Watching that video, you can see the love and attention those guys put into what’s about to blessed upon us. You really feel like these guys are perfectionists and if it’s something they really want to play and they love, then it’s almost certain we’ll be feeling the same way.

I’m not going to write too much here as I’m planning a new blog on Halo and maybe even Bungie, but for now, if you haven’t seen it, watch the video now!

If watching that has wetted your appetite, then go and get Halo ODST and make sure you sign-up for the Halo Reach Multiplayer Beta on May 3rd! If it hasn’t, then you’re probably a poor sole the decided to get a Playstation 3 instead of an Xbox 360. Oh well…

Links

• Bungie
• Halo Reach
• Halo Combat Evolved
• Halo 2
• Halo 3
• Halo ODST
• Xbox 360

Look at those little fellows go. Anyone know what robots they are because they’re pretty awesome – in a geeky way.

I want to see them doing combinged moves next. Imagine that, robot doing pyramids. Would be so cool (if you’re into that kind of thing).

And for the record, Christmas is in Decemeber, so that’s when the decorations and parties should be too. Not October – or even September. It’s killing the Christmas spirit for everyone. That special time of year, we can all remember as kids as coming once a year and lasting about a month, now lasts 3, and gets more and more watered down every year.

My plea: Please stop. I want it to mean something to my kids, and not just be an exercise in emptying people’s wallets. That’s not what Christmas is about. Have a heart.

Before I talk about why I went with this theme, you need to understand that I’m not a designer, but I am a creative person. Ok, so that’s a little ambiguous so let me quantify that statement. I’m the kind of person that falls into the techie-creative genre where I can take something good, and either improve it myself, or work with a designer to really make it great – obviously making sure that the vision is actually able to be built.

Cue The Unstandard 1.2.1 theme by Derek Punsalan. I looked at his older 0.1 version a long time ago, but it was lacking a certain something. Maybe it was the mood I was in at the time? I don’t know. But that classic mix of Orange and black really got me going. And yet somehow, back when I originally looked at it, it just wasn’t right.

So what makes it right now? Well, to be honest, I think I’m a little more mature and experienced now – some would say grown up (thanks for that btw). But when I look at it, it somehow has a wonderfully modern-retro look to it. It really catches your eye and draws you into the site. I also think the use of images for each of the blogs gives more attention to each, I just need to keep the images relevant and fresh – something my passion for photography should support well.

But, as with everything, it’s not quite perfect for me. Derek is continually updating the theme, so any changes I think are of value to his wider audience I’ll be sharing with him. For starters, the use of images to lead into the blogs hinders the SEO for the site, so I’ve added in a div with the excerpt from each blog in it, and then made it hidden from your average user, but glowing like a Christmas tree for Google and the like to crawl.

As for the style, I like most of it, but the orange background for the Sherbert colour scheme? It was too much, so I went back to the original version’s white with orange highlights. I’ve also changed some of the padding in a few places – it wouldn’t be my site if I didn’t make changes would it?

What’s next? Well, the headings needs to be styled a little differently – again, maybe back to the original’s bolder feeling schemes. Some more tightening up of spacing – I used to do type setting, so I’m a little strange on that. And, well, if I’m feeling bold, and I’m honest, I’d maybe like to move it a little more towards the feel of some of the more popular schemes like Magazeen in some areas. Don’t ask me why, but if I can pull it off, I think there’ll be a new style added to the built in list.

And I’ll be continuing to work on my Gallery Plugin for Wordpress to make sure it fits in tightly with this theme, but will also work for the wider audience longer term.

In the meantime, if you’ve got any suggestions for the theme or the site, let me know. I always listen and will make sure it happens if I think it’s a good one.

So there you

• Each photo had its own page – great for SEO
• Each photo had its own URL – even better SEO
• Everything was sized automatically when it was uploaded
• You could comment on anything
• Everything was related through the Wordpress tags
• It handled itself well (I hate errors)

All in all, it was a pretty good system.

Fast forward to today and I’ve changed to a completely Wordpress based site. I love Wordpress. The way it handles content is unparalleled – other than by systems I’ve built in the past – and it has given me a lot of opportunities and it’s a platform I recommend to my clients at Amnesia Razorfish when they want a simple, open-source and great solution.

So, I started looking into developing a plug-in for Wordpress that could leverage my original gallery, or rather the data and images I still had. This posed an interesting challenge as all the plug-ins I’ve tried that handle galleries in the way I want to require me to create a page per gallery and manually enter a tag for the gallery I want in there. That’s messy and too time consuming.

Looking through numerous forums and help files, I managed to piece together a way to create a single page, paste a tag into that page, and then build all of my URLs out from that point. That means I have a friendly base URL that everything is added to using the format:

/[Base URL]/[Gallery URL]/[Image URL]

That gives me a great foundation to build on and add in pagination, additional image features and keep adding galleries and images without having to worry about creating new pages – I find that a little messy. My plug-in so far even rewrites the titles of the page and back links them (the page title is next on my list).

