Now you can find me at the brand spanking new domain of www.flat3d.org!!!  I am fully hosted and domained up…  So there you go!  Be sure to update your feeds, your favourites and your links… 

As the site has actually moved, this won’t be updated any longer, after a little while I’ll put up a holding redirect page, and then eventually it’ll probably just die out…
The flat3d.co.nr links will point to the flat3d.org, but if you are reading this post then someone, somewhere is linking directly to the f2s url…

Nothing else much has changed I’m afraid!  It’s still the same old nonsense and gibberish!  Just with a shorter, more permenant address.  Marvellous!

So get on over to www.flat3d.org and get yourself all sorted out!

At the moment it is on the free hosting that comes with my brother’s broadband connection (a throwback to being in Antrim!). I had hoped I could move it to Biglobe’s space but it doesn’t support php or DBs unfortunately.
I can buy a package from F2S for £25/year and flat3d.net for £12/year (or flat3d.co.uk for £7.50/year, but that doesn’t seem to be right when I am in Japan!)

The space is pretty minimal (200mb w/10mb database) but it is the same as I am working with now…
Can anyone suggest a decent host (not too pricey and supporting php/providing db)?

answers on a postcard… or just comment below…

Sapporo Snow Festival 2009

You can see some pretty awesome snow sculptures at the festival!  I got to go twice, once during the daytime on Saturday, then again on Tuesday evening with Alex, but a mix up in meeting and communications meant I didn’t meet Alex in the end, but still got to see a few of the sculptures all lit up…  The ice ones look much better by night!

Last Wednesday, a Public Holiday here in Japan, a Singaporean student at the language centre (Wan Jee) arranged for us to go to a Singaporean buffet-banquet at a hotel in Otaru.  It was delicious and we all ate far too much!  I had to leave slightly earlier than the others to prepare to give a speech on Friday morning.  The others went to the Otaru candle light festival in the evening.  My speech went well on Friday, it was all about electrocuting myself when I was little.  We have to do speeches each time we finish a section of the course in front of all of the students and teachers at the centre!

Then just the other day my internet began working!  The NTT (Japanese equivalent of BT) came and put in the line a couple of weeks ago, but it took Biglobe (my provider) a little longer to get it up and running.  The line is an optic fibre link to the exchange which promises a maximum ability of 100Mbps, but in reality it is giving 12-15Mbps downstream and almost as much upstream at the moment…  Which isn’t the 100Mbps, but still isn’t bad for a consistent connection speed.

The final bit of news is I am on Twitter!  If you are on twitter you can follow me at flat3d, I’d love to follow you too…  I’m building up my links (it’s all about the links…)
For those who aren’t or don’t know what it is, it is a bit like facebook’s status updates, but made viable.  In reality it seems to be a bit more like one huge chatroom, with a whole lot of conversations going on at once, the nice thing is it sort of tunes in your friends and tunes out everyone else, so you can follow conversations.  It’s also possible to use it to simply let people know what you are upto, which might sound pretty dull or dim, but I like the idea that I can communicate daily life to folk and friends at home.

The big surprise for me is that it is actually pretty big in Japan.  It seems to be filling (bridging?) a gap between the all out geekiness of IRC (internet chat) and the more mainstream social users of Mixi (sort of Japan’s answer to myspace or facebook…)  At the moment I am much to illiterate to make much use of it in Japanese, but as I learn more hopefully it will be a valuable resource in learning about the tech world/culture in Japan and even help me with studying the language!

I will sometime link it into the site here, a twitter updates jobby or something, but I am not sure the best way to do it yet, or even if it is actually worthwhile…  Some more thought required I guess…

So welcome to the new stylee and enjoy your stay, may I particularly recommend the amusing Wired article on lego photographs in the Interesting News section, accompanied by a browse through the links to its right.

If you are reading this on a syndicated site (Facebook or OMF Social) you’ll just have to follow the relevant link to the real blog to see what the craic is!

Hurrah!

I have plunked for a flickr photo display on the right there as Picasa was just a bit too annoying to get to work quite right with the sidebar.. I want it to be like a kind of photo-blog, with the latest photo being most prominent and the previous few as thumbnails beside… Picasa wanted to start at the beginning each time!  Maybe when I have more time I will write a little bit of php to do the work with picasa..  But for now I have downloaded picasa2flickr and am just sticking them up there instead.  It is actually pretty well suited for this purpose as the limitations are upload bandwidth based, whereas picasa’s are storage based…  I will continue to use picasa to share albums of photos though, but they will get posts of their own I think!

I plan to use the photo slideshow as a mini-photo blog, when I take a new pic or something and want to stick it up I can, it integrates with Picasa (http://picasa.google.com) so it’s all nice n easy!
I am also going to contact Tony at OMF about integrating with the OMF website…  I think I will need to make a few adjustments to allow that to work correctly…

Anyways, feel free to comment and let me know what you think!