Posts Tagged ‘web2.0’

In this fortnight’s edition of Online Insights we listen in to the audio tour for the Great Pandas at Adelaide Zoo (yes, I made them which means one of my online ventures finally qualifies for Online Insights), look at a strange but intriguing clock, learn the truth about restaurants and what your waiter really thinks of you, and have some fun venting about a web2.0 removal tool called the suicide machine. Remember, your suggestions are always welcome via sd@steveedavis.com.au.

Giant panda audio tour

Well, after months of development and scriptwriting, we can finally share with you the audio tour for your visit to the pandas at Adelaide Zoo. Here is the introduction (you can download the full audio tour on the giant panda website)

In the process of developing and voicing these scripts, I gained a deep insight into the amazing work done by the Interpretation Unit at Zoos SA. These people have deep love for their work and the animals and have to tread a difficult line between honouring the zoological integrity of the work of the keepers and the latest scientific understandings of animals and conservation with our needs as ordinary visitors who don’t want the mumbo jumbo of latin names and fussy detail. Read the rest of this entry »

Australian Nudist Federation website
Australian nudists have finally entered the 21^st century with an official website coinciding with the release of new guidelines for naturists. Unfortunately, the site is one of the clunkiest I have seen for a while with bandwidth-heavy technology. This site certainly won’t be the model for modern websites. Not only is the design dated, the technical aspects suggest it has either been created by a “friend of a friend of a friend” or by a web designer who has not kept up to date with the importance of fast-loading sites and eradication of annoying, animated gifs bouncing around on the page like a parent trying to be cool at a teenager’s birthday party.

Be that as it may, if you are happy to wait for the Read the rest of this entry »

Good ideas for websites
Sean and I have had some good ideas for businesses and websites during our radio show, so it is only fitting that we share a source for similarly stellar ideas from online – Good website ideas by Simon the Web Genius.

Simon is the alter-ego of David Thorne, the man we talked about in 2008 for trying to pay a bill with a picture of a spider.

I have had a number of his other online pranks float through my inbox in recent weeks, so he is clearly tickling the funny bones of people in my friends network.

David’s site is 27bslash6.com, and it is not for the kiddies. It is for people wanting some silliness and amusement.

You can find the spider story there along with Simon’s web ideas. Here are a few:

• everything.com – This would be a website where instead of having to look all over the internet for what you want, it would all be in the one place. This would effectively end the need for search engines so I would have to be careful that google representatives do not kill me in my sleep.
• whereaboutsami.com – This would be a website where users can write the name of the city and street they are on and I would tell them where they are.
• whatkindofcoughisthat.com – A website that contains sound files of different coughs. Each cough would have a description to allow the user to sound match and determine the kind of cough they have before going to the chemist and buying either dry or wet cough medicine.
• screensavingpage.com – A website that is a black page so that people can go there instead of buying a screensaver.
• amihavingaheartattack.com – A website for people having a heart attack.

For more site ideas, some laughs and a healthy dash of black humour, visit Good Ideas for Websites.

Adelaide Fringe
It is Fringe time in Adelaide again, so it is worth checking out the Fringe website. Lots of information is available about every show and my favourite part is the part that lets you see YouTube clips of the shows and performers who will be appearing. Follow this link to watch Fringe 2009 YouTube Clips – click on the show of iterest and then, in the show’s profile page, click on the television icon and the video clip will pop up. 

Passport Photos for Free
I needed to attach two passport-sized photos to some papers through the week and my Google search brought me to ePassportPhoto.com. It describes itself as “the Internet passport photo booth, empowering people around the world to make free and valid passport photos.” The site claims to, “put an end to the passport photo rip-off,” and I must say I have always thought the passport shoot was a money-for-jam job for photo labs and photographers. My Fringe media pass photo was snapped by a friend on a cheap digital camera, trimmed to size in photo editing software and emailed in. However, this website makes it even easier – as long as you have photo paper and a colour printer. You simply choose your country and the service sets the size your picture needs to be, upload your picture, you move your picture around so your forehead and chin are in the right place, choose how many images you want printed per sheet, then hit print.

The site is free but move through it carefully – it is set up to make it easy for you to simply send your image to Snapfish for printing for money (which is the site owner’s right, of course).

You can create images for your fake Ids, whoops, no, I didn’t say that, I meant, for a range of legitimate reasons at ePassport Photo.

