Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Found in Manchester's trendy Northern Quarter (with the help of the community) but I wasn't able to take it, today. Some woman with a stick up her behind got all funny because I wasn't what she was expecting.
Join the search for the lost ring… we need people in Manchester tomorrow between 4-6pm who can try and get the ring for us. If that sounds like you, twitter me tomorrow.
In that vein, here's a couple of great little resources which have been recommended to me by friends.
How to bridge the distance between business strategy and design – recommended to me by Paul via Del.icio.us. I mean wow, I would love to hear this live, the presentation slides are pretty credible and describing enough that you feel like you could give the presentation
yourself with enough time.
Living digital – recommended to me by Kate via email. I've heard of this guy but yes this is a awesome presentation to google. Would love to get him to the BBC one day. A lot of this for me is shaking head in agreement but its so good to have that sometimes. Even today I hardly ever turn on the TV, its all about Internet content be it licenced, unknown or unlicenced. Its also good to see the technology is ready. My friend bought a Popcorn box a while back and a couple of other friends bought a xbox just for xbmc the other day. And I got to say I'm still having fun downloading what ever highdef content I can find and playing it back on my homemade xbmc box.
Background Patterns – recommended to me by everyone but Lucas was first. Lovely site, well thought out and the fact you can download the pattern is ideal.
I was talking to one of Emma's friend on a night out in London a while ago and we got talking about my theory of Steve Jobs control of Apple (still to be written I guess). Anyway we got around to the ipod and I suggested that before the ipod, Apple was all about Thinking Differently
Now its not about thinking anymore its about you being irrelevant now.
The more famous commercials and print advertising featured dark silhouetted characters against bright-colored backgrounds. The silhouettes are usually dancing, and in television commercials are backed by up-beat music. The silhouettes are also usually holding iPods and listening to them with Apple's supplied earphones. These distinctively appear in white, so that they stand out against the colored background and black silhouettes. Apple seems to change the style of these commercials quite often depending on the song's theme or genre.
Yes you can also be the dark silhouette, a mean-less thing to hang a ipod off? Well thats the way I see and Emma's friend did actually agree with me. Its not very suttle either… I mean what other adverts have you seen when they have blacked out the person? Imagine a wii advert with a black silhouette? Car advert with a silhouette driving the car, hell even a drinks company advert with silhouettes? Yes it might sound all wrong to some of you and maybe some will say its just good advertsing. But good advertising works by getting in deep and making you feel inadaquent or in other words irrelevant right? The ipod adverts are just less suttle.
Yep your irrelevant get use to it, or change it.
right shall I close the comments?)
I'm slowly catching up with some of the podcasts I was able to download at the frustrating speed I've recently had. I wanted to give a special mention to a excellent Stack Over Flow show which is a podcast by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky.
Late in the podcast both of them just run through books which should be read or even owned. And there are some classics in the list.
Don't have time to listen to all that jibba-jabba? Here is Joel's short list:
If you don't like the rambling podcast style, there's also a public transcript with more books that you can shake a tree at.
So I'm online but at such stupid speeds that its like I'm using ISDN.
Another BT engineer came out today to check my ADSL line and the exchange I'm connected to. I bought another wireless adsl router yesterday so I was able to demostrate how slow it was using both the smoothwall box and the cheap wireless router. We even used multiple phone cables and took all my phones out of the loop. The engineer even used his own laptop to run a couple of tests using my equipment and the results were exactly the same.
On this speedtest I got download speeds of 0.11 Mbps and upload speeds of 666 Kbps and finally on this one download speeds of 84.9 kbps and upload speeds of 679kbps
So the upshot of all this is that BT can't do much else and its now down to my ISP to come up with a solution. My ISP (Ukfreesoftware network) are not exactly the best for customer service, so I'm expecting quite a fight on my hands if I want anything to change. Yes this really sucks and I can't understand whats changed.
Its just today been all fixed! Now I'm speeding along the internet, finally.
This has been going on since late June and has involved BT coming out to view the exchange and my house.
Just to hammer the point home, heres a couple of the emails i got over the past few days.
We have now successfully raised a fault with BT against this circuit for investigation, we would recommend that you follow this up by either calling our Internet Support team or emailing us in approximately 5 working hours. We should, have a full update within this time scale.
We have been notified by Entanet that they have successfully raised a
fault report with BT in respect of your ADSL connection.
We recommend that you follow up directly with our ADSL support line on
020 3002 4831 after allowing 5 hours for an update on the fault issue.
This also means the connetion to my hosting is slow and painful, hence I wasn't able to login and restart the apache process before the internet connection would drop.
Thanks for bearing with me, I've only got BT engineer number 4 coming out tomorrow morning now.
Anyway so the point I'm getting at is, I'm finally going on holiday (and I don't mean to a conference/barcamp/etc) just holiday. So novel the idea, I'm a little lost in what I'm going to do besides sleep, sit in the park or beach and do small webby stuff (oh yeah, can't be going on holiday without internet access of course). Anyhow, I've settled on a place and date but I'm not very happy with the price. So I was thinking maybe people like your kind self could help me find cheaper or an alternative. Right now its all looking like this…
Outbound: Tue 15 July 2008
Manchester International Apt > Amsterdam Schiphol Airport
Inbound: Sun 20 July 2008
Amsterdam Schiphol Airport > Manchester International Apt
Total price:GBP 182.70
Hotel: 1 room(s) for 5 nights
XXX star hotel
Star rating Hotel Arena AMS
S-Gravesandestraat 51 , Amsterdam, Netherlands, 01092AA.
