Schinckel.net

I’ve had a couple of “challenging” comments on a couple of posts I’ve made over the past couple of days. It all stems from the fact that a large group of students have “discovered” my blog, and decided to make some comments about and on it. This is not the first time that students I teach have come across it, but in the past, they appeared to be a bit more mature about how they dealt with the fact that I am a person, not just a teacher. I’m close to putting moderation on the posts, as it’s somewhat annoying to have to remove those that I deem to be inappropriate. Which brings me to the point I want to make. By commenting on a person’s blog, you are effectively visiting their house, and leaving your mark. It’s my blog, I’ve put a lot of effort into tweaking the template, and even more into creating content that is, to me at least, meaningful and sometimes important. I reserve the right to remove comments I decide are inappropriate. I’ll usually leave comments that are opposing to my point of view, except if I feel they go too far. If it gets too bad, I’ll just block access from a variety of IP addresses. Like yours.

I’ve always liked the integration of Gmail and Firefox, when you use something like WebMailCompose. However, it’s not clear how to set it up for Gmail Hosted. Just edit the Preferences, and in the Webmail Services tab, find the GMail entry. replace the /mail/ with /hosted/yourdomain.com/ and away you go… Found via Gadgetopia.

A Message • Coldplay • X&Y; ★★★

I’ve just started playing around with Google Calendars, and think there is a lot of potential here. I also use iCal, and sync my calendars with my Palm Pilot, which is better in a lot of cases for me accessing the data than having to go to a website. And it means I can update stuff when I am away from the computer. However, there is one problem, and Google Calendar may have a solution. Shared Calendars. In particular with my Touch Club, I’m one of several people who might need to update a calendar. It would be great to be able to have one calendar file, that I can update either on my Mac, Palm Pilot, or online, and have other people update this as well. However, you can subscribe to a Google Calendar in iCal, and subscribe to a published iCal calendar in Google Calendar, but not have one calendar that is editable in both programs. I might be happy with a solution that bypasses iCal - if I can edit a calendar on my Palm Pilot, and then sync it with Google Calendar, that might do. I’m already hardly using Mail.app anymore, and doing everything with Gmail. Especially since I got ADSL.

One site I am responsible for is that of my Touch club, Central Scorpions. I did have a blog set up, but have migrated to the system my association uses for results and fixtures. I set up a lovely domain name, and using stealth forwarding, I had that stay in the address bar. We really only want people to visit via the main page, anyway, so that doesn’t raise issues of not being able to bookmark a specific page. However, using IE (Win), if I have a stealth forwarding setup, the site runs v.e.r.y…s.l.o.w. Under Firefox (Mac) it’s fine, and if I use a standard redirect, this is fine too. So, stealth forwarding must do something strange, that IE doesn’t like in conjunction with the js for the rollovers, I think. It may have something to do with the way it’s set up as a frame, I’m not sure.

I’ve set up another domain’s email system using Google’s Hosting for Domains, and got really excited when there was a checkbox labelled: Share User’s Contacts, thinking that I could set up an address book for one user, and share it among all of them. This was just what I needed for the organisation, which I help administer. However, it only adds the users to each other’s address books, not every user they add to their contacts…

Whilst troubleshooting Gmail for Hosted Domains mail delivery issues, I came across Google Apps for Your Domain. It doesn’t appear on my Dashboard, but does on Jaq’s. It allows for publishing of web pages, stored on Google’s servers, under your domain name. I’m playing with it now.

I’ve got hosted Gmail for both my domain, and my partner’s. It’s really good - much better than mydomain.com’s crappy email forwarding service, which seemed to fail every odd month. However, there is one caveat to take notice of. If you create a new account, and set it all up, including allowing POP access (which requires logging in, and agreeing to the ToS), everything works fine. If you upgrade this to an Administrator account, you need to log into this account again, and agree to the admin ToS, else you can no longer download mail via POP. Took me a while to figure this out…

I’ve had a loan laptop on more than one occasion recently, and I quite liked it. I recieved an email with an advert for salary sacrifice the other day, and did a bit of research. I’d prefer a MacBook, but the group I got the email from weren’t any cheaper than the Apple Education prices. Anyway, buying a $1700 laptop over 2 years would end up costing me only $15 per week, dropping down to $10 per week over 4 years. I’m due in a couple of months for a payrise of about this much, so I may do this.

From a trackback from Paul’s Time Sink, I came across a Spanish Castle optical illusion. You must see/do this, it’s truly excellent.

I’ve never really liked Steve Irwin. His over-exuberance annoyed me. When he nearly fed his baby to a crocodile, I felt like the rest of Australia was starting to feel the same way as me. Steve Irwin died yesterday, killed by a stingray. The man who scoffed at the danger of crocodiles was (apparently) only the second person in Australian history to die after a stingray-related accident. The stingray’s tail barb flicked up into his chest, and he died shortly after. The news programs on Australian television had created tributes to the man by the evening news, and the late news was almost all about Irwin. Apparently the morning programs were even worse. Having died young, killed by a creature he was filming, Irwin has cemented his place in the Australian collective psyche for a very long time. Going out with a bang has made sure he will stay famous. Of course, had Steve Irwin taken the advice of the anti-skin cancer groups, he would still be alive today. If he’d worn sunscreen, he would have been protected from dangerous rays…