Sweet Cron
There are many social networking sites out there today and many of us find we have our virtual selves spread across numerous sites. There are some aggregation solutions available – places or tools for tying your many profiles into one place – and FriendFeed springs to mind as a popular option in this category. However, some programmers led by Yong Fook in Tokyo have come up with a free, open source tool that you load onto your own website to gather your various manifestations into one place. If you comment on Facebook, upload a picture to Flickr, or do many other similar things, those fragments will all be displayed and archived on your own site in what the makers call a Lifestream.

The name, SweetCron, is, I imagine, a play on the word “sweetcorn” because a cob of corn holds many kernels into one place and a “cron” is a “time-based scheduling service in Unix-like computer operating systems”. At least, that is my guess and I might be reading too much into it!

As of February 2009, you can join the public beta by registering your email address at Sweetcron.

No Clean Feed
Australia’s federal Labour government, championed through Senator Stephen Conroy, is hellbent on one of the most stupid, cynical exercises known to humankind. Under that vote-winning and indisputable catchcry of “stamping out child pornography” (which every sane human would support), Conroy and his cronies are marching ahead with plans to force mandatory filtering of Australia’s internet feed. In the short term, this will choke the speed of internet connections in Australia, it will still let through some material meant to be banned, and it will block material that does not need to be banned. In the long term it means governments will have all the tools they need to stamp out voices of dissent. Thankfully, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, speaks Mandarin, because it means that in fluent dialect, he will be able to swap notes with his Chinese counterparts on how the censorship of Australia’s internet compares to China’s censorship of its. Machiavelli and Goebbels would be very proud of the way Conroy’s cronies are exploiting the child pornography hot button to set up the systems for later governments to take censorship further to block anything deemed “offensive”. Yes, they have missed 1984 by a couple of decades, but they are about to catch up with aplomb.

Please visit the No Clean Feed website – http://nocleanfeed.com/action.html – to get contact details for Stephen Conroy to let him know you are not happy. The website has been created by Electronic Frontiers Australia. The EFA has found that recent tests of six filtering systems by ACMA achieved:

• One filter caused a 22% drop in speed even when it was *not* performing filtering;
• Only one of the six filters had an acceptable level of performance (a drop of 2% in a laboratory trial), the others causing drops in speed of between 21% and 86%;
• The most accurate filters were often the slowest;
• All filters tested had problems with under-blocking, allowing access to between 2% and 13% of material that they should have blocked; and
• All filters tested had serious problems with over-blocking, wrongly blocking access to between 1.3% and 7.8% of the websites tested.

Despite this report highlighting the inaccuracy of these filters and the loss of performance caused by their use, Senator Conroy announced the government will press ahead with a real-world pilot program in furtherance of Labor’s pre-election commitment to force all Australian ISP’s to filter their customers’ Internet access.

This whole development is made doubly disappointing by the fact that the Rudd government happily used social media channels like MySpace to garner public support to get into government, and now that they are in, they are going to sabotage the social side of the net (remember, everything is going to get caught up in this deceitful move) to ensure nobody else can do what they did with the same ease and freedom of speech!

To borrow from a catchcry once used by the Liberal party against the great Labour stalwart, Gough Whitlam, “Shame Conroy, Shame!”

Television Themes and Intros
On the Box Office Mojo website, there has been a competition running to vote for the best television theme song or opening sequence of all time. Admittedly, this is not a conclusive contest but it is a good excuse to relive some memories. The bonus is that the show names in the list of tv shows are all hyperlinks across to each show’s opening sequence on YouTube. (Some have been removed but most I looked at were there). So, forgetting the competition, use this as an excuse for reminiscing with show openings for:

• The Dick Van Dyke Show
• Star Trek: The Original Series
• The Addams Family
• Twilight Zone
• The Beverly Hillbillies
• The Flintstones
• Happy Days
• M*A*S*H
• Hawaii Five-O
• The Sopranos
• Gilligan’s Island
• Green Acres
• The Brady Bunch
• Popeye
• WKRP in Cincinnati

The full list is at Box Office Mojo.

How do different wines taste?
Carl Tashian has created a novel website as part of doing a course, Visualising the Five Senses, at NYU. This website gives you the flavours of wines as a visual representation. Through it, we get to see which flavours are most dominant in the major wine varieties. I can imagine this tool will help people who want some help figuring out the wine styles they are most likely to enjoy.

