There are two sets of profile information maintained by meetup.com for each user …

1. a personal profile specific to yourself and related to meetup.com in general and not to any specific meetup group.

2. a “meetup group profile”, specific to each group you are a member of.

Some of the information in your personal profile is made public (some you can hide), so be careful what you post on your personal profile. Some information on your personal profile might be indexed by Google and show up in search results for your name.

We made our meetup group private, so any profile information posted as part of our group, including introductions, discussions and meetup gatherings, is only visible to other approved members of the group. None of this information is visible to other users, nor is it visible to Google, so it won’t show up in search results.

Members of private groups should check their meetup.com personal profile to make sure that nothing they have posted there is visible to the public / Google. There are a few settings which are enabled by default which you might want to hide.

1. Make sure you are logged in to meetup.com
2. Click on the “My Groups” link at the top of the page (not on the groups in the drop-down list, click on “My Groups” itself).
3. Click on “Hide my Meetup Groups” at the top of the list of groups if you don’t want people to know which groups you belong to
4. Click on the “Intro” tab
5. Under your bio, click on “Hide this” to hide your bio information
6. If you have added interest profiles listing other topics you are interested in joining meetup groups for, you can click on “Hide this” below the list of interest groups on the Intro tab too.
7. Click on the “Photos” tab
8. You might want to click on “Hide profile photos” to hide any additional photos you have uploaded to your profile. Note that your main public profile photo is still displayed on your public profile page – this only hides additional photos.
9. Click on the “Greetings” tab
10. If you have had people leave greetings on your profile, you might want to delete them if they contain personal information you don’t want Google to see.

Note that none of these actions impact on what you have displayed in your private meetup group pages – you’ll need to edit that separately if you want to – but it’s not visible to Google, so you might not need to worry.

You should also be aware that anything you post to your profile page for a specific meetup group (including answers to profile questions) is visible to other members of that meetup group. If you want to change any of that, go to your meetup group profile page and edit your profile information – from your meetup group home page click on “My Profile” under the “Members” menu.

(via InkTank)

I also love the Apple “PC vs Mac” adverts.

… so I was quite amused with this video of a promo for the show which takes off the PC vs Mac concept:

Rather than deleting or ignoring emails that are incorrectly addressed (as most email services would), I prefer to redirect them all to a postmaster account, which I check periodically for emails. Most of them are spam – randomly generated usernames and such sent to random domains - most of these are caught by the spam filters, and the rest I just delete.

However, I am still surprised at the number of valid but badly addressed emails that get through! I set up email aliases for them so that future emails will get through.

I thought I would post a list of the aliases I’ve had to set up – it’s getting long enough and strange enough to be funny now! My friend’s name is Jacque (usually pronounced “Jack” or “Jackie”).

jack
jackie
jackue
jacky
jacqe
jacqueline
jacue
jaque

I’ve also had to set up sale, www.sale, and www.sales as aliases for their sales email address too!

Sorry to everyone I’ve ignored over the last couple of weeks – it’s been pretty intense trying to get this ready by today – a LOT of late nights!

There is still a lot more work to do on the site – it’s a long way from where I want it to be and I have a long list of features I want to implement. All that is done so far is basic fund profile information, charting (including moving averages), and historical yearly and quarterly performance figures.

I currently have data for the following fund managers:

• Colonial First State – Managed Investment Funds
• Colonial First State – FirstChoice Investments
• Colonial First State – FirstChoice Wholesale Investments
• NavraInvest
• Platinum Asset Management

I will be adding additional fund managers over the next few weeks (I have to program the data capture routines for each new manager).

I haven’t yet done the comparison tables – that will be the next feature I work on.

I figured that what I have done so far will be useful enough to some people, and I can get some feedback on what features are important.

I’ve already used the site myself – I finally got the rollovers into my new SMSF, so I’ve been using the data and tables to choose some new funds to invest my super in (although the comparison tables would have been useful here!)

… please remember the site is still in development, so some things may not work completely, and some of the data may not be 100% accurate.

… and then I got caught up with the building of my new website (I won’t link to it yet – it’s not quite ready for launch).

The problem with developing a complex website where there is a lot of programming involved (and this new site has a LOT of programming) … I tend to get into the “zone” and everything else gets ignored. People who have done a lot of programming work should know what I mean.

Because this system is so complicated, it reqiures a high degree of concentration to keep track of all the bits and to make sure that changes I make to one part aren’t going to affect another part (although I’ve been re-architecting the system to make it more extensible, so this should become less of a problem going forwards). Either way, I generally ignore emails and other distractions – and I can’t program and scan photos at the same time (like I can if I’m working on other less mentally demanding things!)

Anyway, the first (beta) release of my site is almost ready to go live, but I’m a bit burned out after a very late night (early morning ??) redesigning part of the programming last night, so I’ve decided to take it easy and do some less demanding things like play with my blogs and photo gallery (and fire up the scanner to do a few more rolls of film from my parents’ slide collection).

I’ll get some new stuff posted shortly.

So, I’m happy to announce the launch today of Dental Chat – a forum based community for dental professionals in Australia and NZ. It is a closed forum, with membership restricted to dental professionals, dental students and representatives from dental supply companies.

So if you are a dentist or know anyone who is – please send them over to Dental Chat, we’d love to see them there. (Naturally I won’t be posting much there in anything more than a technical support capacity … I know very little about teeth beyond what my dentist tells me – which is very little!)

(And yes, I do hate those photos in the banner across the top of the site – especially the needle! … not my choice – but the dental professionals should have no problems!)

Traffic is growing, we have new members (including quite a few new international members), and new forum topics to discuss.

Come and join in the discussion if you are interested in Zoos and animal conservation !!

Why ? Because we can !

So get on ye scurvy dogs – and remember … Keep to the Code.

Upstream: 1018500 (bits per second)
Downstream: 16752800 (bits per second) … that’s about 16Mbps … I was wondering why things were faster all of a sudden :D

Better than the 1.5Mbps currently available on Telstra!

I’m hoping I’ll be able to squeeze a bit more speed out of the line once I’ve done some tweaking.

Might be time to get some rewiring done too … central splitter should help … I’m only about 1km from the exchange, so my speeds should be approaching 20Mbps or more according to this.