My brother is on a trip, doing a course with Inside Pictures and blogging the experience for Skillset.
What that means is he’s touring LA for a few days, meeting film directors, probably movie stars, and talking about the experience on his blog. Check it out.
I originally posted a needless rant here, and decided in the interests of being constructive and not wanting to look like a ranty loon forever, to take down the post and instead write about how I addressed a recent frustration I had when troubleshooting my brother’s Macbook (much easier than editing my original, slightly inane, post). I’m a PC user so apologies if the following is unbelieavably obvious…
So the problem was: iTunes and Software update would not connect despite the fact the internet was otherwise working.
To fix the issue, change your location to the profile for your local wireless network instead of ‘automatic’.
It was incredibly simple but when I originally Googled whatever the exact error message was I couldn’t find an answer. So hoping this helps anyone who has experienced the same issue, and I’ll live with the embarrassment if the reason I needed help with this was that most Mac users find this as natural as uninstalling an application by dragging it to the recycle bin…
Thanks to Rich whose comment on my original rant was reasonable and helpful.
At some point, growing up, you turn against your parents in a small way. Or at least, I did — it felt occasionally a duty rather than a pleasure to see and hang out with them and a distraction from the every day business of going out with friends and generally tearing up the world.
Maybe I’ve matured, or its the stabilising influence and general inspiration of going out with Amanda, but over the last few weeks with my folks visiting, it’s just been amazing to hang out with them. My folks are talented, funny, interesting and brilliant (what else, I guess, would you expect when their progeny includes, well, me), and I’m pleased to have reached a point where I can enjoy and appreciate them as people, not just as their son. Of course, they’re not without their limitations but everyone is, and there genuinely feels to have been a change in me that I am more able to accept them (and others) as they are.
My Dad used to talk a lot about shifting your perspective when I was younger. Speccifically in the context of wasted food much of the time, or in addressing complaints that I was ‘starving’ (“Think of the children in Africa… are you really starving?”) — but something seems to have shifted recently. And it feels good.
I’ve spent a not insiginificant portion of the last six months or so debating with myself as to whether I should buy one of the emerging class of ‘Netbook’ PCs – subnotebook laptops in a 7-10inch casing powered by a low-energy Intel processor and running very minimal sofware and hardware. The bare minimum you need to be an effective Netizen.
Given how much of my day is spent advocating the move to the cloud for one client or another, and / or discussing the increasing mobility of the average man with various media, it seemed only appropriate that I found a way to be more online in more places,
And so, after much headwrangling, and after reading mediocre reviews of the Asus 1000H and the Lenovo Ideapad S10 (to be fair, only bad previews of the latter), I’ve finally bought the cheapo, rebadged MSI Wind that is the Advent 4211. Thank you PC World for saving me some cash.
The machine, needless to say, is pretty awesome. I’m typing this blog post on it and my usual touchtyping pace isn’t being noticeably diminished by the 85% keyboard, the screen is bright, crisp and clear, and the machine outperforms my (admittedly aging) old IBM Thinkpad T40 (vintage: 2004). There are, of course, a few niggles….
1) It shipped with a wireless driver that randomly disconnected from my Access Point. Finding one involved navigating the slightly confusing MSI website, as obviously Advent hasn’t set up a useful one of its own. The very useful MSIWind.net user forums proved invaluable in addressing this issue.
2) The trackpad is a bit small, and I haven’t worked out if its possible to disable tap-to-click (which I gather will be annoying in time) and it doesn’t do side scrolling — which is very annoying.
3) I’m still getting used to a 1024*600 screen. You lose so much real estate! Given that I’m normally working on twin displays this takes a little adjusting. Chrome is well suited to this little laptop, or Firefox with F11.
4) The battery life seems significantly less than the advertised 3 hours if you’re using Wifi. Or maybe Pokerstars just drains more juice than your average app. Or maybe I haevn’t figuried out the mediocre PC World software and power-management features…
Generally, however, its a story of so far so good. I’d recommend the MSI Wind over most of the current generation Netbooks I’ve seen (though both Samsung and Toshiba’s offerings looked interesting on Engadget…) and I just hope they take a while to move the dual core Atom processors into a new generation of Netbooks so I get a brief window in which I feel that I’ve got the best and shiniest tech.
