GAME.com.au

If you’re buying from a game store, don’t think that you’re helping the local gaming shop (there’s not such thing anymore) because game is owned by the UK. They have an online ONLY price of $49.00. Prices will be more in-store, probably around the $58.00 mark.

ebgames.com.au

Next up we have ebgames. This time around, an American owned store. They’ve got the game listed on their site for $58.00.

JB HI FI

Another major retailer and once again, $58.00. You’d think with so many retailer they’d be a bit more competitive?

Here’s where Blizzard and I save you money! First you need to understand, or accept, that you are paying for a game that you install and play, not a box that sits on your shelf gathering dust… If you’re looking for the box mainly, I’ll be glad to print out a cataclysm poster and paste it on some cardboard. If you’re in it for the actual game, this is the best price you’re going to find, and it comes directly from Blizzard.

$39.99! Considering the US to AUD exchange rate at the moment, this is your cheapest option. Here is a link to xe.com displaying the current exchange for US$39.99 to AUD, but it’s around $40.50. This indicates to me that retailer believe that shipping from wherever the game is produced and a cardboard box is worth $18.00. I could make an epic box myself for $18.00! This $39.99 price is what Blizzard is offering as a digital download. People have also been worried that you won’t receive or obtain the cinematics for the expansion if you choose to go for the digital download, however blizzard has stated this as false. Here is a blue post(source) about it:

We’d like to take a moment to clarify how we’ll be delivering World of Warcraft: Cataclysm cinematics to players who purchase the expansion digitally through Battle.net or download the installer from the web in the future.

Prior to the December 7 launch of Cataclysm, all current World of Warcraft players will receive the Cataclysm intro cinematic as part of an upcoming patch. In addition, all other in-game cinematics (including previous ones such as the Wrathgate movie) will be available for download to players who have not previously installed them. These cinematics will be automatically downloaded in the background while you play the game, after other critical game data has been received.

So as you can see, before the expansion is even launched players will have the intro cinematic on their computers whether you get the digital download or not. This is more than likely to come with patch 4.0.3 which will be coming out before the release. Other in-game cinematics like wrathgate etc will be available to download. So in terms of cinematics, one has nothing to worry about.

So unless you’re desperate for a nearly empty box to sit on your shelf, I’d go for the digital download. It cuts down on a number of things along with saving you money. Less discs created, less boxes created and less miles needed.

But I’m not sure how much good this actually does. Sure, I’m all for raising awareness for Breast Cancer, but I can’t help see the negatives in these kinds of campaigns. First, it leaves men in the dark as only women update their statuses, while men are left to wander in the gutter while they think women are talking about the deed. Men (or women) who may not know any better may comment on said statuses and could be embarrassed or put to shame. It can also create an illusion for those that do update their statuses as such, that they are actually doing some good for the cause, but if there is no follow up support for the cause, the cause becomes trivial.

Twitter users have also put their hand up to help raise awareness and are doing a much better job, adding pink ribbons from twibbon.com to their profile pictures with a tweet of something like “Support Breast Cancer Awareness – add a #twibbon to your avatar now!” – which I think is much more effective and sharing than the secretive messages on facebook. However, “i like facebook status” is the number 1 Google search trend for today, with “i like it on the couch”, “i like it on the kitchen table” and “i like it on the counter” and more appearing in the top 20, which tells me facebook users are more confused than aware.

The NFL are also getting into it wearing pink shoes, gloves, and chin-straps for games in the month of October…

So what do you think? Are these viral facebook and twitter campaigns worth it? Do they raise awareness? Does it make things trivial? Let me know in the comments below!

This is just a quick post as I noticed that after my recent brief review of Things by CultureCode, there were a couple of searches that brought people to my site, and specifically, those people were looking for “Things exporting todo items culturecode” – and I thought I pitch in and try and find these people a solution and oh how easy it is!

I’m going to assume that the searches were for an export from Things to something where you can print or save your todo items and send them somewhere. I’m just going to give you a quick demonstration via a couple images.

First, looking in your Things window, you should have your items that you want to export in front of you, and have them selected, like so:

Next, open up your favourite text program, whether it be Pages, Word or even TextEdit and all you need do is drag and drop your selected ‘todos’ into the program, like so:

And now you can do whatever you’d like with your list, print, send, email, whatever! Clicking and Dragging isn’t limited to word processing programs either, you can copy straight into a new email.

Well, that’s it for this post. I hope it helped you in some way and it once again shows you how great this program is for keeping lists!

Note: If this list is on you iPad or iPhone or iPod, sync it with your computer first and then you can do what you wish!

Cheers.

Robbie.

