August 2008
Day trip to Mapleton Falls and Coolum Beach
Sun, 31/08/2008 - 9:19am — jethro
I have had such a heavy workload lately that about 2 weeks ago I planned an entire day off – knowing I would need it and the family would be needing me. So yesterday was locked out in my diary as being work free. well it didn't entirely work out as thanks to Optus screwing around with my plans I had to go and do a wireless internet install and local network setup for a client in their home. 3 hours later, 5 PCs online, mostly patched for 
windows updates, AVG 8 installed and updated, and Live Mesh installed for some users and synchronising backups. I left for this really early so we were able to leave the house and be ready to go at lunch time! We stopped on the highway for Maccas and KFC for lunch 15 minutes after leaving. hen it was back ont he road again and off to Mapleton Falls National Park. This is part of the great Sunshine coast walks and I was on a recce for a great bike ride that we are planning.
I had used the camera heavily the previous two days taking photos for the geek girls dinner and then for the missions fund raising dinner. Check the photos and the 3D photosynth out of the dinner. So the camera batteries were on the charger and I only had my mobile phone camera. Still I took some reasonable shots. The panoramic picture picture above was created using Live Photo Galleries cool panoramic feature from the falls look out platform. I would estimate that the height was about 100 metres straight down. I also made a photosynth of the same pictures – check it out – it is way cook and allows you to zoom in heaps.
We took heaps of pictures on the rain forest walk all up on Flickr. Here's some fun ones of all our shoes and then all our faces. Click the photos to be taken through to Flickr and the rest of the photos.
After that we headed out to Coolum Beach for nachos and doner kebabs by the beach. The children jumped waves and played for a while and then it was time to go home. I relaxed with Jude for a bit before settling into code for a few hours before hitting the sack. All the Coolum beach photos are on Flickr also.
Quick Geek Girl Dinner Update
Fri, 29/08/2008 - 10:36am — jethro
Last night aManda and I went to the inaugural Brisbane Geek Girl Dinner. It was lots of fun!. 19 girls and 3 blokes is a good ratio!.
I took lots of photos – all up on flickr, and aManda will do a longer write up later.
Geek Girl Blogger - Lori MacVittie
Thu, 28/08/2008 - 11:31am — amandaName: Lori MacVittie
Screen Name: Lori MacVittie (I don't use pen names/pseudonyms) 
Personal Blog’s:
The Application Delivery Network -(http://www.theapplicationdeliverynetwork.com)
Two Different Socks - (http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs)
Social Networks:
Twitter http://twitter.com/lmacvittie
SlideShare http://www.slideshare.net/lmacvittie
LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/lmacvittie
Slashdot (no user link)
Fark (no user link)
Delicious http://delicious.com/lmacvittie
FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/lmacvittie
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/people/:ori_MacVittie/552910892
Technorati http://technorati.com/people/technorati/lmacvittie
Current Employment: Technical Marketing Manager @ F5 Networks
Location/country: Green Bay, WI
What is your reason/motivation for blogging?
dining out
Tue, 26/08/2008 - 7:59pm — jethroso im away at the moment. In toowoomba. Working. Its so hard choosing where to eat out. Tonight i had to choose between pizza, steak, chinese, italian and mexican. I went mexican. Oh good food just got served. Im about to enjoy a quesadillo followed by a pablano with the hottest sauce they have.
Geek Girl Blogger - Inaugural GGD Dinner in Brisbane
Mon, 25/08/2008 - 9:33pm — amandaHey there readers of Geek Girl Blogger!
This Thursday night (28th August) Tim and myself will be attending a Geek Girl Dinner in Brisbane.
We are looking forward to meeting a large new range of female bloggers. I personally am looking forward to seeing some bloggers in real life. Proof that they really do exist. All we know about them is what they write ... online ... what if they’re robots? What if they’re not actually girls? It could all just be a lie. So, to see them in real life and interact with them over a meal should be rather interesting. I will report back after this insane event. However if you never read another article by me again... assume the worst. It probably means it turned out they weren’t really what they seemed... aliens perhaps! I’m prepared for anything!
Anyway.
Geek girls… out.
aManda
How come I know so much?
Sat, 23/08/2008 - 10:14am — jethroPeople often ask me that. Not gloating or anything – grin.
No seriously, its not that I know more than others. Its just that I use a website to share it. Anybody who has lived to 40 as I have will have had plenty of experience and learnt lots of things. People who have lived longer tend to know more, and people who are younger tend to know less and think they know more!
However when it comes to knowledge there are some important things to understand. I remember when I finally got my head around these concepts it was like breaking through a brick wall or finally creating the right mix of chemicals! Ka-Boom!
