TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

I must be a bit of a social networking junkie because I seem to have a profile on just about any major social network you can name. Now I've created a profile on WeeWorld.com the site where you can create a WeeMee avatar of yourself (see mine on the right). This profile wasn't one I intentionally planned to create. Another site, Friends Reunited , gave me the option to create a WeeMee Avatar and before I knew it I was sent to WeeWorld where I got hooked in enough to recreate my studio as my WeeWorld Room . I guess the site appealed to me because it has a kind of 'South Park' (the TV Show) cuteness about it. It's a bit like living in your own South Park cartoon but without anyone out to get Kenny (or are they?). Whether I maintain the profile is another thing entirely but for now it's a fun distraction.

The Orphan Works Bill consists of some new US laws around Copyright issues that could potentially cause you to loose your Copying Rights on anything you create from the very moment you make it. The Bill is currently on it's way for consideration by US congress and hopefully will be rejected and put to death with your support. This bill will affect copyright holders world wide if passed so even if you're somewhere other than the US it's worth keeping yourself informed. I'm certainly no expert on this bill so my limited understanding is this. Should someone wish to use your creation for commercial gain and they can't identify or find you as being the copyright holder (after taking reasonable steps to locate you) then your creation could be deemed an 'orphan work' and therefore 'fair game' for anyone to use as they please. The implications are much worse for copyright holders if you research this issue further - which I encourage you to do so you get th...

Is CafePress the right service for you if you're looking to sell prints of your art? Dan, from Empty Easel recently reviewed CafePress in this article, CafePress.com: Where Art Becomes. . . Stuff , giving a less than ethusiastic endorsement. Dan later reviewed a CafePress competitor, Zazzle , in this article, My Review of Zazzle.com: Printable Products and Posters on Demand , in which he rated the site slightly above Cafepress but still not ideal. In both reviews I agree with his conclusions since he is coming from the perspective of sites and their suitability for selling framed art prints. In both reviews he recommends Imagekind or Red Bubble as better options with more choice for buyers. However, I do think his review of Cafepress came across a little more harshly because he did limit his conclusions to what the site offers in the way of framed prints and posters. Dan made no mention that some types of art might be better suited to Cafepresses entire range of products than o...

I was recently informed that Satanism is dumb because: "The first rule of Satanism is to 'do what you want' therefore, if you follow any of the rules after that, that is someone else telling you what to do and not you 'doing what you want'. Hence Satanism is dumb." I don't know the rules of Satanism and I'm paraphrasing this revelation from someone who promptly declared themselves to be very smart. So smart, in fact, they thought they might inform the Satanist 'Pope' at their first opportunity. My article was prompted because this person was very pleased with their conclusion and, at the time, I didn't want to lock horns with such a theological master. (Notice how I'm using big words like 'theological' and 'revelation' to make it sound like I actually know something about this subject - I had to look both words up just to check I was using them in the correct context by the way). Back to the rules of Satanism (which I su...

You may have noticed that I haven't posted to this blog for quite some time. That's largely been due to a lack of motivation on my part. If all has gone well, on the top right of this post you should see an interesting image of a blogger talking with his hand along with the text 'Blah, Blah, Blog'. In many respects this is how I've felt about writing of late. Why bother if you don't really have anything of great value to say? In an attempt to break the drought of posts, this post is to inform you of a new image hosting service called PicApp which breaks through all the legalities of using copyright images through ad supported image hosting of pictures provided by publishers willing to let their images be used in this way. The image on this post comes from PicApp and demonstrates how the ads appear on an embeded image. Supposedly the ads are relevant to content (I wonder if this breaches Google's Adsense terms in any way?). However, what makes the concept co...

I remember when toothpaste was sold in a metal tube. Back then, as a child, you'd cop it from Mum or Dad if you squeezed the tube anywhere but from the bottom. You could even buy special keys that would wind the toothpaste tube up from the bottom so you could get every last bit of paste - no wastage. Then along came the plastic tubes. Finally you could squeeze anywhere and the tube would retain its shape - or so they said in the sales pitch. For the most part this was true. It wasn't as much of a problem squeezing the new plastic tube from the top. Squeezing toothpaste from the tube was now easy - or so you thought. The thing about squeezing the tube from the top (or even the middle) is that it leaves some of the paste at the bottom. Eventually you do have to spend extra time pushing the paste from the bottom up into the top of the tube. Not like the old days when squeezing from the bottom meant you got just the right amount of paste and the tube was always ready for the next p...

I happened to catch the final episode of the documentary Gamer Revolution on ABC2 last night and I was totally blown away with just how much the computer game industry has progressed. If you're interested to read a more detailed summary of the topics covered in the documentary there is a good article on CBC-TV's web site . Although I knew the computer gaming industry is worth millions more than the Hollywood movie industry and I've heard about online games/worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life it's an area of computing that has largely passed me by. I'm just not interested in spending hours upon hours playing computer games (though I am partial to the occasional game of Tomb Raider ). What gob smacked me the most about this episode was the story about a man who runs an online business to 'power level' a player's character in various online gaming worlds. Here's how this works... Say you're playing an online game where the top power lev...