The Machets’ Blog

It’s my birthday today - the 31st of December. Happy New Years’ Eve!

Microsoft recently launched Office 12, the next version in the Office series, to be released late next year (2006) or early the following. I have been given the opportunity to beta test it.

A fully written review of each product will be made available on The Machets’ Blog over the next few weeks. As far as I have seen, the product has become far more powerful than before. Many of the

features existed in previous versions of Office, however they were not easy to locate and use. Office 12 offers a simple, easy to use interface and has major positive differences between Office XP and 2003. Please be advised that until the office suite comes out of beta 1, it is referred as “Office 12.” It will later be renamed to something like Office 2006/7 or Office Vista. Nobody is sure at this point in time.

I will be adding screenshots of Office 12 and its programs onto The Machets’ Website as each program is reviewed.

Update 31/3/06: Microsoft Office 12 has been renamed to Microsoft Office 2007. This post has been added to the Microsoft category.

Two Arabs boarded a flight out of London. One took a window seat and the other sat next to him in the middle seat. Just before takeoff, an American sat down in the aisle seat.

After takeoff, the American kicked his shoes off, wiggled his toes and was settling in when the Arab in the window seat said,”I need to get up and get a beer”.

“Don’t get up,” said the American, “I’m in the aisle seat. I’ll get it for you”.

As soon as he left, one of the Arabs picked up the American’s shoe and spat in it. When he returned with the beer, the other Arab said, “That looks good, I’d really like one, too”. Again, the American obligingly went to fetch it.

While he was gone the other Arab picked up his other shoe and spat in it too. When the American returned, they all sat back and enjoyed the flight.

As the plane was landing, the American slipped his feet into his shoes and knew immediately what had happened.

“Why does it have to be this way?” he asked. “How long must this go on? This fighting between our nations? This hatred? This animosity? This spitting in shoes…… pissing in beers?”

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas for today, and a Happy Chanukkah for tonight and the next 8 days!

If you have scoured the internet for the answer to your questions, you’ve been wasting your time. A new service has been created called Yahoo! Answers, where people all over the world can read and respond to your quieries. The service uses a points system where contributers collect points when they answer a question or rate answers.

The creation of Yahoo! Answers doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t still search the internet for simple questions. The service could be incorrect as anyone answers them, however a good element to Answers is that contributers can put in a reference.

You can ask anything you like on Yahoo! Answers, the only catch is that there is a limit and you need a Yahoo! ID. It’s a great service but be warned - you can get hooked! Visit answers.yahoo.com and start asking!

A wealthy old lady decides to go on a photo safari in Africa, taking her faithful aged poodle named Cuddles, along for the company.

One day the poodle starts chasing butterflies and before long, Cuddles discovers that she’s lost. Wandering about, she notices a leopard heading rapidly in her direction with the sole intention of having lunch.

The old poodle thinks, “Oh, oh! I’m in deep doo-doo now!” Noticing some bones on the ground close by, she immediately settles down to chew on the bones with her back to the approaching cat.

Just as the leopard is about to leap, the old poodle exclaims loudly, “Boy, that was one delicious leopard! I wonder if there are any more around here.”

Hearing this, the young leopard halts his attack in mid-strike, a look of terror comes over him and he slinks away into the trees. “Whew!” says the leopard, “That was close! That old poodle nearly had me!”

Meanwhile, a monkey who had been watching the whole scene from a nearby tree, figures he can put this knowledge to good use and trade it for protection from the leopard. So off he goes but the old poodle sees him heading after the leopard with great speed, and figures that something must be up. The monkey soon catches up with the leopard, spills the beans and strikes a deal for himself with the leopard.

The young leopard is furious at being made a fool of and says, “Here, monkey, hop on my back and watch what’s going to happen to that conniving canine!”

Now, the old poodle sees the leopard coming with the monkey on his back and thinks, “What am I going to do now?”. But instead of running, the dog sits down with her back to her attackers, pretending she hasn’t seen them yet, and just when they get close enough to hear, the old poodle says: “Where’s that damn monkey? I sent him off an hour ago to bring me another leopard!”

It is relatively difficult to find a good, fast and accessible RSS reader. I briefly introduced the idea and convenience of a RSS in my first post, but never properly explained it.

The average person does generally not visit the same websites on a daily basis to see what has been added and updated. As blogs (short for weblog; an online journal) have become very popular over the last few years, people wanted to read only the new content of a website. The next step was to get a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) reader. As something new is added to a blog or news feed, subscribers can get instant notifications when they go to their RSS reader. It’s like checking only the mail you want that’s addressed to the world; like an up-to-the-minute newsletter.

There are many RSS readers avaliable. One of the best is Google Reader, simply because you can access it anywhere in the world (like a web-based email service). Google Reader is not intrusive and is very simple to use. Another user-friendly tool, called R-Mail, delivers each seperate post to your email inbox, so you never miss anything.

RSS technology has been around for a long time but only recently has it become popular and easy to use. You should look for the small orange RSS or XML image if you’d like to subscribe to a feed such as The Machets’ Blog or The Age Headlines, or your online reader’s add image (For Example, Google Reader has the image ).

On The Machets’ Blog, you can simply click on any of the reader images on the right of the homepage to have it added to your favourite reader instantly. RSS is a great way for people to read up to the minute information, from news to jokes to absolutely anything else!

To subscribe to a feed with Rmail, all you need to do is copy the link (something like http://website.com/feed.xml), go to r-mail.org and fill in the link and your email address. To get going with Google Reader, go to reader.google.com and follow the instructions.

A recently added short programme to Google Video is quite interesting and will tell you just how important it is to keep away from a 747 jumbo at full thrust. Basically, they drive a Ford Mondeo and Citroen 2CV behind Virgin Atlantic 747 at takeoff speed.

To view this video at its actual page, please go to youtube.com.

EDIT: Video added into post & change of category.

If you’re a person who wants to publish photos on the internet but doesn’t know how to, don’t worry! We have found a solution for you. Free Image Hosting lets you upload as many images online as you want. It’s completely free and even lets you create a Gallery for all to see. If you want to publish a few images, you can simply add them from the homepage, without creating an account. However, if you create an account, you would have more control over your images and would be able to delete them. Members are not added to any spam mailing lists and can maintain a number of galleries.

Overall, this website is excellent for almost everyone’s needs. The only drawbacks of this service are that you are restricted to uploading only gif, jpg, bmp and png images that are under 300kb in size, and that you can only upload one image at a time. Hotlinking is allowed for auctions, blogs and forums; not for large or commercial websites. Otherwise, this service is fantastic and should satisfy the highest of expectations. For these reasons, we give Free Image Hosting a four and a half out of five.

Visit Free Image Hosting and start publishing your digital photos online!

Update 14/10/06: Free Image Hosting has a redesigned website and allows you to upload images up to 3,000KB in size.