So I’m staying up late (yes, past midnight on a Friday, what a rager!) to watch the Americans smash a rocket into the moon. I’ll expand on this post later. I expect this to be one of those things that is massively hyped up only to end up being a huge let down – still can’t help but watch it though.
UPDATE: Yes, it was a huge disappointment. People around the world had their eyes glued to NASA TV, anticipation building as mission control were counting down – “1 minute to centaur impact!” – hoping for at least some kind of visible plume. What we got was this:
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- Before
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- During
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- After
Yeap, a bit fat lot of nothing.
So in light of this, below are my picks for the best explosions of all time.
Best TV explosion
Mythbusters
The team on the Discovery Channel show Mythbusters relish in blowing stuff up, and they are damn good at it. In episode 117 they tested various methods that could supposedly lead to homemade diamonds. Obviously they all failed (otherwise we’d all be doing it!) so they resorted to using 5,000 pounds (2,300 kg) of explosives to see if an explosion of this magnitude would instantly convert carbon into nice shiny diamonds. It did work, albeit creating only “industrial grade” diamonds. Sorry to say guys, but even if 5000 pounds of explosives could create a top quality stone, it’s still going to be cheaper to buy her that huge diamond engagement ring from the jewellery store.
Watch the videos here: Mythbusters \”Homemade diamonds\” explosion
Best natural explosion
Tunguska event
Take the above explosion, multiply it by a million and you have the magnitude of the impact of the Tunguska event. There are several different hypotheses as to what exactly caused this event, but the most widely held belief is that it was caused by a large meteoroid or comet entering the Earth’s atmosphere above Siberia, and exploding, causing a massive, but indirect, impact. The result was an enormous shockwave that felled trees, killed animals and knocked people off their feet hundreds of miles away. In the few days after the impact, skies in Europe and Asia were said to be glowing – likely due to the formation of Noctilucent clouds high in the atmosphere, composed of ice particles left over from the explosion. According to this reference, “The Guinness Book of World Records (1966 edition) states that due to the rotation of the Earth, if the collision had occurred 4 hours 47 minutes later, it would have completely destroyed the city of St. Petersburg”. Close call.
Scorched and flattened trees as a result of the Tunguska event
Best movie explosion
Live Free or Die Hard
I am massively biased here because I am a HUGE fan of the Die Hard movies. I love the scene where John McClane uses a car to blow up a helicopter because, “I was out of bullets”. The creativity here, combined with the excellent one liner (although from memory I don’t think he actually uses this line in the movie, it is just in the trailer) and the fact that it’s John McClane means it wins my vote for best movie explosion.
Signing off with a lolcat….
So I’m finally back into the swing of things after a fabulous island getaway. I didn’t text, blog, tweet or email for an entire 10 days!
Samoa was an absolutely fabulous holiday destination. Thankfully we arrived back two days before the disastrous tsunami struck. The Samoan people are a positively wonderful, friendly and generous population and it is awful that such a thing has happened to them.
Help support their cause by donating to the Red Cross Tsunami relief fund.
http://www.givealittle.co.nz/cause/pacifictsunami
Below are a few photos of our holiday. Everyone should definitely visit this magnificent place in their lifetime – so much untouched beauty, perfect for everyone from adventure seekers to those who just want to lay on the beach and drink cocktails.
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- Sun going down in front of Le Lagoto resort, Savai’i
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- Wonderful snorkelling in front of Le Lagoto resort, Savai’i
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- Local Matai (chief) at Alofaaga blowholes
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- My family in front of a blowhole
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- Me with my sisters at their beach fale at Tanu
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- Swimming with turtles attraction on Savai’i
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- Interisland ferry
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- Fuipisia falls on Upolu.
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- Seabreeze Resort on the South cost of Upolu.
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- There’s a gecko on my Mah Jong!
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- View in front of Litia Sini at Lalomanu
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- Litia Sini beach fales at Lalomanu
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- Piula Cave Pool on the North coast of Upolu.
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- Robert Louis Stevenson homestead on Upolu
I was almost in tears watching Big Bang Theory when Sheldon and Koothrappali (yes I had to Google how to spell that) had a match of rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock. Now ThinkGeek is offering this fabulous babydoll tee so you’ll remember the rules on the go. ThinkGeek also references the original brains behind this game, Sam Kass. So much cooler than the standard jan-ken-pon - Alex Kidd anyone??
Rock paper scissors lizard Spock tee at ThinkGeek
Next, I came across a little gem on Floozy - Harvey’s “Treecycle” bags that are made out of recycled seatbelts. Gorgeous, eco-friendly and bound to be extremely tough, I *love* the Treecycle Hobo style. Harvey’s is husband and wife team Dana and Melanie, who started the business in their garage in California. Dana was raised in NZ and according to Floozy, learnt how to weave bags from his Polynesian grandmother. Turns out paying attention to granny has obviously paid off, with Harvey’s bags now being stocked at various boutiques and department stores around the world, and being seen adorning the skinny wrists of celebs such as Britney Spears and Jessica Alba (ref).