What Carl has done is collectdescriptive flavour words from over 5,000 published wine tasting notes written between 1995-2000 in a major Australian wine magazine. This makes this tool especially useful for Australian wine lovers because it means taste references aren’t skewed towards Zinfandel!

There are terms like oak, sweet, berry, rich, acid, tannin, strawberry, cherry, plum, spicy, citrus, chocolate, rockmelon, etc, all spread evenly around a circle. Then you can work down a list of wine styles and see which elements are more common in each style – the more dominant, the thicker the line that arches to the element in question.

The catch all findings for “all reds” show oak, tannin and berry as the dominant features, while for whites  we see oak, acid, complex and rich.

To compare reds, shiraz is more oak, pepper, berry and sweet, while cabernet sauvignon is oak, tannin, berry, and rich.

To compare whites, chardonnay features peach, melon and butter, while sauvignon blanc features acid, herb and crisp.

It makes for some fascinating reading, all the better while sipping at the same time! You can find the graph at http://tashian.com/wine-flavors/.

Print What You Like
I met a guy, Richard Pascoe, at an event recently and he told me about a helpful site that helps make printing web pages easier and more environmentally friendly. It is called, Print What You Like.

The website says it will:

• Format any web page for printing in seconds – no more pasting into Word
• Save money and the environment by reducing your paper and ink usage
• Make printed web pages more readable by removing ads, widgets and other distractions
• Fix broken pages that don’t print correctly

I have had a little play with it and believe that once you get used to it, it will become a very handy tool to have around. I think it is worth bookmarking printwhatyoulike.com for further reference.

Road Kill Cook Book
I was in the Riverland at Berri, South Australia, this past week, running workshops on online marketing, eBay and the various web2.0 technologies applicable to small business, and met Cathy from Emaroo Cottages. They run some holiday accommodation in Broken Hill and Mildura. She mentioned that their website boasted a Road Kill Cook Book, so I had to find out more. Sure enough, this free eBook is available from the website and contains these highlights:

Tender Pot Roast Rump of Emu: This recipe includes an interesting fact that an emu’s eyeball is bigger than its brain, making them high speed, clueless feather dusters on legs. It also includes such immortal recipe directions as – Take the selected rump of emu, remove imbedded bitumen, feathers, and any unwanted additives. Allow to stand for a few days while you search for a pot large enough to cater for the rump. And, rounds off with the unusual, serves 50-60.

Ribbon of Rabbit: The recipe notes that most large truck tyres will have already pulverized the piece into a nice flat ribbon. Soak rabbit overnight to help remove fur, tyre tread patterns and remnants of rubber. Moisten rabbit with garlic, olive oil and oregano and place over hot coals.

Silver City Snake Slithers in Batter: Great advice in this recipe – Ensure the creature is actually deceased, there’s no greater surprise than delivering this little trophy to She of the Kitchen than finding it mostly alive and more than a little grumpy with its ill treatment.

Goat au Gratin: Simply can’t go past this advice – clip its horns and wipe its ass, goat is best served rare.

You can find this book at http://www.emaroocottages.com.au/.

Zamzar
I cannot speak more highly of any online tool available. Zamzar is an absolute godsend. This handy utitlity can convert files from one format to another, and even grab YouTube videos for you to download and watch later.

I find it particularly handy for converting Microsoft’s ridiculous .***x extensions to .***. Of particular note, is the ability to convert these new extensions not only into the old Microsoft extension format but also into the Open Office format.

A variety of other formats are also supported, enabling you to convert your pptx files into whatever format is most useful for the program that you happen to be working in. The full list of supported formats is below:

• html – Hypertext Markup Language
• odp – OpenDocument presentation
• pdf – Portable Document Format
• png – Portable Network Graphic
• ppt – Microsoft Powerpoint Presentation
• ps – Postscript document
• swf – Macromedia Flash Format File

One of my favourite aspects is the saving of YouTube videos. I often find material I want to share with others when we are not online. So saving videos to share offline is a great advantage of this tool.

The whole service is free for basic conversions, with a variable turnaround time. If you want faster conversions and online storage, then you can pay between US$7 and US$49 per month. Visit www.zamzar.com.

