September 29, 2006
I Dream Of Genie
While browsing the net today I found this site, Seat Guru, which I must say is damn cool! It lets you lookup the seating plans for every aircraft of a particular Airline and gives you detailed information about each seat by mousing over it. The seat information includes seat pitch/width, entertainment options, which seats have restricted leg room or restricted recline, and the proximately to noisy babies and smelly toilets. With the aid of this information I have now booked the best seats in house, rock on!!
Great hall locations: Travel | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
September 24, 2006
Lazy Sundays
Today was the first sunny weekend we've had since last summer. So not to waste this ideal opportunity to increase my risk of skin cancer, we cruised over to Raglan—a small coastal town, famous for its Manu Bay surf break—for a day at the beach. I recently bought a new digital camera that can take DV quality video with sound, a big step up from my previous camera.
Here is a short film I made while testing out the new camera's movie mode ;-) It has been scaled down for posting on the web though. The film is in Windows Media Format, so you'll need a recent version of Windows Media Player to view it. Right-Click on the link below and click "Save As...", enjoy!
Raglan - Sunday Afternoon (Windows Media / 5.3MB)
Great hall locations: Miscellaneous , New Zealand | Talked about by: 1 Fraggles
September 21, 2006
Name Sake
Looks like someone has gone to the effort of posting all of Uncle Traveling Matt's reports of Outer Space on the Internet, complete with pictures from the Fraggle Rock DVD's!
Great hall locations: Miscellaneous | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
September 18, 2006
First Steps
Well in the first steps of my move, also known as Operation Goat, (why on earth is it called operation goat?! well, originally i was planning on moving to a place where there was lots pastures, shepherds, and um, goats. However, I've since decided that was a very silly idea, and I'm not going anywhere near there... so anyway), and put everything I've had in storage up for auction on TradeMe. Now, if you live outside of New Zealand, you'll probably never have heard of TradeMe (think eBay, but with nicer graphics), but it's big here, in fact it accounts for 60% of the entire country of New Zealand's Internet traffic and is banned/blocked in many workplaces.
My friend Stoo happens to work for TradeMe and on his advice I've put everything up on $1 reserve (€0.50). The logic behind this is people are more likely to bid on $1 reserve auctions, and once you've bid on something there's more commitment to try to win the auction. This hopefully will mean, if there's two or more bidders the price will escalate quite quickly. Of course, this is just the theory and I'm waiting with bated breath to see the final result.
The reason for the clean out, apart from my eventual move, is my mum is moving house at the end of the year and she is cleaning out the cupboards/spare room/basement beforehand. All of us have to go through our junk and either throw it out or move it before then. Granted that most the stuff I'm selling I've haven't looked at in years, so it's not really of great concern what the auctions close for—though more money is always better, lol.
Physiologically though, the sorting through everything—old school/university stuff and other clutter that seems to accumulate over the years—and throwing the bulk of it out, was kind of like putting the past behind me and moving on so to speak. I'm looking forward to a fresh start and the new challenges of the coming year, and this was a good step in that direction.
Great hall locations: Travel | Talked about by: 3 Fraggles
September 11, 2006
JavaScript Performance in Trident (IE)
From the MSDN IE Blog... Most of these are common sense, but it's sometimes good to have a little reminder.
IEBlog: JavaScript Performance Recommendations - Part 1
Great hall locations: Web Development | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
September 9, 2006
The Taming Of The Shrew
Probably the most used and least understood application in the world is Microsoft Word. Like many people my knowledge of Word was limited to the bare minimum required to get the job done. Since I never did anything extensive with it there was little motivation for me to learn how to use it properly, until now...
I've been working a Polices and Procedures training manual for my company that was becoming a rather large document and Word has been slowly driving me to distraction, formatting that wouldn't go away and headings that wouldn't revert. The final straw was the word "Error!" appearing in a grey box in the middle of document all by itself—document corruption was the last thing I needed... So I decided enough was enough, I was going to tame this beast and make it work properly for me.
Here's what I learnt:
Top 5 ways to guarantee a corrupted document
According to the horse's mouth (i.e. Microsoft MVP's) using any of these features is asking for trouble and they should be avoided at all costs.
