Manda QoP

A while back I looked into getting Lasik because contact lenses were uncomfortable after a few hours due to dry eye, and glasses are just impractical when walking dogs in the rain or going to the gym. It took me ten years to pluck up the courage as I'm a bit sqeamish with eyes, but eventually off I trotted to the eye clinic with my loan offer all sorted for the fees so that I can do things quickly before chickening out. I get the eye checks done and find out that the only part of me that isn't too fat is my corneas. They are both too thin for Lasik and there's nothing I can do, there are no alternatives, I just have to live with being a speccy four eyes. ARRGGHHH... Fast forward a few months..{{{wibble wobble fast forward hands thing}}}.. I'm reading a magazine a few weeks ago and I read about something called Ortho-K. It's been around for a while apparently but no-one I've spoken to has heard of it. Why does no-one know about it? It's freaking aweso...

The new phone has shipped overnight. If the US postal service gets a shifty on, it could arrive next week and the queue of people wanting to check it out before I leave MBIE will not be disappointed. I have turned into an excited Tigger! Bounce, bounce, bounce.

I've needed a new phone for a while now. My first edition HTC Desire from a gazillion years ago is starting to get quite battered and its second battery is now starting to fail, prompting me to finally give up and buy a new phone. The problem I have with buying a new phone is researching them; I always end up finding something amazing that isn't yet available, which means a new phone never ends up being purchased. This time though my research wish list item from earlier this year was the Nexus 5, and given that my HTC Desire is due for retirement I have decided to stick to my guns, not look at any new shinies that are coming out in the next few months. I have closed my eyes to the Phone Arena phone compare tool - it will not taunt me with the pretty 50tetragigamegabyte camera phones covered in bling that would make a magpie envious. So, having decided to actually buy a new phone, it's time to research prices. As you probably know, this little gem of a phone isn...

I've uploaded the presentation from tonight's talk at CodeMania after dark.    It was great fun showing everyone how easy it is to create your own Google map, and it was quite interesting the number of people afterwards who said they'd always thought it was something difficult to do.   Lots of people are hopefully now going away to play with customising their own Google maps and with any luck creating loads of funky fun things to play with online.    I can't quite name the overall highlight of the evening for me, but it's a close run thing between the great diversity of topics covered by the other amazing speakers, Corey's disco ball hoodie and Zak the Cat!

26th October 2012 Codemania After Dark Hopefully you've already got your tickets to this spiffing event that's happening on the 26th October. Info here:   http://codemania.co.nz/ I'm doing a lightning talk on creating custom Google maps - very lightning, how to create a map in 10 mins - phew... this will require some fast talking. If you're not going to the event and you want to check out the quick start guide to creating a custom Google map, then check out the presentation.

I've just started to use Java, having never coded with it before, and today ran into a bit of trouble with date comparisons.  The obvious option that I wanted to use had been deprecated so I needed to find an alternate. Whilst Google and StackOverflow are normally my very best friends when it comes to this sort of issue, today they were only a little helpful, pointing me in roughly the right direction but not actually hitting the target. What I needed to do was add 6 years to a variable date and then compare that to today's date.  Sounds easy enough, and in Java version 6 it was, but now things have changed.   I found a useful class called Calendar, however, all the online blogs, tutorials and user comments only showed me how to add years to today's date, which is easy as pie.  What none of them told me was how to add 6 years to another date.   It's probably really obvious for most folks out there, but given the number of questions I found by people askin...

Following a couple of tweets earlier today stating that our Internet in NZ is somewhat better than we folk who complain think it is, I decided to do a bit of my own research.    I've found in the past that many 'facts' stated in newspapers are outrageously wrong as journalists have a tendency to misread or misrepresent data in order to create a good headline, this means I like to dig around and find out facts for myself as basically I don't trust journalists as far as I can throw them. So, what was it that got my blood boiling this morning?  Someone stating that 80% of NZ internet users get speeds greater than 10Mbps.  What a load of tosh!   Yes, the capability may exist and the telecoms may tell us that they're providing these speeds, but we're certainly not getting these speeds.   I decided to dig further and use an Internationally recognized set of stats to find out the truth... you too can find out stats for yourself right here:   http://www...