Sendables – JibJab
This is an hilarious site from the US, where you can access sendable ecards and fun clips.

There is a focus on the upcoming US election with a fun rendition of The Times They Are A-Changin’, morphed into Time For Some Campaignin’. There are some classic lines that pull no punches in satirising all the main players, eg, Hilary Clinton sings about failing to quell Obama’s rising star, to which Bill Clinton says, alas you got close, but no cigar. You can see the video here: http://sendables.jibjab.com/sendables/1191/time_for_some_campaignin.

However, one of my favourite videos on the site (by the way, you find the videos under the JibJab Originals tab/button) is What We Call The News. This is biting satire on the state of mass media news coverage. It highlights the shift from real news coverage to the crap news channels need to concoct or scrape out of the barrel to fill their voracious content demands and maintain titillation for extended periods. You can see this video here: http://www.jibjab.com/originals/what_we_call_the_news.

Kids Around Town
Found an interesting website about a book that is being launched this month (September 2008) called Kids Around Town. It is for parents in Adelaide and unlike other voucher books, is totally family-friendly.

The book will have around 230 vouchers offering freebies, 2 for 1 offers, and 10%-25% off offers. They add up to about $5,000 in savings and there are some competitions in the book too.

Interestingly, the book is not just vouchers. It also contains articles from Mem Fox and Dorinda Haffner, along with listings of favourite playgrounds, markets, parenting rooms and local libraries.

The lady behind this is Sheree Hyde, who created the business so she can work from home, and also so she could raise money for her daughter’s school.

Kids Around Town has been divided into seven sections including BUMPS & BUBS; HEALTHY & HAPPY; EATS & TREATS; WATCH, LEARN & PLAY; GIFTS, TOYS & MORE; LET’S PARTY!; and GETAWAYS.

From mid to late September 2008, the book can be purchased online and at selected retailers for only $28. It will also be available through many schools. Visit http://www.kidsaroundtown.com.au.

Stuart’s Hell
Michael Giacometti is an Alice Springs man on a mission, drawing close to to finishing his gruelling challenge of dragging a 180kg cart over 1000 sand dunes in Australia’s Simpson Desert, from east to west, unassisted and away from roads and tracks.
In September 1845, after 18 months in central Australia searching for the inland sea, Captain Charles Sturt wrote to his wife about the dramatic, red sand dunes that marked the end of his journey:
Ascending one of the sand ridges I saw a numberless succession of these terrific objects rising above each other to the east and west. Northwards they ran before me for more than fifteen miles… The scene was awfully fearful, dear Charlotte. A kind of dread came over me as I gazed upon it. It looked like the entrance into Hell. Mr Browne stood horrified. ‘Did man’, he exclaimed, ‘ever see such a place?!’
Michael is walking from Bedourie (Qld) to Mt Dare (SA), covering 485km in 24 days.
This has never been done before, crossing east to west, because it means Michael will be hitting high sand dunes face on, at the steepest point.
He says he is doing this to immerse himself in the desert and raise awareness of man’s impact on the earth. We should also think of Michael when we grizzle about not being able to water our lawns because he will be surviving in treachorous conditions for three weeks on just 100 litres of water – that’s 4 litres a day, which is the same as a one half-flush of a toilet per day. In fact, his complete water consumption for such a gruelling journey will be the same amount of water you and I use in one average day!
You can follow Michael’s story at http://www.michaelgiacometti.org and progress updates at http://www.michaelgiacometti.org/progress.html

Broadband Choice
Whirlpool is a very popular, Australian-based forum for IT and Telco geeks. They have a handy page that helps you cut through the garbled marketing messages regarding broadband plans and mobile plans, etc. Part of this service is a page set up for you to enter your telephone number into, and it advises you on how ready your exchange is for ADSL2 and other technologies.
And there is one great spin off this function. If you are looking to hire a tradesperson and all you have is a landline number, you can plop their number into this service and it tells you which exchange they are connected to. I used it this week, when searching for an electrician.
The great thing about this site is that although it is written by and run by geeks, it takes the time to explain things in detail AND it points out the traps such as noting whether your broadband connection counts just the data coming to your machine or whether it also counts data you are sending out (or upstream). If the latter, your usage rates can jump 10-50%
You can find the service at http://bc.whirlpool.net.au