Check-in date: Tue 15 July 2008
Check-out date: Sun 20 July 2008
1 Adult(s) 0 Child(ren) 1 Room(s)
Total price:GBP 367.68
=
Total price of your basket: GBP 550.38
Now I can't be the only one to think, geez that seems quite expensive for a 5 day holiday in Amsterdam? Ok I understand its July but I can actually get a flight to Toronto for GBP 440, New York for GBP 360 and Boston for GBP. Its not the same because I have friends who I could stay with while in those places but I'm also thinking I'm meant to be resting and that might mean staying in a hotel so I don't get sucked back into socialising and those wild wild parties 
There are complete alternatives too, like just booking the cheapest sun, sea and beach holiday I can find (which seems to be Greece for about GBP 270-ish. Or if I re-engage my brain again, I start thinking maybe I should be using that 500 pounds to pay off more debits and maybe part of a credit card. Oh well for a holiday….
If you have suggestions for a cheap holiday, let me know I can pretty much do from this Friday till 2 week from now. Sun is good and wifi is also got to be involved some, but geneally I'm looking for peace and quiet in somewhere I can go out and travel too far. So I look forward to hearing your suggestions…
Adrian Hon, talked about his dis-taste for choose your adventures books in his session. He described the 5 finger holding multiple pages and multiple routes which we choose to hold while playing those games. He even mentioned how he sometimes will start the game from the finish.
And it got me thinking, is it only geeks which do this kind of thing? Also is this a good or bad thing? I would say being able to hold multiple places of a complex script in your head at the same time and being able to move forward from any point and resume at anytime any of them has to be a good thing. This actually ties nicely back to the those geek qualities The 10 Real Reasons Why Geeks Make Better Lovers.
Geeks understand multi-dimensional relationships
Geeks connect with their online buddies in several guises, often getting to know the person behind the avatar as friendships deepen and move from adult communities to personal IM.A geek can flow seamlessly between conversation about a friend's partner and kids in one window and an elaborate group sex scene in another, without feeling any discontinuity between the personas. Even if the friend is a 43-year-old father of two in IM, and a 22-year-old dominatrix in the group.
With all that going on, a geek has no problem accepting that sometimes you want mocha ripple cherry fudge chunk swirl with almonds and a waffle and sometimes you want vanilla lite.
Just a quick thought…
Althought I got to add when I put this past Kate, she did say “isn't the only people who read the choose your own adventure books geeks?” So everyone who read those books were doing the 5 finger resume? Maybe…
Technorati Tags: geek, brain, thoughts, multiple, discontinity, time, space
I mean to include this graph of ping.fm in the last blog entry but must have fell a sleep or much more likely the internet went off again (i've been having so much problems with my home broadband recently its not even funny). The graph shows how Ping.FM has or could be come a trusted message broker. Someone posted a comment about incoming XMPP support which seems to add more fire to this idea of a message broker.
But just when we were getting excited about ping.fm, when someone really does things correctly. identi.ca ticks almost all the data portability and openness tick boxes I can think of. Not only is the service a Opensource Creative Commons framework based on Jabber/XMPP but it supports OpenID and remote subscription via OpenMicroblogging which is OAuth and some established responses and returns. But no thats not all, it finally supports Federation, which means finally people really like owning there own can build and maintain there own and connect to the network when it pleases them. Simple this is awesome and I've already joined it.
So I've finally signed up with Ping.fm thanks to David Owens giving me a update to date code for ping.fm.
So what is Ping.Fm and why do I find it very interesting.
Well according to the website.
Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.
Its a service which will pass on your single message (or ping) to other services. So in practice I can message ping.fm and the message appear on plaxo pulse, twitter, jaiku, plurk, facebook and linked in. Of course it does more than that but those are the ones I'm interested. Whats even better is Ping.fm has im, email and applications of its own. So one of my biggest frustrations is twitters im bot which never bloody works, should be solved.
Its also good to see the setup with other services part is done without revealing your username and password when ever possible. But there are a couple services like twitter and plurk where you must. What would have been ideal is OpenID logins, but few of these services support that right now anyway. Actually on Plaxo, I had to go find the login details because I'm so use to using OpenID.
Once your setup, you can just go to the site and type in your messages which get ping'ed elsewhere. But thats not where it ends, nope you can setup custom and service triggers which allow you to route a message based on a rule you setup or something a service does. So imagine Twitter stopped working (yeah when does that happen?), you could divert messages to another service which you may only use in emergencies. I was trying to work out if you get ping.fm to watch for messages which came through another service and echo those out to the rest of services. So say I SMS twitter, Ping.fm sees the twitter messages, notices its not on my Jaiku and reposts it there.
As mentioned before there is many ways to post to ping.fm but no SMS yet. Right now you can use a facebook application, a load of im bots including xmpp via gtalk, google gadget and even a iphone and wap client! Of course more importantly there's a developer API.
Why do I think Ping.fm is that great? Well its using the web as it should be. There was never a reason why you had to sign into different services to leave messages. Ping.fm is like a layer above all the crazyness going on in the social messaging space. I don't know if I quite trust it yet, currently my hand is forced because I hate the alternative. However these guys are going about the whole thing in the correct way. I love the fact there's from day one im bots and a api. This means once I've setup my services, I don't really ever have to log into ping.fm ever again. This might sound shocking but theres another service which is like this. Dopplr, is trying to be quite transparent in its deliver and use to people. So you can setup Dopplr with your personal calendar, its pulls out places and will inform your friends once you clash. No need to really go back to the site ever really (unless you want reviews and your carbon footprint). There is always a question of how these services will make money without advertising but I don't know maybe a pro version ala Flickr or they could sell the attention data being generated from the messages going through there services?
Who knows, but right now I'm pretty impressed with ping.fm. Once they have SMS gateways its going to be even better.