Harveys Treecycle Hobo bag
Beatles Rock Band!! I am a big Beatles fan and can’t wait to give the new game a ago, however unfortunately we are a little challenged in the gaming department currently with only the trustuy PS2 and Guitar Hero World Tour instruments. Need a PS3 to play this, and to be able to play previous Rock Band titles using the Guitar Hero instruments. May have to wait it out a little while longer yet (especially if I buy the Treecyle Hob bag first).
Beatles Rock Band
A quick post on a couple of great image viewing utilities currently in use on my websites…
Tiltviewer
Brought to you by Airtight Interactive, Tiltviewer is a beautiful image gallery viewer built using Flash technology. It gives a fabulous 3D effect and lots of customisable options. It looks uber sleek and professional but takes very little technical ability to implement. You can use an XML file to define your images, or load images automatically from Flickr or Picasa. The gallery is interactive, with users being able to click to zoom in and out, and flip photos over to view image descriptions or other details. The installation and configuration instructions, as well as the FAQs and online forums make this product highly supported and therefore a breeze to implement and customise. To see how I have implemented it, visit the Adagio Wanganui image gallery. I’ve used an XML file to define the images and haven’t customised it too much because it is wonderfully functional out of the box. You’ll also find Simpleviewer, Autoviewer and Postcardviewer from Airtight, which are all very elegant gallery solutions as well. I’ve implemented Simpleviewer for some image galleries on Perfect Venue and really like it.
Smoothgallery
Smoothgallery, from Jondesign (Jonathan Schemoul) is a javascript image gallery or featured content slideshow (or whatever else you decide to implement it as), available as a free download and is also used as the basis for a WordPress plugin. I found this one a little harder to work with than the above Tiltviewer, but that is possibly because I was needing to customise it a bit more. It offers another very elegant solution, and is great for a featured content gallery as part of a home page. There are a few options you can feed it when initialising the gallery, and of course you can edit the heck out of the CSS, however I didn’t find it that intuitive to customise and resorted to the forums quite a bit. The biggest problem I had was getting it to start on a random image. After a lot of digging I found this post with the answer. Nonetheless, it is a great solution and I’m currently implementing it for a “featured venue” slideshow that will persist across a few pages on Perfect Venue.
Slimbox (2)
It seems that everyone is using lightbox on all sorts of websites these days and why not? It is a simple and lightweight viewer that almost anyone can install and use within minutes. For enlarging images on Perfect Venue I’ve used Slimbox 2, which is an even more lightweight version of Lightbox that uses the jQuery javascript library. I haven’t spent time customising this at all because it provided exactly what I needed straight out of the box.
I had to laugh yesterday when a (female) colleague and I were discussing training up my replacement. I wish I could just download the contents of my brain onto USB, ready for upload into his brain. She commented that this was never going to work – obviously because males and females have completely different operating systems. Males are 32 bit whereas us females are 64 bit. Aint that the truth! Lol, lmao, rofl etc etc…
In part 1 we went through how to add individual records (in the form of IDs) to a shortlist. The IDs are stored in a session variable and are separated by commas. What we need to do now, is seperate those values out and use them to get some info, e.g. from a mySql database.
Firstly, we need to seperate the values in our string (stored in $_SESSION['shortlist']) based on the comma delimiter, and put the values into an array:
//put each id in $_SESSION['shortlist'] into shortlistitems array
$shortlistitems = explode(",", $_SESSION['shortlist']);
//get rid of null values
foreach ($shortlistitems as $key=>$id)
{
if($id == "")
{
unset($shortlistitems[$key]);
}
}
A nice explanation of the explode function can be found at W3schools.
Now we have an array of individual IDs. If you were to output it using print_r($shortlistitems) it would look something like this:
Array ( [0] => 1 [1] => 8 [2] => 97 [3] => 53 [4] => 111 [5] => 6 )
This is just a collection of IDs that don’t really mean much to our end user, so let’s use them to query a MySql database, and display some results in a table:
//start the table off...
echo "
<table>";
//loop through the array, returning data from the database based on $id for each shortlistitem. Put results into a table
foreach ($shortlistitems as $k=>$id)
{
$sql = "SELECT * FROM yourtable WHERE id = ".$id;
$query = mysql_query($sql) or die (mysql_error());
while($result=mysql_fetch_array($query))
{
echo "
<tr>
<td>".$result['column1']."</td>
<td>".$result['column2']."</td>
<td>".$result['column3']."</td>
</tr>
";
}
}
echo "</table>
";
Isn’t that nice? We’ve selected one or several rows of data from a database, based on the IDs that our end user has added to their shortlist. They can now see all their favourite widgets (or whatever) on our shortlist.php page. Basically, the above script says “for each shortlist item in our array, put the id into the $id variable, then select some data from a mySql database and display this in a table”. For some more explanation on using php with MySql see Angela Bradley’s PHP/MySQL Guide at About.com.
