Been trying to catch up with my blogging over the last couple of days… An update to a previous post that I’ve been meaning to write-up is that Craig from the Wildimages blog managed to get his problems with the Flight Centre all sorted out. I posted previously how he had booked tickets with Flight Center, and how some misinformation from them put him in the position of potentially losing out on thousands of dollars of travel for his family.

Well, after a lengthy battle he finally got what he wanted  and he now considers the matter closed. The publicity he received with the NZ blogosphere and the Digg post seemed to definitely help him with his plight. There was discussion over on Tim’s blog about what we should all do with the previous posts that were written, i.e. do we leave them intact, delete them, or modify them to update the situation. I’m not a fan of editing previous posts to tone them down, but I decided to remove the Flight Center logo from my previous post, as well as the individual from Flight Center that originally gave Craig the misinformation. Looks like Craig deleted his original post and that’s his prerogative. There are no rules to blogging and everyone should be able to do what they want with their sites.

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for the last couple of weeks – Deb and I went to see “An Inconvenient Truth” (IMDB link) at the Penthouse Cinema in Brooklyn. The movie was Deb’s choice but I was so glad that I saw it.

It’s a really important film that everyone should go to see, it will really open your eyes. It’s a documentary that revolves around Al Gore’s campaign to highlight the serious issues with global warming. The film cuts between a slideshow that Al Gore is presenting and clips of him on the road, traveling around the word spreading his message.

The film hits home hard and Al’s presentation skills really gets the message across well. You’ll leave the cinema either feeling depressed or inspired – but either way you’ll know that changes need to happen. Here are a couple of environment-friendly links that I’ve come across in my quest to help out…

Personal Kyoto – this is a service only applicable to New York residents at the moment, but it’s so simple it should be relevant worldwide. You register with the site and give it your local electricity account number and they produce a chart showing your electricity usage and how it relates to the standards implied by the Kyoto Protocol. The idea is that you calculate what you need to do reduce your emissions in line with what the Kyoto Protocol would require.

Healthy Homes Check Up – more relevant to people in New Zealand, this is a series of questions designed to determine how energy efficient your home is. It then provides options for improvements, along with how much the improvements cost and what the payback period is.

What are you doing to help..?

I started watching Robert Scoble’s new show today, aptly name the ScobleShow. I like it. I watched the first episode with Jonathan Schwartz, who is the approachable CEO of Sun Microsystems. Jonathan is passionate about Sun and its technology and it comes across in the interview. Heck, I want to build something big just so I can use a Thumper!!

Robert asks for advice on how to improve his podcasts and who to interview next. I don’t know much about podcasting, but I do know what I don’t like – I don’t like it when the presenters laugh too much. I thought Robert laughed too much – not even in response to a joke, but just random laughs during his questions. (The same goes for radio DJs, I hate it when they laugh at their own jokes!) I also thought that the laughing made his questions sound mumbled, but that may be because he only had the one microphone as he mentions in his post-mortem.

Robert’s got a huge long list of business cards, and he lists some of them to ask who to interview next. There’s so many interesting people on there, but I wouldn’t mind getting to know Nick Bradbury a little better. I don’t pay for software that often – I’ve always had access to free software through work – but Nick’s feed reader, FeedDemon, is a bit of software that I was happy to pay for.

Keep it up Robert, looking forward to more interesting interviews!

Link to ScobleShow post mortem (wow, Ask blog search rocks!) « Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger

A new version of Windows Live Writer has just been released. This is by far the best Live product that has been released yet, and the only one that actually shows some originality. (The rest of the Live product range are all clones of competing software, or, renamed MSN services.)

This is a really useful update too – the categories list has now been improved (although not perfect yet) and it now sports a scroll bar to navigate through a long list of categories. Also, the Tags plugin functionality has now been built into the core application and has been redesigned and drastically improved to allow easy tagging of posts (now if only Wordpress supported this!) Other improvements include performance enhancements and support for Blogger beta.

The Live team have also integrated their plugins directory into the Live Gallery so that all plugins can be centrally maintained. The first plugins most people will install is the “Insert Flickr Image” plugin and the “Blog This from Firefox” plguin. There’s also a “Blog This from IE” plugin for those other die hard fans!

By the way, I installed Live Writer and am now running it from MojoPac running on my iPod. Full write-up on MojoPac coming soon – just as soon as I figure out how it works…

(Also posted in the beta @ amanzi site.)

Seems like lots of users had problems with iTunes 7 so it’s good to see Apple release an update so soon. Thanks to Neowin for the heads-up.

Buy music, movies, TV shows, and audiobooks, or download free podcasts from the iTunes Store 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Organize and play everything on your Mac or PC. Then sync it to your iPod and bring it along. Anywhere.

• Download here for Windows or Mac
• Apple website

Is it just me, or is this post intentionally naive? Jeff Jones claims that Windows Server 2003 has less critical updates than an Ubuntu 6.06 machine. But if you dig a bit deeper, it appears that most of the updates that have been provided by Ubuntu are for 3rd party software products. Microsoft doesn’t provide any updates for 3rd party software so I think this is a bit unfair. It’s basically comparing Windows Server 2003 to: Ubuntu, AND the entire suite of software that is available for Ubuntu.

Any thoughts?

Update: Just realised that I missed off the link to Jeff’s blog, so just added that now. He’s also responded on his blog, so be sure to read his follow-up too.

“The main goal of User Account Control is to reduce the exposure and attack surface of the operating system by requiring that all users run in standard user mode…”

It all sounds good, but there are two fundamental flaws with the way it has been implemented in Vista.

read more | digg story

Regular visitors here would have noticed that the site has been down for the last few days and has also suffered from intermittent delays over the last few weeks. Well, Telstra have finally admitted there is a problem and hopefully it will be sorted out for good soon!

There’s a big announcement coming from Apple in the next couple of hours, did Apple in NZ ruin the surprise…? 

Link to Apple Nz website Leaks details of new ipods 50 & 80 gb – Mac Forums

This may prove that the banner showing an iPod with full, wide screen is indeed not a fake.

 Banner for September 12th event?

Tags: apple, ipod, nz, mac, rumours

I’ve been using Live Writer for the last couple of weeks and I have to say that it is by far the best desktop blogging tool available today. I had tried most of the others, but none come even close to this. I’m usually quite critical of the Windows MSN Live platform as I think it’s over-hyped, but this tool is definitely worth checking out.

Make sure you grab some essential plugins too. The first two plugins I installed were: “Insert Flickr Image” and, “Insert Tags“.  I’ve now found a couple of other interesting ones which allow me to blog directly from FeedDemon and Firefox.

Tags: windows+live+writer, live-writer, live, microsoft, plugins, feeddemon, firefox