rojojam.com

I've spent some time looking for a half decent standards compliant flash slideshow widget thing for using on this blog this week and I think I finally have a winner, the widget being used below is from monoslideshow.com it isn't free but it was cheap and it has lots of options for customisation plus it works neatly with the standards compliant swfobject and even better it can pull images straight from a flickr rss feed, so I don't have to upload and mess with images I'm using elsewhere already! Sweeeet! as I mentioned FDF yesterday I've made a show of my recent efforts.

woohoo it's friday, I thought this day would never get here. Its been a long and gruesome week in a number of ways and I for one will be glad to see the back of it, hopefully this weekend I can concentrate on getting caught up on everything I've had to let slide this week.

F-F-F-F-F-Friday is always cause for celebration anyway because that means it's Fancy Dress Friday (FDF) over at flickr. FDF was started by the extremely talented the_brownhorse (Adam). Adam decided to dress up in a number of silly costumes for his 365days/threesixtyfive shot on October 12th 2007 (see below) and made a plea for all of his contacts to do the same the following friday....well the idea took off and 30 weeks later a number off us are still dressing up in silly costumes every friday and lots more people have joined us! It's basically a bit of silly fun and a nice way to raise a smile after a horrid week! I'm not sure what my costume is going to be today but make sure you stop by my photostream this evening and find out!! You can checkout all my previous wierd and wonderful FDF shots here

photo credit: fancy dress friday! by the brownhorse

I shot this yesterday whilst taking a short walk through the nature reserve, quite pleased with how it turned out, shot with the trusty 50mm and a set of cheap ebay closeup/macro filters. Wish I'd packed a tripod.....grrr

slightly annoyed with myself this week. I re-started this blog with all good intentions to blog everyday but the last week has been stupidly busy, it has just not been possible. Time (my greatest enemy) has been against me. I'm way behind on keeping up on friends photos over at flickr, I have two blog entries (in my head) I need to get onto site....grrr patience people I'm workin on it! did manage to update my bio page so things are moving!! just slowly...grrr

These are my two favourite pocket tools. the first is a good old fashioned victorinox swiss army knife....very useful for well cutting things and loosening screws and opening beer and tins etc.

The second is a 4gb USB pendrive....I love these things, mine is not only holding handy documents but is running a fine array of open source and freeware portable apps (from portableapps.com) . I can plug into any PC anywhere and have all my stuff with me (browser and plugins, email, office suite, image editing, audio editing, media player, IM software, and minesweeper to name but a few). I even carry round a copy of my website files, databases + apache and mysql just in case I need to carry out some emergency website work on the move. All of this convenience for under ten pounds...ain't technology grand these day!!

If your not already using your portable drive like this...I suggest you try it, very useful indeed. I can also recommend another freeware program called TrueCrypt for encrypting your drive....it's not the simplest tool to use but if you have time to figure it out, its very powerful and having such an easy to lose piece of technology crammed full of personal info encrypted helps me sleep better. =)