This will be the first open BarCamp in New Zealand. It will be held around the end of the year (2007/8) on the 29th of December.

“Everyone is an expert at something. BarCamp allows creatives, technologists, scientists, programmers, and bloggers the chance to gather together and share new ideas. It’s about passion, creating community, and exploring new social media. The difference between a traditional conference, and an un-conference like BarCamp is that BarCamps allow people to interact with speakers throughout the presentations. At a traditional conference the best ideas originate in the hallways and corridors. BarCamp is all corridor” - Erica O’Grady

Erica and some other big names in the American (and world wide) web industry will be flying down to New Zealand to attend our first ever BarCamp. They will be able to share insight on previous BarCamps, what conferences in USA (and around the world) are like as well as what is new and fresh in the world of web design and development.

The event will be held at the talked about, school of the century, Botany Downs Secondary College which has not only won a horde of architectural design awards but is also toted as the most tech-advanced school in New Zealand.

http://upcoming.org/event/177755/

Go sign up at the Upcoming page today!

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Camping

Over the past four or five weeks I have been camping 4 times.

First I went to Mt. Manganui with my family. It took an entire weekend and meant I had to catch up on homework. Doh!

Then, since I was elected as Lead Student, I had to go camping with the Year Nines (the youngest students at high-school.) This took 4 days out of my week, meant I had to catch up on a lot of work (in class work and homework) but it was a lot of fun. Upon returning from this camp I was greeted with a bunch of tests - Grr.

My third camp was leadership camp which as you probably can tell is also because I was e;ected as a Lead Student. This camp was the best out of all four. It was with all my friends (we are all in the leadership realm at school - because we are really the only bunch of people who care) and it was very exciting! I loved this camp and wouldn’t think twice about another.

My last camp was with my family again, at Mt. Managanui, over the Easter weeekend. This wasn’t that fun, mainly because Zak was meant to come but a couple of days before we left he said that he couldn’t go anymore because he had to go to Rotorua with his mum. Ah well.

So, I’m all camped out. Well kinda, I was meant to go camping again today withy all my friends (similar to the leadership camp) but too many people ended up not being able to (or wanting to) at the last minute and organisation was just hell.

Hockey

Yes, hockey trials came and went. I attended them and unfortuneately almost half our seasoned players decided not to play again. I belive their is about 5 senior players left. That means I have a pretty good chance of getting into the team but it also means that my team will suck, compared to the senior teams we will play against.

O, this also showed me how unfit I was and that I need to get a fitness regime.

Driver’s Licence

Yes, I am finally getting my driver’s licence, after putting it off for almost a year and a half. I’m going next week (fingers crossed - I have yet to make a booking) but I am very excited and kind of afraid. Mixed feelings about this. Will tell more when more comes up.

A new website

That’s right I am finally doing it, coding a new website for this place. I have almost finished coding the blog part of it (just some Akismet integration and tagging to go) and then I will tackle the portfolio and lifestream parts. The design is done and a few people have seen it and given their opinions. I am pretty pleased with it.

I decided against doing it in Rails, the learning curve is too steep and the ease of developing in it (in my opinion) is severely over-hyped. I want the new website done relatively quickly so I have done it in PHP. I prefer PHP because I am almost seasoned in it now, only needing to browse for methods of doing things in it for obscure cases. I still hate reg-ex.

Anyway,InstantRailss is still on my machine and withencouragement I will learn Rails - maybe even Django too.

NCEATracker

I still have that random bug and updating the standards have not furthered at all - Zak has been on holiday. To be honest that random bug is not a priority fix for me right now - I’ve decided to make that a Beta feature, available for Firefox users but not IE. Why? Well we have no users yet (apart from ourselves and our friends) and unless we start getting people interested and using it I don’t want to spend time fixing an optional feature. (It’s just a quick way of adding a mark, the normal way works for all browsers so they aren’t losing any functionality.)

Zak’s job is to get the standards in (atleast for Level 1 and 2) and when that is done we’ll approach our school.

Twitter

As always you can follow me on twitter to get a ’round the clock idea of what I am up to

Tags: camping, hockey, driver's licence, new website, jeff croft, erica o'grady, php, rails, nceatracker, django, instantrails, twitter

• I was chosen again to be lead student (YAY.)
• I have been getting some work from the US of A that’s actually web design. I liked my illustration jobs but I really love web design- especially CSS, so I am stoaked about the webby work
• I’ve started working on the design for the next version of ludwignz.com - think Times New Roman, HOT! I’m going to try to make it more than just a blog and a portfolio.I want it to be more.
• I’ve been toying with the idea of a multi-blog. I have no idea what the techincal term for it is, but here’s the basic idea. I want to have a group of young people all blogging on the same blog. The idea is that with more bloggers, you’ll get regular content even though each particular author may not post regularly. I’m finding people who are interested right now before I doany real work.
• NCEATracker has hit a ditch. 2 things. 1. I’ve hit this Javascript bug in IE which ruins the “quick” path to adding a mark (no biggie at the moment) and 2. Zak has gotten bored with Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V to populate our standards database.
• I’m going on camp this year, with the year nines (the new young kids at our high school) - which is a a ‘perk’ of being lead student although I miss a lot of internals.

