The Burmese Python (Python Molurus Bivittatus), is the largest subspecies of the Indian Python and one of the 6 biggest snakes in the world, native to rain forest areas of Southeast Asia. (An excerpt from Wikipedia). There is now one living in my office. (Not an excerpt from Wikipedia).

Some may know that I have quite a passion for reptiles; such as my fiancée, friends or clients to Zen Elements who have visited once or twice before. Recently (being this summer) I began a small operation boarding reptiles for people while they are away on holiday, in research and planning of a new venture in 2009.

A month or two back now, I had an Albino Burmese Python stay and I have to say, she was gorgeous. Over the two-weeks I was looking after her, I have to admit I became quite fond of her and was a little saddened to have her owner come pick her up after having had a lovely holiday away… B*****d! =P

HOWEVER! In my local reptile centre (Strictly Exotics – an excellent little place I must add!) a beautiful Burmese Python had come in… I had him out straight away!

No two-ways about it, this ‘little’ blighter just had me sold. He had a lovely temperament, loving attention while liking time to himself as well and didn’t I mention… he was just beautiful! Well, I was decided on it… however, there is a ‘but’. My home is not just ‘my’ home but home to myself and Maya! At least, very soon to be (: So the next task was to persuade her if we could get him… *fingers crossed*

All I can say, snake or no snake, I really do love her. It took some time (..two weeks..) but Maya agreed kindly that we could have him stay with us, seeing first how things go.. and as long as there was a lock or twenty on his vivarium!

So, that very same day, we went to pick him up and here are some pictures of him.
(many more to follow I am sure too…)

We are still trying to think of a name for him too…

- Hebi…? Snake in Japanese, Maya’s suggestion.
- Bo (Bo-Staff)…? My B.Dragons are called, Sai & Little Sai.

SO, your comments / suggestions on a name will be welcome!
Maya and I look forward to hearing them! =D

Take care every one!
Alex | Zen & Maya

Plurk Badges have been released to the Plurk community, awarded based on merit. These standard badges I have also detailed below, however, I wanted to play a little and so got to work developing the PLURK:CSS to add in a badge (or two) of my own.

When I informed my friends what I had managed to write, it became a popular request that I release the code, so I am here to share with you how it can be done… “if it can be done”. You are welcome to use any of the code and images I have written without credit, although it is always appreciated.

Limitations:

1. This will only work if you have already successfully been awarded a genuine Plurk Badge. The reason for this is that the layer and images we edit, are only incorporated into the profile at this time.
2. If you are awarded more than three genuine badges, say goodbye to this working on the first code, I do however have the further CSS trick which is detailed below. Just keep an eye on your badges!

MAKING YOUR NEW PLURK:CSS BADGE
Step 1. Create a blank canvas: 39 x 39 pixels.
Step 2. Go nuts creating your badge (…extensive tutorial here)
Step 3. Save your new badge, I’ve found a .png works well here

Some Badge Ideas (…or free to use)!

* please feel to use any of the above badges and the last one (the enso) is a little tribute to Zen Elements, if you so wish to do so :-))

CODING YOUR PLURK:CSS BADGE (single, double or tripple badges)
.award_bar {
width: 200px;
}
.award_bar img {
padding-right: 48px;
background: url(your_badges_url) no-repeat right;
}

CODING YOUR PLURK:CSS BADGE (four genuine badges)
.award_bar {
width: 200px;
height: 95px;
background: url(your_badges_url) no-repeat left bottom;
}

CODING YOUR PLURK:CSS BADGE (five genuine badges)

… Ummm… ask me when we get to that one.

ZEN ELEMENTS DASHBOARD WITH PLURK:CSS + BADGES

THE GENUINE PLURK BADGES

	Inviting 10+ Users
	Inviting 25+ Users
	Inviting 50+ Users
	Creator of a Plurk community site
	Yet to see - 100+ Response Comments to a Plurk…? (Let me know if you see!)
	Translator of Plurk
	Widget implimented on website - Apparently not active yet (thanks fusedreality)
	Reached Plurk Virvana
	Not yet seen
	Has more than 50 fans
	Some of the first Plurkers

Take care everyone & happy PLURK:CSS’ing!