Greetings everybody. Last time we touched base I showed you a neat little application called Things that help you make lists and notes of your things to-do. This time around I’ll be showing you a neat little tool that can help you with all your finances.  As a freelancer you are your own everything. You are the designer, the writer, the manager, the artist, the janitor, the coffee maker and even the financial director of sorts. It’s a good idea to get an accountant for when it’s time to do that stuff that only an accountant could know how to do, but in between, how can you keep track of everything your accountant needs? Enter Billings by Marketcircle.

Billings can help you keep track or your financial going-ins and coming-outs and gives you more time to focus on your work and your clients. It has many features that can help you on your freelancing adventures, but I’ll mention just a few of my favourite to give you an idea of what it’s all about.

The first feature that I’d like to show you and which is by far my favourite, is the automatic timer that attaches itself to the mac menu-bar and counts the hours and minutes that you work. It makes tracking your freelanced hours so much easier as it take care of it for you. Even if you go idle or away from the computer for a set time, it will stop recording and ask where you got to! It not only helps you keep track of time, but you can use the time against a multiplication for your hourly rate, and it generates the amount automatically.

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It can then take that amount that was generated and put it into that client’s specific account (which you set up earlier) and create a invoice and statement. You can modify the current invoice templates or create your own inside the application. Once you’ve set up your business details and your templates and you’re happy with the preview provided, it becomes a one click invoicing tool, which opens up your mail with your client’s details in the email ready to go.

There is also an iPhone/iPod Touch application that you can use to keep track while you’re out and about, such as expenses or mileage tracking, as well as the timed feature like the Mac application. The app is free from iTunes, however, some key features, such as the all important sync from your device to your Mac require an in app purchase of $17.99. I believe this price to be a little steep, but only because I haven’t absolutely needed it yet.

This is just the beginning of a fantastic application that has so many features that I could only pick out a couple of my favourites to write about in this post. However, you can head to the application’s website to get more of an idea of it’s features. I highly recommend Billings for a small business of any kind, but I find it especially appealing because of the track time feature. A copy of Billings will currently set you back US$49.95 for 1 user. Pretty cheap considering the power of this application.

]]> http://www.robbiecoutts.com/billings/feed/ 0 http://www.robbiecoutts.com/things/ http://www.robbiecoutts.com/things/#comments Wed, 26 May 2010 15:00:38 +0000 Robbie http://www.robbiecoutts.com/?p=142 OK, so I kind of wanted to write something on here just for the sake of it. I don’t want it to go to waste while I pay yearly for a domain name and web hosting. That’s like, buying shoes and walking in bare feet. I never walk in bare feet. I always wear shoes and socks, always. Inside (not shoes), outside, even at the beach. Yep, I wear my shoes and socks to the beach. And you know what, I have some of the softest feet going around because of it. Anyway, back to what I was talking about before going off on this crazy analogy… I don’t want to waste what I’ve got, so here I am posting to you.

I wanted to let you in on some of the cool little going ons that I’ve found recently. Having announced my latest endeavour of a new business – or for lack of a better term, my freelance design identity – I’ve found a few little gems that perhaps you might be interested in. These are small little things that you, the aspiring business Entrepreneur (did I use that term correctly?), can possibly use on your own endeavour to build that little idea into something bigger.

First of all, a little disclaimer… I use a Mac. I have nothing against PC users, that’s totally fine, each to their own and all that. But if you’re looking for things to help your business on your PC, you’re mostly at the wrong place. If you’re undecided or have neither a Mac or PC and are looking to purchase, perhaps this will tip the scale one way or the other. Anyhow, I’m now going to introduce you to a couple of things that have helped me so far in the setting up/running of a business and what I believe will continue to help me in the coming stages of my business.

First up organisation. I’m probably the LEAST organised person that I know of and anything that can help me to organise myself is… Lists! I love writing lists, it puts all the jumble in my brain into somewhat of a chronological order and allows me to address each issue/problem/thought one at a time. When you think of lists, you probably think, piece of paper for each list, write each item down, do the task, cross it off. And I know that ‘cross off’ is such a good feeling! However, I didn’t want to have to write everything down, waste paper, or lose bits of paper and have to try and find list items that I had or hadn’t completed. That’s when I came across a nice little app called Things.

Things

Things is a nice little application for the Mac that makes your task management so much easier! The layout is easy to navigate around, making it simple to start making instant ‘Things’ that you might need to do for that day, or the next, or any day in the future! You can organise your tasks into projects or areas of responsibility and it integrates with basically everything on your Mac. It syncs with iCal and of course syncs with the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad app of the same name, allowing you to add things to do on the fly and update your Mac at a later stage. Things is the most popular paid task manager in the entire iTunes App Store. I love it, it gets everything out of my head and onto paper. And of course, it looks sexy as! Go take a look at the Things pages on CultureCode’s website!

