Feb 09

Wow.

One year has passed since the introduction of freshbytes.

What a year it’s been: an absolutely huge learning curve for me, but I’ve loved every moment of it. The Web is a huge place, and I’ve just dipped my toes into it.

We’ve had our highs. We’ve had our lows (it’s all quiet on the forum front – more on that later). Most of all, though – it’s you, the readers that make this place what it is.

This isn’t just some place to come and read words on a webpage – hopefully, it’s a place where you’ll find moral guidance, some words of wisdom (speaking completely from experience counts as wisdom, no?), laughs, as well as food for thought. Hopefully, you’ve experienced all four from here this past year, but if you haven’t, drop me a line telling me what you think, and what could be improved, and I’ll endeavour to try and encompass your needs.

That goes for pretty much anything, by the way… If you think there should be more games, shoot me a line, or comment on the miscpage.

Speaking of games, some of you have noticed the lack of games on freshbytes. Previously, I would have said something like: “Never fear, the games are still there, you just need to look in the right places!”, but being far wiser than I was a year ago, I now realise that not all of you are geeks and look in the source code for links to obscure pages. No really – I’m kidding. There really is no secret – if you clicked on a particular paragraph of the post where I mentioned that the games where taking a leave of absence, then you would have got some funky pop-up saying “You step in the stream, but the water has moved on. The page you are looking for cannot be found”, or something to that effect.

I’ll stop blabbling now, and just give you the link to the games page: here. Oh, and it’s also at misc.freshbytes.com.au – so remember either one, because they both go to the same place.

Well, I hope you’re loving the new look freshbytes. Unless I find something horribly wrong with this theme, or I just don’t like it, it’ll probably stay this way for a while – and by that, I mean at least a month. If you think the new theme is cool, try dragging the sidebar widgets around. They move! Insane! The only thing they don’t do is drag from one sidebar to another – so you can’t move the Wall from the right to the left, for example. Yeah, I know. Some stuff is broken, or looks horrible. I’ll have to fix these over the coming days – mmm, more fun. /sarcasm.

Now even though I use a Mac, I’m not a designer person. While I can write CSS, I could never do as good a job as the people over at Blog-Oh-Blog! (for Limau Orange, the previous theme) have, or even the people at MangoOrange, for the current i3Theme. There are a whole host of awesome three-column themes that I’m currently experimenting with as well, so if you visit freshbytes and it the theme has changed or something has broken, don’t worry. I’m just messing about, which will happen late at night because apparently, that’s the best time to get things done!!

Right, so that’s about it, then.

Comments below.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 04

I’m sorry about the delay in posts, once again you can blame Chris. Oh well, moving on…

If you missed the last post, head here to read it, or click the previous post button down after this post.

I’m fully aware that the iPhone 3G is a gadget in massively high demand, but it’s sometimes hard for Apple as a company to predict how much stock they’ll need for a particular product. Sure, the iPhone 3G has been described as “the second coming” or “the be-all and end-all”, but does it really come as surprise that the iPhone 3G is one of the most highly-anticipated smartphones to come out on the market, possibly being the best thing, EVER?!

Well, Apple apparently underestimated how popular the iPhone actually was.

ArsTechnica says:

There was a hilarious explanation given regarding shortages of the iPhone 3G. While Apple is “confident” in the ability create supply, it apparently is “difficult to predict demand.” Nonetheless, Apple is preparing a roll out in 20 more countries on August 22nd, and will be selling the iPhone 3G in more than 70 countries by year’s end.

Hilarious, indeed. How could Apple have mis-underestimated the popular iPhone 3G? Didn’t they go to all the trouble to create massive, massive speculation, “leaked” spy shots of the new model, awesome new features such as 3G, GPS, new design, the iPhone 2.0 software, and so many other cool features – it’s laughable that Apple couldn’t anticipate this. And they said Apple had “genii”….

Anyways, the weekend was pretty mad, if you haven’t already read my post at my other website, then you should go and read it now. I went to two 18ths, but three people had birthday parties – congrats to Felicity, Paul, and Ashley. I don’t know how much you drank, but I actually used my bottle-opening belt to open a bottle. I felt really tough after that, like I had just fulfilled another chapter in the Benny Ling saga. Truth be told, I have absolutely no idea what I was thinking when I bought that belt – it was a good four years or so ago though, so it’s not like it’s a new belt, by any means. Aidan just wanted something to open his Corona with, and I suddenly realised that my belt had a bottle opener. Handy.

Radi8tion07, “NagFest”, was a massive hit. Sure, Black team didn’t win – Adam wasn’t there, so maybe that was why – but we had loads of fun, and maybe even learnt something? I for one didn’t know that a horse was called a Nag. Sure, whatever. Since we’re talking about horses, I’m going to go ahead and wish them a happy horseday or whatever, because August 1 is the official horse day. No horsing-around, thanks!

The radi8 winter camp is coming up soon. It’s a winter camp, so it means lots of Skiing at Mount Field. It’s from September 18-19, and it costs $40/person. I’m not totally sure if I’m going or not – sure, it sounds like fun, but not really if you don’t have any friends that are going – and places are limited to 25, so hurry up and book!

Today’s parting video is brought to you from Paul’s bday party – video courtesy of Emily’s phone camera. Apologies in advance for the utter rubbish quality, my phone didn’t do so well either, and the iPhone, well, it can’t do video at all! :(

This firework was as big as your thigh, but about half as long, and it was called the “Underwater Fury”. It wasn’t actually underwater – and it was also far cooler if you were actually there – but you went to Flicks’ instead, didnt you?

Enjoy, comments below.


written by Benny Ling \\ tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,