In fact, only yesterday I thought to myself, if only I had a way to gauge how good overall a Prosciutto and Mozzarella Panini from Bite on 14th Street between 2nd and 3rd Ave., was. Alas, I feared the only way would be to tempt fate and try it myself.

Would it be good? Would it be bad? Might I infact fall over and die, it being that bad/good. Perhaps a giant hawk would swoop down from the very skies, swiping the aforementioned snack from my outstretched hand, leaving me in the great bind of being without lunch.

Thankfully, we can get around these issues with the site DELICIOUS SANDWICH DOT COM. What a handy site.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now if only I didn’t live 4,209 miles away.

Remember all those things you used to do with a small compact device. Well now you can do them with something the size of a car – and it costs $10,000. You’ll love it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why yes. Yes it could. (Watch it to the end)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Final Results -

• 1st: Jay
• 2nd: Phil
• A respectable 3rd: Joel
• Did not finish: Al

Ok – yes Jay won. But he cheated. His legs are like three times longer than anyone elses, and Al will argue that his shoe came off, but we all know that he just threw it off his foot so he wouldn’t have to face that he’d come last.

(Great camera work by Paul)

For those that havn’t seen it, you can watch the advert here.

The advert was hugely successful and spawned a slew of imitators. One of these was one relativly short lived take off by Tango (Clear).

Now, its more likely you havn’t seen this advert. Same music, same concept though replacing the hilly streets of San Francisco for a street in Swansea.

Also, the balls are now fruit. You can watch this one here.

But thats not the interesting part. The interesting part is this website:

Swansea North Residents Association

Examining the site you can find various interviews about how terrible the advert was – how it ruined their lovely street, even how Aled Edward’s was late to work that evening because he had to wash the pulpy mess off his car. You just can’t make this stuff up.

My personal favourite is the video interviews with the shocked and angered residents. With this quote from this woman, being my favorite.:

Eileen survived both wars with the utmost composure, but couldn’t contain her anger when her home was bombarded by kiwis and citrus fruit.

I think I may just sign the petition, I mean, its their street today, what about tommorrow? These terrible TV types, will be flinging fruit down everybody’s streets. Oh No!

I guess its one way to get kids to eat fruit.

(I’ve got a slightly nasty feeling this may be part of a failed viral campain – I mean it just seems too lame to make up doesn’t it?)

Using flvplayer to play a flv file on my machine worked fine. As soon as I uploaded it to a server (infact in this case it was my localhost – but same thing really) it no longer played.

After all sorts of searches for phrases like “FLVPlayer not streaming video”, “flv not streaming online”, “problems streaming flv video”, “im bored and slightly hungry”, “why isn’t this working”, “what is the answer mr google? tell me!”, “flv player flv video streaming problems” and so on, I came across an odd thing. This is a well known problem .

Under IIS 6.0, microsoft changed the way they handle flv files. Heres the article by adobe on how to fix the problem with iis. The way to fix is to add the .flv extension as a MIME type on iis.

The way I found to do this best (as it was on my local server) was to go to IIS and then the Default Web Site, right click on properties, then go to the HTTPHeaders tab. On the bottom click on File Types and in there add the following:

Associated Extension: flv

Content Type (MIME): flv-application/oclet-stream

For all intents and purposes, this should of fixed the problem.

But it didn’t.

Here’s the markup I’m using for embeding:

<object data=”mcpassets/flvplayer/flvplayer.swf” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” height=”600″ width=”600″>

<paramvalue=”file=assets/video/pete.flv&image=assets/video/pete_thumb.jpg” name=”flashvars” />

<param name=”movie”value=”mcpassets/flvplayer/flvplayer.swf?file=assets/video/pete.flv&image=assets/video/pete_thumb.jpg” />

<object>

Now while this showed the thumbnail, the movie itself never played. After much searching and some going TOTALLY CRAZY, I discovered the root of the problem.

While the path of the thumbnail is relative to the page, the path of the flv, oddly, isn’t. Instead, the path of the flv is relative to the location of the flvplayer.swf.

Does this make sense? NO. But after some quick code changes, and changing the params to this:

paramvalue=”file=../../assets/video/pete.flv&image=assets/video/pete_thumb.jpg”

TADA! It now works. Isn’t that lovely. I’m sure there will be problems in the future, but for now, I’m happy.

1. I have no where to put one
2. I’m meant to be a grown up
3. I don’t know where to buy them
4. The constant fear of a terrorist attack by rampaging, genetically enhanced sheep clones

Maybe number 4 is just me, but this demonstrates EXACTLY what I’m afraid of.

Click here to view the embedded video.

See? No, I bet you’re afraid of terrorist sheep. They’ll attack you in your sleep. Your precious precious sleep. Little terrorist sheep.