to add content.