Amazon have launched an interesting new search service, powered by Google but with the ability to keep histories of your searches online, to search within the pages of books, and a number of other interesting features. I’m going to try it out for a few days and post an opinion soon, but its definitely an interesting idea.
Gmail sounded like a good thing to me when I heard about it, and as usual, from Google, the technology and implementation sound great. Check out this review.
Microsoft tried a similar thing with regard to grouping emails as conversations in Outlook 2003, but with this there are memory management issues if you leave all your emails in your inbox. Obviously, when this happens on a remote server, it is less of a problem, if one at all.
Now if they could only sort out the fuss about their privacy issues.
via the Guardian’s blogwatch.
“The development of Weblogging is a genuinely positive development in mass communication, and particularly in publishing and journalism. It is one of those developments – like easy Internet access – that one knows is possible but couldn’t quite imagine happening. And then it slowly dawns on you that although you were only aware of small steps being taken, a milestone has been reached, and something significant has been achieved.”
Says The Register’s Nico Macdonald in an interesting piece contemplating the future of blogging and its related fields, publishing and journalism. Some interesting thoughts; while I hardly consider myself as someone who’s changing the world with my thoughts (yet), there are some good perspectives in there. Worth a read for you ardent bloggers.
Oddly enough, and I’m not blind to the irony, the article also lambasts blogerati for their inward focus, lack of depth of research and failure to write on substantive topics – thus the supposed new new journalism fails to be anything of real relevance. But like all good memes, there will be proliferation, there will be replication, there will be discrimination, and only the best will ultimately matter.
Sorry, Chris has been blogging about google search strings as well, and I find this quite funny.
Here’s the top ten (of ten) search strings for this site as of today:
Top 10 of 10 Total Search Strings
# Hits Search String
1 2 18.18% avril lavigne download free don’t tell me -lyrics
2 1 9.09% armand.co.uk
3 1 9.09% axl rose facelift
4 1 9.09% badass latin phrases
5 1 9.09% download badgers song by weebl
6 1 9.09% eragon download sites
7 1 9.09% qwghlm pronounciation
8 1 9.09% richie rich punjabi download song
9 1 9.09% waiting for my real life to begin download
10 1 9.09% zatoichi dvd cover download
Google has some trouble, evidently, with blogs. If ‘google weebl badgers find’ takes you to my site, then how will one ever find badgers? And WHO searches for ‘badass latin phrases’? I thought for sure that I’d be coining a phrase there…
To check out these, and other statistics for this site (yes, we track all visitors. I know who you are, where you’re sitting, and what you had for breakfast), go here.
Damnit, I’m still being a techie. I remembered reading about Stuff Magazine detailing a list of the top ten gadgets for 2004, and being pleased that I had a number of them. I reckon that I’m approximately 80% geek according to this. Here’s the list: how do you scale up?
# Bluetooth Mobile (Nokia 6600)
# MP3 Jukebox (Apple iPod)
# Plasma Screen (Pioneer PDP-434HDE)
# Home Cinema (Pioneer NS-DV990)
# Personal Video Recorder (Sky+ for BSkyB)
# Digital Camera (Pentax Optio S4)
# Games Console (Microsoft Xbox)
# Wi-fi Laptop (Sony Vaio)
# Wireless Network (Netgear)
# Watch (Seiko Arctura Kinetic)
Approximations allowed in scoring (i.e. SPV e200 instead of 6600 as a bluetooth mobile, Creative Jukebox in place of iPod etc.,)
Alright, I mentioned earlier that I was thinking about getting Xbox Live and, well, I did, along with Magic The Gathering: Battlegrounds and Amped 2, and I thought I’d post some thoughts.
The infrastructure is incredible; Xbox Live has a unified ID system, so you have one login, one friends list, across all the games that you play, and you can keep track of your rankings, friends and downloaded content, some of which is charged at a premium, using the Xbox Lived-up dashboard.
The headset plugs into the controller and works well enough. The ‘mute’ button is definitely useful, as you don’t always want to talk to people in Phoenix, Arizona, playing Magic at 4am local time.
Despite using a very small proportion of my ADSL connection (connected as it is via a network bridge/cross-over cable, via a wireless network), there’s very little apparent latency or lag for either game and the VoIP service that works in game is pretty clear.
At £29.99 including a year’s subscription, I reckon Xbox Live is well worth it, if you play with any keen-ness any of the games it supports (and they are increasingly legion).
Just so y’all know, my Xbox Live ID, oddly enough, is ‘Division6’, and I’m honing my red & white spell book for some major ass-kicking. I’m ranked about 500 in the world (mad skills!), out of about 10,000 Magic players. My aim is to kick the bejeezus out of Matt (aka CSmith), who’s a couple of hundred above me in the league table. He’s a little raging goblin.
Alright, that was remarkably geeky. I think I’ll write about sport and women for a while to straighten myself out.
