FastFrame.com.au is a new Flash and Flex-based site with a luxurious rich application interface, created by webqem.

The company behind it is a photographic agency that subcontracts photographers for specialist events or skills, such as portraiture, wildlife, weddings, sport, etc.

So you can arrange for a photographer to come to your event, take photos, and them make them available to view and purchase online.

Very fancy

I finally finished (well, mostly) my two new complementary [tag-tec]dog[/tag-tec] sites, My Dog Space and My Dog Site.

They are written in different languages. MyDogSpace is a php package with slight modifications. MyDogSite was written from scratch in ColdFusion, as a learning tool for the language. It is still fairly basic language-wise, but functionally I think it’s a great dog search system.

In MyDogSite you can search for a dog holiday by state, region, suburb and feature, then display a detailed information page, which includes a photo and Google Map of the location.

I’m still planning more improvements to MyDogSite - more automation, a club search, and more content, but it’s a good start.

I was looking around for a free photo gallery to put on my Christmas site. Hoping that people would send me their photos for inclusion, so I could have a bunch of Christmas photos that would inspire people to decorate their homes. There are few things more magical than seeing a home lavishly decorated with Christmas decorations.

So I checked out the well-known Gallery2. But it needed a MySQL database. I have already used up my database allowance at my hosting account, with this blog, my Sydney Photos site, and I’ve planned the other for a separate Christmas function.

So I ended up with TinyWebGallery, an XML-based photo gallery. I’ve installed it as my Christmas Decorations Photo Gallery, but despite all the traffic to the site (currently only page 1 at Google, and page 2 at Yahoo, although it used to be #1 at both), no one has sent me any photos yet. It really just has some photos of the Christmas windows at David Jones in the city, that I took with my camera phone. So I need some more.

I had a few hiccups installing the free open-source PHP program. I installed it, and it didn’t work. Then the next day, it did come up, but admin didn’t work. Then the next day, admin did work. I still haven’t got the basic login functions working, but I can upload photos, and people can view and page through the site, so that’s enough for now. It was a big help manually deleting the cached photos from the cache folder.

Check it out.

Took advantage of the fact that the kids were up in Queensland for the school holidays, to escape to Cradle Mountain in Tasmania.

We caught a Virgin flight down to Launceston, and hired a car to drive to Cradle Mountain. Stopped off at Cataract Gorge first, to see the suspension bridge. Absolutely stunning. Even the peacock, who distracted me while I took a photo of him, and then stole my scone with jam.

On Saturday, Les and I went for a 3 hour guided walk around Dove Lake. It was a lovely, easy walk, and I fell in love with the colour combinations of the lake, trees and sky. Apparently the tannin from the button grass colours the water, creating a wonderful mix. You can check out my photos at www.flickr.com/ozgeekmum.

So, feeling adventurous, we planned to climb to the top of Marion’s Lookout on Sunday. A stunning ridge next to Cradle Mountain, it has views to Dove Lake on the left, and Crater Lake on the right.

That night it snowed. It was beautiful to wake up to, but we weren’t really geared up for hiking in the snow. I didn’t have gloves, and we bought one of the souvenir yellow poncho raincoats, in a nice vinyl.

We chose the difficult path, straight up the side of the mountain, figuring that we should get the hard part out of the way first, then have an easy, longer route back.

We made it to within 10mins of the top. At that point, standing near the top, with only a short, exposed ridge between us and the top of Marion’s Lookout, it was still snowing, and gusty. In fact it was so gusty, the wind actually shredded the raincoat into pieces, off my back whilst I was still wearing it. I’ve never actually had clothes ripped off my back by nature before. There were pieces of yellow raincoat blowing around the top of the mountain. Plus the small matter of being hardly able to feel my fingers, I didn’t think I could make it to the top.

We revived with a little Cradle Mountain whiskey from our room, some vegimite sandwiches we’d brought with us, and a superb dark ginger chocolate. Brought my fingers back to life with a nice warm chest, and set off home again.

Finished a beautiful weekend off with a decadent hot tub in the Health Spa attached to Cradle Mountain Lodge. It’s a beautiful outdoor hot tub, with stunning views over the bush.

An absolutely stunning time. Hope you liked the pictures from my trusty old Canon IXUS.

My mobile phone is around a year and a half old now. It was a gift, bought in Singapore, so it had a few settings that didn’t suit Australia.

The guys at work have just got new trendy phones, and have been experimenting with all the bells and whistles: camera picture resolution, connecting to the web, redirects and more.

I had walked into a Vodaphone store the other day and casually asked if my phone could connect to the web. The assistant gave me a scrap of paper with a number to ring, which I promptly lost.

So tonight I went to Google, searched for “nokia australia web settings” and found the Nokia Asia Pacific page. I followed the prompts, and presto, it sent me three SMSs with the settings required. I just had to save the SMSs. Then I followed my phone menu, and actually connected to the Vodaphone Live page!

Amazing. It actually worked first time.

Now to learn how to upload photos from my phone to Flickr. Andrew’s already done it. Apparently the Nokia N-series phones have a one-click upload to Flickr. But mine is an old 6670. So I had to download the Nokia LifeBlog software to my PC, and then install the application using Nokia’s PC Suite.