Chris Meistre

We love reading about and watching other people’s adventures as much as we like going on our own.  I’ve been wanting to buy the book of Ewan McGreggor and Charley Boorman even since I read somewhere about there epic adventure from Scotland to Cape Town on motorcycles.  I kept on hearing about it, but it kept slipping my mind to actually get the book when we’re in the bookstore.

Thursday we went to go get some movies after a awesome day at the Tweewater 4×4 Trail with a group of people from EC Offroad Adventures.  There was another series that we wanted to watch, but luckily for us it was out.  I spotted and immediately then took the Long Way Round series.  I thought I must’ve misheard the title previously, because I thought it was called Long Way Down.  After showering and getting the dogs fed we put on the DVDs.

I immediately saw I made a mistake by taking the wrong series, because actually wanted to take Long Way Down and this Long Way Round was a completely different series.  The reason we wanted to specifically see the Long Way Down series is because of the travels through Africa, something we want to tackle soon.  This however was one of those mistakes you don’t regret.

In Long Way Round Ewan McGreggor and Charley Boorman decide to drive around the world (London to London) on motorcycles.  They would do this by heading east through Russia and Mongolia amongst others.  Once we started watching it though, we couldn’t stop and we carried on until the early hours of Friday morning.

I think we could relate to a number of things they went through, the ups and downs of a trip, the thrill of the unknown and the fear of the unknown from our own little, in comparison, adventures.  Watching this made me feel more that I needed to get away and that is what I’m supposed to be doing.  One thing you don’t always realise, is the amount of planning that goes into a trip like that.  They started planning about 6 months before and as with everything in life, it definitely wasn’t easy.

Needless to say, they made the whole journey.  Otherwise they wouldn’t have made a series about it, would they?

On Friday when we dropped off the DVDs, we decided to get the other series as well.  The one I actually wanted to take, Long Way Down.  And then Friday night was spending watching the DVDs until early the next morning again. This is where Ewan and Charley start off in Scotland and drive all the way down to Cape Town on their BMW motorcycles.  They go right through the deepest darkest Africa

Someone told me they found these DVDs boring, and I can only think that is perhaps a person that isn’t really into having adventures like that, and rather treated the series as a normal TV series.

Oh great, another image search engine, do we really need more?  I think TinEye is an awesome little image search engine.  It’s completely different to other search engines.  With normal search engines you type in a keyword and then it shows you images based on that keyword.

With TinEye you can upload an image and ask it to search where on the web this image is located.  It doesn’t just work with the filename either, it analyses the content of the image. It even shows you images that are similar, i.e. including the same words.

Why would this be useful?

For one thing, you can search the Internet to find out who is using your company’s logo or any of your design work.  You can also use it to trace any incrimination pictures that get emailed to you to verify their authenticity.

A complete description of what TinEye can offer you is available.

There is even a Firefox extension available that allows you to just right click on any image and with a click of a button search the web to find more occurrences of the image.

With so much focus being put on social networking on the Internet, a lot more of our personal information is out there for everyone to see. I’m not one to be paranoid about these things, and always try and remember that whatever I’m putting out there will most likely be public knowledge from them on.  Sometimes I do see things that make me wonder though.

We make use of Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and various other forms of blogging and microblogging to let the world know what we’re up to. What we sometimes forget is that whatever we’re broadcasting might not just reach our friends, but in fact the whole world.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read about someone posting something on Facebook, forgetting that they’re “friends” with their boss. You can just search facebook fail in Google and you’ll quickly see loads of funny examples.

People have lost partners, jobs and friends because they post something without realising everyone can see it. Sure you can set privacy settings, but still, you never know what might be accidentally forwarded on.

The reason I’m thinking about this again is that in the last week I’ve seen many mentions of people saying they’re going to go away for the long weekend. It got me thinking that if I wasn’t such a good person I could find out where these people stay. And knowing that someone will not be home I could break in and steal some of their things. Just because I’m thinking it, doesn’t mean I will actually do it. So if you get back Monday and some of your stuff is gone and you read this, don’t come knocking on my door.

Criminals are a lot more clever than we give them credit for. Sometimes I look at ways that people get conned and I’m truly amazed at the methods and equipment used. Imagine where the world would be if they used that power for good? If I could think of this one scenario where someone can use a simple statement like “I’m away for the whole weekend” to break into your house, imagine the stuff they can come up with to watch out for.

I’m not saying start being paranoid and stop using the websites and forums you might be making use of.  Write anything you say on the Internet (and for that matter in email as well) keeping in mind that your words might be available to the whole world.  Think of that before you type any sentence and you’ll probably reduce you risk by 90%.

I’ve just come across the Free Traffic System. It allows you to register for a FREE account and then promotes your articles for you.

What I find interesting about this specific service is that when you submit your article, you get to search and chose on which blog and article sites you want it to go. This helps you place your articles in places that are specific to whatever you’ve written about.

Obviously with the FREE account you are limited to the amount of blog and articles sites you can submit to, but that limit is set at 30 sites per article. That’s still 30 highly targeted links back to your website… for FREE.

I just want to see if this generates any traffic to the website I promoted in the article and then I’ll upgrade to the paid account.

I’ve also been using Article Marketer which has approved 7 of my articles and it’s already being published in over 490 directories each. I’m monitoring the stats to see how much traffic I get from that.

At the most recent Ubucon it was announced, by Mark Shuttleworth himself, that the next major version of Ubuntu will be called Lucid Lynx.

This release carries on using the unique naming conventions the creators of Ubuntu make use of.

It has been explained the reason Lucid Lynx has been used is because the word lucid means to be clear and the lynx is a thoughtful predator. Both which are very good definition of what Ubuntu has become.

Here is a video clip from Youtube with Mark making the announcement.