Over the Christmas break, I spent about 50 hours or so putting together an initial design and release of a new photo gallery – the result is Modus InOperandi.

The plan is that this will be my semi-professional site – eventually including a service where prints of selected photographs can be ordered from (I found a pretty good service that has a well-recommended API – but more on that later).

This also means that I’ll be starting to think about rebuilding Horus Kol to be a dedicated blog (in Drupal), and probably remove most of the galleries. That probably won’t happen until sometime over next month or so – as I’ll still be adding features and content to Modus InOperandi.

In the meantime – enjoy the photographs over on the new site. There are some old and some new ones there – including fireworks shots taking on New Year’s thanks to my new remote-shutter-release for the SLR.

The more astute reader may have noticed the change in the address bar – this is now horuskol.net.

Not much of a change, to be honest – but the reasoning is that I am slowly winding down my .co.uk domains and will likely be moving my own sites out onto hosting in Australia, while finding others to take on the Scouts and clubs’ sites I currently have, too.

Why .net? Well, .com is really supposed  to be for commercial organisations, and .org for not-for-profit organisations. .net is a good domain for anything else, really.

Don’t worry – you don’t have to do anything – all the .co.uk links should simply be diverted to .net.

With that said – I’m off to find someone to take on those other sites.

New Year’s Resolutions haven’t really ever been my thing – I tend to just review and set new objectives whenever I feel like a stretch or a change of direction.

And, in all honesty, these aren’t really new year’s resolutions again – that’s mostly just a coincidence. The timing is more down to the fact that I’ve had most of a month for some reflection.

So, I have some new goals in life:

Lose weight

My more recent attempts to lose weight have been somewhat less enthusiastic than half-hearted, meaning that I’ve been settled at 120-125kg for a while now.

My aim is to make it all the way down to 90kg as soon as possible. Thankfully, my family are all joining in on losing weight (although, they don’t have as far to go). We’re actually putting into a kitty, and the person who loses the most in a month gets the kitty.

Part of losing weight is diet – which I’ve got planned and sorted. And part of it is activity – so rejoining the gym, and getting up and using it is another goal.

Take more photos and publish them more often

There is something going on somewhere all the time – and my aim is to get my camera out to these events and take pictures as much as possible – and then publish them here on the website.

See more of the country

Obviously, this will help me take more photos, and give me more to write about.

I already have a trip to Melbourne being planned for the end February – I’m going to take the train down there, and fly back. Eventually, I’d like to take the train from Adelaide out in all directions (Melbourne, Perth, Darwin, Sydney) – just to say I’ve done it.

Get a car

And this will help me see more of South Australia – I have no idea what I want, and I keep swinging between a VW Camper (mobile kitchen and bedroom), a station wagon (better roadhandling – plus enough room to sleep in it), or a Mini Cooper (just as a style thing).

I’ll probably end up getting some ten-year old station.

So, that’s what I’ve set myself as goals for the next few months – I’m looking forward to it.

The email account I setup for my new Random Tweak site received a notice of someone posting a comment – I got all excited at that, since I haven’t yet made a real effort at getting the word out there.

So, I was a bit letdown when I got there and it was a spam comment for viagra.

It amazes me that spam comments are still so prevalent these days – over HTML Forums, we are regularly hit by spam posts which are vigorously (and humourously) dealt with by the moderating staff. But the continued spamming of sites and blogs shows that it is still a viable strategy for spammers – which means that many other sites are not as discerning about what gets posted on their site (which will actually have a bad effect on their search engine rankings in the not-so long run).

It also means that they are generating sales through the links (or, worse, getting enough credit card details to steal from) – at least enough to make the exercise profitable. Seriously, though, who in their right mind is supplying these spammers with their credit card details?

I always think twice before providing any details to anyone over the internet – even when I’m trying to get into my bank account, I’m very careful to make sure I’m at the right site (very important since mybank.com.au is VERY different to mybank.co.uk).

But there are a bunch of people out there who must be going “oh, cheap viagra” or “oh, free iphone” and freely giving away their 16 digits and home address details to god knows who in god knows where.

Still – as long as it is profitable for spammers to be so blatant about it, it makes my life easier by making it easier to spot – so I guess I should be grateful for the rather gullible public at large.