This year however, I’m going to do it. This will be the first time I would have grown out some facial hair since I was… hmm would be since I was 14 now (when there wasn’t enough to shave but enough to be noticeable). Movember 2008 will have the money go towards the Cancer Society to help research prostate cancer, and the Mental Health Foundation for their Out of the Blue campaign.

So this is where you come in. While I’ll be growing the Mo, you guys can donate to it in two ways:

1. You can go to my MoSpace to see how I am going and donate via credit card.
2. You can write a cheque out to “Movember Donations Account”, referencing my registration number 1762121 and post it to,
   Movember
   PO Box 12 708
   Wellington 6144

If you are growing a Mo yourself, let me know and I’ll sponsor you back, MoBro to MoBro.

If you are growing a Mo, but haven’t registered, you still can at the official Movember website.

So the photo is my clean shaven self. Stay tuned for the results.

• Sponsor now!

Yeah, there is nothing special about it yet. It’s showing tweets. Woo. All in good time though…

I do need a good name for it first.

I have more fun tapping – it doesn’t require me to push down, and also doesn’t require me to move my hand. You could call it lazy, but I call it genius. Yet, even though we’ve had this “tap to click” motion for some time in Windows/Linux land, the Macbooks took their sweet time. I don’t remember when they started having the tap, but I do remember for a long time trying to use a Macbook without the feature. (I’ve had too many people point out my ill-informed lies.)

Once Apple did have the tap, they took it one further and added the two-finger tap. Oh man, now I don’t even have to move my hand when I want to do a right-click! I can just tap the pad using two fingers.

But “took it one further” insinuates they took a small step, but no, they took a leap and allowed you scroll through things just by swiping those two fingers across the pad. No longer do you have hotzones that you have to swipe your finger in, now you have the whole track pad.

I just had a play with the new Macbooks, the ones that have no button. You can still click for those moments when your mind flips, and it works very well (as if the button was there). You can even do a right-click by setting a hotzone. But, why do that when you have the two-finger tap? Then you have the two-finger scroll. The new Macbooks added the three-finger navigation (it goes back when you swipe your three fingers to the left, forward when you swipe to the right). Then there are four finger swipes. I’ll admit, these are a bit of a stretch. You swipe up with your four fingers to show the desktop (it was like swiping away all my windows). You swipe down to show all the windows (it was like bringing them in). It all worked, magically. The application switch though was awful. You swiped with your four fingers left or right to bring up the Alt-Tab switch. It just wasn’t as magical as the Expose switch.

I’m quite excited in getting one of these. People may think I’ve gone crazy (I was once an Apple hater), but these things look nice and decently spec’d. I might manage to get one before the year is out, if not early next year. The play also took away my fears of the shiny screen (it isn’t as shiny as it is made out to be), which is good.

Spore
Was fun until I realised that the games from Creature to Civilisation phase are way too simple and I was doing the same thing, making friends or enemies via pretty similar means. The Limited Edition guide book put it as not wanting to make the game too complex. I think they could’ve easily pushed the envelope, got a bit more gameplay out of the thing, and players still getting it. Maybe they think that Sims players are all idiots? I don’t know. I played it constantly over the weekend it was released, and was disappointed by the Space phase with its crazily high prices for anything that was remotely awesome. Haven’t played since. Well, I loaded it up and tried to patch it, but the patch downloaded so slowly that I forgot about it and turned the computer off. Why do you force me to only patch through the game Maxis (the EA Downloader thing does not work).

WipEout HD
This thing is awesome. Super-slick graphics, silky smooth frame rates so you never miss a beat. Pretty much everything you can expect out of a futuristic anti-grav racer. And boy is it challenging. One thing I’m finding a bit disappointing is that online doesn’t seem to have many AUS games. Ah well, it is otherwise a pretty thrilling game.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

Finally went out and bought this game. It’s fun and slightly challenging. I’m impressed by the number of headshots I’m getting considering there is no auto-aim. Oh and the graphics are the best I’ve seen. And it’s a year old. It’s pretty crazy how it looks like a pre-rendered movie, but it isn’t. Not quite finished yet though.

The next game I’m really looking forward to is LittleBigPlanet. Apparently this one is definitely living up to the hype based on beta tester feedback. Of note, Fable II is also being released at the same time. Two epic games, both exclusive to one platform (LittleBigPlanet is PS3 exclusive, Fable II being Xbox 360 exclusive) and, here’s the kicker, Media Molecule was founded by ex-Lionhead devs.

The last new blog refresh was way back in November 2006 and has since taken a life of its own really. At the start of this year I was just trying to come up with something brand new. In the end I decided against it and just give the current theme a major refresh. And here it is…

This theme was actually all about lightening the load, as that is what all my previous version attempted to do. Javascripts and Styles were sent to their own file if possible, and the image load has been greatly reduced. There are small nicities about, for example, try go to a page that doesn’t fit the screen height (a tweet for example), and click on that search link to the right.

Also, the image borders are done dynamically, and are all thanks to this technique from The Shape of the Days. Thanks to the little bit of demo code, I was able to adapt it to apply to images as well as the videos (yes, the videos are now a bit more obvious).

The comment sections have had a major overhaul in a back to the basics way, and now include your Gravatar.

Under the hood, I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.6.1.

Let me know of problems.

It is another back-to-the-basics web browser, it provides nothing revolutionary to the layman user, but the insides is a bit of an evolution for your basic web browser. In an essence, Chrome looks at the web as a powerful platform rather than a series of pages. You could be forgiven for completely missing this swing, as it has happened all rather quickly. However the moment Google’s email product Gmail hit the market, we knew the web was going to start turning into something special.

It has gotta be named Chrome for a reason.

Google Chrome is just a web browser, but one that has been completely optimised so the web apps run as if they were on your desktop. The user interface is also optimised – the home page contains your most visited websites, and you have the most minimal toolbars I’ve seen in a browser. It contains back, forward, refresh, an address bar, and two buttons that pop open menus. The tabs are at the very top of the browser window, a place that has always made the most sense to me.

It loads in a snap, the pages wait for no one to draw. Whilst Firefox has a draw delay, even removing this still did not match the performance of Chrome. Some say that Chrome runs slower, but after running one of the selector tests, it wiped the floor with Firefox 3. Stuff just runs fast.

Chrome’s memory management is also a plus, with the task manager loaded, opening Gmail and then closing it again, I was able to regain all the memory Gmail took, it was as if I never opened it.

I think this is a huge kick for web browser makers to get their act into gear and start thinking the same way. Microsoft is already coming up with tab sandboxing for Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla are on their way into making Tamarin work with Javascript 2 (it’s Mozilla’s Javascript Virtual Machine, and it runs code almost as fast as native programs) (Mozilla also have Prism, which I see Chrome takes a page from). I have a feeling that this is Google pulling the best stuff that is incoming and forcing it onto us right now, and boy do we need it!

I have my thoughts about Firefox with this though. Mozilla has no excuses now for its rather sluggish performance and memory guzzling ways. We may see some major changes in this arena with Gecko 2, which will be the base for Firefox 4, but we have over a year before then. This is also true for Internet Explorer, but I’m not in a mood to care about that web browser just yet (although, I do like what they’ve done with the auto-complete).