Hey everyone.

Sorry I haven’t updated much, been working as usual.

One of the things I’ve been working on is a website (www.housebbi.com)  for a friend of mine, Dave Bodycomb.
He’s an Architect and Builder, who is using his wealth of experience to help inspect homes before people buy them.
He creates a detailed analysis of the building, highlighting any weaknesses, or areas that are likely to require special attention. If anyone in Adelaide, South Australia is looking at purchasing a house, I highly suggest you contact him.

The website is House Buyers Building Inspections From a design point of view the site is on-purposely simple and efficient, but hopefully without being boring. Creating it was a good exercise for me, as I created it all by hand, using a lot of CSS for the look and layout, with bits of PHP for some dynamic parts, and to make updating the header, and footer easier.
The highlight for me was calling Dave up and making style changes as he was on the phone. I had WinSCP automatically updating any local file changes to the webserver (keep remote directory up to date), and was editing the CSS and HTML using SciTE. I found this was a great way to code, although you do need to be familiar with the languages.

Q: Why do I code by hand?
A: Because I’ve tried various editors and IDE’s and they seem to be more work, not less, and very few even know a:hover{ text-decoration: underline; } let alone advanced CSS and PHP.

Well, the short film I’ve been working on, School Yard Justice is coming along very nicely.

Just a few hours ago I got a copy of the current video edit from the director, Rodney Twelftree. Yay for external HDD’s.

While at his place we talked about the tweaks needed to the film, and also to the website, and music.
I’m currently rendering the footage out at the required settings so the amazing Muso, Ryan Kris, can tweak the music to the film.

So yes, at the current rate,  the Labour of love, and long time coming, short film, School Yard Justice will be premiered once Rodney goes for a trip overseas.

This is just a collection of April Fools jokes people found on the net.
Web based April Fools jokes :

• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/announcing-project-virgle.html – Google and Virgin setting up a base on Mars
• http://a.viary.com/blog/posts/dodo-web-based-time-machine — A web based app to age, and de-age people and images.
• http://www.thinkgeek.com/index.shtml – Some crazy inventions, like a USB pregnancy testing kit, Super pii pii borthers game, Labyrinth lock, Betamax to HD-DVD converter, the ZapCam – YouTube Tazer, and an awesome personal Soundtrack T-shirt.
• http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1784 – NineMSN acquires Whirlpool.net.au (Forum about Australian ISP’s).
• http://www.collegehumor.com/ – Links to what looks like a MySpace page with a post about the teenage girls father buying the site for her.
• http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gday/index.html – Be able to search the Internet that will be in 24 hours time.
• http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html – Gmail custom time, allowing you to send emails into the past.
• http://www.pizzahut.com/ – Pizza hut turning into Pasta Hut.
• http://tasvideos.org/ – automatic text reading application for the blind to better enjoy the site… a site devoted to watching people play video games really fast.
• http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/top-10-creation.html – Top 10 creationist discoveries of all time (such as T. rex ate coconuts, NASCAR is the official sport of the spiritually enlightened)
• http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/31/why-were-suing-facebook-for-25-million-in-statutory-damages/ – Tech Crunch is suing Facebok for $25mill.
• Some comics changed about like http://www.xkcd.com/ goes to questionable content. which goes to Dinosaur comics which directs back to xkcd.

Other things were You Tube Australia was Rick Rolling everyone, and so did LiveJournal.
Some people did things like setup a see through monitor, or use the good old BlueScreen saver.

Other suggestions for your cubical dwellers next year :

• Set someone’s system font to Wingdings, or some other unreadable font.
• If someone leaves their keys or swipe card behind, freeze them in a mug of water.
• Some video card drivers (such as the Intel ones) lets you display the computer screen upside down, and are hot keyed.
• On a mac, the little known keyboard shortcut ctrl+option+apple+8 inverts all the colours.

Personally I’d have liked to setup the Upside-down-Ternet.

These thumbs link to the 1280×1024 sized photos (my desktop size).

These are free for distribution, and you are allowed to manipulate the photos, however proper credit (attribution) must still be given to the author of the originals – Michael Kubler.

Please visit www.greyphoenix.biz for more information, or email me at contact@greyphoenix.biz

*Last image edited in Photoshop

I’d love at least a comment from anyone that likes these and uses one as their background.

The cat picked up this little guy, and I was tasked with trying to put him somewhere safe outside (not that there really is such a place).

OMG, yes!
Summer Glau, who played the kick ass River Tam in Firefly and Serenity is again kick ass, only this time in the Sarah Connor Chronicles.

I just saw the series premiere and it looks awesome.
http://www.terminatorfiles.com/news/2007/2007-02-09-b.htm