Kristen and I went to see National Treasure 2:Book of Secrets yesterday at the matinée showing. Our hearts initially sunk when we got to the lobby and there were about 100 kids going up the escalators in front of us AND we heard that they were going to see the same film as us. However, the kids quietened down really quickly as the trailers began so that was a really nice surprise. The funny thing was that there were a few funny parts in the trailers that the kids REALLY loved and it was neat to hear a lot of laughter at these points.
Spoiler alert in the extended entry!
Goodreads.com looks like a good tracking site of what books have been read or you wish to read. You can create multiple shelves that books can be stored on, for example Sci-Fi, Reading and Read for a Terry Pratchett book. It looks books up pretty well by author or title but it had a couple of issues trying to match an ISBN number that I got from one of my books, but typing the title in worked fine (probably a different edition). It has a widget plugin for wordpress and an image or flash plugin for other blogging sites and a facebook application too. I’m using the image plugin to the left here as flash is annoying – especially if you use flashblock like me. By filling in more details about your location it will show you information about other groups in your area and also links to upcoming for book events – there is one author appearing in downtown Columbus soon.
There is an option to import books using a text file using ISBN numbers – I’m not sure how well that would integrate with a cuecat but I would imagine that people with a cuecat have already scanned their books into a database already.
Naturally RSS feeds abound for various types of book categories such as the books I am reading, that are on my shelves, authors etc.
If you give it a try, my username is Absoblogginlutely.
Some of the Friends In Tech team have posted some of their best shots of 2007 so I thought I’d post my own too. Some of them have already been uploaded to the various photo galleries but some photos are new ones (and at least one was taken today). I’ve tried to keep the number to about 2 per month, but some months needed more than that. They may not technically be the best, but they are some of my best memories of 2007 that I took (I’ve not included pictures that Kristen took). Flash is required but most people have this nowadays and the photos are fairly small to allow a quick load but it does take a little while.
I’ve not had this issue personally, but apparently you may get crashes with ie6 and December’s Security patches. The quick fix is a registry setting – more details at Jesper’s blog who also has a fix to install/push out.
I got an invite to Photophlow this morning. Photophlow is like IRC with flickr pics, all on steroids. A nice interface but be warned that it will suck up time when you start using it! I had an issue with firefox trying to get to the chat rooms – the system would just sit there and never connect into the room.
This turned out to be an issue with flashblock – if you use flashblock you need to go to the tools menu, Addons, Select Flashblock and choose options. Then add www.photophlow.com. Restart firefox and you should be able to connect. For some reason this didn’t work first time for me – only after I totally disabled Flashblock, logged in and then re-enabled it, would I be able to connect.
I have some invites available if anyone wants to try it.
Blockbusters are increasing their prices for their monthly dvd rentals by $2. We are on the $14.99 plan for two videos at a time and 3 instore exchanges per month. The $2 increase is not a lot but is a 13% increase. Strangely their email extols the virtue of their existing service but gives no details as to what extra benefits are available for the increased price. A temporary way around the increase might be to upgrade NOW to the 3 dvd’s at a time, 5 instore exchanges which is currently $17.99 and a 6 month prepaid subscription is available (but no discount). So for an extra $1 a month you get one more dvd in shipment at any time and an extra 2 instore changes.
Well the Blackberry still reboots even without Google Sync installed so I’m now beginning to wonder if this was the cause of the original reboots a while back or not. The BB has rebooted itself at least once a day, normally around 4.30 to 5pm but today it’s rebooted about 4 times already and it’s not even 1.30pm yet. Oh well, as I’m off for a whole week for Christmas (yippee) I might just leave the phone off to let it get some rest.
Hopefully you’ll be able to post comments to this blog with ie7 now. I had to remove the css styling for the fields and make it into a table as I couldn’t work out which bit of css was breaking in ie7 (but working in ie6 and firefox)
The last episode of In The Trenches has been posted online now and my interview with Kevin Devin is included. I actually volunteered to do the interview about a year ago but we’ve only just got around to recording and uploading it to the website. The entire podcast is worth listening to, but I appear 22 minutes in.
Google Sync for the Blackberry is now available – a program that synchronises your Google calendar(s) with the one on your phone which in turn is probably synchronised with your Exchange or Lotus Notes calendar. I installed this yesterday as this would mean I would have my work, personal and wife’s calendar all in one place so I could keep up to date with my availability.
The install took ages to download and run – about 30 minutes in total and a synchronisation was made successfully. However 10 minutes later the Blackberry rebooted. I wasn’t surprised as it has been doing this about once a day for the past week. After the 15 minutes passed for the Blackberry to reboot and come back to life everything was good for about 10 minutes……then it happened again – another reboot. After about 90 minutes of this I decided to remove Google Sync and the phone has stayed online ever since (or at least it’s not rebooted every 10 minutes!)
In summary, a great product when it works but totally useless after the initial sync is done. I’m really hoping the next version will be stable. Needless to say this is only my experience – I’ve not had anyone else in the team try this yet – they probably wont as we can’t really afford the phones to be out of action whilst we test it. I was fortunate yesterday in that I was already on the office phone so couldn’t use the blackberry for incoming calls anyway.