Been doing some fiddling here, keeping my web eye in (and getting sidetracked from my stupid photo gallery script). I came across a bunch of tools that all the cool kids are using, so I decided to give a couple a go, and am pretty happy. The first is del.icio.us, an interesting experiment in public/social web bookmarking. My list is here. Another neat thing about del.icio.us is that it exports the list as an RSS feed, which seem to be undergoing an explosion of different uses these days, and I’ve done some minor hacks to Feedsplitter, allowing my links for each day to be integrated in the blog posts here. Cute.

Another thing I’ve given a try is FeedBurner which can wrap an XML news feed and insert all sorts of other things in it, like del.icio.us links, or photos on flickr. So if you actually consider this site to be interesting enough to check back on, hook up my feed in whatever RSS reader program you use (Firefox 1.0 has a neat feature for this now, which they call ‘Live Bookmarks’).

Finally, I’m home from Europe and have shaken off the residue from my first real taste of the wonders of jetlag. 48 hours of no sleep, plus a time-shifted body clock, plus temperatures 30 degrees higher than when I left didn’t really go down too well. But that’s been and gone and I’m now finishing off the taxes and paperwork that were waiting for me here, soon to start putting some of my (overcast and grey, sigh) photos online.

While I was out in Newtown on Sunday night with friends from uni, I came across a DVD which I just had to buy: WarpVision: The Videos 1989 – 2004, a compilation of 32 music videos of artists on the Warp label, like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, LFO, and Nightmares on Wax and by directors such as Chris Cunningham, Alex Rutterford, Pleix, and The Designers Republic. I haven’t finished looking at them all, but so far, they’ve been damn good. While I’m at it, I’ll also plug the awesome DVDs sitting next to this one on my shelf: Directors Label: Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry. Get these now!

Well that was fun, being here at Ton’s place when the big button was pushed and the new release of Blender 2.35 was made available to the world, and he even sneakily used a testing file of mine for the front page screenshot. We also had a good dinner tonight with Bart about how to proceed with the sticky issue of the website, which was very productive.

I had some high hopes for cool stuff to put in version 2.35, but unfortunately other things like preparations for the conference and having a good time in strange new countries got in the way! Oh well, there’s already plenty of awesome stuff in this release anyway, got to save something for 2.36. :)

I’ve made it out of (the very interesting) Russia intact and well, and am back in Amsterdam for two more days to reunite with my laptop and prepare for the terrible trek back home that awaits me on the 16th. Since I had to change my booking at a late date, I got a terrible connection, meaning that the entire Amsterdam to Sydney journey will take me roughly 31 hours. That’ll be just a barrel of laughs. *ahem*

I also now have 2.5GB of photos to sort through, plus 4 or 5 rolls of film. I guess now that I have a little digital camera too, I should really get around to fixing up my crazy homebrew PHP web photo gallery thingy into something more usable and reusable. Anyway, till next time (when I’ll be a lot warmer than I am now).