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Flying Rainbow Pop-Tart Cat (the MP3)

So it’s the latest meme from College Humour. All it needs is an MP3 for those nutty enough to want to listen to it more than once, twice or even a hundred times.

My gift to you; an attempt to see just how much traffic I can drive to my little corner of the interweb and a not-too-subtle attempt to drive a friend to full-blown psychosis (or at least his partner). I give to you, the Flying Rainbow Pop-Tart Cat… on MP3. Encoded at 192 kbps, so you can catch every little meow, in glorious MP3 so you can take with you on your journey through this world devoid of pop-tart cats.

Flying Rainbow Pop-Tart Cat MP3

Link will go offline if this gets too popular. ;)

Has anyone else noticed this song is extremely useful for doing repetitive work like data entry? Meow meow meow meow meow?

 

Declaring war on hay fever

After referring a few people to this product and getting some great feedback, I thought I’d share with you all, my miracle cure for hay fever.

Hay fever, or allergic rhinitis as Wikipedia refers to it, is a general allergy to Australia in spring time. Usually in individuals suffering from it, the symptoms include itchy eyes, runny nose and waking up feeling like you’ve spent the night with Lindsay Lohan, Amy Winehouse and Mike Tyson. This week I managed to actually tear a contact lense whilst rubbing my eyes due to hayfever symptoms, whilst I’m not trying to compare myself to Chuck Norris, you have to admit that’s pretty extreme.

Even the Bee Gees sang about it

There are many suggested ways for dealing with hay fever, the majority of which I’ve found ineffective.

  • Antihistamines; commonly purchased over-the-shelf pharmacy products such as Telfast, Zyrtec, Clarityne and so on. All guaranteed to leave you feeling every more tired in the morning. While they might be effective for relief of symptoms during the day, and some may be non-drowsy, after a while I couldn’t deal with the tiredness anymore.
  • Decongestants; nice in theory but I don’t think anyone wants to be tweaking for three months straight. Comes with a mild side effect of stroke due to bleeding in the brain, this may impair your ability to live.
  • Avoiding pollen; this is a great solution for people who don’t breathe. Or perhaps we need to think outside the square a little, how about we modify all the fucking grass in the world so we’re no longer allergic to it? Think I’m kidding?

    GRASS KILLAH

  • Desensitising injections; I have to admit I don’t know too much about this but you have to get a lot of injections, every year… and it stops working after a few years. The first two comments on this page are gold.
  • Steroids; it works, just do it. It’s called Budesonide, sold in pharmacies as Rhinocort Hayfever. Unfortunately it can get quite expensive but for most people it should only be for a few months, a few pumps up your nose each night and most of your symptoms should be taken care of for the next day. If the thought of taking steroids everyday doesn’t appeal to you, well rest assured it’s only a very, very small amount and all the information pamphlets from AstraZeneca say you’ll be fine. Really. In case you don’t believe me though, these are the worst side effects from budesonide from Wikipedia.

Budesonide may cause:

  • nose irritation or burning
  • bleeding or sores in the nose
  • lightheadedness
  • upset stomach
  • cough
  • hoarseness
  • dry mouth
  • rash
  • sore throat
  • bad taste in mouth
  • change in mucus color

In addition the following symptoms should be reported immediately:

  • difficulty breathing or swelling of the face
  • white patches in the throat, mouth, or nose
  • irregular menstrual periods
  • severe acne

rarely, behavioral changes—when these do occur, they seem to mostly affect children.

I think I can live with some breathing difficulties, horseness and irregular menstrual swelling that will mostly affect children, ANYTHING that actually takes care of the symptoms and allows me wake up in the mornings with some energy.

Disclaimers:

  • I was not paid a commission, fee or reimbursement of any kind to write this blog post on behalf of AstraZeneca Australia Pty Ltd or its affiliates.
  • Whilst I may have acted in the role of fire warden during my career which included training in dealing with a chemical, radiological and biological weapons attack upon the Victorian Public Service, I am not and do not profess to be a trained or qualified medical practitioner. You should seek qualified medical advice before spraying steroids up your nose every day.
  • I have never spent the night with Lindsay Lohan or Amy Winehouse.

October 2010, an update!

So a year on from starting at IE, what’s news? Besides spring and the joy of hayfever again, I thought I’d give a run down on what’s been keeping me busy.

Hoyts.com.au and hoyts.co.nz; the website for the cinema chain that operates here and in NZ is both a business and technical challenge on many levels. Dealing with external vendors, multiple stakeholders and a codebase that was far from Sitecore best practice has been a learning experience. In the year since we’ve managed to put live a home page redesign, regular maintenance updates and bug fixes, and most importantly; the new rewards program which is going strong.

Hoyts Corporate Australia and New Zealand; architecturally what should have been a fairly straight-forward exercise to create a ‘microsite’ running off a main site presented it’s own challenges when working around some publishing booby traps left by the previous developers. Also learnt some lessons about working with a multi-site Sitecore installation.

Hoyts Mobile Australia and New Zealand; a couple of brand new Hoyts websites, no Sitecore integration. Designed to replace an older WAP mobile site, the new mobile website incorporates some of the latest HTML5 and CSS3 techniques to streamline front-end development. Server side, it was awesome to work with MVC2, not having done any MVC development for a while, it took a while to get used to again.

Other stuff about mobile development and this site:

Maxxia NZ; just to make sure Sitecore isn’t the only CMS I work on, I did Level 1 and 2 Umbraco certification. Just in time to build the Maxxia NZ website. Nothing notable about the site itself, from the point of view of CMS’s though, it’s refreshing to work with a different CMS and one that really is bare-bones compared to Sitecore. Highly recommended for small/mid-level organisations looking for a .Net CMS, or for anyone not looking to pay for Sitecore’s full feature set.

IE Website; much to the amusement of the other .Net developers, I also put my hand up to play with WordPress. I’m not sure I’d call myself a WordPress guru, but I did get to play with a couple of cool new features of WordPress; custom post types and taxonomies.

Along the way, I’ve also learnt a hell of a lot more about front-end development than I expected. I’d even say I know my way around Photoshop and creating non-table layouts in CSS… it’s only taken me a few years to catch up to everyone else on this.

Finally, I couldn’t finish this post without giving a shout out to all the peeps at IE. They’re pretty sweet ;)

Special kudos to the .Net team there, the dorks… and Mig’s mum. She’s super sweet. ;)

A new haircut for 2010

Just a short post to say hi to all the people who are following this blog and a little present for all of you for hanging around.

This is an old photo of me from the early 90′s that not many people have seen… well okay, everyone on my Facebook has seen it numerous times and the Footscray police are familiar with it, but if it’s new to you; I hope you enjoy it.

My younger and wilder days

It was the early 90's and M.C. Hammer and Vanilla Ice were making us do crazy things.

You wouldn’t believe how many people ask if this is really me. Do you really think I would ever wear such a horrible shirt? Or be able to grow that much facial hair?

Merry Christmas and hope you all have a safe and enjoyable New Year. :)

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