Amanda and I have got a little hooked on Tetris Battle – a competitive, Facebook-integrated game that does what you’d expect it to. Getting lines bumps the opponent up, with bonuses for hitting ‘bombs’ and getting multiple line-completions in sequence.
Given how busy life is at the moment, these sorts of quick social game are all I have time for. Are there any other good ones I should look out for / avoid on pain of addiction?
The garden keeps on giving; more potatoes have come up – they’ve been OK – I think I’m perhaps not a massive fan of this particular varietal, but I haven’t tried them chipped or roasted yet. I need to research how to keep seed potatoes fresh for a year as I’m hoping that the Lapland potatoes prove as delicious when grown in the ground here as they were in Finland.
The strawberry plant gives of itself daily – more sweet tiny strawberries keep materialising. The courgettes are starting to come in thick and fast, although cucumber production seems to have slowed – we might need to add a bit more feed.
I’ve finally got around to bug spraying the plum tree, which seemed to be suffering some kin of minor infestation. Will have to see how it pans out. The two remaining apples on our apple tree are perfectly formed. Quite exciting.
The tomatoes are ripening fast – there seem to be a lot of them. Emily’s slight allergic reactions to both tomatoes and potatoes has taken some of the fun out of these, but Amanda and I will enjoy them!!
Angry Birds does not play well with my slightly obsessive tendencies:
Am now, in odd intervals, replaying every remaining level that’s not three-starred until I sort it across all three full Angry Birds games. Go me!
We got Amanda a new bike recently, a surprisingly hard thing to choose. Sites like Which? don’t make bike recommendations because the models change too quickly and there’s so much subjective in the assessment of a bike. And retailers aren’t as helpful as you’d like them to be as every retailer stocks a massively different selection due to exclusivity deals with some of the major manufacturers.
One thing did immediately become apparent; other than the retailer made ‘generics’, bikes are expensive. When I asked my colleague @geowgeow about one brand of affordable retailer-manufactured own-brand bike, his one word review was "crap." They fact that all bikes seem to use fundamentally the same components (Shimano gears, etc) makes it almost impossible to tell them apart on paper; you either have to mystically ‘know’ or you have to be able to tell by looking and feeling it. Which I obviously can’t do.
In the end, we went for a well-customer-reviewed Trek hybrid to match the one my family got me a few years back, and which I knew from experience of Trek was likely to be decent – and it is!
Interestingly Trek will only deliver via their resellers (and not direct to consumer), so the store has an opportunity to tune, tweak and assemble the bike for you and guarantee a certain quality of experience. Of course, the fact you then have to take a wheel off to get it in the car doesn’t help you when you get home, so it took an amount of fiddling to stop the wheels rubbing against the mudguards…
I’ve just finished blitzing my way through hundreds of pages of the Walking Dead comic. It has been amazing, so far, not something I expected to say about anything involving zombies.
Unlike the movie/zombie convention, the comic serial has enough time to explore some fascinating issues. The nature of what it is to be human; to have humanity, of what you’d do to protect family, to survive in extreme circumstances. On the source of strength; on leadership, on psychological trauma and mental instability; on social dynamics and societal constraints.
It’s a rich, rich vein of possibility that is amazingly well executed, and which I think perhaps could only have worked in this specific medium (I’m not sure how well this will translate to TV unless they can miraculously stay on the air for 3-4 years).
I am looking forward to the introduction of Michone on the TV series, if that happens anytime soon. Simply fantastic.
Whilst I’ve been frustrated with how long its taken Tranquil PC to fix my media centre, I finally got an explanation out of them on Friday; they’re not only replacing the hard drive but upgrading the whole build to the latest components needed to ensure repeat failure doesn’t happen. I’m guessing something overheated as the parts being replaced include the cooling system and the DC power supply unit.
I’m not sure if I should be annoyed at being shipped a ‘defective’ machine or impressed that they are taking the trouble to use what they’ve learned in the last 9 months of shipping my PC to upgrade it for me. I’m leaning to the latter; but we’ll see what kind of shape its in when they eventually get it back to me…
RIM/Blackberry’s days are numbered, IMHO. As a mobile platform, it is lagging painfully behind its rivals and increasingly only die-hard fans, luddites and bankers remain loyal – and the latter generally have little choice.
There are a few reasons it succeeds in the enterprise; its excellent push-email platform and its high level of security. However, one reason why it does well is because it’s a terrible, terrible phone.
Say what?
Well, as anyone that’s ever looked into it will know, managing a business contract with a mobile operator comes with its moments of extreme tedium. One of these is dealing with the monthly billing – where people with disproportionately high monthly bills need to account for their calling patterns, going through a gargantuan itemised list of calls, expensing some and paying for others. Few of the mobile operators are doing such fantastic deals on inclusive minutes at an enterprise level that businesses can afford to ignore high levels of usage by even a small proportion of the user base.
This is one of the reasons why some businesses will hesitate on the iPhone. People will be more likely to use it as a primary device, giving up their personal mobile, and this will drive billing and administration costs up. There’s already a higher initial cost and this would be compounded. Blackberries are so hopelessly clumsy for anything but email they tend to be used as a back-up phone if at all, so this problem is far less significant.
And businesses can’t just subsidise individual mobile tariffs. For my employer to contribute to a mobile tariff I pay personally would constitute a “benefit in kindâ€, they would have to give it to me gross of tax – so probably a 30-40% premium on the mobile tariff. Which doesn’t make any sense at all.
So – mobile operators, if you want to make the premium on iPhones by selling them to business (as Apple seems to want you to), then launch some more affordable ‘all you can eat’ or flexi tariffs that will cope with rogue users. And RIM? I have no advice for you. I’ve no idea who will acquire you when your fortunes flounder for the last time, but can’t help but think that’s where things are headed…
My recent poll (Heart is still winning) seems particularly timely in light of news that there will be a Captain Planet movie. I am confident this will be a piece of unending, tedious drivel, but hey – who am I to judge?
So I love the concept of Circles, but Google+ isn’t quite there for me yet.
Here’s why not:
1) No APIs yet, so no limited extensibility and hard to work into my social media syndication strategy – I can’t get my blog to cross post to G+, for example. The xhtml / rel=me thing should work but between my ineptitude at HTML and bugginess in Buzz, I can’t make it work.
2) Not enough people on there that I actually know – the only circles of mine where people are saying anything are “randoms,†“journalists†and “PRs†– which tells you a bit about the early adopters I know.
3) Too many randoms are adding me for no apparent reason – I can understand why some of the big hitters have stepped off the platform within days of joining
4) I don’t use enough of the other Google apps (Picasa etc) that would make it really useful. Maybe I should.
On Facebook at the moment I have one fundamental complaint: the newsfeed’s selection of news stories is currently completely borked. I’m getting old stories from a very small set of my friend-network because Facebook is trying to guess which "circles" I want to hear from and excluding many of my friends.
Sort it out, the pair of you!
The Google+ iOS app isn’t terrible, but it isn’t great either. It’s buggy, crashes a bit and/or loses threads from notifications, occasionally fails to load beyond the login screen, and doesn’t seem to let you filter your stream by circle. Which seems a fundamental error. It also seems a little limited by way of available features for sharing, etc.
That said, Google is clearly iterating fast – the first bugfix release was out within 24 hours. And it has a nice, clean UI and a good touch interface. So we’ll see what happens.