Over the last week or so I’ve added a few features to the website.
First up is a search box which you can find on the sidebar. By default it will search this website, but you can quite easily search the web with it as well. This is something I had on the old site but never bothered to bring across to this site. I finally got around to doing it (and had to mess with the HTML Google provided in order to do it). Incidentally, that text box in the yellow section at the top of the page is also a search of sorts…but it only searches articles and does a pretty poor job of it. The Google search in the sidebar searches the whole website.
Second, each article’s page now contains a “print” link. Not long after setting up this website I did a bit of work to make the printouts a bit nicer as they originally printed out the whole sidebar and a lot of other excess crud, as a result printouts from this website are pretty clean and straightforward. However, the thing that really annoys me about website printouts is that you have no way of knowing where the links point to, and if the URL is a long one it gets chopped off. The “print” link on each article solves this problem by creating a print friendly version of the article which makes a note of the full URL, and where all the links go. I think it makes the printouts a bit better, but it’s entirely up to you which one you use.
Thirdly, I’ve recently had some pretty poor experiences with both YouTube and Google Video, the former managing to lose a video immediately after telling me it had been uploaded successfully, and the latter taking the better part of two hours to “approve” my recent video about the hot air balloon and the AirServices Australia building. As such I have installed a flash video player on this website. My videos are no longer at the mercy of third parties, and hosting them here is much better for archival purposes (such as PANDORA). Here is my new, local version of my most recent rain video.
Recently I have received a few inquiries about the welfare of James Goodwin and Robbie McGregor, so I might as well address them.
James Goodwin is currently working for Macquarie National News (2GB & 2CH) as one of their Parliament House reporters, or to be accurate, their “Federal Parliament reporter”. James has his own profile page on the 2GB website and can occasionally be seen on television news bulletins holding a 2GB microphone at those members’ entrance media scrums. He can also be heard occasionally reading the weekend news for 2CC and 2CA. At this stage James doesn’t host one of 2GB’s prolific podcasts, although I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets one once the date of the federal election is announced, as he was hired by Macquaire mainly for the purpose of covering the federal election.
For the benefit of Ron who lives in Central Victoria and has seemingly been a fan of James since he worked for Southern Cross News (2UE, 3AW, 4BC, 6PR etc), James sounds much the same as he did back then. Unfortunately it’s not a quick process to find one of his reports on the 2GB webstream as I have no control over what they run in each bulletin, I’ll keep checking for audio periodically, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.
Update 5:51pm February 6th, 2007: Despite James being 2GB’s Federal Parliament reporter, he has spent some time in Sydney as 2GB’s police reporter. This is something I was unaware of until today. End Update
Whilst I was monitoring the 2GB webstream yesterday I stumbled upon an ad voiced by someone else I keep getting asked about, ex-SBS voiceover man Robbie McGregor.
Robbie, these days, is providing voiceovers for just about anything. He can be hired through rmk Voice Productions (he has his own profile page there).
Click here for Robbie McGregor voicing an ad for the Rockdale Mattress Factory.
On Saturday morning I must have been sleeping lightly because I had the radio on in the background, and it had an effect on my dreams. Apparently on the 2CC gardening show there was a debate about global warming.
My dream took place at a seminar with two scientists, they had a grand plan to rid the world of global warming…their solution was to build all future buildings out of celery, the only problem was that they couldn’t decide which type of celery to use, and had quite a rowdy argument about it (even if the only argument they were able to come up with was “you can’t do that”).
Whilst I doubt that there is any merit in their plan, the dream did prompt me to find out whether or not there are different types of celery, and apparently there are.
I told John Kerr about this dream on Sunday morning and he seemed amused. He still thinks that I have very peculiar dreams.
