Artwiculate

LOL, I managed to crack the top 20 in the Twitter game Artwiculate:

Each day they post a word to Twitter, and it’s up to contestants to use that word in a Tweet. Points are awarded based on the number of retweets and votes that your tweet receives, and the winner is the tweeter with the highest score at the end of the day.

I received the award for “tautology”, with the tweet: “I adjure the cacaphony of #artwiculate mavens, in my mellifluous voice, to consider my previous assertion that sempiturnal is a tautology“. (Adjure, cacaphony, maven, mellifluous and sempiturnal were the previous days’ words, so I was basically being a smartass.)

It’s a nice little combination of Social Media, vocabulary building and gaming. Check it out: http://www.artwiculate.com.

Unhappy little Vegemites

Testament to the power of television and advertising is how I’ve never seen the ad for Vegemite on television, yet I still know the theme song. The whole thing. I don’t even remember the Australian National anthem, Advance Australia Fair, as clearly as I do the Vegemite song. C’mon, sing it with me – you know the words:

We’re happy little Vegemites as bright as bright can be
We all enjoy our Vegemite for breakfast lunch and tea
Our mommy says we’re growing stronger every single week
Because we love our Vegemite
We all adore our Vegemite
It puts the rooooose in every cheek!
(Dum da-dum)

But there were loads of unhappy little Vegemites out there yesterday, as Kraft announced that the competition winner – and the name of the new Vegemite – would be Vegemite iSnack 2.0. No, I’m not kidding. There’s a hot debate out there right now about whether this is a marketing stroke of genius because it has made people talk about it, generating buzz (the Twitter hashtag #vegefail peaked at 7th place in the trending topics), or else the ultimate in Corporate Stupidity. The name fails on multiple levels: the use of the trendy “i-” prefix for a product completely unrelated to technology, the “2.0” version number and the notion of it being a snack when everybody knows it’s just a spread.

It sounds so wanky to say “I’ve tasted iSnack 2.0”, but I have, and it’s not too bad – if you liked Vegemite before chances are you won’t mind this. Just think of it as regular Vegemite with less salt (so it doesn’t shrivel up your mouth) and more fat (to make it much more spreadable). Nutritionally speaking though, the old Vegemite was probably better for you.

The product wasn’t exactly flying off the shelves, and it was discounted quite regularly – I picked up 2 jars for $5.

Have you tried the new Vegemite, and do you think the name is an epic fail, or clever marketing ploy?

It’s-a me, Charles Martinet!

Over the weekend Jenny and I had the privilege of meeting Charles Martinet – the man behind the voices of Mario, Luigi, and a whole host of others from the Super Mario video game franchise, who was visiting Australia (read: Melbourne and Sydney) as part of a Nintendo promotional tour. I won a competition from the Nintendo Web site to Meet the voice of Mario, but was initially confused though: since Martinet was making public appearances, I wasn’t exactly sure what I had actually won.

It turns out that me and 3 others at the Auburn store got to spend a few minutes with Charles in private, and not have to line up. He was a great guy in person, very down to earth and friendly, quite chatty and patient. He autographed stuff for us and answered a few questions. The funniest was when a guy asked whether he ever stands behind kids at demo booths and does the voices in the background. Charles laughed and said that the kids would probably say that he sounded all wrong anyway.

The first 50 people in line on the day received a gift bag of Mario merchandise from Nintendo and so did we (the prize winners), but ours also included a 9″ Mario figure and a lanyard instead of a pen. The other two items in the bag (same as the ones you buy from KMart) were a Mario cap and a series 2 – 3″ figurine. I got lucky with this – the 3″ figurine that I got (Daisy) was one of the two “rare” ones in the series.

The only thing I regret was not getting Charles to record me a ringtone in Mario’s voice. I had totally planned on asking him to do “Hey Caesar, its-a the telephone!” but as usual I couldn’t bring myself to impose on another human being, even though he absolutely wouldn’t have minded and even asked me whether I wanted anything else after he signed my copy of Super Mario Galaxy. Damn this geeky shyness! I really must learn to be more aggressive at going after what I want…

A couple of photos (more pictures over at Flickr):

The things we do for love

Here it is, boys and girls – a gun permit allowing me to legally own Masterpiece Megatron (MP-05) which arrived in today’s mail. You can now truthfully say that I’m certifiably something (what that something is depends largely on how you feel about geeks and collecting things). In order to get the permit, I had to:

• Be a member of a legally registered club, that being the Megatron Club Inc.
• Demonstrate why it is a necessary part of my collection
• Detail how I will store the item to prevent unauthorised access
• Submit a P638 Application for a Prohibited Weapon Permit, and provide certified copies of 100pts worth of ID

Fortunately, the fee is waived for collectors.

