Manon, Alice and Eliza – climbing
Manon, Alice and Eliza climbing in the recently-trimmed hedges in Jesus Green.
XHTML/web instead of PowerPoint[r]
S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System
This is great and much better than the ‘save as HTML’ option in PowerPoint[r].
It’s a bit too difficult to simply replace the ease and ubiquty of *.ppt but I could see this being added to applications that export to ppt (eg the mindmapping software NovaMind for the Mac has great export to text, ppt and Keynote: I’m sure that these applications could manage the CSS and bits of javascript that’d just be too tricky for the rest of us – especially while cranking the ppt handle in the run-up to a presentation…
Ready-reckoner for setting your price as a freelancer..
Pricing is guesswork – but here’s a ready-reckoner… 🙂
Having been self-employed some years ago, and now working on ‘new business’ activities, one of the hardest aspects of new products or service is the pricing level. A “cost plus” approach isn’t ideal when either the cost is simply your time or when there’s an absolute limit to your earning due to a scarce resource (hours in the day).
Most people initially try and cover the mortgage (ie mortgage x2 /working days available), but the problem arises from success: if you’re fortunate enough to be fully billable then you’ll only ever make 2xmortage!
Anil’s suggestion is an enlightening one:
Anil Dash: Pay By The Hour
If you think this is just for laughs, consider the impact on an existing client when you suggest doubling your rate 🙂
All smiles at the Market
At the Columbia Road flower market on Sunday with Josie and her son Franklyn, a moment’s happy rest as Franklyn is “bookended” by Manon and Alice. They’re sitting on Jessie’s doorstep. The V3’s ‘astigma-cam’ is at its milk-bottle-best here. Memo to self: get better camera in next phone!
Balloon Bazooka
Balloon Bazooka the Ultimate Water Balloon Launcher
Oh yes – Gotta get me one o’these!
Our Basic or Entry Level Model can launch a balloon over 300ft. It has a small air tank, great for folks who don’t own an air compressor or are on a budget…
Entry level? “Folks who don’t own an air compressor”? I’m on a different, amateur level to these guys, but one look at the picture of them on the home page makes you realise that these are fun-luvvin’ professionals. I’m adding an Air Compressor to my Christmas List!
$99 is pretty good for this weapon-grade fun. Wonder if it’d get through UK Customs… 😉
nowEurope: European Software Directive Defeated
nowEurope: European Software Directive Defeated
Succinct round-up of the position on the European Software Directive by Greg Kirsh, a NowEurope.com contributor.
More patent fun – advertising
Google seeks RSS ad patent | The Register
Fantastic. Yet more protectionism of the blatantly obvious. I’m surprised that no-one’s pulling up the prior art from, say, campaign management and tracking in the mail outbound email systems. All of the major players offer the ability to encode each link so that you can track who clicked what, where in the mail, for a given offer code etc etc etc. Just because this is to be delivered by RSS rather than into our inboxen this is to be a new invention?
As an advertiser, I can only see this increasing costs. As a customer I simply await an ad filter for my news reader.
That cynicism aside I’ve noted that a number of feeds already include adverts – mainly where the site has an existing ad engine. These mainly seem to relate to alternatives or add-on sales. There’s a possible benefit to having in-feed ads that can help support blogs or other non-commerce sites. In the same way that Google’s ad inclusions can give a useful amount to highly-trafficked and well-converting sites, I can see how my RSS habits (i.e. skim through the feed, hardly visiting the sites any more) would reduce that revenue.
If ads keep chasing us like this then using the web will become evermore complex and demanding of the ‘humanoid’ common sense filters. Could even be as demanding as, gasp, talking to other people one day…
Lost in translation…
What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages? The authors of the Systran translation software probably never intended this application of their program. As of September 2003, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original. Remember the old game of “Telephone”? Something is lost, and sometimes something is gained. Try it for yourself!
The results can be a bit hit and miss, but there are some real gems.
“up and away in my beautiful balloon” becomes “for the distant and moved ascent far in pretty aerostat of the mine”. Er, exactly 🙂
TheFridayProject: web to print
The Friday Project :: Launch Announcement
The people behind The Friday Thing and ‘London by London’ (editorially-managed email newsletters) have racked up the PR by turning themselves into ‘a publishing company’.
The founders of the company are fortunate to have a) two titles which are book-ready; b) topics which lend themselves to the coffee-table/whimsy market and c) journalistic and commissioning experience – ie turning ideas into commissioning briefs for publications and/or pitching column concepts to editors.
Whether there’s a massive movement to create books from web concepts remains to be seen. There’ll certainly be enough to keep a publishing company busy for as long as it maintains a sense of whimsy and fun. From a web perspective, the myriad whimsical sites, personalities and one-line-jokes represent a real mother-lode for the A&R people in publishing… Maybe people should look carefully at their copyright statements on their blogs and mailing lists 😉
Google the moon ;)
Google Moon – Lunar Landing Sites
How much fun is this? In honour of the manned moon landings of 1969 (er – why honour them now?) Google has ‘adapted’ its mapping software to map the landing areas.
Fun to see the surface of the moon and zoom ever closer… Just select the maximum zoom for the fun revelation 🙂
Great. The FAQs are funny too. What a fun place to work 🙂