Alex | Zen

Search Engines: the most widely used application on the world wide web. Whether it is Google, Yahoo, Live, Lycos, DogPile, Etc… we use them and you might not even realise just how much you use them. Now, we are being introduced to the new and innovative Scour.com - The Social Search Engine.

Opening its doors to the public only one month ago (launched June, 2008) Scour has been grabbing some attention. There are three main areas that have really caught my interest and where else better to start really, than to share those with you?

1. The Social Search Engine
Users rate the results that are returned in their searches, similarly to something like Stumble with a ‘Thumbs Up’ (Relevant) or ‘Thumbs Down’ (Not Relevant) system. This means that the search results obtain a rank by participating users and the more relevant sites begin to obtain priority positions in future searches.

2. Results & Position
Scour returns up to 30 results in its searches: 10 x the three search engines, Google, Yahoo & Live. With each result returned on Scour, the position is displayed from the other search engines of where that result would be found. This I found to be quite accurate with the searches I had been testing with.  You can then also arrange your results by each of the individual search engines ranking structure.

3. Revenue
Did I mention, you can make money from this!? There is a points system integrated in Scour, where users are rewarded for searching, ranking, commenting, etc… After reaching 6,500 points, users can redeem their earned points and pick up a Visa gift card with the amount entitled to them on it, starting at $25.

How Users Earn Points:

• +1 point for every search
• +2 point for rating a search result
• +3 points for commenting on a search result
• + 25% of the points earned from your friends - [Join with Zen Elements here]

• There IS a limit cap to prevent scammers of 500 points per day

User Interface
Scour’s design is light, clean and the returned results are displayed in an easy to read layout.  With AJAX driving the site, operation is slick and speedy even with its slightly more graphical interface. When you click on one of your search results, the site loads still within a Scour envoirment (which you can close) so that you can vote/comment with ease.

The Future Of Scour… reading tea leaves
Scour is actually a later development from the previously named AfterVote (more can be read on that here). If AfterVote is anything to go by however, we might be seeing some great features popping up soon in Scours inventory such as custom search preferences, personal profiles, friend grouping  and more.

Final Thoughts
Google is & always be my preferred search engine: ‘Tokyo Time’, ‘Dundee Weather’, ‘Define: CSS’, ‘1000 * 5′, etc… I love it. However, I will continue to dabble with Scour and I am very interested to see how Scour develops as more and more users join the community and begin to participate.

It is fair to say that unless you are going to be religiously using Scour to search something crazy, you’re not going to make much money. Still, possible money making aside, it is hard to deny that Scour is a pretty nifty search engine.

End of the day, join up and see what you make of it. What do you have to lose?
[ZEN ELEMENTS INVITES YOU!]

Take care & enjoy your searching, where ever it may be!

Alex | Zen

Plurk has released to Plurkers over 25 Karma, the access to alter their profiles CSS. I for one, am LOVING it!! There will be many new profiles popping up stretching the limits of what a Plurk profile can do through the editing of CSS and I’m looking forward to seeing them.

Very briefly: CSS stands for ‘Cascading Style Sheets’ and is a markup language for altering and giving style to a website. There are far to many things to cover in CSS to write in one post however, what I will do is list some of the ID’s and CLASSES that you will no doubtadly want to play with. I will also finish with a few great resources for learning further CSS if you would like to experiment further.

ACCESSING THE PLURK CSS EDITOR
My Profile [edit] –> Customise Profile –> [CSS text area]

NOTE ON COLOR:
All the color(s) I have used in this post [#000000;] are set to BLACK only. These numbers are called hexadecimal numbers and each when used with the ‘#’ represent a colour. You can find a whole resouce of colors for your profiles here at (Colour Lovers).

