A update on the SPV M600 query

I got it! yep and it was well worth the wait!

So a quick update on whats happening with the SPV M600 which I'm still currently trying to get. So expansys emailed me on Wednesday and said they have 9 phones in stock, would you want us to deliver it to you tomorrow. I decided against it because it would mean a change of contract and everything would have to go through expansys instead of Orange directly. This may seem stupid if I really wanted the phone that badly but actually the new contact would have cost me extra every month, therefore ignoring all the time and money I've spent with Orange for the last 3 years. So I thought I would search the London Orange Business stores for M600's. I visited the Holburn, Cheapside, Oxford Circus and Woolwich business centres multiple times this week, after getting some hot tips about the M600 being delivered to those stores. Obviously all the trips ended up in no phones. I think the closest I got to the M600 was the Woolwich store, where they sold out the evening before I phoned up.

Anyway I decided do things a little differently after reading Dan's comment about holding Orange to ransom about moving to Vodafone. I decided to call Oranges, I'm moving to another network line. And it worked out well for myself.

They agreed to keep me on my current contract but change the amount of free text messages I get every month and give me the phone for free. At the time (yesterday – Thursday) I was dismissive of the offer because I thought the phone wouldn't be in stock for another month. So agreed that Orange should call me when theres actual M600's in stock which they can deliver the next day.

I decided to keep search and phoning Orange stores looking for any left over stock of the M600, just incase (i ride past 3 of them in the mornings). But the same women who I spoke to yesterday on the phone at Orange, called me mid morring and said what I've been waiting for months. We have stock of the SPV M600 would you like me to send you one on a free upgrade? I almost started laughing, yes indeed!

So now Monday at sometime my new phone should come and I will finally have the phone I've been waiting for. I just hope Orange don't jack me around because I know Expansys have another deliver of M600's on Tuesday and I will be very tempted to just call them up, unless one of the stores gets it in first. Geez sounds like a endless loop, doesn't it? Lets just hope Orange delivers on its promise. As I have a load of applications ready to install on it.

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London’s Intellectually Curious dinners?

Food for thought, from Slashdot on Wednesday by an anonymous reader.

Slashdotters are certified geeks, but apparently there's a bunch of other people out there who are very interested in science, technology, politics and culture but they don't want to be known as geeks. A media consulting firm called OMD did a study for the company that owns Space.com and LiveScience. They conclude that 60 million Americans can be called “intellectually curious.” Intellectually, I'm curious what that makes the rest of them.

I know for all the progress people have made with the word Geek, people still cringe when I ask if they fancy going to a geekdinner. Its kind of weird being a self confessed geek and seeing geek tendious in other people but they refuse to submit to these natrual urges. So i've been thinking maybe just maybe we would actually attract more people if the name changed. Not to say I'll be changing it, its just a thought that we could actually be celebrating the side effect of intellectual curiousity not the source its self. I guess like celebrating a blogging application rather than the application of blogging?

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One of the meetup features I miss

Meetup

I will be first to admit that Meetup.com has some good features, but since they started charging the group origaniser it seems like there has been a move away from its system. The problem is where do you move to? Eventful and Upcoming are my prefered services but there are things like Zevents also. However all of them don't quite have all the features of meetup.

One of the features which I miss from Meetup is the ability to print out signs to attract people to the event when your at the actual venue. Last nights London Blogger's meetup was a small affair but attracted some regulars to geekdinner but I also finally met Jo. Jo printed out the meetup sign and placed it on the long table in all bar one, soho. I certainly miss this.

So I've decide to build a XSL transform to generate one of these for Eventful events. My first thought was to transform the XHTML page which already has microformat data for the event.. But quickly realised that the page isn't XHTML at all, for example my next geekdinner event. So unless I cleaned up the HTML first using something like Jtidy first it seemed pointless. So I started looking at the RSS and ATOM feeds. And there is where I struck gold. In the ATOM feed there is everything you need and more. Unlike the RSS feed which is simple RSS 2.0 with A9 Opensearch and Yahoo Media RSS extentions, the ATOM feed has some google data extention. The schema links no where but contains the event dates, location and more. All defined in nice namespaced elements which means its easy to pull out the data needed for the XSL transformation. I was hoping to adapt the XSL to transform not only Eventful ATOM feeds but also upcoming events. But there syndication is either ical or some odd combined html/javascript yahoo or google export. Which really sucks because its not valid XHTML. I'll post my XSL one I'm done. But I'm also considering a XSL-FO transform instead of CSS and XSL. Although its tempting to use XSL 2.0, I 'm going to resist so people can download it and apply the XSL locally. Humm maybe a simple Greasemonkey script will make this even easier to apply to any eventful event.

