All posts by Armand

Miscellany

Cosmickarmalicious

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Whoa, ScoobHad a bit of a ‘whoa, Scoob’ moment today. It came about 3pm, when I noticed I’d been wearing my nice new jumper inside out all day. Sheila, who bought me the jumper, assured me this was good luck.

Apparently when you do something stupid and sustain a run of bad luck, the universe owes you one. I’m watching you, universe. You owe me a thing that is as good as wearing a jumper inside out for half a day at work is bad. Erm, like a doughnut or something.

Cosmickarmalicious.

One of the good things about having tags on a blog is you can let people know when you’re trying to be funny. This post, for instance, is tagged ‘humour’…

Books, Miscellany, Personal, Television

…then I had a good Sunday

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Today was a good day. And there was me getting stressed about not having much planned for this weekend.

After nice, quiet drinks with Sheila, Dave, Afo and Chris at the pub last night was up at a sensible hour this morning, and finished reading the new Kevin Anderson novel. It is awesome – now have to wait frustratedly for the next one.

Then I caught up on phone calls to family and friends, which is always good.

Then I caught up on last week’s opening episodes of season 3 of Lost. Which was less obviously good, but I’ll reserve judgement.

Then I bore witness to Spurs 3-1 victory over Wigan. I have one word for this, and its [[w00t]]!

Now, going to try to work on the ever ephemeral novel for a bit before heading out to see Bond.

Yes, it has been a good day.

Sport

Winter morning

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BadmintonHave commenced a weekly ritual of Badminton with Sheila and had a fun game today. But it was en route to the court, standing in the horizontal, spraying rain that I was transported back to my school days, going out to play games on the accursed Bourbon pitches on wet, unpleasant days like this one. You’ve got to love contextual memory.

The nostalgia made it all good. I stood there and let the world rain on me for a while.

Current affairs, Media & Marketing

Press gazette closes

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The industry trade magazine of the, erm, newspaper industry has shut down today after 41 years (via Guy Clapperton).

Sad. End of era. Yes. Best wishes to the people struck by the redudancies.

But – do we now have room / demand for an open source Press Gazette equivalent, powered by WordPress? Am sure that people would contribute; all you’d need is a hack (or group of them) willing to put some free time in, as The World’s Leading does for the PR industry…

It wouldn’t be as thorough, but it could still be fun. Volunteers?

I am aware that there’s probably a few blogs that do stuff like this. Please point me in their direction…

Update: Ah, yes – Martin Stabe is carrying on with Press Gazette style blogging on his website. Am duly subscribed.

Viral

40% off Threshers Wine

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Update: If you’re looking for the March/Easter promotion, click here!

More wine!Seriousla. Cool stuff. Full story on Hugh’s blog, but essentially Thresher’s is giving people 40% off wine and don’t think it’ll get far because it isn’t promoting it. Either they don’t know what a ‘blogstorm’ is or they didn’t count on Hugh’s blogmendous influence.

Download the coupon here and stock up. I’ve been meaning to get hold of some of Hugh’s geek wine (Stormhoek) and this is my chance!

And for the cynical amongst you who think that this is precisely Thresher’s plan, well, I don’t care! 40% off wine is big! Christmas season is coming! Oh — and spread the word. Please repost this. Everywhere.

Meme, Technology

Last night a DJ stole my life

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Well, when I stole, I mean borrowed, when I say night, I mean afternoon, when I say DJ I mean colleague, and when I say life, I mean ability to interact with my digital world; by which I mean laptop. Without my customisations, configurations etc, I was without:

    passwords (no big deal, but a bit annoying)
    FF toolbar folder (very frustrating – my favourite web ‘apps’ on there!)
    all those Windows tweaks you just do (took some fiddling!)
    No Windows favourites (slightly annoying)
    No customised keyboard shortcuts for Office (grr)

And so on. Although it is probably possible to reconfigure the way Windows logs us on so all this stuff is stored on the server, this would almost certainly drive our server requirements up quite significantly and potentially be quite inconvenient for remote use. Not sure.

But the point I wanted to make (I’m a fan of the thin client world) was that if I could just log on to Firefox remotely when I fired it up, half my customisations would be in place, which would be great. Although I appreciate it’s a massive security risk. And if I could save my Windows preferences somewhere and temporarily apply them to a system that I have to use on occasion, that would also rock. Although, again, probably a security risk.

All the good things are security risks. The world would be better without malicious hackers, criminal masterminds and Noel Edmonds (I’m just kidding, I used to love his show).

What are the top 5 things you miss when you have to use someone else’s PC? Chris? Tom?

Film

The Prestige

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Bats and WolvySaw this movie last night: starring Wolverine, Batman, Alfred, Ziggy Stardust and Scarlett Johansson (who gets to keep her real name), this is an awesome film. I don’t want to say too much — for those who don’t know its basically a Marvel/DC crossover with Wolverine and Batman feuding for the title of ‘greatest magician ever’ — but suffice it to say that Wolverine does get his claws out and Bats does at one stage sport a utility belt of sorts.

Awesome.

Internet, Technology

C:\> is dead. Long live search

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I remember one incident in 1994 very clearly. I was doing work experience at a development lab in Malaysia, and one of the programmers who was coaching me handed me a copy of the Win95 beta surreptiously. Scrawled in faint pencil on the cover of the CD-Rom was the following text:

C:\> is dead. Long live the start menu!

It was all a bit odd. But to my point.

Scoble asks why Google would need an OS: various people have already commented on ‘web OS’ versus ‘desktop OS’… which I think is perhaps a layer of abstraction too far.

The reality is… Google Search itself is an OS. Think about it; you know the command line interface: how to search for things such that you’ll find them again. How upset are you when you repeat a search and, for whatever reason, the result you were thinking of doesn’t come up on the first page? Ok, maybe not literally upset, but it can cause some frustration.

Search is your gateway to every application you use on the interweb — in fact, you may not use bookmarks anymore, or a spelling checker, or anything… Just fire up Yahoo!, or Google, or whatever, and you’re away. It’s why (I suspect) people show so much brand loyalty to their search provider — when you’ve learned the syntax of one, why would you switch? It’s the same reason many PC users who might otherwise be swayed by the slick appeal of Apple stay put (not me, I have lots of reasons for not swaying from the good ‘ol PC platform).

And it’s why many search engines, at their most basic level, are homogenizing: the neutral, clean look of Live.com etc. mimics the success of Google in (what’s probably the hope!) that people won’t notice they’re not actually using Google when they fire up their browser of choice.

Everyone wants to be the new C:\> (the start menu really isn’t iconic enough for this).