While on a string of Zazz - related posts , we now have Miss Zoe, a new deal-a-day site that is a sister of Zazz. While Zazz caters to the tech geeky products (usually), Miss Zoe is planning to serve up a variety of products, many of which will suit the non-geeky woman (and man). They hope to launch the site with their first product at 8am EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) on Monday 21st January.

On a side note, I won the competition to locate the new site, run in the Zazz forums. The following clues were dropped:

• It's a something.com.au
• It is a Miss
• It starts with Z
• It looks a lot like zazz

It only took me three minutes (according the forum post time stamps) to find it :S. After giving misszazz.com.au a try, and finding it didn't work, I found a list of girl's names starting with Z. Zoe jumped out because it was about the only name on there that I recognised, and Voila! (got to keep up the french connection): misszoe.com.au . Sofia (from zazz) and Christelle (from the coffee shop next door) are going to give the site their best shot, so here's best wishes for their success!!

Cheers,

Matt

Some discussion (and competitions) in the Zazz forumz lately lead me to look back at some AA (Ascii Art) bits and pieces I've looked at in the past. AA is, essentially, producing pictures using no more than the 256 ASCII characters (hence the name). Below is my Zazz avatar, rendered in AA.

            ttttjj::  ;;..

          ;;tt    LLtt;;iitt

          ii;;    ..ii    ..ff

          ii;;      ..      tt,,

        ,,LLtt  ..        ....LL

    ..ffii  tt  tt        ttLLttii

  ..LL..    tt  ii..      ttttLL;;

  ff..      tt                  ff

;;tt        tt    ::ii    ;;..  ;;ii

ff          tt..;;GGtt;;..iiGGii  jj..

ffff          ttii    ffttii  ..ff;;tt

KKii..                tt          ffiiff

tt;;ii                tt            iiLL

    tt    ii  ;;..    tt

    ff    ffttfftt    tt

    ff....ff    jj....tt

    GGDDDDii    ffGGGGii

To get the desired effect in HTML, the AA must be enclosed in <pre> tags to tell the browser that the text is preformatted, and so spaces etc. will be preserved.

One of my personal favourite demonstrations is the well put together BB (AA -> BB, get it? ). BB showcases what AA art can do, and although now 10 years old, it is no less exciting. Below are some highlights:

As you can see, the possibilities are (almost) endless! If you so desire, you can watch all your movies in AA too, using aaxine:

Recognise dear Smeagol?

So, if you really want to amaze your friends, render them in AA! (not Alcoholics Anonymous, ASCII ART!)

So I was bored this morning... what better thing to do than to do that wordpress theme I've been putting off for days?

Actually there are plenty of better things to do, but I finally threw together this theme. There's still problems with it, since I threw it out so quickly, but it looks better than the previous theme, imho. It is by no means complete, and some pages in it are based quite heavily on the default Kubrick theme that comes with wordpress. I also had to upgrade wordpress to get it to support a tag I borrowed from this theme :S .

I think thats all the news for now - if anyone wants a copy of this theme just let me know...

Cheers,

Matt

Just returned from a great two weeks camping on Friday. Had a great time, and while camping, suffering from techno-isolation, I came up with some great ideas on what to write on my blog next. There's only one problem...

I Can't Remember Them

So, while I'm sure I would have cranked out some great pieces on this little-viewed site, I can no longer remember what I was going to write, nor even what provided me with this inspiration .

Oh and I need to rework a blog theme one day too... (and find a job)

I've been hanging out a bit on Zazz lately Zazz is an online shopping site, that only sells one type of item every day. From their site:

We feel that online stores are too bogged down with items. You know what it's like, you go to a major internet department store and unless you know exactly what you want it's near impossible to find something suitable for your 3rd cousin's 65th birthday. And if we were going to just sell one thing for the rest of the company's lifetime we don't think we'd make very much money, so we keep things fresh by selling new things every day.

One of the best things for me is that the rollover between items is at midnight EST, so only 10pm over here. This makes checking the daily zazz a nightly ritual.

So far I've bought a 400GB external hard drive, and a USB digital TV tuner, both of which are (hopefully) somewhere between here and Melbourne at the moment. Now I'm just hanging out for them to arrive :S

EDIT: They've arrived!!!! Yipee!