Those of you that visit Digg.com on a regular basis will no doubt have come across today, but otherwise, I give you Homeless James Bond. Kind of a James Bond for San Francisco!

There’s also a sequel that you can see here, and also check out Operation Kitty Calender which is hilarious too!

Yesterday they officially launched Hulu - a website with a very stupid name but lots of great content. It’s basically a video site with loads of TV channels and and movies available to stream for free. Most videos are pretty good quality, and the player is nice. There is limited advertising throughout the presentations but it’s much less advertising than you’d get watching these shows on tv - typically it’s about 15 seconds of ads per 10 minutes during half hour shows.

It’s owned by Rupert Murdoch, so at least we know it won’t be taken offline like many other sites that offer similar things. I watched two new episodes of the Simpsons last night and was very impressed.

Oh, and it’s only available in the US. Sorry!

I got bored yesterday during my lunch break at work so I added a little bit of PHP to my CSS file of this blog. Basically, the header image changes depending on day. 7 images - one for each day of the week. Decided this place needs some excitement. And no, I’m still nowhere near finishing my site redesign.

My weekend was nothing special. I spend Saturday browsing round a toy shop and remembering how much fun it was being a kid. I bought a frisbee and spent most of the afternoon in the Golden Gate Park playing with it. It was too windy really to throw it in a straight line, but it’s been ages since I’ve played frisbee. Plus the hippies in the park were doing their usual music which is always entertaining.

I headed to the beach afterwards which was insanely windy and I spent all of 10 minutes there. A much better idea was the mall where I got my ass massaged by one of those lazy boy chairs.

Sunday I went down the California coast to Big Sur. A lot of driving but beautiful scenery and great weather. Was very relaxing, got some pictures which I might post later. Going to look at a Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier tonight in Oakland. It’s $1200 for head and cab, which is peanuts compared to the $4000 I’d pay at home for the same set up. Excellent.

January 30th, it’s finally here!I came across an article on Digg early last week which linked to a blogger named Simon Owens, who has set up this day to encourage as many people as possible to jettison their horrible MySpace accounts. And I couldn’t agree more.I would encourage you to check out his reasoning. He gives a list of ten solid reasons to abandon the social networking site, one of favourite reasons being:

4. You visit someone’s Myspace profile only to suddenly have music start blasting out of your speakers. Bonus points if it happens to you while you’re at work.

Bloggasm: January 30th is International Delete Your Myspace Account Day

Fortunately for me I’ve never had a Myspace page. There was a time when I was tempted, but just looking at some other pages and letting my eyes bleed at the red text on yellow background was enough to keep me off it. I do however manage the Myspace of my band but I at least spent a little time trying to make it look half decent (not an easy task I can tell you, their markup is almost entirely table-based and very difficult to style individual elements). I’m reluctant to delete this page as I’m not the sole subject of this page, and like it or lump it - Myspace is almost an essential component in getting your band noticed.Yet for personal use, I definitely don’t have the time for Myspace. It may be the biggest social networking site online, but it’s doing a terrible job. Even Facebook has been having a terrible run lately, so maybe it’s better to sever all ties with social networks? At the moment, Facebook and Flickr are the only two I have an account with and I’d like to keep it that way.

My Weekend

I had Sunday and Monday off work this week. Sunday was a great day to relax, so I went to the Nikko Hotel and made use of their excellent swimming pool, hot tub and sauna facilities. It was almost deserted so it was very relaxing. I also paid my weekly visit to Guitar Center and played my wonderful Taylor guitar again. Honestly, it sounds better and better each time I play it. I cooked for Valerie on Saturday night so she repaid the favour by cooking me a French omelette on Sunday night. It wasn’t bad, I have to admit.Monday was excellent. I actually woke up at 8.30am feeling like I’d slept in until noon, so I got up and started work on a university report I have due in tomorrow. In the afternoon I went to Chinatown and bought myself a huge hold-all bag for all my stuff. I’m moving back to my old place on Sunday and last time I had my big bag full of stuff, and then about 3 other smaller bags of crap so I figured it was easier to have two big bags and be done with it. Luckily, you can get almost anything in Chinatown for a good price and so I talked the nice girl into giving me the $29.99 bag for $15. My dad would be proud of me.I also bought myself a new pair of shoes. Check em out: They’re pretty much a Converse rip off but their slightly cheaper and a bit more durable, I think (very important cos every pair of Converse I’ve ever owned has lasted about 3 months). Only $30 from American Eagle, and very comfy.I’m most proud of this purchase though. When I move back on Sunday, I won’t have to change room or move anywhere else until I leave, so I really want to get some stuff so I can really feel at home. So I checked on Craigslist for a DVD player so I could finally watch DVD’s on my TV instead of on my pokey Mac screen. And behold: Picked it up from a guy living near the Golden Gate Park for a mere $15. Hardly used, apparently he’s just moved in with his girlfriend and she already has a player, so he doesn’t need it. Got batteries with it too.In honour of the new player, I rented Mr. Bean’s Holiday but annoyingly the TV in my current bedroom doesn’t have AV connections. Grrrr. But it’s a good movie, if you like Mr. Bean.Anyway, I must get back to work. Toodles. 

I just got my bill in from my web host which means that in exactly 1 month it’ll be a year since I got this site up and running. Just while I’m on the subject, if you’re looking for a cheap, reliable web host then I highly recommend Big Wet Fish. They’re not flawless and I have minor issue from time to time but they’re customer support is superb and I’ve never had to wait more than 1 hour for a reply from their support team. Usually the reply comes with the problem fixed. And problems are few and far between. They’re about 15 quid a year (including domain) and they’re based in good old NI so you’re supporting good, local produce.

So, as I was perusing my site it’s become obvious that it’s time for a change. I’ve learned a whole heap of web design stuff in the last year so there’s loads of new little tricks that I’m dying to put into practice, not to mention I’m getting tired of this design now. Probably the most drastic change I’m going to make is I will add a CMS to the site to allow me to easily manage the entire site’s content without FTP access and an HTML editor. I’ve been reading a few books and I’m fairly certain I’ll use Wordpress as the CMS. Believe it or not, it’s not only possible to use Wordpress as a CMS - it’s actually highly robust and does a far better job than loads of other open source alternatives.

Don’t get too excited (like you would…), because change takes time. I have the whole development process to go through followed by new content to write and then the actually design implementation. Ideally, I’d like to get it done for around Christmas time but given that I work about 60 hours per week and have loads of other things to occupy my time outside of that, it could take longer. But I can assure you the new site will be awesome.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Google’s share prices recently, because they’ve been going up…and up…and up. In fact, as of today, just one share in Google will cost you around $620. That’s insane! I’ve put together a few statistics just to really get my head around how huge this company has become:

So the highlighted figure is Google’s annual revenue. $181 billion dollars. One company. One hundred and eighty one BILLION dollars. Unbelievable. To put that in perspective, this is Wikipedia’s list of countries by GDP:

The oil-soaked United Arab Emirates generates $168 billion dollars of economic activity every year, which is still smaller than Google. At the moment, the search engine giant is almost bigger than Portugal. This blows my mind. I also recently read that Microsoft was bidding for a sizable stake in Facebook, like 20% or something. Turns out Facebook’s net worth is around the $500 million mark. Insane.