Today The Canberra Times reported that a British student was thinking of ideas for ways to pay for his university fees and came up with the idea of selling one million pixels at $1 each for advertising space. The result is The Million Dollar Homepage, and he is very close to making his $1 million!
He's been able to attract Ebay, Yahoo, The Times and many online casinos. This is still more proof that crazy ideas involving the Internet can (sometimes) actually work.
Friday, December 30, 2005
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Travel: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Soon after the wedding we went off to Malaysia flying Singapore Airlines. They have movies on demand even in Economy class, which meant I had the choice of 60 movies and numerous TV shows to watch. The service was also very good, so they made a good impression on my first-ever trip flying with them. The only thing missing was the socks and toothbrush that I'm accustomed to receiving on longer trips with Qantas.
We arrived at the Grand Plaza Parkroyal, Kuala Lumpur, which was very conveniently located right near the Bukit Bintang monorail station and the Sungei Wang Plaza, which is a massive shopping centre that includes a ten-pin bowling centre. You can see the hotel in background in the picture to the left. The picture is taken from the bridge to the monorail station and also to Sungei Wang.
The following morning we went into the shopping centre and I was surprised to see an armed security guard carrying a shotgun across his shoulder, along with a regulation hand-gun. They sure take their security seriously here. I became used to seeing police and regular security guards with serious weapons in the following days.
I started reading the New Straits Times and it was refreshing to read a newspaper that didn't mention terrorism at all. The top story of the day had a headline something like "Nude Squat Inquiry", which was responding to the release of a video recorded on a mobile phone of an arrested suspect performing nude squats as part of their body search procedures.
Police were criticised for recording the video and also for carrying out the procedures in the first place, without public knowledge. Malaysia is heavily censored and people appear to be pressing for greater freedom of speech and personal liberties.
One of the first things to hit me about Malaysia was the crazy traffic, where indicators are seriously underused, lane markings are considered more guidelines than anything else and motorcycle riders rarely obey any road rules at all. I was taking a video of a random street and was almost run over as a motorcyclist decided to use the footpath instead of the road.
In the picture you can see a bunch of bikes that have taken over the pedestrian crossing on the other side of the road.
There were a few other things to surprise me. The first is that the shops are open at hours that are much better suited to my body-clock. They don't open until around 11 am, but they don't shut before 10 pm or even later at night. The shopping centres are also amazing (or scary for those people like myself who are only interested in shopping for about an hour or so).
The markets in KL, especially in the Chinatown region (Petaling St) are amazing. By day, the street is sort of open for traffic, but by night it closes in and a trip through all the vendors can take an hour or more. As you travel down Petaling St, you're offered plenty of 'genuine copies' of things like shoes, handbags, wallets and dodgy DVDs or games.
Probably the most pleasant surprise was that our currency is actually worth something in KL and food is pretty cheap there. There are about 3 Ringgits to 1 AUD, and you can typically get a meal for less than 5 Ringgits, which means food is cheap. Alcohol is on par with Australia, so it is not uncommon to pay more for a drink than you did for your meal.
To be continued...
We arrived at the Grand Plaza Parkroyal, Kuala Lumpur, which was very conveniently located right near the Bukit Bintang monorail station and the Sungei Wang Plaza, which is a massive shopping centre that includes a ten-pin bowling centre. You can see the hotel in background in the picture to the left. The picture is taken from the bridge to the monorail station and also to Sungei Wang.The following morning we went into the shopping centre and I was surprised to see an armed security guard carrying a shotgun across his shoulder, along with a regulation hand-gun. They sure take their security seriously here. I became used to seeing police and regular security guards with serious weapons in the following days.
I started reading the New Straits Times and it was refreshing to read a newspaper that didn't mention terrorism at all. The top story of the day had a headline something like "Nude Squat Inquiry", which was responding to the release of a video recorded on a mobile phone of an arrested suspect performing nude squats as part of their body search procedures.