You can see it in action here:

http://www.gregory-brine.com/digital-photography-gallery/

I’ve also added a widget to the right-hand side that links through from anywhere. And, it evens adds images to blogs that are related to that gallery:

http://www.gregory-brine.com/2006/04/05/noosa-australia/

The admin side of things isn’t finished yet – that’s going to take a little more work – but in the meantime, I’ve got my old much loved and much missed galleries are back and on their old URLs.

Next on the list to be done:

• Link to Wordpress tags
• Add a lightbox for opening the image fully
• Add in commenting – going to try and use the Wordpress built in commenting
• Build the admin system – yeah… that’s a biggie

Let me know what you think and if you have any comments.

Links

• Wordpress
• Nomad Pete
• Amnesia Razorfish
• Digital Photography Gallery
• Noosa, Australia blog

At the last count, there was around 7,500 results in Google and 15,600 in Live Search. That’s pretty impressive for word we made up!

So, @delicategenius interviewed @likeomg, @eunmac and @gregory_brine to find out more about how and why it came into existence. You can watch it over at the Delicate Genius Blog: DG TV: VELOCIROFLCOPTERSAURUS. Enjoy.

Article Links

• @likeomg
• @eunmac
• @gregory_brine
• Delicate Genius Blog
• Amnesia Razorfish
• Velociroflcoptersaurus
• DG TV: VELOCIROFLCOPTERSAURUS
• Google
• Live Search

But of late, I’ve been struggling to get the inspiration and I’m not sure why. To defend myself on how slack I’ve been, I love writing, as you can probably tell by the way I’m waffling now. I always have enjoyed writing, and I also love helping people review things they’ve written to help them target their audience better. Be it for a client, internal procedures, technical explanations or even personal documents like CVs.

That’s just the way I am, and I enjoy it. So what happened?

I’m using Twitter a lot, and talking to people getting links, re-tweeting and sharing dialogues with people. Maybe that’s the problem. I also still have my large number of feeds attaches to my Newsgator account – I check that on my work machine, home machine and my iPhone. Maybe I have too many feeds and am overloading myself and can’t focus on things.

At Amnesia Razorfish, I’m a project manager, but have involved myself in a lot of other projects. This has seen me moving away from my technical role, where I was quite a pioneer in researching and documenting things for the various companines I work for.

In my personal life, I’ve not been travelling much of late, and I like to keep my more personal adventures to my close friends on Facebook - I’m sure a lot of people understand where I’m coming from with that.

So what’s happened? What’s gone wrong? Maybe I just don’t have time anymore. My trip to work is now a walk, so I’m missing out on that hour of travelling a day that used to let me watch numerous podcasts.

I just don’t know, and I feel like a part of me has gone.

But then on re-reading this blog, maybe I just need to start writing again… Just sit down with a computer, see what happened on the day and write. Maybe that’s what a good personal blog is all about.

What makes it worse is that the detox I’m on is quite strict, possibly overly strict: No meat, egg white wheat products, oranges (wrong PH), you get the idea. I can have fish every so often though. Mix that in with the variety of herbal pills you take with it – yes, the effects are true – and you get an interesting diet.

But I’ve made it, and I’m feeling better for it, I think. That might just be the removal of beer and coffee, but I’m sleeping better and I do feel a little better than I did – not that I ever felt bad.

So what do I miss? Well, I really do miss my morning cup of coffee, but I think after this, I’ll limit myself to just that morning coffee. And obviously beer, but again, that will be down to once or twice a week. And meat and eggs. That’s been the toughest as you can imagine, especially when you make scrambled eggs as good as mine!

The one downside is going to the pub with your friends and watching them getting drunk is no fun… hmm… Beer. Not helped when friends go “I admire your will power. Want a beer?” Thanks for that Dave. So cruel.

I will make it though. Only another week to go… No problem!

But this blog is to give a big shout to the guys at NCL Hosting! Transfering my site across, and moving the domain proved a little problematic due to my domain being near to expiry, and some communication trouble with the old hosts.

Their patience was exemplary, and now my site’s up and running faster than ever. If you’re looking for a new host, I recommend NCL Hosting!

It was first reported in the Amnesia Razorfish offices in Sydney, but word has it that it has started to migrate through channels such as Twitter and Google.

We will be do further studies into this mythical beast, and hope to be able to obtain sketches of it’s appearance over the Christmas period when heavy bouts of laughter are expected to draw it into the limelight.

Update: One has been seen in the wild, thanks to Iain Mcdonald for capturing this historic moment. Here it is: Velociroflcoptersaurus

So here goes… The usual rules for round the clock is pot the balls in order, striking the balls in order. Our drinking variation is this:

• Miss the ball your meant to hit, 1 finger of beer
• Foul – e.g. sink the wrong ball or the white – drink two fingers
• Pot the ball you’re going for, everyone else drinks a finger
• Do something stupid – this is discretionary one, but you’ll work out how to use it – drink one or two fingers

And that’s it. Simple eh? And it does the trick. One word of warning though, you’ll be refilling your glasses frequently! It was a tough afternoon in the bar.

For the record, we were trying out our new local, the Bat And Ball in Redfern.