- Using Master Documents
- Complex Nested Tables
- Using Versions
- The Fast Save feature
- Using the Document Map
The best ways to recover a corrupted document
From what I've read the most common place for document corruption to be located is in section breaks. Every document has at least one section by default, so if you haven't explicitly created sections, there will be one hidden away in the very last paragraph mark of the document. These are the best ways of recovering from document corruption:
- Select everything except that last section break, and copy & paste into a new document. Ctrl+End and then Ctrl+Shift+Home will create such a selection.
- Save as another format, reopen that new document and then save it as a new word document: Rich Text or HTML seem to work well as the middle men.
- Paragraph marks themselves can also be corrupt. So if you have one paragraph that is misbehaving, text appears in weird places when working with it or styles are screwed up, try cutting and pasting it to and from Notepad—you'll need to restyle it after you paste it back though.
- As a last resort try saving the whole file as plain text, however you'll lose all formatting and graphics in the document—but you will kill any and all corruption permanently!
Really Useful Keyboard Shortcuts
| Shift+F3 | Change the case of letters. |
| Shift+F5 | Move to the last change Handy if you've just selected some text and want to get back to where you last typed. |
| F4 | Repeat the last action More useful than it sounds, if you've just styled some text, you can select some other text and hit F4 to give it identical styling. |
| Ctrl+Alt+O | Switch to Outline view |
| Ctrl+Alt+P | Switch to Print view |
| Ctrl+Alt+N | Switch to Normal view |
Outline view is probably the most useful feature I've recently learnt. It allows to navigate around and edit a large document with incredible ease. In Outline view you can choose to see just Level 1 Headings, or Level 1 & 2 Headings, or 1, 2 & 3 and so on, or all headings and their text. Move you cursor over a heading and switch back to print or normal view you're instantly at that location, even if it was 400 pages away from where you were.
You can also move headings up and down, but it doesn't move just the heading it moves all the sub-headings and paragraphs under it, meaning you can make alters that cover dozens of pages in one go—without selecting any text.
These are the most useful shortcuts for working in Outline View:
| Shift+Alt+1 | View Level 1 Headings Only |
| Shift+Alt+2 | View Level 1 & 2 Headings |
| Shift+Alt+x | View Level 1 to x Headings |
| Shift+Alt+A | View All Headings and Paragraphs. |
| Shift+Alt+Left Arrow | Promote text (make higher level heading) |
| Shift+Alt+Right Arrow | Demote text (make lower level heading) |
| Shift+Alt+Up Arrow | Move selected headings/paragraphs up. |
| Shift+Alt+Down Arrow | Move selected headings/paragraphs down. |
Outline view is only of any use if you have used styles in your document. These are selected from Formatting Toolbar (the drop down list with Heading 1 in it) or Styles & Formatting sidebar. Using styles also makes maintaining your document a lot easier too.
Hopefully this info helps you tame the shrew too!
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
September 8, 2006
Will The Real Matt Please Stand Up...
If you've ever had the inclination to google me, I'd like to say that 99.99% of the results that match "matt gifford" are not me. The point is further confused because there are several other web developers with the exact same name—yes the world is a strange place, lol.
I would like to state for record that I am in fact not this guy, or this guy or even this guy, or any other Matt Gifford you might find.
I am in fact this guy:
(the pictured sites are my designs)
1996
comp.os.ms-windows.nt.admin.networking
—My first and only ever post on UseNet.
1997
www.chameleon-tours.com
—My first domain, named after the company from The Faceless Ones a 1967 episode of Dr Who. The domain never really had a fully complete site attached to it and always seemed to be a work in progress.
1998
www.houston.co.nz
—My job prior to the ill fated trip to the UK where I got Meningitis and ended up in the Intensive Care ward of a NHS hospital (yes, almost dying kinda sucks, lol). The design on the left was actually completed in 1997 and was my first commercial website project. The 1998 redesign shown on the right was completed with the skilled help of my friend and co-worker Mike Bowie.
1999
www.timeshifting.net
—My first actual website which featured lots of photos, music and miscellaneous stuff. Named after a term mentioned in a 1981 video about making home movies. The address is now no longer used, however I'm holding on to it for future use.
* I drew the Timeshifting logo pictured above ;-)
2000
www.lbc.co.nz
—My last ever job... and thank goodness for that, jobs are evil beasties, lol.
2001
www.gatecrasher.co.uk/connected/events/australia
—A post after an auckland club night.
2002
www.bubblefm.com
—My pirate radio station that ran for about a year until men in black from the government turned up at our door threatening to put us in prison... minor issue about not having paid $250,000 for a commercial radio license, lol.
lists.soekris.com
—Also about this time I was looking into the idea of starting an engine management system business.