St Kilda Film Festival
This week sees the St Kilda Film Festival travelling show roll through South Australia. The event is 25 years old and this year’s competition attracted 700 short films. Unfortunately the festival’s website is boring. It just has the basic information about the event and the films, but there are no snippets to watch. This really needs to be addressed. However, you can see one of the films that is travelling, on the Tropfest website, because the film was entered in both competitions. The film is Beggar’s Belief, and it is quite a funny, quirky story, that just gets ironically weird. You can link to that from the Tropfest site here – http://www.tropfest.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=380367. While on this page, you will also see the winning film from Tropfest, Marry Me, which, if you have not caught up with it yet, is a beautiful story of unrequited love and BMX bicycles. If you click on any of the movies, other than Marry Me, you will have to watch a 30 second commercial before the main event – you don’t need to start clicking madly, thinking you have gone to the wrong place. (Tropfest has been running since 1993 and is now the world’s largest short film festival.
Back to St Kilda Film Festival, and the touring show will be in Mt Gambier, Tuesday, at the Sir Robert Helpman Theatre; here in Adelaide Wednesday, at the Palace Nova; Renmark Thursday, at the Chaffey Theatre; Port Pirie Friday, at the Northern Festival Centre, and Whyalla Sunday, at the Middleback Theatre. It’s actually doing the opposite of our health system – the film festival is going out to meet the people in regional areas, instead of forcing them to travel to the big city! The festival’s official site is http://stkildafilmfestival.vic.gov.au.
A friend of a friend of a friend knows you’re on vacation
As you know, I am a passionate advocate of social networking sites. But someone does need to pay the piper. In the case of sites like these, the trade off is giving away personal information to the site provider. So, you get membership to a warm, fuzzy, online community where you can rekindle old friendships, make new ones, and take part in global conversations, in return for the site operators being able to aggregate user information, sell it to advertisers, who in turn use it to target advertising. I think that is a win-win. But, as the Canadian Office of the Privacy Commissioner rightly points out, there are some downsides to not thinking about how much personal information and media you share on these sites. You need to remember you are giving full rights to your words and pictures and information to these companies.
Some of the downsides can be:

• increased marketing coming at you (although, it is likely to be targetted)
• lower types of people learning when you are on holiday and seizing the opportunity to rob you (or learning when you are having a large party that they could gatecrash)
• getting curly questions from potential employers who have researched you online
• giving away your date of birth (I always use a fake, but memorable one)

This link will take you to a video that asks, “what would you want a friend of a friend of a friend to know about you?” As the commissioner points out, joining a social network is our personal choice, “but we would hope that people would take a minute to think about their choices – and how much information they end up handing over to corporations, advertisers and marketing companies.” Fair call. The video is here.

Evernote
We can now have an external brain to keep track of all the tiny bits of information we encounter every day, through a service called Evernote. The service is in Beta at the moment and I am a few days away from taking part in the early trials. The technology is breathtaking. The basic idea is that Evernote will capture and remember everything you send to it and then it will index text including text from images so that you can search for bit of information you need, whenever you need it.

There are three prongs to this service:

• The website, where you register your Evernote account
• Your desktop, where you install the software
• Your mobile phone, where you install a client for capturing and sending information to your Evernote account.

There is a very good introductory video about this service on the front page of the website.

Some of the features I am looking forward to using include the ability to send a phone picture of a wine label or business card to Evernote, copying sections of text and images from interesting websites without needing to save the whole page which will make bargain hunting easier, and the ability to capture my handwritten notes into the system with my webcam.

You can sign up for a Beta invitation at www.evernote.com.

Libra
Here is another site to help you organise your “stuff”. It is library software to help you capture books and other media into a single database, with the ability to export lists to spreadsheets or webpages.

There are some very cool aspects to this software, including:

• Your webcam can become a barcode scanner for reading your book barcodes
• You can set it up to track people who borrow your books and media
• You can export your collection to a page on your website, so that you and your friends can peruse your collection – might come in handy when you need to make an insurance claim.

Before you wonder how long this will take, the process for loading information is made quite fast and simple because Libra taps in to the Amazon database. This means when you scan or type in an ISBN number, your collection gets information imported about the author, publisher, story, etc, in an instant. CDs, DVDs and games sometimes need to be searched by titles, but it sure beats typing everything out longhand.

When you look at your collection, simply clicking on the media title will display the title’s information. You can start getting organised today at www.getlibra.com.

