Today is St Patrick’s day and I have Irished myself. Actually I have Irished my Nana Mouskouri self from my friend Andreas’ Eurovision Party last year. What do you think?
Tourism Ireland has released this great little Facebook app to celebrate St Patrick’s Day.
Log on to Facebook and head to the GoToIrelandOz Facebook page to Irish yourself.
Go on, Irish yourself! You know you want to!
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One of the great things about my trip to New York was being able to watch a bunch of programs on Hulu. Hulu is a great service available in the US that lets you watch current programs over the Internet. There are a bunch of great shows on offer like House, Lost, Dollhouse and other shows not yet shown in Australia like Modern Family.
Unfortunately when I got back to Australia, licensing rules and IP addresses stopped me. When you try to watch anything, you get the Hulu black screen of nada.
How to set up Hulu to watch outside the US
Firstly, do not waste your time with a free service. I spent numerous hours researching the itnernet and trying a bunch of different free services. Hotspot Shield, FoxyProxy and IPHider do not work. You just cannot get a connection to the US that is fast enough and Hulu is shutting down most of these free services.
Your best bet is to purchase a US Based VPN. There are numerous VPN providers out there. Some even give you the ability to switch between the US and the UK, therefore allowing you to watch the BBC iplayer too!
As an added plus, a VPN will also help you get around this ridiculousness Internet filter that is being proposed by Communications Minister Senator Conroy. According to Adam Turner, writing for PC Authority:
“…the easiest way to access restricted content is to mask your location using a US-based Virtual Private Network. A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel from your computer to the VPN provider, who then connects you to the internet.”
(Thanks to Anthill for this quote)
Steps to watch Hulu in Australia
1. Check your internet connection speed. I have the Bigpond cable Ultimate and sometimes it still results in stuttery play. Go to www.speedtest.net and check your download speed to LA. If you get anything below 0.5Mbps then it’s probably not going to work for you.
2. Purchase a US VPN from a reputable company. I like StrongVPN.com because for $55/year you get the option of using a US or UK based IP address at one time. However, be careful as they do restrict the number of times you can switch between them.
3. Set up your new network (Your VPN provider will have the details) and connect
4. Start watching shows!
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It’s 2010 and I am in New York City! It is so cold, but this won’t stop me getting out and about!
While I am here in New York I hope to visit:
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019
There is a Tim Burton exhibition running until April that I hear is fantastic. You can also buy your tickets online beforehand which will save me having to queue up when I arrive.
Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Avenue New York, NY 10128
The Kadinsky, is coming to a close on Jan 13, 2010. The Guggenheim is currently exhibiting almost 100 paintings and 60 drawing spanning Kadinsky’s career from 1902 to 1942.
Jean Georges
1 Central Park West, New York NY 10023
My friend Daniel recommended the winter meneu at this 3 star Michelin restaurant. I can’t wait to try the Foie Gras Brulee and the Squab a L’Orange.
See my NYC map below for all the places I hope to visit!
View Ny Trip in a larger map
Airtoons is a parody site of airline safety cards and had me in stitches on planes in North America in 2000 when I recognised some of the images. From memory the purple magician featured heavily in the Canadian Airlines (RIP - I was on one of their last flights between Honolulu and Toronto) safety cards.
Thank you Airtoons guy for resurrecting your great website. You can now buy t-shirts and even have a custom airtoon portrait made – cool!
Link: http://www.Airtoons.com
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It seems to be the week I reminisce about my old employer, Expedia. Check out Tim Hughes’ thoughts on: Expedia trialling Wotif display format in Australia. Expedia.com.au has previously trialled this around 2006/2007.
Tim picked up on my tweet from last week:
“Just noticed that Expedia.com.au has @wotif like display for New York Hotels. Not the “prettiest” but functional http://bit.ly/5Avcoy”
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The Expedia.com.au blog has been surprisingly quiet recently. In fact the last post was over 7 months ago. Have they given up on the idea of the blog?
Expedia.com.au has been slow to embrace social media and their blog has been their only (correct me if I am wrong) foray into the social media world.
Judging by the number of comments it never really took off as a conversation starter, mainly a one way message.
Interstingly the blog is still linked to in the footer of the homepage, which, on a side note, has had a great makeover recently which seems to have triumphantly conquered in their A|B testing and is now permanent.
Interesting article in the SMH yesterday, claiming that Bebo is shutting down it’s operations in Sydney due to lack of traction in the Australian market. Facebook dominates the social media pace in Australia.
“According to Nielsen NetView for October, Facebook’s “unique audience” was 8.1 million, followed by YouTube on 5.8 million and Wikipedia (5.2 million). MySpace was steady on 2.3 million users while Bebo lagged well behind on 358,000.”
According to the General Manager, Francisco Cordero, Bebo focuses on the 13-24 market but Bebo struggled to get a foot hold here in Australia, and failed to really challenge either Facebook or Myspace.
Read the SMH article, Woe is Bebo: site to shut down in Australia by Paul McIntyre
Interesting Related Posts:
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Features
- Sync files across your computers effortlessly
- Access files via the Internet
- Dropbox comes with 2GB free storage
- Refer friends for an extra 250MB per referral
- Upgrade to 50GM for only $9.99/month or 100GB for $19.99/month
- Share folders with friends or co-workers
- iPhone App now available
- For the full list of features check the Dropbox website – Dropbox Features
Download
Download Dropbox now and get the new Dropbox iPhone app.
]]>I had to go an see the Shamu believe show which was fantastic. (However I could have lived with out the overly emotional sugary soundtrack and the “I had a dream” stories…)
I decided to sit in the Soak Zone to see what would happen….
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Krustyfries, who created the original site design and development, were engaged to implement a simple cost effective e-commerce solution to sell the bands extensive back catalogue and tour merchandise.
The site utilises FatFreeCart for the online shopping cart and Paypal to handle the payments.
Available on the site are 9 of the Bcaksliders full length CDs, posters and t-shirts.
The Backsliders latest mini album, Throwbacks is out on October 1 and is available for pre-order now at the Backsliders online store.
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