Back and a YouTube announcement (plus a small surprise)

Long time (ish) no see!

Came back from Devon at the weekend and as soon as I got back I had an enourmous amount of admin to do (photos of which will be up shortly).

When I moved onto my YouTube subscriptions, I discovered something new: there was a 'link' on the actual video. Now usually this is only on embedded videos which will link you to the official YouTube page of it, though this was different, it was on the main page.

I went to click and found that it now pauses it, with a fancy animation (really fancy). Try it yourself! It's simply a zooming in of the new status of the video, paused or playing, with the same icon as is on the pause/play button.

Gets quite addictive pausing and resuming videos when you first discover it.

As for the surprise that I mentioned in the title. It's more of a competition than a surprise really, but anyway, it still stands. Any of you into graphics design? Well, I need a logo for the site and instead of doing it myself, I'd like my readers to do it. You have just over one month (requests for longer are allowed, and I can extend it if you wish) to make me a logo which is no more (and hopefully no less) and 300x50 pixels. It must include the following:

• The text "Ratscallion hints" in any font or size you wish, but it must be readable easily
• The Windows icon (any one you wish that is recent, ie, nothing that is pre-Windows XP)
• The Ubuntu icon (this can be with or without the text, I don't mind)
• My YouTube account avatar (found on Flickr here)

The closing date for this is September 28th and you can get your submissions to me in many ways:

• Submit them to a photo sharing site (Flickr, Twitpic, etc) and paste the link to a photo in either a comment or email (or Tweet it to me, I'm @samozzy)
• Send it to me as an email. Just send it to my Google Mail account as either an attachment or within the email. Click here to make an email addressed to me.

As I said, you can use any of the aforementioned methods to send your submissions or questions (including lengthening the competition time).

I will slowly but surely wittle down the submissions (though all will be featured on my Flickr and on here) until I have one that is my favourite. This will be featured on anything I can including my YouTube, advertisements on other sites etc.

In other news: I'm dropping the Google Wave video. As I found out, there is already a shortened version of the keynote on YouTube which I will embed into the next post.

For now,
Yours,

Ratscallion

For now,
Yours,
Ratscallion