Wayne D's Blog

You may have heard about the controversial Australian tampon ad, it's well worth the 40 seconds it's going to take you to watch.

If you read my blog with any regularity you will know that I have become a bit obsessed with Yahoo! Live. One thing noticed was that it was sometimes difficult to find the rooms of people I know in the pages of people who had their camera online. Yahoo has very helpfully allowed access to the live servers and the current broadcasting information through a defined API. After searching one night and finding out that the people I knew had congregated in a room with a private URL I decided to put together www.myyahoolive.com. This site allows users to keep a list of their favourite channels and tell very quickly who is online and who's room if active among their friends. I know a number of people have told me that they have browser bookmarks for the rooms they visit but that seems not be a sustainable way of doing things as the number of available channels grows,

I know that this site fills a hole in Yahoo Live functionality that I wanted, I hope that others find it useful too. I have grand plans on where I want the site development to go but I'm going to hold off until I find if other people find it useful too. Some of the things I have planned is a click to expand list of who is in a particular channel and an interface that lets people organize their favorite channels.

The easy part is done, the initial site development, now the hard part begins, getting the word out. Please spread the word to any Yahoo! Live user you know.

Every so often when I check my blog access logs I see a couple of hundred or more hit. A closer look inevitably shows repeated access to either the comment form or the email form on my blog. The evil spammers are trying to either generate email or referrer spam through my blog. What is irritating is that they never succeed but they inevitably keep on trying. I was thinking about using a capcha system to validate users before they post instead of the register and validate system that I currently use. I'm just afraid that the evil spammers will use their nefarious methods to get around this.

I forgot to add a my twitter URL on my last post, so follow me over to twitter at www.twitter.com/wdawe and follow me.

I'm off to work on my latest secret project, details to be revealed very soon.

I've written about Geekbrief before and when I watched todays episode about Twitter I thought it would be a great short video to share. Check it out especially if you are a Facebook status junkie.

his weekend I went camping with my son's Explorer troop. Saturday night was cold, at 5 a.m. I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep. Sunday night was worse, it was -21 C when we got up Monday morning and it was probably at least -25 C during the night. I had three sleeping bags and four layers on top, three below and when I woke up at 11 p.m. after two hours asleep I was miserably cold. I toyed with the idea of getting in the car and heading down the road to the small town nearby to see if the motel was still open but I soldiered on. It was so cold that when I put my hands outside of the sleeping bag they hurt. For some reason my body responds to the cold by wanting to pee which I had to do twice in that very cold night. At least after dashing into the night my toes were no longer ice blocks for a few minutes. It did not last, drafts seemed to slip into my sleeping bag everywhere. I am so over winter camping. If I never see the inside of a frost filled tent again I will not despair.