There’s been some other things like I finished a painting (of Meerkats) and designed a really cool new one, I’ve started using my iPod again and I’ve got a ‘maybe’ venue for BarCampAuckland.

The reason for this post is because I haven’t been twittering much lately, and I wanted to give a nice update, but I will get my act together so follow me on twitter to get a better idea on where I’m at and what I’m up to (I’m going to try and implement twitter better on the next version.)

Tags: lead student, web design, projects, times new roman, design, nceatracker, camp, painting, art, twitter

Sorry for venting.

O, I went to Fall Out Boy’s concert, wasn’t that great. Pete Wentz annoyed me by swearing the entire night and then starting a “God Damn” chant - completely obnoxious and offensive to Christians like myself.

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I moved host. And then I started the trasnfer of my domain to my new host which I thought would take a few hours.

The first time, this went on for about 8 days. A few times a day I would check whether the transfer had completed only to be greeted by a lovely message, “Transfer (Pending)”. Yay, it’s pending. That means so much. I didn’t get much status report at all. Maybe a message of the current stage and the percentage complete of the transfer (since it turns out there are multiple steps.) No, just ‘pending.’

Now this would be fine if I waited for a day (like most people) before it was finally trasnferred but see there was the ‘multiple steps.’ Now one of those steps is sending a confirmation email to the regsitrant of the domain who has to reply and confirm that yes they are the person who owns the domain and they do in fact want to transfer it.

Now, I only found out this bit of information after the domain transfer failed after the first 8 days. No, not from information in the email (or the webpage) that told me the domain transfer had failed but because I had to specifically ask the support team.

You are probably thinking, why didn’t you check your email for 8 days, and if you did why didn’t you answer this confirmation message. Well, I did check my email, several times a day infact, and the reason I didn’t answer the confirmation email is because I didn’t receive it. How come? Well I found out that I am not the registrant of the domain.

Hang on, I’m paying for ludwignz.com but it’s registered under my old hosts’ name with my old hosts’ contact details, including their email address (which happens to be their sales email address, odd.)

I contact my old host to get the registrant information changed but I can’t because if I do, I can’t transfer the domain for 60 days. Why? Apparently it says so in the Terms of Service. Well ok then.

It’s at this point that I explicitly tell my old host to check for a confirmation email from my new host which would be sent to the email they had filed as the registrant email for my domain. They agree.

I restart the process and it’s been 5 days now. My old host claims they haven’t received an email yet, and my new hosts claim they can’t tell me when it has been sent. It’s fast approaching the time where I have to pay for the domain again and I’m not paying the old host for a years use of the domain only to have the domain transferred 3 days later and then have to pay my new hosts for another years use (the same year.)

So, I’m having problems with my hosts and transferring domains. It’s still not sorted out yet, but the reason that you see my site again is because I realised this could go on forever and I may as well get my old host to change the DNS to point to my new host (because I can’t control that myself at my old host.)

Lesson to be learnt. Buy your domains from an independent provider like GoDaddy.

Sorry for the rant.

Tags: domain, host, frustration, problem, domain transfer

First I had Maths. I felt SO stupid when I walked out the class because I struck a blank at almost half the questions we were given as revision. Plus, when I got asked to answer a question, it was the one that I looked at and feared most. I got it wrong because I made silly mistakes. Anyway, Mr. Lee is good. And so is the class, nice and quiet.

Next I went to Economics. It was OK. Mr. Sharma is also a good teacher. I don’t really have much to say about Economics yet. Nothing interesting happened.

After first break I went to Graphics where we got the traditional Graphics intro. I was given it by Mr. Achary -like ladt year - although I hope, unlike last year, we stay in his class and don’t get moved. In Graphics I misunderstood a sheet and started drawing the object as a whole instead of just copying the different views freehand. I had to start again. Woops.

Physics came next with Mr. Hart. Our class is cramped. Seriously, it amazed me how full it is compared to the other classes. Instead of 10-20 people we have over 30! Physics was the most chosen option in Year 12. WOW. The class being so full I didn’t get to sit with Rebecca, Zak and Lisa because we were too slow finding seats. Instead I sat with Lisa while Zak and Rebecca were spread out around the class in random spots between other groups.

Just before Graphics we had whanau assembly. We got told that if we wanted to become a Lead Student we had to give our application letter in by Monday. I really want to be a Lead Student. So I spent the entire afternoon on my letter. Stressing about it, changing minute details - trying to make it perfect. I’m still not happy with it but I’ve had some people read it and they say it’s good. I think I should leave it before I ruin it.

After lunch we went to the PAC. Here, Mr. Leach told us how our free periods would work. Every second Thursday we would go to Berkeley Cinemas to watch a movie. The rest of the time, we could go home during our free period. I’m lucky as both my free periods are at the end of the day. (The other is on Monday.)

That was my first day at school as a senior.

