Musings of a psycho #48
Another hot week in Sydney and another week closer to the end of 2009!
Sunday, 22 November 2009
#326 - Hot weather makes me feel lazy.
Today was a super hot and humid day in Sydney and I just simply felt like doing nothing at all. The day was indeed a very lazy day, just sat at my desk doing not much at all. In fact halfway through the day I just decided to lie down and sleep, though not much longer afterwards I woke up because it was too hot. Tried googling to see if there was any explanations to why hot weather makes people sleepy or lazy, but unfortunately didn't come up with anything useful other than a random comment on a forum saying "Cold weather makes me sleepy too. Being awake makes me feel sleepy."
Firefox Multitouch Gestures
For those of you who are unaware, I have converted to the "dark side" and now own and use a MacBook Pro laptop at home. One of the awesome things about the laptop is the multitouch trackpad. Used as part of the OS it is great - swipe 4 fingers down triggers expose swipe them up show desktop and a couple of others.
Having said that I spend a good chunk of my time on Firefox while using my Mac and there are some very useful multitouch gestures you can add! There are a couple of other tutorials out there already, but for some reason the ones I've found only talk about the twist left/right to move to the previous/next tab. Being curious me, I went exploring and found out how to get some more equally helpful gestures working!
Musings of a psycho #47
This week has come and gone, and somehow I don't feel as productive as I would have wanted to be. Maybe it is the stinky hot weather or maybe the time just slipped away, but either way yet another week has passed by. Hopefully I'll be able to use my time more effectively this coming week. As for the the Week 47 musings...
Sunday, 15 November 2009
#319 - Two things: Fast decision making can be critical at times and people can sometimes think very irrationally...
I was standing at the train station today waiting for the train and looking at a group of three people who were just talking to each other. Suddenly one of them accidentally drops their phone (an old Nokia 3315), all three look down at the phone, then one of them stepped forward to pick the phone up. Except when he stepped forward he kicked the phone down onto the train tracks. Now all three were staring at the train tracks. At the same time the announcement overhead starts "The train arriving at platform three...", the group looks to their right and indeed a train is coming.
So what do they do? One of them is just standing there seemingly still deciding whether he should go and grab the phone or not; the other jumps down to grab the phone while the other is yelling "leave the phone!". Luckily the guy that jumped down to grab the phone jumped back up before the train passed - he had probably only 1 or 2 seconds to spare. The fast decision made by the guy that jumped down meant that he was able to get the phone and be safe (had he hesitated he would not have made it in time), but on the other hand, I feel that it was a rather silly decision to make - risk your life for a phone.
Musings of a psycho #46
Yet another week has flown by and we find ourselves already halfway through November! This post is a day late due to my lack of Internet/computer use over the weekend. For those who are curious as to why it is Musing #46...read on 
Sunday, 8 November 2009
#312 - There is actually a ISO standard (ISO 8601) that covers the "representation of dates and times"
In my attempt to give my weekly musings a bit more structure, I looked up what day and week of the year we were in. The day of the year was simple enough, but the week was actually more complicated that I thought it was! I always assumed that 1st January will be Week 1..but then thinking about it, if 1st January is a Friday, will it still be Week 1? According to ISO 8601, if 1st January is a Friday, Saturday or Sunday it is actually Week 52 or Week 53 of the previous year (ISO 8601 week starts on Monday). To confuse things even further, the system followed by USA is different to ISO 8601 - weeks start Monday, and there are partial weeks at the start/end of the year. If you're wondering, 09/11/2009 is Week 46 and the reason I start on Sundays for these posts is so I can have Sunday to write them up, and it's no fun to come up with the musing for the day and write about it on the same day.
Musings of a psycho
My second instalment of my daily thoughts/random discoveries. If you're wondering, the reason for starting at #305 is because November 1st is the 305th day of the year.
Sunday, 1 November 2009
#305 - It's amazing/interesting to think about what you have learnt during the day and find one thing that you feel is worthy to share.
This obviously comes from the post from last week as it was the first time I really sat down at the end of each day and thought about what to write about. In the past I have probably casually just thought about the day that has just passed, but never in much depth. It definitely takes some time to pick out the thing to write about, but I feel it is worth it - especially at the end of the week when I read through my notes I've jotted down for each day. Admittedly at the end of some days it felt like nothing special enough happened that day to write about - after all I can't expect all days to be exciting - just have to make sure there aren't too many of them
Thought of the day…
It is no secret that I rarely update my blog - so much in fact that I feel a bit guilty myself, and also I've had "complaints" from friends that my blog is dead. On Tuesday one of my friends challenged me to write a weekly post:
i challenge you to write a weekly entry to your blog on 7 new things you learned about this world, 1 new item for each day. not too difficult hey?
There was no reason I could think of to decline this challenge, so I have decided to take the challenge! Though I'm going to cheat a tiny little bit, instead of "7 new things I have learned" it will be things I have learnt, found interesting, would like to share. So here we go - my first weekly post and hopefully the first of many more to come!
Sunday, 25 October 2009
Thought of the day: www.example.com, www.example.org, www.example.net are reserved domains that are not available for registration!
In the past couple of months, I've written and done a fair bit of testing and as expected there are always going to be "dummy" email addresses, web-links etc. The most common being ones like: admin@example.com, www.example.com. One random day I thought to myself "Hey, what if someone registered 'example.com' as their domain name, wouldn't they get a tonne of random traffic?"
Well, to my surprise, the domain names: www.example.com, www.example.net and www.example.org are actually all reserved and not available for registration. If you want to read all the details you can have a look at RFC 2606 (warning: I've found RFCs have the tendency to be sleep inducing).
ps. didn't quite discover this on Sunday, but discovered it relatively recently - and trying to remember something that happened on Sunday when it's Tuesday is surprisingly hard!