All this for a toy!?

Now all I have to do is to find one to buy when I’m in Hong Kong. I can also look forward to being stopped by customs as I re-enter the country after spending 8 tortuous hours on a plane…

A modern look and feel

Following on from yesterday’s post about the new logo, today, a bit of background about the template, and some behind-the-scenes stuff. If you have a blog, or are thinking of starting one, read on… I’ll share some important lessons that I learned, to help you to avoid making the same mistakes I did.

Lesson 1: get the right tool for the job

Whatever tool you feel comfortable with is probably the right one for you, so I wouldn’t say that this is a very important lesson, but it’s the first one because it enabled everything that follows. I used Blogger for yonks, ‘coz I thought I only needed something that would take my posts and turn them into a blog, and that’s what it did. Using my own design was possible but cumbersome, which made me put off the redesign for a long time.

When I started building GeekReads using WordPress though, it was like trying new food in a new country – I didn’t know what I was missing out on until I’d experienced it. The self-hosted version of WordPress, which is available as a 1-click install process from most hosting providers, allows you much greater levels of customisation in an interface that is extremely well polished and easy to use. It also has a feature to import posts and comments from Blogger, which made the decision to migrate a complete no-brainer.

For the record, I also had a play around with Drupal while I was trying to build a new site for my father-in-law’s guitar business. I admit, it’s a very powerful Web platform but you almost need a degree to be able to use it.

Lesson 2: pick a template that suits you

The “version 2” design, featuring the Crosses at Golgotha image, was launched not long after I moved from Adelaide to Sydney, having finally left home to make my own way in the world. The choice of image and the relatively dark palette of the theme may be a clue as to my state of mind at the time.

I like to think of myself as a much more mature person now, with a greater understanding of how the spiritual and intellectual parts of me are integrated, and I wanted that to show through in the visual aspect of the thoughts that I shared with you in this blog.

When I first thought of updating cyberseraphic, I envisaged mucking around with Photoshop and HTML like I’d done since way back when I first coded a Web site, but the technology moved on and I hadn’t; ever since CSS became standard many years ago, people stopped using HTML tables for layouts. Why didn’t I just use a stock template? Because I couldn’t find one that was “me” enough, and what is a blog of not an expression of one’s individuality.

In the end, I sorta got lucky. Smashing Magazine ran a competition on creating typography-based templates, and the results were offered free. The 3rd runner up, Experimental by Rodrigo Galindez, stuck out for me because of its clean design and simple structure. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a fully developed WordPress template yet, so I settled for its younger brother, Modern Clix.

The template still has a few niggles, namely in that it doesn’t support the default way in which WordPress handles images and captions, and has limited support for sidebar widgets, but overall I’m happy with it and very much look forward to the finished version of Experimental.

Lesson 3: free hosting sucks

Until recently, cyberseraphic was always hosted on various free servers: f2o, 000webhost, byethost, etc. of which the only one I’d have recommended would be f2o except they’re no longer around.

000webhost did a massive dodgy where they broke peoples’ sites under the guise of “migrating” from old servers to a new ones, a project which they claim to have told everybody about in an e-mail a year ago, but nobody can find any evidence of this. Some people lost a lot of work as a result, but luckily for me I was still using Blogger at the time, so I was able to simply republish my posts from there. Any attempt to fix the problem (including trying to delete my account) resulted in a recommendation to upgrade to their paid hosting services. It’s a really underhanded way of converting customers from free to paid accounts, and I wanted nothing more to do with them.

I moved to Byethost, who have a very slick operation, but the problem with them is that your Web site would sometimes get randomly redirected to another (spam) Web site. No thanks.

So why did I persist with free hosts when everybody knows there’s no free lunch? Because it enabled me to host my own domain (this is important in ways that I don’t really have the time or energy to explain in this post, but if interested leave a comment), which the free Web space from my ISP doesn’t let me do; and the amounts of storage and bandwidth provided by most hosting plans was overkill.

It was through the Whirlpool forums that I discovered the Cove value hosting plans – you can’t really argue with a couple of bucks a month! So now I have the reassurance of knowing that my data is routinely backed up (even more important now that I’m self-hosting with WordPress), and that the service is not likely to disappear unexpectedly tomorrow.

Wow. That was a long post. If you’re still here, thanks for sticking with me. Don’t worry, I’m not planning on doing too many more posts like this, ‘coz I don’t particularly want to turn cyberseraphic into one of those “meta” blogs that blog about blogging. But if you’ve got any questions about my redesign process, drop me a note in the comments.