Tags: zak, rebecca, novia, school, year 12

It was meant to post

So I am blogging from Google Talk, thanks to this new service called imified (thanks to Erica for the headsup.) I am doubting that this can be used to type long blog entries but for quick updates this would be good

Blogging in Wordpress is not the limit. There is also the ability to edit Basecamp, Backpack, 30Boxes, Blogger, Google Calender, Typepad and Movable Type. As well as imified services such as notes,to-dos and reminders.

O and this other service called, Remember the Milk….?

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I need to get some web work. Someone please give me something to design and build.

Please excuse my venting, but I am bored.

Tags: bored

I was mostly excited about virb because it was like Gmail used to be at the start. Exclusive. You needed to be invited to get in. And I badly wanted to get in. Really bad. I was jitterry when I saw the GTalk message pop-up saying I received an invite.

I quickly accepted it, then sent Erica and Zak an invite.

Customising

Editing your look can be simple. Or easy.

Either you use a ’styler’ to select colors (from a color range ,similar to that in Photoshop), font families and font sizes for various elements. Or, you could go dive into the HTML and CSS of the page immediately under the advanced tab.

I felt kinda bad because at first I only edited my profile using the basic method by picking colours and default font families/sizes. Then I realised that the basic option was just a tool, to do most of the work for me.

What I loved, was the basic layout customisation. It’s a drag and drop of all the modules. You can drag them around to the change the order of modules in each column, and even to swap columns. Unfortuneately for now, you can only use one layout with the basic layout customisation tool, and that’s a two-column layout (wide on left|thin on right). This didn’t matter too much for me because it’s a good layout, and if you wanted to change this you could always delve into the advanced CSS and HTML.

I see expansion in terms of “layout” plugins in this section. The option to browse maybe a gallery of “layout”or upload a “layout” file yourself.

When I delved into the CSS and HTML I only had to change a few minor things, such as the H1 font, the position of some specific elements and the size of the ‘Group’ and ‘Friend’ images.

To preview your layout you click a “Preview” button which launches a new window/tab, depending on your default browser setting. In this new window is your page display with the HTML and CSS in the advanced customisation tool in the previous window. This isn’t a live preview yet, however there is a blue bar on the top of the preview reminding you it is a preview, as well as a “Refresh” button that refreshes the HTML and CSS used to render the preview.

Adding and Organising Photos

This is probably the first ’social-networking service’ or even ‘photo site’ (including flickr) that I would upload photos to regularly. Why? Because they make it simple, fun and pretty.

I can easily upload the photo, or many photos. Crop it (if I’m planning on using it for a display picture). Tag it (it even remembers previous tags I’ve used and suggests them as I type). And add a title and description.

I can add these photos to photo album by dragging them into the album.I can re-order the photos in the album by dragging them around. I can change the order of the photo albums by dragging it around. I can drag photos between albums. I can drag stuff, fromplaces to places. And it makes sense. It’s such an easy, simple and natural way of organising photos.

Friends

When you view someone’s profile you can click “Add as Friend” and write a personal message to go along with the request. Pretty standard. In fact, Friends work pretty much the same way (as far as I can tell) as they do in most other social networking sites - apart from the following:

• You can give each friend a nickname - that only you see.
• You tag friends with relationship information.

Apart from that you can make the friend not show up in your friends module on your profile, turn off announcements from that friend or remove them from the activity logs on your home page showing you what you’re friends have been doing(on virb.com ofcourse.)

Groups

You can join Groups. Don’t yet see the benefit but I’ve joined two so far; BarCampers and Twitterers.

Other stuff

Since virb.com is media orientated. You can upload your own music (your own, not music you own) and videos. And you can blog.

To have music (other than your own), for example from a band,in your music playlist - you need to go to their band page and select “Add” from their Music Player to add that song, to your playlist.

What else they can do…

I’d like to see three things from virb.

1. They stay invite-only. This keeps the quality level high.
2. They give me the option to add my blog feed (RSS) and then add the blog posts from this site, to the blogs module - instead of having to double post everything.
3. They integrate ‘management’ into the profile view. When you view your profile and you see a photo description with a spelling mistake in it, you can’t click “Edit Photo” right there. You have to go to your “Home”, then to “Photos”, find the photo you want and then click to edit it.

Conclusion

Virb beats myspace. Hands down. Why? It’s simple, intuitive and fun to use. + it looks damn good.

Folks over at Unborn Media, if you want me to remove or unpublish this review until you go public (hopefully staying invite-only), then please contact me and I’ll do so ASAP.

Tags: virb, myspace

I got my timetable and saw I got all the options I chose last year, yay.

• Graphics, Mr. Achary (YAY)
• Economics, Mr. Sharma (New teacher, don’t know anything about him.)
• Physics, Mr. Hart (Woot! Awesomest teacher.)
• Chemistry, Ms. Weir (No idea about her.)
• Maths, Mr. Lee (reminds me of Hiro from Heroes.)
• English, Mrs.Rook (I don’t think that’s the right name.)

I have no classes with Novia, Nooo! But I do have some with Rebecca, and almost all of them with Zak.

Good start.

O, If anyone has a Virb.com invite, please pass one to me

Tags: school, ncea 2, novia, zak, rebecca, virb