Blogger bother

I was annoyed about the recent outages, but they seem to have resolved. After two Blogger-less days, it occurred to me that the powers that be might well have resolved the situation by now, and I should clear the cache and cookies, then try logging in again, which I did. 

It's alive! It's alive, I tell you! *Maniacal laugh*

Group names

I've been messing about with the dictionary widget on igoogle and came across some rather funny words. What exactly is a clowder of cats? I know it's a group, but where do these words come from? And what would you call a group of nerds?


Hmm... Now I'm thinking. This is a dangerous thing. Okay, how about "a niggle of nerds"? "A program of geeks"?  "A forum of gamers"?


Can anybody think of a better term?

Favicon fun

I like to play with graphics and will try anything at least once. When I noticed those tiny pictures that show up in the top left corner of tabs and web address bars, I began to wonder a) what they are and b) how I could make my own if I wanted to. 

The answer is here, if you're interested. They're called favicons. When making your favicon, choose the hosting option, then go back to your blog and choose design/edit HTML and add the code they give you just before the closing </head> tag. Then voilà, you have a favicon of your very own.

Do you see what I mean about needing to get out more? That said, I do think it looks cool. I'm all pleased with myself now!

On blogging and the creation thereof

So I decided to start a new blog, the idea being to chronicle my assorted ramblings, which some people have told me are funny.

Prelude 

Okay, so I went trawling through the internet (read Google; I'm too lazy to use other search engines) to find some pictures to use, inspiration for my pen name and stuff to write about. Do you know that Google does the weirdest things when you're looking for images that are labeled for commercial reuse with modification? That's what you do to get pictures you can use on blogs and whatnot without getting into trouble for copyright violations. We'll get to how I discovered that later. The point is... well, there are several, actually:

1. You are less likely to find what you are looking for if you take the noble, honest (and free) route, i.e. search by "licensed for commercial reuse with modification"

2. You will find all sorts of weird stuff... well, stuff that's not necessarily weird but simply doesn't belong in those search results. Try working your way through Images/women/labeled for commercial reuse with modification and you'll get pictures of a city street, an old black and white picture of men playing soccer, pictures of women, Uncle Sam, a picture of an old building (it's a hospital), pictures of women, Daniel Craig as James Bond, some dude preaching or giving a lecture, pictures of women, Aussie former PM John Howard, a balding dude with a mic, a temple of some kind, two naked fairies that appear to be about to do a green dragon (see for yourselves!), a bowl of noodles...

3. You will think, 'Bugger that, I'll do something else.' So I did.

The Blog Begins

Then I went trawling through dictionaries and thesauruses to find a good name for my blog. It was going to be "Cal's Chronicles" (based on my old C.B. handle from back in the day. Guess how old I am!) but that's lame, so I had a bit of a chunter to myself and the title just came to me.  Then, because I couldn't find a suitable picture on t'internet I made my own.

Okay, I cheated, but only a bit. I mean, you can hardly tell, can you? It's late, so I'll write the first post tomorrow.