What’s Wrong With Judging People

December 5th, 2009 Filed under: Rants, Web | Tags: christian, judge, judgement, ki, side hug, vlog

Discussing my thoughts on judging people that were brought up by comments on my Christian Side Hug Video.

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Youtube Trolls and Tiny Cinemas

November 22nd, 2009 Filed under: Life, Movies, Reviews, Web | Tags: cinema, Food Inc, Movies, trolls, vlog, youtube

My second vlog where I talk about some youtube trolls on my first vlog. Also about the movie Food Inc. and the tiny cinema ‘The Academy’ where Ivy and I went to see it.

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2 Free Google Wave Invites

October 15th, 2009 Filed under: Web | Tags: email, google, internet, wave

Google Wave is Google’s new communication toy. It’s kind of like a new version of e-mail that includes aspects of wikis and chat as well as collaboration tools and more. I can’t really explain it but watch the little video below to get a run through of how it’s taking e-mail to the next level.

Watched it? Good, so now you know what I’ll talking about, you’re probably wondering how you can start using it. Well bad news is it’s actually invite only at the moment. But the good news is I have a couple (that’s 2) Wave nominations left to give away. I say nominations and not invites, because Google says “Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.”

So what type of impossible request am I going to demand for you to receive one of the nominations? Nothing too hard really. Just leave me a comment saying why you want it here, plus leave a comment on any other post on my blog. In 24 hours I’ll pick the best two commenters and nominate them for a Google Wave invite.

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Awesome WordPress Theme

September 10th, 2009 Filed under: Web, Work | Tags: resume, theme, wordpress, Work

Found this cool Wordpress theme online called Time to Revolt. It’s so cool I just had to use it on one of my sites. Unfortunately I didn’t have a site that suited it, so I made one. Let me introduce you to my brand new online resume!

Not exactly perfect for your average persons resume, but for me it’s great. A bit of a laugh never stopped me from getting an early childhood teacher job.

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My 15 Minutes of Fame

July 2nd, 2009 Filed under: Life, Music, Web | Tags: new zealand, nz beats, podcast, radio, wellington

To my surprise late last week I got an e-mail from Access Radio in Wellington. They were contacting me because they were planning a show based around kiwi podcasters and they had run into my little site NZ Beats Podcast. One of the co-hosts Yenping and I got to talking and she ended up doing an interview for her show.

First I have to say, Yenping did a fantastic job of making me feel at easy. I usually get quite nervous in these sorts of situations, but this was just like having a conversation with an old friend. She also talked me up, a lot. My head size tripled in size while listening to the show, made me feel quite proud of myself and NZ Beats.

I have the interview bellow for your listening pleasure, but I would suggest heading over to the Access Radio Blog and listening to the whole show there. That way you’ll also be able to hear another interview with a different kiwi podcaster Tom whose podcast, Like a Mad Dog Running through a Puddle of Gravy, consists of him and his brother shooting the shit about an array of different topics.

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You Tube ABC’s

May 5th, 2009 Filed under: Reviews, Web | Tags: abc, list, Music, videos, you tube

The You Tube ABC’s are a complete list from A to Z of the first two videos that You Tube auto-completes in their search box after entering just a single letter. Basically it’s the most popular searchs on You Tube for each letter of the alphabet. Enjoy…

Aa is for Akon and American Idol
Bb is for Beyonce and Britney Spears
Cc is for Chris Brown and Crack a Bottle
Dd is for Dead and Gone and Day and Night
Ee is for Eminem and Enrique Iglesias
Ff is for Fred and Funny
Gg is for Green Day and Ghost
Hh is for Halo and Hannah Montana
Ii is for I’m on a Boat and I Love College
Jj is for Just Dance and Justin Timberlake
Kk is for Kiss Me Thru the Phone and Kelly Clarkson
Ll is for Lady Gaga and Lil Wayne
Mm is for Michael Jackson and Miley Cyrus
Nn is for Nickelback and Naruto
Oo is for Obama and On a Boat
Pp is for Poker Face and Pink
Qq is for Queen and Quest Crew
Rr is for Right Round and Rihanna
Ss is for Soulja Boy and Single Ladies
Tt is for Taylor Swift and Twilight
Uu is for Usher and U2
Vv is for Vanessa Hugens and Viva La Vida
Ww is for Womanizer and Watchmen
Xx is for X Factor and Xzibit
Yy is for Young Jeezy and YouTube
Zz is for Zac Efron and Zombie

So there you have it, 26 letters and 52 videos. I’m extremely surprised on how many of the videos are music related; either a song or about an musician… if you can call Hannah Montana / Miley Cyrus a musician. Anywho, hope you liked it. Please share with your friends on Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Twitter etc.