So using Cocoon and a simple XSL, you can now see any event from Eventful in a design which can be printed out on a black and white printer and pinned up at the event or before the event. Its not quite the table things I was thinking about before, Instead its a useful A4 poster. To use the service? simply enter the eventful unique code into the url after http://cubicgarden.com/cocoon/eventful/poster/{eventful code}. So here's a list of test events.

Please note you need to view the print preview to actually see the correct poster, because I'm using two stylesheets one for print and another for the screen. Oh and the current XSL is here. Please modify it if you feel the need, its released under a creative commons licence.

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The next geekdinner will be with Marc Canter

Marc Canter and his girls at SXSW

I do not even know where to start with Marc Canter. Honestly he's one of the guys whos been around since the early days of the internet and beyond. Good friend of other great personalities such as Doc Searls, David Weinberger and JD Lasica. I'm excited to announce that our next geekdinner will be with one of the most outspoken and genuine guy in the internet industry today. Marc Canter.

Here's a few snippits from the profile on wikipedia.

Marc Canter is a recognized figure in the sphere of open standards, social networks and blogging, and has been interviewed and quoted on the subject matter in numerous publications. Marc is a frequent speaker and panelist at conferences such as Web 2.0, SuperNova, Gnomedex, AlwaysOn Innovation, SXSW and many others. Marc is also a contributer to many open standards efforts and is champion for end-user controlled digital identities and content – being a co-founder of the Identity Gang

He is the founder and CEO of Broadband Mechanics, a digital lifestyle aggregator /images/emoticons/laugh.gifLA) company. Broadband Mechanics builds tools and environments to enable online communities. They target their products at a broad user base with the hope that everyday people can make better use of Internet technologies.

Broadband Mechanics recently released Ourmedia (along with JD Lasica), a community for digital creators to store their work for free. This nonprofit effort provides unlimited storage for grassroots video, audio, music, photos, text and public domain works, and presents a community space to share and discuss personal media.

Broadband Mechanics also recently released StructuredBlogging, a compatability box effort at establishing clear standards for microcontent. This organization has released Perl and Php libraries and plug-ins for WordPress and Moveable Type. StructuredBlogging is a complete superset of microformats.org and has established schemas for events, reviews, lists, media (audio and video), people and group showcases.

You can find his voice on his personal blog

So the details of the event. It will be Monday 1st May downstairs in the Polar Bear's Cellar bar. It will start at 6pm and carry on till late. Yes its a Bank Holiday and I know London's Public Transport isn't the best on Bank Holidays but were starting earlier and bring everything forward so people can get home without too much hassle. The price will be 5 pounds just to cover the range of food as usual. Yes there will be vegatarian food and I have spoke to the polar bear about trying to seperate the food a lot more. I will post a entry on the geekdinner.co.uk website tonight if I can find the login and password. Look out for it on the londongeekdinner Eventful group and the London metro on Upcoming.

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Recent xbox media centre changes

Firefox entension in use

Recently the Xbox media centre team have been working on a stable 2.0 version. This means there is a code freeze while they iron out any outstanding bugs. But this hasn't stopped the innovation around xbmc.

So first up, xbox media centre took both game and multimedia 2006 sourceforge awards. On the side, Azureus won overall winner which like Jon is a permanent fixture in my video viewing. Good to see xbmc winning awards like this. I really believe its one of the best open source projects out there at the moment.

Some innovation which I haven't quite worked out the possiblities of yet. In the recent update to xbox media centre (march betas), is the ability for xbox media centre to connect to FTP servers. This is pretty crazy, because the only limitation is now the pipe, as you will also see in the next innovation. I've connected to my personal cubicgarden FTP server and a couple of annoymous FTP servers. It works really well and you can browse around for any media which is on there. It would be good to connect to Webdav servers but I'm sure thats coming soon. Reminds me to suggest that in the forums.

