Monthly Archives: April 2004

Stuff and Introducing Operation “Spread Da Love”

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Its been a while since I posted some new stuff.

Long weekend came and went, nice start to the weekend with Nathan’s b-day gathering then Dave Gormans Googlewhack Adventure on Saturday.

Dave Gorman was great, his tale is one of the most clever and intriguing ones I have ever heard (check out his site for further details on this extraordinary mans adventure). After the show he hung around so me and Nat picked up a copy of his book and he gladly signed them :) Overall great night!

Another long weekend is coming up and we get to go see Ross Noble (should be absolutely fantastic!)

And in other news I am proud to introduce the latest upgrade to houmam.com, appropriately named Operation “Spread Da Love” (its appropriate because it just is…OK) so far Alex has contributed 4 fantastic images of my mug in funky places (including an ass), god bless that man ;) Might get him to send a high quality image of the logo and see who can “Spread Da Love” in the most imaginative fashion.

Keep Da Love A Spreadin’

Software that makes you go mmmmm

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You know there are some days where you just find that everything you ever wanted to program has already been done by someone else. This is to be expected considering how many programmers there are in the world.

However there are certain developers around the world that take that step further and share their work with everyone else. Most people who know me know I am pretty big on open source and gnu linux (I can see Gary shaking his head in disgust).

Although my current line of work involves VB.NET programming there are still people out there making some damn good open source/free controls that I find myself using every day.

I thought I would give them a heads up and a tip of the hat on a job well done.

NetSpell A free open source control that does spell checking within any .Net Application (I have no idea where I would be without this control especially when it comes to the ESP)

Tim Dawsons .Net Controls quite possibly one of the best set of controls I have used and it sure makes your apps look pretty ;)

Today I came across a set of extensions called The Genghis Project, all I can say is wow what a great package. I spent about a week trying to achieve the same effect of most of these extensions and mine only half worked! You have to wonder why MS just doesn’t add these control features to windows forms.

Recently Aaron has been tinkering with Lucene for various reasons and I have to say this puppy is great. The more time I spend reading up on it and seeing it in action the more I want to get my hands dirty in it.

Anyways enough computer talk, Tivo is taping CSI for me and its time that I catch up on the 15 minutes I’ve just missed :)

Updates Galore

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Well after the great battle of the garage door and the electric garage opener thing, I decided to sit down and update some of the stuff on my site.

The gallery has now been updated to Gallery v1.4.3-RC2 and its dependencies have been updated too, I don’t really like the black style for gallery but hell it will do for now (updated the blog theme to match it but There is still more work to be done)

All in all a pretty productive half hour :)

Ah and for all the people who have asked about my evaluation, it went very well and you will all be happy to know that I will be staying on as a full time software developer at Dark Blue Sea (it was not as short lived as I expected, hurrah!)

I’m the lead singer of my band, I get all the girl’s to take off their underpants……MY SALSA

Happy Easter & The Trip To Fraser Island

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Hello All,

Its been a while :)

Happy Easter to everyone, I’m sitting back on the 3rd day of my 4 day long weekend. So much time I don’t know what to do with myself.

Its been a good holiday so far lots of rest and fun.

The confectionery warehouse was open 24 hours during the holiday period so me and Haesel went through at 11pm (I was worried about being surrounded by all sorts of shady characters but it was pretty busy with all sorts of candy obsessed characters, some with teeth, many without). I don’t know what it is but the second I walk into a house of candy or a place with large quantities of sweets I go off sweets and I couldn’t decide on what I wanted. I wound up with a bag of dark chocolate covered almonds (yum yum)

We went to Fraser Island yesterday (we being me, Rod, Alonso, Andrew and Tim. I should have some photos posted up by next week), it was an early start to the day (3AM start to the day) so we could get on the first barge through to the island and spend as much time as possible there.

I have to say Rods van/love mobile was the best way to get there and back, it is truly the holiday tranporter of choice in my books. Sure we weren’t able to hit the sand as hard as when he had the Holden but it was travelling in comfort and style.

We saw allot more than when I was there last (and allot more dingoes), we swam in a creek, a lake
and the ocean which is a lot more swimming in things I usually get up to. As usual the place was just fantastic, I am not a camping person at all but if there was an initiative to go camping on the island I would seriously consider it (consider being the key word here :) )

I am now off to fix the garage…..a great way to start the day!