Some simple poetry

So I had been helping out my kids do poetry some time ago (a couple of years or so) and had written a couple of rather bad limericks.  I found them just now and have decided to share them with the world, enjoy. There once was a giant bowl of soup That was made from …

Calhoun Surf

Recently I've been getting into classic vintage surf rock. People like Dick Dale, The Astronauts, and The Ventures. This has come about from getting back into the Dead Kennedys and noticing a very surf/rockabilly sound to the guitar work. I did some reading and indeed the Dead Kennedys guitarist, East Bay Ray, came from a surf/rockabilly background. While getting into the …

My TEDx talk is now on YouTube

As I posted last week, I did a talk for TEDxUWA. It's now been posted up onto YouTube by the lovely people at Taku TV. I've put the link for the talk on my talk page or you can get to it directly on this YouTube link. Thanks to everyone who has watched the video or read …

I delivered a TEDx talk

Last Saturday afternoon, I did a talk for TEDxUWA:Masterpiece the inaugural micro-conference of a new TEDx organisation in WA, TEDxUWA who are in their first year of operation.  This was a fantastic experience if a bit boundary pushing for me. This was the first time I had planned, written, rehearsed and delivered a full talk, with some …

HTML safe and escaped text in a rails view

In my skilling up in Rails application I was wanting to add in the feature to allow a user's comment/post, if it contained a URL, to make that URL clickable. A fairly simple change but one with a bit of a trick on Rails as it turns out. My first attempt was fairly straight forward. …