You can head to the website right now and try out a fully functional trial version of Things. For the first 15 days of using Things in trial mode you’ll be able to use every function. Once the trial has ended, you will still be able to view and export your things, but changes made inside the application won’t be saved. If you wish to continue working on your lists inside of things, you’ll need to purchase the license code or serial number. The purchase price for this fantastically useful application is a low $69.95 AUD or $49.95 USD. A small price to pay for organisation.

I’m going to leave this little app with you before I continue on with some of the other little things I’ve discovered recently. I’ll hopefully post something in the next couple of days.

You may have also noticed, if this isn’t your first time here of course, that I’ve taken on a new theme. This is not my own work of art, but that of Derek Punsalan from 5thirtyone.com. The theme is called Grid Focus, and that is what it is. A beautiful WordPress theme focused on Grids. I really like the format and I’m happy for it to be a placeholder until I have the time and motivation to come up with my own thing! Go check it out!

That’s it from me.

Cheers.

There were some really fantastic ideas coming in and I’d like to really thank you all for your contributions. You definitely gave me some ideas to think about. However, I didn’t feel like I really found what I was looking for. So unfortunately, no one has won the prize of the iPod shuffle… yet… But stay tuned, because you’ll be given another chance to win this fantastic prize and this time it will be even easier! But now for the good news…

After all the submissions I decided to sit down again and see what I could come up with myself, even though having tried numerous times already. Fortunately this time I was finally able to come up with something that I really liked and thought could work. So, After I came up with the name, played around with logos for a bit I had such success that I registered the domain nearly straight away, and thus, it was born.

I would like to introduce you to…

Leafkit! Sustainable Multimedia Design & Development.

What do you think? Like it? Hate it? Something you would change? Honestly, I’m open to ideas, although I have already registered the domain and started on the design obviously! Anyway, I’d love to know what you think of it. The site is currently in “Under Construction” mode, but will be up and running soon I promise! So tell your friends about it!

Now, as for the competition… the Green iPod shuffle, is still up for grabs for anyone. This time, you don’t have to think about anything, no use of your intellect whatsoever!  How good is that?! So, what is it that you need to do? Well, now that the pages are up and running, I’d love for you to go along to Leafkit’s own Facebook page and/or follow Leafkit on Twitter! It’s that simple. Become a fan, follow on twitter or facebook, and be in the running!

Now that it’s established and primarily up and running, I would also like to inform everyone that Leafkit is open for business and happy to provide you with professional design services. Anything that you need! If you’re interested in the services we provide, feel free to shoot me an email to …

Once again thanks for visiting my site! Please come back soon!

Cheers.

Robbie.

Ok, so here’s the deal. I’ve decided to start getting back into my design work, including but not limited to web design, logo design etc. I’ve got a plan worked out, but the problem I’m having is… coming up with a name for, i guess you could say, the ‘business’. I’ve had a couple of ideas, but it’s hard to come up with something that is unique, interesting, available in domain registration and available for business name registration. It seems that everything I’ve come up with so far is taken in some aspect and sends me back to the drawing board. This is where you come into it…

I’m giving one lucky person the great opportunity to name my new business identity and if chosen, be the winner of a green iPod shuffle! Even if I don’t choose your idea directly, I may choose to follow the direction of your idea in which case you will still be awarded the prize! Here’s the scope: I want to be able to provide design products and services to everyone and anyone that needs it at reasonable prices, and I want to provide these products with the client’s products hopefully being carbon neutral. Hence the green.

Yes, computers, websites and the internet do use energy, directly and indirectly. Carbon offsetting these products means offsetting the the computers used to create the products as well as the servers that hold their websites to reduce their carbon footprint. Think about facebook, which is just such a huge website… Well somewhere in the world, there are servers (like big computers) that are turned on 24/7 to make sure people can access it. That is a lot of computers that never get turned off and use up a large amount of energy, not to mention the millions of people that access it everyday using their own computer.

UPDATE: In summary: All I’m looking for at the moment is a name. Something relevant to the scope of my brand, which is carbon offsets and reasonable prices. Hopefully this clarifies things a little further.

So that’s basically it. That’s my idea. But yep, can’t think of a name. That’s the only thing holding me back so far. So… do you think you’ve got what it takes? Think you can come up with a unique, interesting business name for me? If so, you can email me: rjcoutts (at) gmail (dot) com (replace the at and the dot of course) or you can leave your idea in the comments…

Thanks for reading! Hope you can come up with something new and fantastic!

Cheers.

