This all comes at a point when I’m seriously considering wiping my laptop drive and building a version of Ubuntu without Unity from the very start. Problem is I don’t really want to loose all the applications, preferences, etc, etc… So I’ll try and get Gnome3 fully working then maybe one day soon, just do the wipe. I am hoping Ubuntu allow Gnome3 to be a part of Ubuntu or allow such projects to grow and establish themselves.
For some stupid reason which I have no idea… I got 3 calls from a call centre while I was at home trying to work today.
It got to be a bit of joke by the second call because with the first call I got so peed off about what they were trying to tell me I just hung up after 30secs. When someone called again, claiming to be calling from Microsoft customer support, this time I playing along with this call just to waste there time and work out what they wanted me to do so i could warn other people not to follow the steps.
Caller: open Internet Explorer and type in ammyy.com.
Caller: click to download and install ammyy
Me: I can’t do that (lies of course)
Caller: Why not? click the link and choose install.
Anyway that went on and on for about 20mins, and so of course I hit Twitter with some funny bits I was hearing on the phone. By the time I finished… I was doing stuff like using the toilet and saying I was still in front of the windows XP machine (I would have thought the sound of me peeing would be a clear clue that I wasn’t really listening)
By the time it finished, Nic Ferrier suggested I should record them next time they call. So I did, but I didn’t catch the start of the conversation, so I started recording about 10-15mins in. Here’s the recording with a con-artist.
People sometimes ask me, why do you put on your blog that your dyslexic?
Well I believe its got a lot of advantages… and of course disadvantages…
One of the strange advantages is the dyslexic-dar (modifying the gay-dar term). You seem to get a sense of when someone might also be even slightly dyslexic. There’s certain things people do and say which triggers the radar in my mind. Usually there’s a strange kind of infinity, and it might be down to familiarity of communication and habits.
I do personally think I have the ability to think differently from other people
Tom and his mum are right, being dyslexic is an advantage when problem solving for example. You just think very differently about problems and don’t get hung up on the same issues. The way you view the world is very different and in a world where thinking outside the box is valued highly this is a precious way to view and model the world.
I can imagine even 30 years ago, this wouldn’t be an advantage but right now, it certainly is… I refer back to Bill Thompsons talk at Future Everything… Designing the future, this is certainly what I feel I’m doing. A world where my strengths are an advantage. Its somewhat empowering to see others dyslexic people embracing it and using it for there own advantage.
A while ago, after my bleed on the brain, the doctors looked at my dyslexia report from 2000. They said, I had been outpacing my projected overview by a long way and maybe the bleed might have set me back to how I was projected back then. If you know anything about me, you would read the report and say nahhh thats someone totally different, maybe they got the reports mixed up? But I think what the report doesn’t account for is the massive change in technology. Maybe without the technology things for me would be very different.
Thankfully I live in a world which somewhat values logic, abstract/intangible concepts and openness.
Jeremy Clarkson has blasted the BBC’s move to Salford – branding the city a ‘small suburb’ and saying he would quit rather than relocate.
The Top Gear presenter used his Sunday newspaper column today to take a swipe at the corporation’s decision to move a string of departments to MediaCityUK.
He described Salford ‘a small suburb with a Starbucks and a canal with ducks on it’ and said that he would resign if the motoring programme was moved north.
Clarkson – who reportedly receives a £2m-a-year salary from the BBC – claimed the decision to move five departments to brand new buildings at Salford Quays was based on politics, saying ‘it was a box that has been ticked’.
Clarkson, you can take or leave him. I’m not exactly a petrol head, so I’m only loosely aware of what he does on top gear… But some of his comments are just stupid and well ignorant
Some people simply have no vision and frankly need to roll over and let someone in who does have the vision and maybe the guts to give it a shot. This big head stand in the way of the people who will ultimately save the BBC. In actual fact if you read the whole thing, even with publication bias and all that out the way, its maybe the swan song of a long over-due industry on its very last legs.
It feels like so much longer and I wonder if thats a sign of real disruption?
It feels like its been here forever and you almost can’t remember before it. Life is forever changed… Imagine life before the mobile phone? No I can’t really either…
Starting this Friday (8th July 2011) Arcadia bar will be transformed into a wonderland for House & Trance lovers… We have a licence till 2am in the morning! So do drop in from 8pm and…
Startup your night of bars, clubs and unrestrained debauchery in the best possible way…
The concept is its a place to start your night although we wouldn’t mind if you want to stay for the cheap drinks and some excellent tunes and mixing in any bar inside Manchester. We’ve hacked the club experience on to the bar experience and ramped it up…
I was asked by an aspiring writer whether at this point it’s still worth it as a writer to own one’s own domain, i.e., in the age of everyone being on Facebook, setting up one’s online shingle elsewhere is like opening a business on a dusty street a mile away from Main Street.
My thought on this: Hey, remember when everyone was on America Online? And then everyone was on Friendster? And then everyone was on MySpace? And now everyone’s on Facebook? Yeah, you’ll notice a pattern here, perhaps.
Yes, but Facebook is huge, you say, with unspeakably large numbers of users worldwide and a valuation of $70 billion.
Wow, I say, just like America Online was huge, with an unspeakably large number of users online and a valuation of over $100 billion.
Yes, but everyone knows that AOL was wildly over-valuated, you say.
Really, I say. And then I let that just hang there as long as it needs to until you get my point.
There’s a huge benefit to having everything in the cloud (per-say) but I feel ownership and licencing is so important and will become a huge issue in the near future. As the author wrote, there has been many services promising a space which you can as such own but none of them have lasted the test of time. Why? Maybe because the companys content strategy doesn’t match our long term goals of ownership.
Some will say, but your just an old fart and holding on to a world where ownership is important. Of course I would say nahh… its more than that, ownership is fundamental to the human condition. If you feel you have no ownership, you feel like a kid and more likely to vandalize someone elses stuff. I mean what difference does it make to you?