Big picture? I think UMPCs are going to continue to be a big thing for the next couple of years. The combination of easy portability, battery life, compelling price point and general full featuredness of them is remarkable. We’ll see more given away with laptops, more sold in major retail chains, and more people sporting 3G models on the trains. We’ll see more manufacturers churning out carboncopies of each others Netbooks, we’ll see differentiation in some software layouts (especially for the Linux variants) and battery lives and design (and not much else). It’s a connected future, awwww yeah, and there’s no getting away from it.
Disclaimer: Google Enterprise is a client. This isn’t really my clients’ beat but its not unconnected given how much faster Chrome is with Ajax/Javascript than most things, and therefore Google Apps. Well, until Firefox 3.1. Maybe.
I love Firefox. I love Chrome. I’m switching between the two interchangeably at the moment. Here’s the good and bad of Chrome and why I haven’t given up on FF altogether.
Good
Fast!
Less resource hungry – no more memory leaks!
Clean interface
More stable than FF & IE!
Windows only (I maintain my view that Apple Macs suck, and am not bothered that Google hasn’t yet released non-Windows versions. I’ve read that they will, so that’s good in principle)
Neutral
Still can’t save passwords for Yahoo (FF can’t either). Why not?
Can’t distinguish between different Google Apps profiles (again, FF can’t either). Why not?
Not so good
Shortcuts go weird (e.g. CTRL – minus in Google Docs to delete a row doesn’t work)
Needs an IE rendering plugin, and lots of other plugins, which will come in time…
Some websites go bananas
Needs nicer animation around the shortcuts toolbar
…sorry, life has been busy. My UMPC arrives this week and you will no doubt be hearing more from me.
Ping me by email if you need me in the meantime.
Jon at EA sent me a copy of the Spore Creature Creator, a component of the new landmark title from Maxis (y’know, the SimCity guys) that’s due later this year. I haven’t installed it yet, but was amused by the consequences of Jon demo-ing it to Jonathan Ross and his family (and most especially his son Harvey).
Harvey posted on a forum that he’d seen the game and received tens of pages of comments because people didn’t believe he was Jonathan Ross’ son, because people believed he was, because they didn’t believe he’d seen Spore, and because they did. It was all a bit bizarre and Jon, who works the PR at EA, had to comment on it for a blogger or two.
I’m not at the level of fame yet that I get personal demos of new video games (Jon, when does that happen?***), but it’s nice to get sent stuff to play with too. I’ll be writing a bit on the C&C 3 expansion pack soon, which EA were good enough to send me last week.
We’re working on some gaming stuff at the office too. When I get those previews I’ll let you know.
*** Just spotted this. I can win the celebrity Spore experience by entering a competition with EA. Maybe I should try the Creature Creator first…
Apologies for another work-related post but, hell, we’re just doing a load of interesting stuff. Brands2Life, and its International network of partner agencies the Oriella PR Network, has just done a study into the changing requirements of journalists across Europe. The study was conducted across multiple countries covered by the Oriella PR network, and had 347 respondents. There were some interesting findings, including:
Half of the respondents (46%) revealed they are expected to produce more content for their respective publications.
Video is having a growing impact on journalism with over 40% confirming they are now responsible for producing online television or video clips, despite only 3% of respondents being employed by traditional broadcasters.
European journalists are increasingly required to deliver their content in differing formats – 44% of outlets offer journalist authored blogs; almost a fifth (18%) are now producing audio podcasts; and almost one in four (24%) offer video podcasts.
You’d probably have noticed much of this if you’ve visited a news website lately. The message out of this for us PROs, obviously, is that the game has changed. My boss won’t thank me for telling this story, but he remembers a time when press releases were sent by post or (at best) fax — email shifted expectations of what we had to deliver then, and social media and the multimedia delivery platform that is the web is beginning to have an analogous impact on the nature of reporting in Europe today. Of course, in many instances, you don’t need the latest whizzy Social Media News Release or funky viral — but in some cases there’s scope to provide much more compelling content to support journalists in their endeavours.
