Gemma celebrates web 2.Ooooh

So apparently when you’re in Flickr if you add a note to one of your photos with the comment ‘ho ho ho hat’ it creates a Santa hat to place on the head of the photo subject. ‘Ho ho ho beard’ works in a similiar way.  

I may be incredibly behind by only discovering this nifty easter egg (christmas cracker?) this morning, but much fun was had playing with my bit10 related photos. For example:

So Merry Christmas everyone, and for an extra diversion check out this year’s bit10 christmas card:  bit10 Shoot ‘em up

Thanks to the heads up from Lifehacker, I now have 10 Moo Flickr minicards winging their way to me and I’m excited!

Given away free to Flickr Pro Users, Moo minicards are basically calling card representatives of Flickr photos that can be personalised and used for all manner of things (businesscards being the most obvious).

So far the flickr feedback on the Moo user group has been ecstatic with happy customers taking photos of their sets when they arrive. Ideas floating around for ways to use the cards also includes leaving them on the tube or train to generate traffic to the photographer’s flickr userpage.

Being the more…amateur photographer that I am, I love the idea of having a wallet sized version of some of my favourite pictures to hand. Each card is made from heavy stock paper with ‘a smooth satin finish’ and is roughly half the size of a normal business card (28mm x 70mm). Working in conjunction with Flickr, the app is incredibly easy to use; choose a picture, select the area to ‘moo’, and either look at a preview or hit send.

The backs can also be customised to include name, address, phone number, blog address etc, but for the free sample only, the Flickr logo is mandatory (with or without buddy icon).

bit10: Fancy letting your employees upload their favourite self portraits to be used on the next round of business cards? 

Everyone else: They’re only giving away 10,000 free sets - so snap yours up here. 

technorati tags:moo, web2.0, flickr, cards

Coming back to work after a holiday is never easy, especially when whilst away you find yourself falling back into your body’s natural rhythm of rising at 10:30-11am, eating dinner at 2pm, tea at 10pm, and then not sleeping until the wee hours.

Booking a business over breakfast event for my second day back was perhaps slightly silly given the above. However, the topic, organised by the Chamber of Commerce on ensuring you maintain a work/life balance, was quite interesting and a good trade off for the missing Snooze Time.  

Plus, getting up early made me appreciate having dinner at midday where I got to play with my new toy: the Simpsonmaker.

I’ve always wanted to be in the Simpsons (and yes, I was feeling very generous to myself).

I make it a rule never sign up to email newsletters; even if they start out interesting they soon deteriorate into pointless drivel padded out by even more pointless and uninteresting adverts.

But…being the contractictory woman that I am,  I’ve broken my own rule. And the weekly email that’s caused this remarkable turnaround?: ‘Martin’s Money Tips’.

The title is cheesy and the website/forum is a usability nightmare but the content is worth it -  especially for the less financially astute or downright thrifty among us.

A few of you may already be familiar with the eponymous ‘Martin’, that’s Mr Martin Lewis aka the ‘Money Saving Expert’  of Radio 2 fame (allegedly, given that I don’t listen to that particular station )

So, in the interests of sharing his excellent finds/advice/tips of the trade, here’s an example of some recent topics of interest:

Flights from London Gatwick to New York for £160

Martin’s Mortgage Guide (suitable for first time buyers)

Free giveaway: 75 pairs of Ideal Home World Tickets

Linkage:

MoneySavingExpert.com

Martin’s Money Saving Tips [newsletter sign up page]

Well at the moment Coventry, but this time next week I’ll be in Alcudia, Majorca gaining a few extra freckles.

However even if I hadn’t gloated, the observant among you could still have discovered my whereabouts given a couple of dead certs: 

1. My tendency to upload photos to Flickr before I’ve even unpacked/picked up the fur balls from the catsitter/reset my watch to GMT and…
2. My newfound love of geotagging

Geotagging aka adding geographical metadata to Flickr pictures in this case, allows members to find and share photos by location.

Each individual photo or set of photos can be tagged using Flickr Organizr’s new “Map” tab by dragging the image onto a specific location on the map. As well as allowing searches for all pictures taken in Sherwood Forest, for example, I can also create a geographical map of my personal piccy collection.

It’s very simple to use and as usual with Flickr, I can choose privacy settings to control who can see the picture locations. Similar to Google maps, Flickr’s map (actually Yahoo’s), allows searching, map zooming, and panning. Pretty nifty.

Links:

Flickr

Great shot - where’d you take that? [Flickr Blog]

In other news:

Flickr maps also beats any of those crappy ‘number of countries I’ve visited’ memes hands down.