The next thing is the send media URL to Xbox media centre. Its been in xbmc for quite sometime but the application to get it working has been a windows only application. And there was no way I was going to run some odd application just to quickly post a media url to the xbox. But now someone has wrote a Firefox application which does this. Its really cool too, because all you need to do is set the ip address of the xbox and then right click on the link you want to send. And within seconds the xbox will start streaming the media link. Oh and for you mac fans theres is also a Dashboard widget, i'm sure it won't take long for it to be a Yahoo/Konfabulator widget too. Obviously the pipe/bandwidth is still a issue. But damm its quick and easy. This fits perfectly with Keep Vid.com however you can't get stuff from You Tube because its in FLV format and the xbox won't play back flash video files. Ideally the xbox would play back flash formats or Keep Vid would transcode it to something more playable like avi or mov. Then people could also take it away and play the media on there psp or ipod.

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Finally a reason to dump user generated content

From Derek Powazek, the guy who wrote Design for Community (the book which got me and Sarah together.

Death to User-Generated Content
Can I make a suggestion? Let's all stop using the phrase “user-generated content.” I'm serious. It's a despicable, terrible term. Let's deconstruct it.
User: One who uses. Like, you know, a junkie.
Generated: Like a generator, engine. Like, you know, a robot.
Content: Something that fills a box. Like, you know, packing peanuts.

So what's user-generated content? Junkies robotically filling boxes with packing peanuts. Lovely.

Calling the beautiful, amazing, brilliant things people create online “user-generated content” is like sliding up to your lady, putting your arm around her and whispering, “Hey baby, let's have intercourse.”

UCG or user generated content has always got my back up. But now I know exactly why now. This is perfect Derek, couldn't have said it better and to be honest the phrase Authentic Media isn't bad at all.

Authentic media comes to you unfiltered by the global brands and conglomerates that have taken over the mainstream media. Authentic media is the raw, first-person narrative you can find on blogs and homepages. Authentic media is what happens when the mediators get out of the way and give the mic over to the people who actually have something to say.
The best part about this phrase? It paints the rest of the mediascape as inauthentic. I can live with that.

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Orange why can I not have a strikingly compact M600?

SPV M600

Orange are simply taking the piss now. Not only do they have the phone I want in stock but they will not sell it to me because its classed as a business phone. Yeah how stupid is that? Tell me Orange what about the SPV M500, SPV M2000, 3G mobile Office card and the SPV M5000. Hummm well Orange? What adds to the insult is the fact that Orange France are selling the SPV M600 as normal and that Orange UK won't be releasing this phone out of the business tarrif till sometime in Summer at least (so I've been told). Anyway, I've bitten the bullet and bought the phone via a 3rd party. Expansys reckon they have the phone ready to go, so I've bought it from them under the understanding that I can return it within 30days if I'm not happy with it. I can also cancel the order if Orange get it before Expansys, but I very much douht it. So yeah goodbye to the Nokia N80, its a good phone but its not coming on to Orange till late May now I hear, Vodafone in May.

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Geek and Geekhag podcast number eight – Black White

Chess piece

My and Sarah's 8th podcast is now available online. Enjoy and please leave a comment if you've enjoyed it or simply hate it. This is really part two of podcast number seven but its unique enough to simply make it another number. As always, enjoy.

This time me and Sarah explain what happened after the last podcast and spend most of the time talking about Black White, a TV series we've been downloading recently which tries to tackle black and white culture in America. We talk about the difference between Black American culture and Black English culture. The weirdness which is simply the extreme American way and how I love to mess with people stereotypes and perceptions of young Black men. We settle on the fact that a whole range of things keep up the perceptions and that people hate change.

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Geek and Geekhag podcast number seven – london geekdinner

London geekdinner

My and Sarah's seventh podcast is now available online. Enjoy and please leave a comment if you've enjoyed it or simply hate it.

This time we mainly discuss last week's geekdinner with David Teten. The good, the bad and the fall out. Sarah decides that the podcast is too long but we decide to keep it anyway. There is also a long advertisement for Papa Johns by Sarah. And finally we decide to go for the Terry and June music as recommended by Adam and Helen (thanks for the mpeg3 Adam).

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London’s Geek entertainment dinner TV

Len, Meredith and Irina

Slightly borrowing from Geek entertainment TV a little, I've started to do short video for the London geek and internet scene. Think of these three interviews as screen tests. In the meantime don't permalink to these files as they may get moved to Archive.org. At the moment there all copyrighted to myself till I get written permision from the people being interviewed that its ok to release them under a creative commons licence. The format used is Xvid which will play back using VideoLan's VLC or any decent mediaplayer with the Xvid codec.

David Teten on his geekdinner (8.8meg) and some links David recommends (0.9meg)

Ben Metcalfe on Social Networks (15meg)

Tom Morris on OPML (20meg)

All the videos are now creative commons licenced and free to download and mashup at Archive.org

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