An idea or concept may or may not be chosen, therefore a prize may or may not be awarded. Only a chosen idea or concept will be the recipient of said prize. Submitting ideas and or concepts transfers the rights of said idea or concept to the author of this post therefore ownership is obtained by the Author. Cheers.

As you can see from the picture and the witty title, I am getting back into the swing of things. This means I’ll be posting a lot more often with interesting (mostly) bits of information for you all. The first bit of information I’m going to release to you guys is basically the whole reason how I made it to this point. You see, for the past year, I’ve been avoiding this website like the plague, because I was afraid. Yep, scared of a website. Why? Because it was in such a mess and I didn’t know how I was going to fix it up. I made a couple of attempts in the past few months, but today, having nothing to do, decided to sit down and have a real go at it, and I did. I’m about to go into some Internet techno-babble here so be warned… For those of you that know WordPress at all, you might know that it’s up to version 2.9.1 right about now… well, I was still on version 2.0.2 with only a manual upgrade possible. So yeah, I tried numerous times to export and import my database in Wordpress to a new one, but was constantly greeted by errors and confusion. So, I did probably what I should have done some time ago and searched the WordPress forums! And Alas I found my solution!

Basically I wanted to export from an older WordPress database to an upgraded fresh install WordPress database. Sounds simple, and I didn’t think it was, but it turns out that it is. So what did I do? After my searching I was lead to the WordPress-to-Wordpress Import Plugin from the guys over at Technosailor.com. At first I thought it too good to be true, but from seeing the comments of 3,000+ I decided to give it a crack. Lo and behold I was finally & safely able to export my precious precious posts, pages and comments. The next part I also wasn’t too sure about, but WordPress has advanced so much that I was simply able to import everything with one click! So here I am, writing in a brand new user interface, installing themes and plug-ins like nobodies business and using little funky things like widgets!

WIDGETS ARE AWESOME!

Anyway, from here on out you can expect to find me posting more often, hopefully with some points that you might find interesting. I tried to use my previous custom theme but as it was built for the previous version is didn’t seem to want to work. So the theme you’re seeing at the moment is just a theme I picked from the ‘featured’ in the theme section of WordPress. It’s the ‘Piano Black Theme’ created by mono-lab. It’s a pretty sexy theme and is compatible with widgets. I hope to be recreating my own theme in the near future and hope it to look as good if not better than this one!

A few other things on the horizon, I plan to re-start my freelance design work, including web design and such. If you’re looking for someone to build and/or maintain a website for you or your company, feel free to give me a shout and I’ll be happy to help you out. Not just websites too, logos, business cards, invitations, the works! Also keep an eye out for a couple of brand new web sites I’ll be starting that some people may find interesting.

Well, that’s about it for now I think. I will definitely be posting more and more so bookmark me and follow my RSS feed!

Thanks for reading!

Cheers.

I don’t know if you all experience it like I do, but when you stop declaring ‘fan mail’ as ‘fan mail’ and start declaring it as ‘spam’ – that’s when you realise you’ve lost the passion. It’s no longer about the people but more so about the money and the fame, and it’s not what I wanted to become. So I’ve decided to make a comeback. I’ve stopped living the life of a star and have come back to my roots… And this is where it starts, my first blog in a year and a bit.

Now, after all this time of neglect and abandonment, are you, my people, the fans, even still out there? If I can just reach one of you perhaps that will be just enough for that one person to spread the word that I’m back. A wise-man once said “Post, and they will come.” – I don’t remember who it was but I’m sure he was old and wise. I imagine him in a robe of sorts, holding a staff, and he says it to me with a hand on my shoulder. He also has a long white beard, which I’m tempted to pull to see if it’s real… oh crap… it is…

So… people of the interwebs… I am back! Go, spread the word. May you enlighten people of possibly one of the best comebacks of all time. Me! And don’t worry, I am dedicated to bringing you more of what I used to bring you. Whatever that was. News? I dunno, whatever…

UPDATE: This post is no longer relevant. Don’t bother clickin on the links below! Cheers.

So at Tafe I am currently working on my Final Project, which is a Management Project where we can do pretty much anything we want (God I hate open briefs!). For my project I have chosen to create a “Choose your own adventure website” with a twist. With 2 twists actually…

The first twist is who writes the story… You! That’s right, you can write your own part in the story… This is where I need your help! Please go to the submissions page and submit your own part of the story! Feel free to submit as many stories as you wish, and just maybe your story will be chosen!

The second twist is… For each part or page that is chosen, I will create a piece of art that will represent the part or page of that story… If that makes sense… Well, that’s the plan anyway…

So please, go to the submissions page and help a fella out!
It would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers!