...and the Wave crashes

Just when I thought I'd found the perfect use for Google Wave, the surf gods conspire against me.  The team I'm on has quickly become what my colleague has deemed "Wilful misusers of technology," with email discussions commonly and rapidly deteriorating to one-line responses devoid of a greeting or farewell remark - even a name or first initial.

So musing that we've all begun to use email as though it were a group text chat (one-line responses and all), I suggested we try using Google Wave instead.  After all it nicely and neatly keeps conversations in a lovely, convenient single thread that doesn't weigh down the inbox - and even enables you to engage in nearly synchronous communication.  What's not to like?

Unfortunately that surboard may have pearled, with Wave having crashed at least 3 times on me in the last 30 minutes, culminating in the gorgeous and yet equally frustrating outage notification included seen above.

The moral of the story is, while I'm not certainly not ready to turn my back on Wave - it is still in the preview state - I'm now much more reluctant to rely upon it in any meaningful way.  Give it time though, Slater wasn't built in a day.

Posted via email from Mike Bogle

Sydney University

Two people I respect

This came through Twitter just now. Quite a powerful image if you ask me.

Doctor Who according to a 4 year old

Maddie asked me today whether Doctor Who was an owl, who the Garlics were (Daleks) and why they were the baddies. Surely there's a satirical comic strip in there somewhere.

Comment Grief

Arrggggg. Due to YouTube recently bringing in support for wide-screen clips I've changed my template. Previously the clips would spill over into the right nav and looked pretty wonkey. However having just made the changes I've discovered that many of my previous posts have been set to disable commenting, which is not what I want.

It's not the template's fault that comments have been disabled mind you (nor Blogger's for that matter). I was using a 3rd party commenting tool known as Disqus for a while, and they required the native Blogger setting be set to disabled in order to implement the tool properly. Having switched templates though I had to reset the HTML, which removed all the customisation I'd done and reimplemented the comment's disabled option that I'd set. Got that?

Unfortunately the only way to resolve this seems to be going back through each post one-by-one and changing the settings at the post level, which at this point is too tedious to consider.

All posts from here on out should be ok, but this may not be the case for the older posts. Apologies for any inconvenience - not that I get many comments anyway ;)

Beach Safety

This is a great video that carries an important message regarding beach safety.

I grew up in the beach community in Southern California and spent many, many summers body surfing, boogie boarding, surfing and just playing around in the water. So I'm quite comfortable around the ocean. And yet when I first came to Australia many years ago I made a very important discovery about the ocean - beaches are not all the same.

Different regional, geographic, oceanographic, geologic, and meteorological conditions yield different beach conditions. So just because you grew up in the oceans around Southen California - or elsewhere - doesn't mean you know anything about the beaches in Australia.

My first time out in Aussie waters I was amazed at how chaotic the currents were under the surface. In Southern California the currents tend to flow one direction, but in Aussie waters - at least insofar as I've experienced them so far - these rules don't necessarily apply, and in fact a single column of water can experience currents flowing from many different directions at different depths. Aussie waters are a much different beast.

Initially it seemed silly to resign yourself to only a certain section of beach when there were miles to choose from, but then after venturing out into the water the first time, the concept of "stay between the flags" made perfect sense to me.

Now having children, the significance of beach saftey is even more pronouced. It's critical to respect the waters we swim in, because things are not always as they appear on the surface.

Physical Caffeine Addiction

Hmmm, interesting epiphany. I go a day and a half without coffee and find myself overcome by migraines and vomiting out the door of our stationwagon in Katoomba carpark. I drink a coffee, migraine disappears.

What to do, what to do...

Sick Fynn

Sick Fynn
Originally uploaded by acousticdad

Greetings from the realm of phlegm and snot.

Snow

Brilliant!

Via the SMH: "Saying they were tired of YouTubers "ripping us off", British comedy troupe Monty Python have struck back, launching their own channel on the video-sharing site."

Go there now, quickly: http://youtube.com/MontyPython.

I love you guys - rock on!