Mr Dad
I have been amazed at how many parent-focussed sites there are on web, since becoming a parent. One I found, called Mr Dad, is a site set up by a US-based Parenting Expert, Armin Brott. Although the site tries to sell you his books and DVDs, there is a blog on the site of his Q and A column, in which he answers questions from dads. Here are a couple of interesting ones:

Sharing. A dad wrote in to seek solutions to his two-year-old’s grabbing and non-sharing habits. Armin replies by sharing “The Toddler’s Rules of Ownership” which included such gems as If I like it, it’s mine, If it’s in my hands, it’s mine, If I can take it from you, it’s mine, and If it’s your and I steal it, it’s mine.

He makes the point that “he toddler who shares easily is a pretty rare bird. In fact, toddlers are supposed to be self-centred at this age.” In fact, allowing your children to see the reactions from people who they grab toys from, is part of the lesson about how to share. Here are a few ways Armin says we can prepare for play dates, to keep your child’s developing sense of sharing moving in the right direction:

1. Prepare by reminding your child that more than one friend might want the same toy at the same time.

2. Put away or don’t take the “unsharables”.

3. Practice sharing by asking your child to share a toy with you from time to time, then make a big deal of saying thank you when you return it.

4. Enforce a no-grabbing policy by returning toys to children if your child has grabbed them.

Curiosity. Armin has some great suggestions for harbouring a sense of wonder and curiosity in your children. Did you know that between 2 and 5 years old, children ask 400,000 questions? And that how you answer them plays a big part in their development, more so than the 13 years of schooling that follow? Armin says the best answer is another question, such as “what do you think”? The goal is to encourage the search for answers, not just dish out questions like the Bigpond dad!

Read through the questions and answers at www.mrdad.com/ask.

Chillmasterflex
This site is meant to be a “counterweight” to the hustle and bustle of your typical website. There is new age music in the background and a choice of images – sunset, lakes and woodfire. I chose the woodfire. It fills your screen and you can just stare into it in a darkened room, and relax! Note: let images load before you choose “fullscreen”. Also, I had difficulty getting the lakes and sunset to load. The fire, though, was lovely. www.chillmasterflex.com

50 things everybody should know how to do

This article is a rich resource of how-to links and videos covering a pretty comprehensive list of basic life skills. Sadly, the only one missing that I think is important is “how to make or find the perfect espresso”, but I guess they had to cull some things from the list. The full list is here and the headings are below.

1. Build a Fire – Fire produces heat and light, two basic necessities for living. At some point in your life this knowledge may be vital.

2. Operate a Computer – Fundamental computer knowledge is essential these days. Please, help those in need.

3. Use Google Effectively – Google knows everything. If you’re having trouble finding something with Google, it’s you that needs help.

4. Perform CPR and the Heimlich Maneuver – Someday it may be your wife, husband, son or daughter that needs help.

5. Drive a Manual Transmission Vehicle – There will come a time when you’ll be stuck without this knowledge.

6. Do Basic Cooking – If you can’t cook your own steak and eggs, you probably aren’t going to make it.

7. Tell a Story that Captivates People’s Attention – If you can’t captivate their attention, you should probably just save your breath.

8. Win or Avoid a Fistfight – Either way, you win.

9. Deliver Bad News – Somebody has got to do it. Unfortunately, someday that person will be you.

10. Change a Tire – Because tires have air in them, and things with air in them eventually pop.

11. Handle a Job Interview – I promise, sweating yourself into a nervous panic won’t land you the job.

12. Manage Time – Not doing so is called wasting time, which is okay sometimes, but not all the time.

13. Speed Read – Sometimes you just need the basic gist, and you needed it 5 minutes ago.

14. Remember Names – Do you like when someone tries to get your attention by screaming “hey you”?

15. Relocate Living Spaces – Relocating is always a little tougher than you originaly imagined.

16. Travel Light – Bring only the necessities. It’s the cheaper, easier, smarter thing to do.

17. Handle the Police – Because jail isn’t fun… and neither is Bubba.

18. Give Driving Directions – Nobody likes driving around in circles. Get this one right the first time.

19. Perform Basic First Aid – You don’t have to be a doctor, or genius, to properly dress a wound.

20. Swim – 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. Learning to swim might be a good idea.

21. Parallel Park – Parallel parking is a requirement on most standard driver’s license driving tests, yet so many people have no clue how to do it. How could this be?