First there is far more knowledge than you realise. About lots of things. As soon as you can possible make the admittance that you don’t know everything there is to know about any given subject, and that other people may know more or different things about the same subject the sooner you will stop being a “know-it-all” annoying type of person. I used to be one of these before this “revelation” hit me. More on this below. I think the worst thing I can hear some one say is that they don’t need to learn about something because they know all they need to know about it. The only thing sadder than that is the person who is convinced they are right about their knowledge of a subject and is not prepared to listen to reasoned debate of alternative views. Religion and politics feature highly with this one.
Second there are 4 types of knowledge.
SEO results
Sat, 23/08/2008 - 8:32am — jethroSEO or Search Engine Optimisation is paying off for me.
I have an unfortunate name. Tim Miller is a pretty common name. So when you do a Google search for me you cant find this Tim Miller, instead you find a whole bunch of other people. This is part of the reason I have promoted my blog as SpyJournal. Its a unique name and its the name I use for most of my social websites and so on. Our business names also of Jethro Management and Jethro Consultants are pretty unique.
So when I do a Google search for SpyJournal, every single entry on the first page is me. Jethro Management is the same, and Jethro Consultants has the second last one only as not me. 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10 results is pretty good. I think I have a pretty good chance of getting found with my company name. By the way I would be interested if readers in other countries could try the same thing and let me know in the comments what you find. Feel free to use other search engines, though Google is of course the main one. I cant remember the time I needed to try a different one!
The next step for me is to keep working on my keywords, specifically Drupal and Excel and Excel VBA.
I have received numerous jobs recently through from people who found us with Google searches here in Australia. More in the last 6 months than in the rest of our business history so far.
VBA primer plans
Fri, 22/08/2008 - 1:10pm — jethroI have been requested numerous times recently by readers in comments and emails to write some how to articles for VBA. It is my intention to start to do this.
My basic plan will be to take situations where new VBA users record some code with the VBA recorder, and then want to try and make it more robust.
An article by Nick Hodge (the Excel Nick Hodge) on Dicks Daily Dose of Excel website illustrates my point.
I probably will not write articles as long or as in depth as he has done. Instead I will focus on small parts of this code such as range selection, switching workbooks, defining variables and constants and using them etc. Specifically each article I write will have real practical application. E.g how to copy data from one file to another, how to save a spreadsheet as values for emailing etc.
In the meantime enjoy Nicks article on his coding technique particularly the latter stages where he talks about the progression in code development in VBA.
Breaking news and information
Fri, 22/08/2008 - 12:20pm — jethroI have something like 20 or more websites open in browser that I want to be able to review or recommend. I haven’t got time so I will link them here, tag on delicious and clip into socialmedian as appropriate.
Here goes.
Microsoft
- Windows Live One Care for Server. Free trial. Works on Server 2008 Standard 64 bit, SBS 2008 Standard and Premium.
- File Dialogs – adding My Places in the File Open and File Save As dialog boxes. Quickly find frequently used locations on your PC or network.
- Adding signatures to email in Windows Live Hotmail
- Plugins – Flickr for Live Writer, Flickr for Outlook, Flickr for Word. Zemanta for Windows Live Writer. Hat tip to Sarah Perez from Channel 10 for this. (see our Geek Girl profile on Sarah)
- Another from Sarah is the Circle Dock Application launcher. Go straight to Circle Dock.
- How to share large files without attaching them to email
- Bulk convert old documents to new Office 2007 format from Digital Inspiration. I will be trialing this with a set of copied documents to test the results.
Geek Girl Blogger - Miss604 Rebecca Bollwitt
Thu, 21/08/2008 - 2:38pm — amandaName: Rebecca Bollwitt
Screen Name: Miss604
Personal Blog: www.miss604.com
Social Networks: Flickr, Friendfeed, Twitter, Pownce, Facebook 
Current Employment: Self employed: Senior Partner, sixty4media
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
What is your reason/motivation for blogging?
It started off as a passion for writing about the region and sharing my local knowledge including a love of history. Combine that with my technical background and my love of all things social media and I have managed to turn blogging into a full time job, which in itself motivates me more and more each day.
What is it that you find yourself blogging about, mostly the same stuff or does it vary?
Miss604.com is focused on my life in Vancouver, which involves unconferences, meetups, walks in the park and hockey games, among other things.
What style of blogging do you do, short and regular, or not so regular but long, other? And is your blogging just text or do you also use audio or video?
I try to use at least one photo with each post, I find it's easier to tell a story that way believe it or not. I also try to incorporate short video clips usually max 90 seconds (Flickr video size).
How Rebecca became a Geek Girl Blogger:
In 1997 I started an online fan site for my favourite band at the time, using Netscape Communicator and I was instantly hooked on HTML. From there my passion for all things web grew and saw me dabbling in online audio, streaming and editing until I was hired at the world's largest webcaster of financial audio. This career move, based on my digital media hobbies at the time, lead me to Boston where I oversaw online production (the recording, editing, encoding and live streaming of audio).
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I write about my family, the internet, technology and gadgets, productivity with Microsoft Office applications Excel Tips and more.
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