Sadly, my photos centre around England & Wales, with a bit of Spain and France thrown in for good measure… 

According to the majority of internet surveys, up to or over 90% of web users browse with some version of Internet Explorer - this number seems slightly incredulous to me given that everyone I know SWEARS they only use Firefox  (’down with Microsoft, Man…’), but I happily admit to being an IE user.

Yes, I have firefox installed. Yes I know it’s much funkier/cooler/has widgets that can be embedded etc etc, but all of that is slightly outweighed by my love to see websites as they’re supposed to be rendered - not with odd formatting and wonky columns. I also admit to finding it a little backward to install an IE plugin so that you can open internet explorer pages within firefox. Despite this, I promise I do not believe in one browser having a monopoly - I’m clearly just lazy.

So imagine my delight when, after reading a pretty positive review in .NET magazine, I downloaded IE beta 2 (or to give it its formal moniker ‘Internet Explorer Release Candidate 1) and found TABS! A BUILT IN POP UP BLOCKER! A GOOGLE SEARCH BOX! Basically all the uber-cool features of Firefox and more.

My slightly less-informed review follows the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve finally succumbed to the vanity search. Well, I’ve already searched, but now I’m admitting to it.

Whilst my illustrious director works to propel himself to the top of Google, a quick check for my name shows this blog has already achieved that covetous spot; not really that surprising given my name combination:

1. Gemma: Many of my non-Brit friends had (surprising) never heard of my first name, infact one American actually pronounced it with a hard G - as in Gum.
2. Coward: Not exactly up there with the Smith & Jones’s of the world.

Shockingly enough however, a quick peek at spot #4 and my hopes and dreams of being unique in the world are shattered: Hello to the Gemma Coward of Sir Roger Manwood’s school in Sandwich, Kent!

Whilst I’m writing of the proliferation of the good Coward name, the real prompt for this post was tonight’s viewing of Edinburgh Fringe Festival coverage. I was just about to turn the very unfunny show off, when up popped ‘The Coward’s’, a four man sketch troupe soon to be heard on Radio 4 (review here). Sadly, my digibox recording of the show decided to cut off before I could see the rest of their sketch. However, in that short time, I did get to wondering what other Coward’s are out there (besides my most famous sur-namesake, Noel), and a quick check produced:

• Coward Shoes:
  

  Brand-name quality and comfort, sizes 4-14, widths N-WW

• Damon Coward:
  

  Songwriter in the style of Elvis Costello, REM, Strokes, Verve, Blur, Frank Black.

• Sharon Coward 
  Another songwrier, this time from Canada.
• An auctioneer, another sales person, a sculptor and a whole family of bloggers 

Hmm, I guess one famous person is enough ;) 

I’ve never been camping, not properly. I’ve been to Hagg Farm with school where they made us pitch tents on boggy, Peak district hills but after all that hard work, we still returned to our warm and cosy dorms at night.

I may have camped in a friend’s back yard once, but given that her mum bought us peanut butter sandwiches for our midnight snack, I don’t think that counts either.

I’m searching my mind about this because my fiance, James, and I are off to Wales tonight for long weekend camping trip with friends. We’ll be stopping off in Aberdare first to stay the night at James’s parents, but then we’ll make our way to West Wales in search of a field close to St Davids, and more importantly White Sands where my aformentioned companions will be whiling away their days surfing and bodyboarding. My recent ailment sadly means I’m stuck on dry land where my ear won’t have a chance of getting wet.

So I’m wishing I’d been camping before as then I’d have some idea of what to pack. My landlocked status means I should be sure to take some entertaining books: fact, fiction and puzzle, but I’m really regretting not nicking my brothers’ psp (especially as he’s got a mega drive emulator, with Aladdin on it). I don’t even have a gameboy. Perhaps I could convince James to come ashore long enough for a game of frisbee?

I’m also worried as I don’t have any particularly sturdy shoes. My trainers died a death during an It’s a Knockout event I did with work a while back, and the rest of shoes are ballet pump/flats. Still, it’s not like I’ll be climbing Ben Nevis, like a certain project manager of ours…

My friend, Gill, an ardent camper recommends bringing lots of pasta. The upside of this is that I can make the one and only dish I can cook: Macoroni Cheese. Yum.

No doubt my flickr account will contain pics for the nosey or extremely bored to view when we get back.

In the meanwhile, at least the bit10 blog feed will have a rest from the relentness personal drivel i’ve been posting of late!

Update:

Apparently torches / head lamps, some sort of heat-generating device, and the address of the nearest B&B are the camping ‘must have’s’.

On a more work-related topic, I was quite intrigued to read Cathie’s post on Semacode and thought I’d have a play with the site.

Apparently this is bit10:

Update: A quick search through Flickr’s tags reveals a cluster devoted to pics of semacodes, along with a particularly interesting one of a semacode cut into a field, crop-circle style!