Can you pay me back for the Coffee? #OcadoAndChill

date @ simone's 2324

When Hannah sent me a link to the metro piece about one of the bloggers I follow a bit…

Basically person A meets person B, things don’t go so well on the chemistry front. Person A decides things to call it a night or go home. Person B goes away then a few days later, contact Person A wanting compensation in return.

Here’s the story as my date told me

My mystery into who pays on the first date stemmed from a journal I wrote on OkCupid when I went on a date with a previous woman. She had made a bit of a song and dance about paying and I kind of innocently wondered, out loud. I do wonder sometimes if I should wonder a little quieter. This time my post on OkCupid caused a small flurry of comments and discussion (and I guess more dates).

My date brought up who pays on the first date and we natter away about that date. However My date told me a story which literally made my chin drop for ages.

On her previous date, she had gone after a bit of chat back and forth. The man had come across quite strongly and My date decided to give him a chance anyway. On the date he wasn’t really make a good impression, and when the bill came she offered to pay half. The man didn’t think this was a good idea and insisted on paying for the whole thing. My date said again, she was willing to go dutch and split the bill. Again the man insisted to pay for everything. Feeling like she may have insulted his inner ego, she backed down and let him pay.

The man walked her to her bus stop and suggested another date should be on the cards. My date righly said maybe she will see. The next day he called her to see how she was and about the second date. She broke it to him nicely, there wasn’t any chemistry and there wasn’t going to be another date sorry. His answer back was frankly shocking…

He said WHAT? I couldn’t believe it… I felt like I had misheard My date in the low level buzz of Bakerie.

“He said he wanted his money back!”

Yes the man My date had last dated wanted his money back after My date had offered to have pay half orginally.

My date must have sat there looking at my face of shock and horror for about 5mins. Every once in a while I would repeat her words again… “he wanted his money back?”

Both are pretty shocking to be honest even in the face of Dating awkwardness.

As nobaddatesjustgoodstories says,

I don’t come with a money back guarantee. Dates aren’t commodities.

I actually felt angry, because as you’ll know if you read this blog often, I am a massively big believer in women always offering to pay for dates.

His response is just beyond me!

Absolutely… I can not even imagine what it must be like to be treated like this.

However my date had a very good reply, one that was genius…

After a while we broke up in laughter, when it had all sunk in and I could ask what happened next?

My date was a strong willed woman and I just knew that couldn’t be the end of the story. It wasn’t… She told me.

She explained how hurt she felt but she thought on her feet and told him, to send his address to her and she will send him a cheque for the exact amount of the money to the penny.

Oh my date was good! I commented to her… Yes she continued. And I have not heard anything from him since.

I pretty much fell back and clapped my hands, attracted a few glances around the Bakerie environment. “Amazing!”

My date was amazing, and what a story. I thought my dates were bad but she had taken the biscuit, put cheese on top and eaten it whole.

This is only one chapter out of a collection of stories in a book/blog keep meaning to make public… Maybe its about time?

Think and a Drink with Frank Rose

Frank Rose

Having been invited to join a panel about new forms of storytelling in Gateshead, with Frank Rose in Newcastle. I was looking forward to meeting him and hearing what he had to say.

Frank ran through a bunch of examples of how storytelling and narrative structures have hardly changed over the years. Most I assume is in his book which he was quietly promoting (I bought a copy, even through I admitted to Frank I would end up buying the ebook version and the book would be lent out to friends who are interested).

The event went pretty flawlessly but there was no real disagreement, so hence no conflict. I did find issue with the lady I was sitting next to (Agnes Wilki). Her comment about quality of content I hear a lot from people within the BBC. So I had to point out that quality can be two things (actual pixel quality and the more subjective idea of quality of the overall concept) some audiences care about one over the other and some don’t care at all.

The overall talk was good but really needed more time for the discussion which started but never really got going unfortunately.

