Spy Journal 3.0 - My view of the web, personal life and work
My view of the web, personal life and work

• Death by Tray - Darth Vader goes for lunch
  

  This is hilarious - Darth Vader goes to the deathstar canteen for lunch, done with lego.

  Unfortunately not suitable for kids, a couple of swear words, but in context.

  I laughed out loud!

• Christmas Lights
  

  We went for a tour of the Christmas Lights near our place the other day, check out my photos on Flickr. I think these guys are insane, but at least they create something for us to enjoy and the kids love it - cheap entertainment!

  While you are in the mood check out these amazing lights - 110,000 feet of electrical cable and over 40,000 lights.

• Particls
  

  Particls is a free RSS solution that will filter out your RSS items for you. Particles tracks your favourite sites, topics and apps and ranks them for you. Good posts stream into the sidebar and great posts have an alert.

  We are using Particls to track the keywords that pop up in news articles on the web. Things like Gadgets, Excel, Web 2.0, PC Games and the like. Particles helps us filter out the crap and bring the good stuff to you.

  Oh and Tim has met the creators of Particls too! 

• Excel Slow? It may be the Google Desktop application causing it.
  

  Has your Excel application slowed down lately? Have you installed the Google Desktop Application?

  They may be related. Dick from Daily Dose of Excel reports this article taken from Charles Williams web page.

  This report comes from Charles Williams of DecisionModels.com fame. Charles knows a thing or two about performance in Excel.

  For the last few weeks I have been trying to find out
  why clearing a large range of cells caused Excel to hang on some PCs
  but not on others. This does not happen with Excel 97, but does with
  Excel 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007.

  It turns out that its not just Clear, but also Delete or
  transferring data from a variant to a range, or even just selecting a
  large range of cells. The further down the sheet and to the right the
  slower it gets. And the more recent the Excel version the slower it
  gets.

  Someone on the newsgroups discovered that, when using VBA, you could
  bypass this problem by switching off EnableEvents, and then someone
  else discovered that the culprit was Google Desktop Search.

  The problem actually turns out to be the Google Desktop Office Com Addin. When you deactivate this you get a miraculous speedup.

  With Excel 2007 it is fairly easy to deactivate:
  Office Button–>Excel Options–>Addins–>Com Addins and deselect Google Desktop Office Addin

  With earlier versions of Excel you have to customise a toolbar and add the Com Addins dialog to it.
  View–>Toolbars–>Customise–>Commands tab–>Tools then about
  halfway down you will find Com Addins, select and drag to the toolbar
  of your choice.
  Then you can uncheck Google Desktop Office addin.

  If you have multiple versions of Excel installed you only have to do this once.

  Presumably this COM addin sets up one or more application-level
  events to monitor things like Selection Change and Worksheet change and
  then tries to trap the change in order to index it.

  If you want to measure this effect you can download a Variant
  Benchmark Timer from my website that allows you to run a read and write
  benchmark with and without EnableEvents.

  DecisionModels.com/Downloads

  This represents an interesting new twist in the Google-Microsoft wars!

  Thanks Charles.

   

• Real Live Preacher Maintenance Gig
  

  I have just been asked by Gordon from Real Live Preacher to handle all the technical maintenance and management of his website. Seeing as his site is getting over 3000 unique hits a day that's a responsible job! I have been talking this possibility over with him for several weeks now and am very pleased he has come to us. We plan to do an excellent job - of course. Hi Gordon :)

  rlp will announce the news officially on his site tomorrow, though he gave a teaser today.

  The funniest thing was that within hours of his emailing me (while I was asleep) the site broke, so my first email of the day was his acceptance and 2 emails up was his cry for help! With the help of my techie Rohan, we solved that one quick smart and are now planning the major job of upgrading his site to the most recent version of drupal. 

• My Most Memorable Christmas - well one of them anyway
  

  Here's a little known story about me. I used to live in New Zealand. Specifically in a little sleepy seaside town called Motueka. We even had our own "resort", a beach side caravan park at Kaiteriteri beach. There was a general store, petrol station, boat wash, bait and ice, tea rooms and fish and chip and ice cream counters. I worked there three summers in a row. I actually had a full time job but I used to work there while on my paid vacation. It helped defray the costs of the holiday - petrol money travel, food and drink etc.

  I don't even remember exactly which year this was, but it would have been somewhere between 1988 and 1993. At the time I owned a Hillman Avenger. In fact I purchased it explicitly for the holiday - I think I swapped $700 for it. It was a bit of a scrubber, but it went ok.

  Well Christmas Eve I worked at the shop - cooking fish and chips. I think from memory i did a 4 hour shift. I left to drive to my grandparents place about 50 kms away late afternoon. I was going to be there for christmas day, though I had a shift christmas day afternoon and again on boxing day. On the way I decided to take a long cut via a gravel road that rankind of parallel to the mainr oad, but it was more fun - hint I was into rallying back then and fancied myself as a bit of a gravel drifter and liked trying the scandanavian flick whenever possible.

  Anyway I was haring along this low use gravel road when around a corner in front of me a ute appeared, fully drifting across the entire road. I was heading straight toward him and as he was still crossed up in full opposite lock I figured I was going to collect his rear end. Only thing for it. At the last second I wrenched my wheel to the left and drove into the bank. I hit it with my front wheel with a tremendous bang and it flipped the car up onto two wheels. I clearly remember seeing the road through the side of the windscreen. I travelled that way for a few seconds before banging back down onto all 4 wheels again. In the meantine the sliding ute had fishtailed past me in a cloud of dust. I came to a stop and got out to inspect the damage. Nothing broken, but I had bent the subchassis front arm that the wheel attaches to. This meant that the front left wheel now faced left when the right one was facing straight. Maybe only by 5 or 10 degrees, but enough to drastically affect the steering. In fact I soon discovered i could go around left hand corners by letting go of the steering wheel!

  I continued on to my grandparents and enjoyed the evening and christmas morning with them. In the afternoon I had to drive back to the resort. In fact I ended up driving over 200kms before I could get to a workshop on the day after boxing day when they re-opened.

  There are more stories I can tell about that holiday, but that is all for now.

• Challenge for the day
  

  I have just picked up the management of a fairly high profile drupal blog, and its broke!

  Challenge = do everything else I was supposed to do today and fix that! At least I have a good techie to help. 

• Social Networks I use and recommend
  

  Following is a list of the social networks I participate in. Feel free to check my profiles out, add me as a friend in your network, join them etc.

  Face book http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=802918101

  Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=11408554

  Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/alborath/

  Delicious http://del.icio.us/jethrocon

  Twitter http://twitter.com/spyjournal

  Tangler http://www.tangler.com/people/id/9318

  Sadly I