NB. This list was made on the 5th of May 2009

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Tutorial – Let Your Readers SMS You

March 8th, 2009 Filed under: Web | Tags: sms, tutorial, web

This is how I made it possible for readers of my blog to text message / SMS my phone for free from my wordpress blog. It’s a bit of a hack going through twitter and twe2, but it works. If you wanted to you could just have it so that readers can send you a message on Twitter instead.

First you’ll need two twitter accounts. One that you usually use and one for your website. We are going to be using the Twitter API to send a direct message to your normal twitter account. Twitter doesn’t allow you to send a direct message to yourself, so you will need to have a second account for your site which we will use to send the message from.

Now if you are setting this up on a wordpress site you are going to have to install the Exec-PHP plugin. This plugin just lets you post php into a normal wordpress text widget or a wordpress post/page. We will be using a bit of PHP to send the message to Twitter.

Now that that is out of the way we can get down to business. You will need to post this code where you would like the “Send me a text message” form to be displayed. I put mine one a separate wordpress page. NB. If you are putting it onto a page or post in wordpress remember to enter it into the ‘HTML’ editor not the ‘Visual’ WYSIWYG editor. If you even click on the ‘Visual’ editor tab once the code has been entered it will change the code and make it useless, causing you to start again.

Here is the code:

<?php
if (isset($_POST['submit'])) {

$twitter_status = $_POST['twitter_stat'];

if (strlen($twitter_status) > 0) {

// Set username and password etc
$username = ‘enter_site_twitter_username‘;
$password = ‘enter_site_twitter_password‘;
$sendto = ‘enter_your_twitter_username ‘;
$direct = ‘d ‘;
$message = $direct . $sendto . $twitter_status;
// The twitter API address
$url = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml’;
// Alternative JSON version
// $url = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json’;
// Set up and execute the curl process
$curl_handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, “$url”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, “status=$message”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, “$username:$password”);
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);
// check for success or failure
if (empty($buffer)) {
echo ‘message’;
} else {
echo ‘Thanks for the message.’;
}

} else
echo “<p>Error: I won’t send blank messages!</p>”;
}
?>

<h2>Send me a message:</h2>

<p><strong>What’s so important?</strong></p>
<form action=”<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>” method=”post”>
<input name=”twitter_stat” type=”text” id=”twitter_stat” size=”40″ maxlength=”120″ />
<input type=”submit” name=”submit” id=”submit” value=”Send”/>
</form>

I have highlighted the text that you need to change red. We will walk through those changes now. enter_site_twitter_username will need to be changed to your sites twitter username (remember you have 2, one for your site and one for you).

enter_site_twitter_password will be changed to your sites twitter password. The password is needed because the code rest of the code uses it to log on to twitter and send a message. Don’t worry no one will be able to see the password.

enter_your_twitter_username will be changed to your real twitter username. This will be added to the start of the message your readers write so that it gets sent to your twitter account. Please remember to leave the empty space after your username. eg. ‘whataboutki ‘ = good       ‘whataboutki’ = bad

<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?> this should be able to be left just the way it is if you are putting the code into a wordpress text widget. If you are putting it into a wordpress post or page then this will have to be replaced with the url of the post or page eg. http://www.whataboutki.com/text-sms

Once you have made the changes you should have a form that looks like this one your site. If you test it out it should send the message you type as a direct message to your normal twitter account from your sites twitter account. Yeah!

Now you just need to get twitter to send that message to your phone. If you are in america then twitter can do this for you. Charges might apply. if you aren’t then you can set up a twe2 account. Twe2 will text your twitter direct messages and replies to your phone (most countries) free of charge. It uses another service Wadja to do this, so every message will have ‘> FREE SMS WWW.WADJA.COM‘ at the end.

Hope this helps some people out there. I know this stuff can be tricky and trust me I don’t really know what I’m doing either. Just playing around, it’s the best way to learn. Anywho if you know of a better way to do something I use in this tutorial or need something explained a bit better just leave a comment.

Also, I understand that this opens you up to the risk of spam. I hope to add a Captcha type thing to it at some stage.

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