Straight after the talk, was food and the food choice was pretty excellent. The only shame was the lack of flat surfaces to really eat and chat. Frank signing his books the art of immersion and I got talking to a bunch of people including Frank’s wife about the differences and similarity’s of the UK north and south with the American north and south. As she asked me about the BBC’s move to the north of england.

Overall the event was good and well worth visiting if your in the North east. Glad to be part of it and I look forward to coming to more of them in the future. Its also worth mentioning Franks blog on the same subject is full of gems.

TED Books? But will it share?

In my email today, a email from Chris Anderson of TED,

I’m delighted to share with you a significant new step in our efforts to promote "ideas worth spreading". We’re announcing today the launch of TED Books. TED Books are to Books as TED Talks are to lectures. They’re short, pithy, riveting. They’re designed to express a single big idea in a way that can be absorbed in a single sitting. A typical 18-minute TED Talk might be around 2000 words. A typical traditional book is at least 60,000 words. TED Books nicely fill the gap in between. They come in at 10,000-20,000 words. So they can be read and absorbed in an hour or two.

These books are designed for electronic distribution. We are launching with the Amazon Kindle Singles program which opened today. The Kindle platform allows books to be read on iPad, iPhone, Android phones, PC and Mac – as well as the dedicated Kindle readers. Each TED Book costs just $2.99 (but may cost more in international markets)

Interestingly me and Nicole were just talking about my Kindle and reading non-fiction books. I have quite a few non-fiction books like Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent tipping point. I regularly lend them out to friends and family.

I’ll be interested to see what permissions are attached to the these ebooks. Ideally it would be very open and easily sharable. But thats not going to happen… Wishful thinking on my behalf I think but its a shame because the authors seems to be publishing under the TED brand, so I imagine it wouldn’t be that hard to convince the authors to make there work freely available or at least with less restrictions. Oh well…

Kindle everywhere your ebooks everywhere…

Kindle everywhere

Amazon are really cornering the reader market. Not only do they have one of the best ebook readers, but its also one of the cheapest (using there ability to ship many of them). But what really smashed it for them has to be the app which pretty much runs on everything. From PC’s to Android phones. Windows phone 7 to the ipad. Now there launching a kindle for the web. This will optimise any browser into a ebook reader. Impressive stuff.

But I’m worried…

This all seems to be out of the same play book as Apple and there itunes music ecosystem. I can already imagine the special links being sent around social networks pointing into the kindle ecosystem. The only saving grace is the kindle for the web.

Hopefully Amazon will follow the Google approach with these things and leverage the web not fight against it.

If Amazon screw up, Google seem to be right behind with there own ebook store.

What does this mean for the Kindle device, well this is all good news for the Kindle. Kindle is a fantastic eink device but shouldn’t be the only place to see ebooks. Hopefully more people will make there way through ebooks on devices like their phones then make there way towards reading on a eink device. I use to read my ebooks on my PDA (compaq ipaq) and it was painful but I found myself getting use to it. Now I can’t imagine using a phone or anything LCD like to read large amounts of text. But thats just me…

Its great Kindle is everywhere, and people can choose how they want to view the ebooks, period. Choice is good!

Now if they can just sort out the ability to buy a book and ebook version at the same time that would be great.

Code v.2.0 launched today

Code 2.0 book

Lawrence Lessig just launched Code version 2.0 today and best of all he released it under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

So Code v2 is officially launched today. Some may remember Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, published in 1999. Code v2 is a revision to that book — not so much a new book, as a translation of (in Internet time) a very old book. Part of the update was done on a Wiki. The Wiki was governed by a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. So too is Code v2.

Thus, at http://codev2.cc, you can download the book. Soon, you can update it further (we're still moving it into a new wiki). You can also learn a bit more about the history of the book, and aim of the revision. And finally, there are links to buy the book — more cheaply than you likely can print it yourself.

Lessig is already asking for remixes, which is great because I'm certainly going to convert it so it works on my phone soon.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]