…stop using so many ‘…’s.
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All posts by Armand
Bloggi-quette
I’ve been writing more recently (as, erm, you can see) and my list of categories is growing slightly unwiedly. Is it useful to have dozens of categories? When I blog on technology, should I add tech categories for specific areas of technology I’m writing about?
Not quite sure how it affects search, or how people use my site. Interestingly, according to the various analytics packages I have working, categories ‘2’ and ‘3’ are the second and third most pages on this blog (other than the root) – technology and media.
Answers on a comment.
Oh – and my blogroll is expanding. Finally getting around to adding the people I read… sorry for the delay, folks, I’m sure I’ll be winging dozens of referrals your way soon ;).
Taking care of business
I really hate the task tracker in Outlook – the reminders it fires up are irritating, and I haven’t found a useful way to track sets of actions. Googling around revealed nothing satisfactory, but I’ve found some cruddy freeware client that lets me do hierarchical task management – which makes it slightly easier to keep track on what I’m working on, stuff I’ve delegated, etc.
What I really need is one that (1) lets me print out my task list (a limitation built into the client I’ve downloaded, the premium version costs money and (2) I can access from anywhere. This local client model really doesn’t work for task management.
So really I probably want Google to design one.
The reasons I haven’t linked to the software I’m using are twofold: firstly, I’m not sure I want to even implicitly recommend it to anyone and secondly, I can’t remember the search string I used to find it. I didn’t deem it worthy to add to my Linklog…
Mail betas
So I’ve been using the new beta services from both Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, and I’m slightly underwhelmed.
Both Yahoo and MS seem to think that users want their webmail to work exactly like their POP email client. Which is just wrong: having a clunky, slow, messy web interface that looks like a mutated version of Outlook is probably not how people want to read their webmail. The key thing for me reading webmail is that everything is as responsive as possible: which is why I love Gmail Google Mail so much – the Ajaxified pages let you flick straight into and out of emails, compose new ones, etc… and I love the keyboard shortcuts.
That said, of the two, Yahoo are doing it much better. They have the ads in right place so that they’re not too intrusive, and so that you actually get more than about 2 square inches of frame in which to read your mails. But: abdicate, find a friend with Gmail invites, and get a new, bling, Google account… (I have a 100 invites for anyone who wants an account…)
My sofa….
via Bloggerheads.
My sofa is large, white, luxuriously squidgy and slightly agéd. It is a thing of wonder, and I suspect contains some kind of trans-dimensional vortex. It is magnificient. Like a man once loved a lamp, I love my sofa.
My name is Earl…
…Okin. Earl Okin is a quite funny man we saw recently at the Hampstead Comedy club. Some people think he’s creepy, but I think he’s quite good, and have bought his amusing album, Musical Genius and Sex Symbol.
I don’t know why I like amusing music (amusic?) so much. Maybe it just appeals to my slightly twisted sense of humour. Maybe comedy singers just have a good sense of melody?
That said, I’ve consigned every ‘Weird Al’ CD I owned to cold storage… But I guess its debatable that he is humourous.
Heggles
I bought John Hegley’s Family Favourites CD the other day, having seen him perform a few years ago (at a show my brother was reading at). Some might call that a delayed reaction, I call it… measured.
Great as it is, I am somewhat disappointed. Primarily because the great music-comedy-poem-thingy that is Luton Bungalow sounds very different on the recording to how I remember it – at the gig I was at, he sang:
“In my Luton Bungalow…. low… low… low… Luton Bungalow!”
On my CD he simply sings:
“In my Luton Bungalow.”
Which is clearly a poor substitute, although I’ll admit this story loses something in the telling. But its a fantastic disc, and he’s a fantastic man: I’d recommend it to anyone.
Space opera + Hamer Horror = Hamer Space?
Since reading Peter Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga a few months ago, I’ve been itching to get into his bestselling Night’s Dawn Trilogy, which I finally did this month. I’ve just finished the first whopping 1,200 page volume, The Reality Dysfunction.
It has great similarities to his more recent series – a grand, swooping, dynastic space-opera with hundreds of worlds, a complex political superstructure and economy, a fantastic cast of characters, and some very creative science and technology.
Where its different? Well, it tackles religion. And also the walking dead. The walking dead, needless to say, is where it gets really weird. I’ve never seen the word ‘sequestration’ used so many times, even in that density of pages – of course, its possible I’ve simply never seen the word used at all. How does it decline: I sequester, you sequester, he/she/it sequesterers…
The book is actually quite suspenseful at times (if not actually frightening), and I am looking forward to the next one. The sheer level of intricate detail he goes to is astonishing – everything resolves, eventually. I just need to get through the remaining 2,000 pages of the series to see what happens…
Social bookmarking is really useful
I was asked today about a news story I read back in October in the Times. Much as I like Times Online, the search function is moderately dire, and I had no chance of finding the particular story (about the computer programmer who had outsourced his job to India) using conventional means.
Fortunately, I had linklogged it with delicious and searching for the tag ‘outsourcing’ returned one hit. Bonza – and here I thought it was just a way to share the memes I get emailed every day :).
Rubbish TV
Have you ever just felt the need to watch rubbish TV? I have – last night being a particular case in point.
I admit, I had some curiosity about the Merlin’s apprentice miniseries, but it evaporated shortly after the principle character (the apprentice in question) started talking to a pig in the opening sequence.
“Who’s pig is this,” I asked myself, “and why do I care?”
It is one of the worst pieces of television I’ve ever encountered and it went on for nearly 3 hours. And I watched it all. And enjoyed making fun about the pig with my sister. Not sure why…
I am sure that Sam Neill should be ashamed of himself. No amount of money was worth that travesty…