22. Recognize Personal Alcohol Limits – Otherwise you may wind up like this charming fellow.

23. Select Good Produce – Rotten fruits and vegetables can be an evil tease and an awful surprise.

24. Handle a Hammer, Axe or Handsaw – Carpenters are not the only ones who need tools. Everyone should have a basic understanding of basic hand tools.

25. Make a Simple Budget – Being in debt is not fun. A simple budget is the key.

26. Speak at Least Two Common Languages – Only about 25% of the world’s population speaks English. It would be nice if you could communicate with at least some of the remaining 75%.

27. Do Push-Ups and Sit-Ups Properly – Improper push-ups and sit-ups do nothing but hurt your body and waste your time.

28. Give a Compliment – It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give someone, and it’s free.

29. Negotiate – The better deal is only a question or two away.

30. Listen Carefully to Others – The more you listen and the less you talk, the more you will learn and the less you will miss.

31. Recite Basic Geography – If you don’t know where anything is outside of your own little bubble, most people will assume (and they are probably correct) that you don’t know too much at all.

32. Paint a Room – The true cost of painting is 90% labor. For simple painting jobs it makes no sense to pay someone 9 times what it would cost you to do it yourself.

33. Make a Short, Informative Public Speech – At the next company meeting if your boss asks you to explain what you’ve been working on over the last month, a short, clear, informative response is surely your best bet. “Duhhh…” will not cut it.

34. Smile for the Camera – People that absolutely refuse to smile for the camera suck!

35. Flirt Without Looking Ridiculous – There is a fine line between successful flirting and utter disaster. If you try too hard, you lose. If you don’t try hard enough, you lose.

36. Take Useful Notes – Because useless notes are useless, and not taking notes is a recipe for failure.

37. Be a Respectful House Guest – Otherwise you will be staying in a lot of hotels over the years.

38. Make a Good First Impression – Aristotle once said, “well begun is half done.”

39. Navigate with a Map and Compass – What happens when the GPS craps out and you’re in the middle of nowhere?

40. Sew a Button onto Clothing – It sure is cheaper than buying a new shirt.

41. Hook Up a Basic Home Theater System – This isn’t rocket science. Paying someone to do this shows sheer laziness.

42. Type – Learning to type could save you days worth of time over the course of your lifetime.

43. Protect Personal Identity Information – Personal identity theft is not fun unless you are the thief. Don’t be careless.

44. Implement Basic Computer Security Best Practices – You don’t have to be a computer science major to understand the fundamentals of creating complex passwords and using firewalls. Doing so will surely save you a lot of grief someday.

45. Detect a Lie – People will lie to you. It’s a sad fact of life.

46. End a Date Politely Without Making Promises – There is no excuse for making promises you do not intend to keep. There is also no reason why you should have to make a decision on the spot about someone you hardly know.

47. Remove a Stain – Once again, it’s far cheaper than buying a new one.

48. Keep a Clean House – A clean house is the foundation for a clean, organized lifestyle.

49. Hold a Baby – Trust me, injuring a baby is not what you want to do.

50. Jump Start a Car – It sure beats walking or paying for a tow truck.

Pick Up Pal

No, this is not an online swinger’s service, this is car pooling service with a slight twist. Drivers and would-be passengers both register independently on the site and then the site’s proprietary system matches drivers to passengers using a raft of preferences. Part of the twist is that you can also find a driver to deliver some goods for you, rather than just take you for a ride.

Who pays? The passengers pays an agreed price to the driver and the driver is then billed for 7% commission by Pick Up Pal.

It was launched in January 2008 by a Canadian, whose mum signed the Kyoto Protocol on behalf of the Canadian government. I guess that gives some street cred to a service like this! The site claims to have saved 480,000kg of CO2 emissions and to have coordinated 1.5 million km of travel.

Another clever aspect of this site is the free website offer for groups holding events or organisations with high people traffic. It is called the eco-rideshare program, and the free sites helps people come together to share transport to/from the event or organisation.

If you want to explore the site, sign up as a passenger and look around, at PickUpPal Adelaide.

Juice Bag

Here’s a glimpse into the future. Reware, a US-based company, has just released a solar powered attaché case that can recharge your mobile phone, PDA, and other accessories while you are on the move.