Verbiage:

This is important to note that just like all the other CSS, these colour changes to the verbiage will only work on ‘YOUR OWN’ plurk profile. I would also like to add that the above verbiage is with respect to @janechin and her Plurkaholics Verbiage post.

UPGRADE THE SIZE OF YOUR RESPONSE TEXT BOX:
#input_small {
height: 75px;
}

This one I have found paricularly useful for responding to friends posts and hope you will too.

CSS Resources:
(w3schools) - CSS Tutorials (Basic to Advanced)
(CSS ZEN GERDEN) - No code but some lovely examples of CSS
(Google) - Google is always my friend for some quick hints ‘n’ tips
(Jay’s Brainfart) - A run down on Plurk’s CSS with some nice CSS themes you can use too!

There will be some more to follow, I just really need to get on with some other work.

My Final Thoughts:
I think this is a GREAT advancement in Plurk and I will be looking to cover more Plurk:CSS when I get the opportunity to do so. I also look forward to seeing peoples crazy developments with their profiles!
One thing however which is a GRAVE concern to me… Please PLEASE, be careful not to create a profile that everyone will know recognize as a ‘MySpace Profile’. These are notorious to have loud colours, badly tiled backgrounds & garish colours.

Take care everyone & happy PLURK:CSS’ing!

Alex | Zen

The .ME domain name craze, beginning not all so long ago, is something that I am personally not going to be jumping into. At least, not in any rush. What about you though? Is a .ME domain name something that interest you or have you already taken the plunge?

As I am sure many were aware, the .ME domains have been lingering about in whispers for a while and not so long ago, GoDaddy & other registrar companies released the .ME domain to the public for purchase.
I noticed the effects immediately as my Plurk Timeline (..Join me there..)  filled rapidly with Plurks of ‘Just registered suchandsucha.me!’ or ‘DAMN, suchandsucha.me is taken!! (s_angry)’. Twitter was not all so different, so I read.

I posted a little Plurk about the .ME craze and as the evening went on, while having a few debates about it all, I found myself searching randomly for funny (…some perhaps naughty) .ME domains. In the end, had I thrown the pennies at it, I would be buying: iamnotgettinga.me.

I have several top-level domains and I just don’t give too big a hoot about dotME’s. I do think you can have some fun making clever, silly or naughty porn-potential domain names but they are just not for me. I am just happy sticking with my .co.uk’s, .com’s and .net’s… and not spending any more money (^_^ ) Thank you.

ALSO, The GoDaddy Fiasco.

News hit that GoDaddy, one of the popular distributors of the .ME domains, under-estimated quite how popular the .ME domain was going to be and with servers crashing, they started to experience registration problems.

In many instances, single .ME domain names were being registered by several people at once. NUTS! In these cases, full refunds are being given and the saught after domains are being sent to auction… AUCTION!??  This did make me ponder… Was this really a server issue or a devious ploy for popular and saught after domains making it to auction where perhaps more money could be made over what they are worth…?

Well, this was just a little side tracked thought but there was a good write-up about the issues experienced, along with a GoDaddy responce, here on Mashable.com which is also found here on Digg.com

Some Domains I Spotted:

• why.me
• ani.me
• f_ck.me
• poison.me
• bite.me (when it comes to the .me’s, pretty much how I feel…)
• … I will probably come back and add some more for the heck of it.

Final Two-Cents (1.00106 Pennies):

I am actually going to monitor one or two .ME’s I saw sold, out of curiousity, just to see what comes from them. I just hope through my curiousity, no cats are harmed…

Anyway, for me (and as domfosnz mentioned from Plurk) these .ME domains are a reminder of the .mobi domains that was a little craze way-back-when. I am not going to jump on the .ME bandwagon anytime soon as I think this bandwagon ‘might’ just encounter a propetual cliff in its not to distant future. We’ll see anyway.

Take care everyone,

Alex.me | Zen.me … d(^_^; )o