What if they want to remove items from their shortlist?
Add this to the top of your php script (i.e before you do anything with the $_SESSION['shortlist'] variable)
if ($_GET['shortlist']=="remove")
{
$_SESSION['shortlist'] = str_replace($_GET['id'].",","",$_SESSION['shortlist']);
}
…and put a link like this in another cell in your row of results:
echo " <td><a href='shortlist.php?shortlist=remove&id=".$id."'>remove from shortlist</a></td> ";
Components to this wee snippet:
- ($_GET['shortlist']==”remove”)… This says that if we have shortlist=remove in our URL, carry out the code below. This is only set when we click on the ‘remove from shortlist’ link.
- str_replace… This finds the string we want to remove (i.e. the id plus the trailing comma) with “” (i.e. nothing) – thus deleting it from $_SESSION['shortlist'].
- a href=’shortlist.php?shortlist=remove&id=”.$id.”‘… By clicking on this link we are saying (a) run the remove from shortlist code, and (b) remove the id that relates to this row ($id).
The whole shebang…
<?php session_start()
//connect to MySql database
mysql_connect("your.hostaddress.com", "username", "password") or die(mysql_error()); //Note I usually put this in a seperate file and then use include() to call the file
mysql_select_db("Database_Name") or die(mysql_error());
//remove from shortlist
if ($_GET['shortlist']=="remove")
{
$_SESSION['shortlist'] = str_replace($_GET['id'].",","",$_SESSION['shortlist']);
}
//put each id in $_SESSION['shortlist'] into shortlistitems array
$shortlistitems = explode(",", $_SESSION['shortlist']);
//get rid of null values
foreach ($shortlistitems as $key=>$id)
{
if($id == "")
{
unset($shortlistitems[$key]);
}
}
//start the table off...
echo "
<table>";
//loop through the array, returning data from the database based on $id for each shortlistitem. Put results into a table, include 'remove from shortlist' link
foreach ($shortlistitems as $k=>$id)
{
$sql = "SELECT * FROM yourtable WHERE id = ".$id;
$query = mysql_query($sql) or die (mysql_error());
while($result=mysql_fetch_array($query))
{
echo "
<tr>
<td>".$result['column1']."</td>
<td>".$result['column2']."</td>
<td>".$result['column3']."</td>
<td><a href='shortlist.php?shortlist=remove&id=".$id."'>remove from shortlist</a></td>
</tr>
";
}
}
echo "</table>
";
?>
And there you go. PHP session_end.
Husband came home the other day going on about a new website called Deal Eater. He met the guys that started this site through work and it got me thinking – there seem to be quite a few of these ‘daily deals’ websites popping up about the place.
Whether it’s the so-called recession creating a need for us to shop more frugally, or the fact that it is no longer un-cool to clip coupons, that has created a market for these types of sites I’m not sure. Either way, it’s a good thing and they sure seem to be popular. Below is a summary of these daily deal websites operating for New Zealand consumers.
1-day – one of the originals, we have purchased of this site multiple times. There are three great daily deals, where you can purchase anything from chocolates to electronics, clothing to cosmetics and more. Most deals I’ve seen on 1-day are below half price.
Dealaday – similar to 1-day but with just one deal every day. In the past week they’ve had iPods, Bob the Builder playdough sets, weight loss supplements, NZ Car magazine subscriptions, scooters and digital cameras. Most of these products had 50% off the RRP.
Off The Back – daily loot with one main deal and two side deals everyday. This site is very community based; users can comment on products, mark them ‘hot or not’ and participate in the forums. These guys are on a mission to get to 100,000 comments – they’re currently at 70,878. Not bad for a site that has been around just 18 months.
Deal Eater – this fairly new website gives you daily eating/drinking deals in Christchurch and Wellington – Auckland will be added soon. There is one lunch and one dinner deal per region which are available for a 24 hour period. I’ll definitely be checking here whenever I can’t decide where to go for dinner.