The bag sells for about AU$330 and can power an army of small devices. It doesn’t have the “juice” to charge a laptop at the moment, but you never know what’s around the corner. You can find out more at http://rewarestore.com/product/profolio.html. – hat tip to Lee Hopkins

Wiki Send

If you have ever had to send a large file to someone and did not want to burden your recipient’s email server, Wiki Send is a free tool you will find useful. You can use this service to upload large files, up to 100 meg, and then send a link to your recipient who can visit the site to download your file. If you give your recipient a week to download the file, the service is fast. If you choose to give them more than a week up to 90 days, the file will be put into the second class service area, and will download at half the speed.

I have also been using YouSendIt but WikiSend has a cleaner and simpler interface. Start sending files now at www.wikisend.com.

Workcover blog for injured workers by injured workers
This blog site was recommended to my by a listener, David, and it seems to be a busy blog that documents public comments and commentary on all things related to South Australia’s workers’ compensation system.

It makes for some depressing reading. You certainly get the impression that there is a strong, heavy current moving decisions in one direction and that workers have ideas and suggestions that have no chance in holding back or diverting tide.

There are some amazing threads of conversation on this blog, especially “New Legislation- More disadvantaged Workers-More blowout??” which contains insights into the role of case managers and claims that there seems to be a layer of lazy middle people standing between rehabilitation services and workers who actually want to get well and back into the workforce. I also notice the Liberal party is involved in the conversation and there are also some mentions of Kris Hanna.

You can visit the blog at http://www.blognow.com.au/workcover/.

Polldaddy
I discovered a new service for creating polls and surveys online, that can be easily embedded into blogs and websites. It is Poll Daddy and it offers a very slick free service – which I am using for our babydavisblog.wordpress.com.

The free account lets you set up and run polls and then has an easy to follow system for embedding the poll onto your homepage, or into your WordPress blog, MySpace page, TypePad, Facebook, Blogger – and there is even a Flash converter for posting your site on systems that don’t allow Javascript applications to run.

You can also run surveys but they are limited to 100 entries in the free version.

PC World and Fox News are just some of the companies using Polldaddy which means it passes muster with some of the websites that count.

You can have your own Poll Daddy at http://www.polldaddy.com.

David Seah
It doesn’t matter whether you are retired, working freelance, running a small business, or just wanting to perform better at your job or within your household, you now have access to your very own, Personal CEO.

David Seah is a freelancer who was frustrated with his attempts to focus and see jobs through to completion, especially when jobs had nebulous outcomes or pathways. So, back in 2005, he created a set of forms to act like a CEO breathing over his shoulder to ensure he could honestly say to himself that he had been being productive.

The forms – there are many styles – have a column for tasks and bubbles for every 15 minute period in a day. It is quite dramatic when you look at a day in hindsight, or even as it is unfolding, to see a series of filled in bubbles for time taken on tasks, or a series of bubbles with slashes through them for each period that was effected by distractions.

There’s also another brilliant tool – the Compact Calendar. This simple, elegant calendar prints out onto one page and has each day of the year plotted consecutively across seven columns. So what? Well, unlike a traditional calendar, which has loose ends when months change midweek, this has the whole year available in one glimpse. This makes it much easier for scheduling projects, holidays, and deadlines. What’s more, David’s fans around the globe have created local versions with public holidays and there are some Australian calendars on his site.

If you want to look at this calendar and then work your way through to his forms, visit David Seah’s Compact Calendar page at http://davidseah.com/page/compact-calendar. Thanks to Adrian for this site suggestion.

Geoff Peters Trio
I was looking at baby name websites and found one which I’ll talk about another day, called Baby Name Guesser, but, as often happens online, I was intrigued to see a note that the guy behind the site has a jazz band. So I clicked on the link to his band’s site and discovered the most sublime, or should I say, hip, jazz.

This is the perfect arrangement of piano, drums and bass that you could ever wish for.

One refreshing aspect of the site is that Geoff has a ton of music available for you to listen to while online, or download to listen to later – all free. He is running the honour system and trusting that if you enjoy his music, you’ll hop back to his site and leave a donation via PayPal.

Forget that Melbourne has the Jazz Festival at the moment, swing over to the Geoff Peters Trio site and have your own concert at http://www.gpeters.com/listen.php.