Police were criticised for recording the video and also for carrying out the procedures in the first place, without public knowledge. Malaysia is heavily censored and people appear to be pressing for greater freedom of speech and personal liberties.
One of the first things to hit me about Malaysia was the crazy traffic, where indicators are seriously underused, lane markings are considered more guidelines than anything else and motorcycle riders rarely obey any road rules at all. I was taking a video of a random street and was almost run over as a motorcyclist decided to use the footpath instead of the road.In the picture you can see a bunch of bikes that have taken over the pedestrian crossing on the other side of the road.
There were a few other things to surprise me. The first is that the shops are open at hours that are much better suited to my body-clock. They don't open until around 11 am, but they don't shut before 10 pm or even later at night. The shopping centres are also amazing (or scary for those people like myself who are only interested in shopping for about an hour or so).
The markets in KL, especially in the Chinatown region (Petaling St) are amazing. By day, the street is sort of open for traffic, but by night it closes in and a trip through all the vendors can take an hour or more. As you travel down Petaling St, you're offered plenty of 'genuine copies' of things like shoes, handbags, wallets and dodgy DVDs or games.
Probably the most pleasant surprise was that our currency is actually worth something in KL and food is pretty cheap there. There are about 3 Ringgits to 1 AUD, and you can typically get a meal for less than 5 Ringgits, which means food is cheap. Alcohol is on par with Australia, so it is not uncommon to pay more for a drink than you did for your meal.
To be continued...
Friday, December 09, 2005
The Wedding: Today's The Day
At 3:30 pm today, it will be time to get married! Time has really flown since Aug 21, 2004, when I asked Georgie to marry me on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I also can't believe that it has been more than 7 years since I started going out with George!
As predicted, the weather is fantastic, with nice sunny weather, 25 degrees Celcius max. It should be awesome at the reception at Federal Golf Club, which we played at on Tuesday. It was George's first game there, but it was something that we both wanted to do before we got married there. Despite the severe storm that lasted only 5 minutes or so, it was good fun.
As predicted, the weather is fantastic, with nice sunny weather, 25 degrees Celcius max. It should be awesome at the reception at Federal Golf Club, which we played at on Tuesday. It was George's first game there, but it was something that we both wanted to do before we got married there. Despite the severe storm that lasted only 5 minutes or so, it was good fun.
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Reading: Books I've Read
I started thinking the other day that it would be great to be able to auto-generate a list of books that I've read, in the same way I do for blogs. Delicious Library was something I'd seen used on persistent.info, but it is only available for Macs, so I had to find something else.
Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to spend on this right now, so I took a look at some collection software and tried only a few at random. Alexandria seems to be the best. It can add books just using the ISBN and the can generate HTML. The problem is that there isn't a concept of reading lists or sorting on custom fields. What I would like is to be able to do is add all the books I read and then generate a list sorted in descending order by the date I finished reading. Alexandria is written in Ruby, so it should be possible to modify the source to do just that, but I should still spend some time to see if somebody hasn't done this already.
In the meantime, I'll just have to settle for a manual list, aided by Alexandria's auto-generation of the nice HTML layouts for me.
Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to spend on this right now, so I took a look at some collection software and tried only a few at random. Alexandria seems to be the best. It can add books just using the ISBN and the can generate HTML. The problem is that there isn't a concept of reading lists or sorting on custom fields. What I would like is to be able to do is add all the books I read and then generate a list sorted in descending order by the date I finished reading. Alexandria is written in Ruby, so it should be possible to modify the source to do just that, but I should still spend some time to see if somebody hasn't done this already.
In the meantime, I'll just have to settle for a manual list, aided by Alexandria's auto-generation of the nice HTML layouts for me.
Friday, December 02, 2005
Software: Firefox 1.5 Released
After a few release candidates, Firefox 1.5 has been released. On the surface it looks pretty similar to V1.0, but there are several improvements under the surface, including better updating, support for more web standards and even faster browsing.
I should really update my Firefox extension to support V1.5.
I should really update my Firefox extension to support V1.5.
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