Grabawine – with the name no doubt inspired by Air New Zealand’s Grabaseat, this website offers three wine deals every day, with each wine being sold by the half-case. I haven’t purchased from here yet, namely because I haven’t actually tried any of the wines they’ve had on sale. Perhaps I would be more swayed to make a purchase if there was a detailed description of the wines nose, acidity, notes, bouquet and other winey terms that I don’t understand but seem to sell me when I read them on a bottle…
FirstIn – I had never head of this one but after a quick Google came across this site claiming to be ‘New Zealand’s original daily deals website’. It was started in 2004 so I guess this would be correct. Today’s deals on FirstIn are all electronics and because I haven’t seen it before I’m unsure if this is all they do.
Happy bargain hunting everyone!
My absolute favourite band of all time are set to rock AMI Stadium in Christchurch on November 29th this year. I was flipping OUT when I heard the rumours at work on Friday and several news sources, as well as a post on PJs official fan club website (www.pearljam.com) have confirmed the tour dates early this morning.
I am stoked beyond belief that they are coming to Christchurch. Fingers crossed they don’t cancel like The Killers did in March this year. I just hope that all of Christchurch (and New Zealand) gets behind this legendary band and that the show sells out fast. This is going to be the highlight of the rock calendar in New Zealand this year so don’t miss it! At $120 for a Gold section ticket it is far more reasonable than AC/DC and in my opinion will be a WAY better show (*ducks for cover*).
More details here: http://pearljam.com/news/pj-announces-australianew-zealand-tour-fan-club-pre-sale-travel-package-details-coming-soon
So… are you planning on going? Post below, would love to hear your comments!
I am not much of a gamer but I frickin love the Wii. Last weekend I went out and bought the new Wii Sports Resort with Motion Plus (and an extra Motion Plus for two player of course). Developed and published by Nintendo, this is the sequel to Wii Sports (which comes bundled with the Wii console). The game comes with one Motion Plus controller add-on as you can’t use the software without it. Attached to your existing Wii remote, the Motion Plus enhances the motion-sensing capabilities of your controller. You won’t have any trouble attaching it as it comes with an 8 step installation guide.
All excited and ready to try it out I popped the disc into the console, only to be halted by having to run a menu update before being able to play. This took only a couple of minutes, but following this (as if the 8 step guide wasn’t enough) there is a three minute instructional video on how to attach the Motion Plus to your controller.
So now we’re ready to play and have 12 different sports to choose from. There’s lots of reviews out there so I’m just going to provide a quick summary of what I thought.
Fun on your own:
Archery - this is one of the games I wanted to play over and over again to try to keep improving my score, and OMFG there’s even LAVA at the end!
Power Cruising – not sure why it’s not called jet skiing, but I loved this one. The trick is to really get into it and pretend your on an actual jetski.
Best two-player
Swordplay – Other reviews have said that this is a let down but I find something strangely satisfying in fighting my husband with a sword until I beat him over the edge of the platform. It was a pretty boring one player game with each round lasting about 5 seconds. I did look pretty fierce in the replays though.
Table tennis – This is my pick of the bunch. With the Motion Plus, the motion is very similar to how you would actually swing a real table tennis paddle. It does seem slow at first but once you start to get the hang of it after a bit of practice (and stop trying to play it like Wii Sports tennis) you can get some speed up and then SLAM the ball at your opponent when they fumble it.
Played once and didn’t play again
Wakeboarding – didn’t feel compelled to play this again at all. No specific reason, just hated it.
Frisbee – better with a real dog.
Didn’t play because needed some sunlight
Canoeing, cycling and golf – golf bores me on the original Wii Sports. Males seem to like it though, should I be surprised?
The rest
Bowling – pretty much the same as Wii Sports. I suck at it just as much. There is a new game option of the 100-pin game. I didn’t find it any more exciting and you’re screwed if you get a 79/91 split.
Basketball – I quite liked the 3-point contest. The 3-on-3 game was a let down though.
Air sports – the dogfight is a bit of fun however I got pissy because I lost really badly.
Final thoughts…
I would give this an 8 out of 10 and reckon it is worth buying. It has enough really fun games to keep you entertained and the Motion Plus adds a new dimension to the game. The graphics haven’t been improved at all – spectators still bob up and down with no legs and detached balls for arms. But who buys it for the graphics anyway?
Some other good reviews:
http://www.ben.geek.nz/wii-sports-resort-with-motionplus/
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/review-wii-sports/52930
http://www.wiisportsresort.com/#/home (Wii Sports Resort official site, which I think is well done)
I just had to share this….
I was so excited this morning when the courier knocked on the door with my parcel from Peter Alexander. I saw the air guitar sleep tee in the latest catalogue and just had to have it.
Air guitar sleep tee from Peter Alexander
I absolutely love it even if my husband thinks it is gimmicky and a waste of moolah. What a relief I can finally practise air guitar by day AND by night.
All I need to do now is organise a sleepover and stock up on feather pillows….
Rock on!