Of course, to all them PR bloggers out there this is a no brainer — you’ve been living, eating and breathing this stuff for a couple of years. However, judging by several of the conversations I’ve had with comms directors lately, the message is taking its time to sink through. I love this sort of research because the theory is one thing — but having journalists actually tell you that they’d like to see more multimedia content, would like more b-roll (web journalists as well as broadcast and national media), well, it warms the heart.
Have a gander at the report at the study’s website, and you can read Journalism.co.uk’s write-up here.
Mozilla is trying to get into the Guinness book of records with most downloads in a 24 hour period. It’s going on now – get Firefox, spread Firefox.
If you don’t know what that is, and you’re reading this in Internet Explorer — [doink]. That’s me hitting you in the head with a rubber mallet. It’s an awesome web browser, and is to surfing the web what spoons are to eating soup — a necessary tool, and a curvy, shiny piece of awesomeness to boot.
(I haven’t actually installed FF3 yet. Mozilla’s load-balancing is good, which is to say the website was still up for me to hit download, but not that good, in that I’m getting 5 k/b per second down a pipe that should give me 1.25 mb/s. I’m looking forward to it, though, in a geeky kind of way).
Update: FF3 installed on three machines now and I’m loving it on all of them. Most of my extensions/add-ons have been upgraded (not the Delicious one, oddly enough) and it seems to run smoother, faster and less resource intensively than before. Although it does seem to have a larger RAM footprint than FF2, where my systems would grind to a halt with this much memory in use in earlier incarnations, FF3 seems well stable. Happiness is a shiny new browser. Yes, yes, I’m a geek.
I won’t deny, I quite like to be meme-tagged. It’s a validation of my internet existence, and some small evidence that people are reading my blog (although the comments are a good way of doing that too, if you feel so inclined). Tom tagged me for this, and then Chris tagged me for it again, but I’m still only going to do seven songs so you can feel relieved. I won’t inflict my taste in music at you for too long. I’m also not going to write bags about each one as, honestly, I don’t want to. But thanks to the beauty of embedded video, you’ll get to listen to some of them if you feel so inclined. And then you can judge me, you bastards.
For those who don’t know what this is about:
“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.“
Here we go…
Urusen – Hugo
My friend Ben’s band. Seven types of awesome. Been listening to Urusen’s new album pretty much on repeat since it came out last year. Can’t believe they haven’t been signed. Not only have I seen them live more often than any other band, I’ve also jammed with Ben a number of times, which was an awesome feeling, given how moving I find the music. Myspace here if you want more.
Sunsets – Powderfinger
This one is Tony’s fault. He introduced me to this Australian band in a move no-doubt designed to persuade me of his Nation’s superiority over everything else. Unfortunately, I love them and this song is not only wonderful but has a fantastic anime supporting video.
Waterloo Sunset – ??
Arvind has a band whose name I forget cover this song for the French Film soundtrack / closing credit, and, wonderful as the Kinks original is, the cover is something magical. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for well executed acoustic rock.
Falling Slowly – Once
This one is Arvind’s fault too. Deeply romantic, melodic, soulful in a way that I appreciate.
Newton Faulkner: Tear drop
I know, I know, Massive Attack fans will probably lynch me. But I do think the cover is impressive, and love the guitar as a drum thing he does. This one is Ashvina and Sheila’s fault.
Out of our head – Sheryl Crow
I’ve loved Sheryl Crow since I was 14, despite the fact that I loathe most things that have any connection with country music. Love the cadence of this one.
Now and Forever – LoTR Musical
This is principally a recency thing. Saw this musical a few weeks ago and can’t get the song out of my head. Not sure why they’re chuckling so much in this clip.
…and that’s it. Not being one for doing exactly what I’m told, I’m not going to tag seven people. I will tag a few, though: Arvind, if only because he’s managed to get two songs in my current seven, and because he’ll probably give me more music I want to listen to. Noel, because I want to know what the man who got me into Metallica is listening to. Richard, because it’s something fun to do whilst waiting for your passport, and Craig if he gets a second on his travels. Tim, because he’ll probably have fun with it and Jack, because, well, you have to Ask Jack. And Chris, who strikes me as a chap who will have a decent soundtrack.
Damn. I did do what I was told. Seven tags for seven songs.