…by which I mean, hello to all the lovely Canadians who have been reading my site! I should probably password the webstatistics, but I’ve found them to be of moderate interest; and its somewhat gratifying to realise that other people read my site more than I do (I use Mozilla rather than IE as a browser – and yet IE 6.0 is the most popular browser to readers of my site).
Mozilla is brilliant, by the way. Get it. Now. Tabbed browsing! No pop-ups! Do you know what that means? Never mind, you still need it. Really.
As to other things; jetlag, shopping, driving and other preparations, as well as seeing many members of extensive family have occupied Malaysia time. Interestingly, though, my sleep-deprivation-jetlag-preparing-experiment seems to have worked reasonably well, and I’ve adjusted to Malaysian time reasonably rapidly. Of course, that means my only excuse for my relative inactivity is the heat… but that sleep deprivation thing did make me go slightly loopy. I don’t recommend it; no wonder Channel 4 got in trouble over its reality TV programme Shattered.
Saw American Splendor last night. A movie about how real life is difficult – which evidently can make for a pretty interesting film. Reasonably gritty and given a sense of the real by interstitials with the characters on whom the film is based (the mature – not adult – comic book writer Harvey Pekar primarily). A film, even a docu-film, about a subject this self-involved would have been easy to do badly, but it wasn’t. Muy Bueno – read Harvey and his wife’s blog here.
I’m off to Malaysia for the next week, visiting family for Easter; blogging frequency will almost certainly be reduced. So in good housekeeping style, there’s a few things I ought to set out clearly here, having failed to blog them in any sensible way.
Things seen:
(a) Continuing, brilliant ER, mediocre, but sometimes amusing Tripping the Rift, Simpsons, Smallville and Frasier continuing through their current seasons.
(b) Bubba Ho-Tep is a great film about a black JFK, an impotent Elvis, and a Mummy wearing a cowboy hat. Not just cult, but very clever too. Stars the epic Bruce Campbell.
(c) Zatoichi and 21 Grams are both films worth watching; the former a performance piece/far east cowboy feature, the latter a sometimes over-clever but generally moving film from the creator of Amores Perros.
(d) The remake of Starsky & Hutch is a less good film, but completely enjoyable
(e) The new Orange Film Foundation (or whatever) ads. That guy is DAMN funny. Anyone else think he’s a bit Kevin-Spacey-esque? Any links to info about these ads would be appreciated.
Things done:
(a) I’ve also been introduced to Xbox Live and intend to get it myself (if I can get it all to work, with my Xbox Live, a patch cable, a Mac and a wireless network – told you I knew about the tech) so that I can beat Americans at Magic: The Gathering.
(b) As well as the rebranding/self-hosting of this site, I’ve found an AMAZING blogging tool which posts using the Blogger API, so you know what I’m currently listening to (as seen below).
(c) Finished Jennifer Government (brilliant), and am proceeding nicely with the Rogue Nation of Badass Devils and the Republic of the Sunne on Nation States.
(d) Started Hey Nostradamus, as recommended by Chris, and Absolution Gap, as recommended by me. Alistair Reynolds’ previous Revelation-Space-Universe books are pretty good too.
(e) I’ve added Brazil, Heat and Donnie Darko to my films-I-should-have-watched-by-now list (having finally crossed off The Usual Suspects a few months ago). Any takers for some video nights?
Things revealed
(a) Damian is the one with the continental fruit beer fixation, as noted on the napkin of a thousand blogs.
(b) Tom & I are working on a secret project. It’s very exciting.
(c) I’m trying to stay up all night to prepare myself for the jetlag to Malaysia. The jetlag caused by the introduction of British Summer Time is contributing to a sense of increasing dazedness. Might post again later, especially if I decide to rewatch bits of Hi Fidelity again…
See y’all…
Thanks to the help of Chris and Tom, this blog has had a substantial facelift, is now blowered by pogger, has had comments naturally disabled then artificially re-enabled by haloscan, and is now hosted on new servers. It also has a new counter, but just mentally add ‘1170’ to that, because that’s how many clickthroughs the blog had when it was hosted on motime.
I think its pretty rocking, and I can stop wasting time making it look good and get back to my arbitrary (yet pleasurable) writing of nearly completely meme-free blogs.
Although I will try to get some links up in the blog template so you can click between Chris’, Tom’s and my blogs (in our blog-ring of three), should you desire.
At the pub last night (it was an entertaining evening, many things happened in addition to my realisation about the flying v (? – see below), conversation with Tom, Damo & Richard led to many blog-inspring ideas. Worrying, really, that I manage to occasionally see conversation and real life as inter-blog time filling. Last night was a minefield of bloggable material, which will materialise on the site over the course of today.
This napkin provides the minutes of our meeting, insofar as subjects I wish to blog upon. No doubt Tom will blog on others.
Oh, and in a moment of Catatonia and Tiger-beer-inspired genius, Tom came out with this lyric: “I put horses heads, in people’s beds, because I… have a blog.” Outstanding.