2003
www.timeshifting.com
—Finally got the .com version of my domain and launched the first version of my company's website.
2005
www.uncletravelingmatt.com
—Started my blog which you're reading right now.
Great hall locations: Miscellaneous | Talked about by: 1 Fraggles
September 7, 2006
Nightmares
I had the worst night's sleep in the history of the world ever last night... I woke up at 4.30am this morning freezing cold (the duvet had fallen off), after having the scariest dream ever, which was totally arse because, 1. I'm far too old to be having nightmares and 2. I couldn't get back to sleep for ages—and embarrassingly had to close wardrobe door.
I was in this old house with a group of people I didn't know, where years ago these other people had been imprisoned and burnt alive. It was kind of Victorian style and almost completely pitch black inside, velvet curtains, stuffed animals on the walls, and all this gold/silver & jewels that we were told not to touch because it belonged to the aforementioned dead people—the person that told us this then promptly vanished. The light switches were made of carved bone that when switched, didn't turn on lights but made parts of the house move around, as we walked through the house you could feel the chill of things following you, behind, just out of sight...
Within the house people seemed to gain psychic powers, I remember holding out my hand (palm facing out) and moving a pot of Blistex away from me and back across the floor by concentrating really hard and visualising it in my mind—I did however watch a Scrubs episode about Harry Potter last night though, hmmm... This dream seemed to take the scariest parts of every movie I've ever seen and roll it into a one weird juxtaposition.
In the end we went to see this lady, in this dark drawing room that could help us get out of the house but when she turned around, it was the librarian from Ghostbusters! ...it was then with a gasp that I woke up.
(incidentally this librarian also scared the bejesus out of me when I was seven)
Great hall locations: Miscellaneous | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
September 3, 2006
Masquerade Ball
Last night I accompanied my baby sister to the Great Race Masquerade Ball at Waikato University with my mum and her partner.
Me con mia mamma e sorella piccola
Great hall locations: Miscellaneous | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
Sheep & Starbucks
A Thousand Words
Sheep on a ute, in the middle of the city, right outside Starbucks... and they say Hamilton isn't a hick farming town.
...I rest my case
Great hall locations: Miscellaneous , New Zealand | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
September 2, 2006
Fast Flowing Waters
When I was young, maybe 7 or 8 years old, my dad and I used to go hiking up near the Coromandel, an area that is both beautiful but bears the scars of the 1870's gold rush. Yet at the time it didn't see it like this, the tunnels and discarded equipment in the middle of forest was a source of excitement and adventure for a small child. A few of the rivers and streams are still polluted from the mining, though fortunately there are many that escaped unscathed and our hikes usually ended in lunch and a swim in a nearby stream.
I seem to be doing so much recently, not that I mind being so busy, but at times it feels a lot like it did swimming in those streams; being pulled along swiftly by the current, little feet not always being able to touch the bottom. Most nights I'm not home to 7 or 8, in fact it seems like I'm never home these days, not that I mind that much as this flat is quite damp over winter.
My business is growing which is both exciting and daunting. I guess it's the realisation that most business owners come to when they have to start hiring people. You're no longer responsible for just yourself and as employer as have a obligation to help your staff grow and move forward in all areas of their lives, not just professionally. I like Richard Branson's approach to business that you have to love what you do, in so you'll hopefully create an environment where people enjoy working. In contrast to the television series The Office, which seems like so many companies I've worked at in the past.
At the moment I'm taking courses on management skills and building high performance teams, the non technical skills of running a business and an area that is all too often neglected. It looks like it's going to be a long road ahead and I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little scarred. Nevertheless, this path seems right and who knows, the swimming hole at the end of it might be pretty good.
Great hall locations: Miscellaneous , New Zealand | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
September 1, 2006
How The War Was Lost
The ants are back, in force. The pre-emptive strike was launched without warning about a week ago. If you're not familiar with this bathroom battle, catch up on the war room chronicles. They must have got spy intelligence that I had bought a new toothbrush, and the prize is oh so sweet this time... as I've upgraded to an electric model! The attack appears to be coming from several vectors now and my previous secret weapon of whitening toothpaste, which the ants seemed to hate, no longer fazes them. I fear this might be one battle I may not win...
Great hall locations: Miscellaneous | Talked about by: 1 Fraggles
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