Off To Utah

Another business trip to Provo looms, so another excuse for not blogging. Hooray!

I leave tomorrow morning and will have a week of meetings, presentations, meetings, dinners, and meetings. Oh, I almost forgot about our ATV tour on Sunday! Hacking about on a ATV (that’s Quadbike in English) on a mountain trail: what could be better?

TTFN

I Ignore My Home Page

I had a great strategy for keeping myself on the blogging straight ‘n’ narrow: set my blog dashboard as my browser’s homepage! Simple eh? If the first thing I see every time I go online is my blog just begging for a new post I’ll get better at updating it regularly won’t I?

Well won’t I?

Clearly not. Nearly every time I start browsing I catch myself acknowledging a minor pang of guilt as I ignore the beckoning homepage and browse on to Facebook, Twitter, and anything else, as long as it’s sedentary.

Phew, I’m a bit knackered now. Better stop before I get a bit more tired.

Crash

Just ten days after we gave my son Elliot a car for his 18th birthday he goes and crashes it.

Firstly and most importantly, he’s OK. Secondly I’m feeling angry, relieved, deflated and sick in equal measure.

He didn’t do it on purpose of course, but the collision was the result of not paying enough attention to the road, and serves to further embed the poor reputation that young male drivers have in this country.

He went into the back of a stationary car in front of him. The front of his car crumpled, pushing the radiator up against the engine block, and the steering wheel airbag exploded in his face, grazing his arms and filling the car with smoke. I can imagine how frightening it must have been, but then my next emotion is anger and frustration at how much trouble it has caused and yet how easily it could have been avoided.

Now all Elliot’s plans for visiting distant friends over the summer have evaporated, and the need to get a job and start earning some money during the Summer Holidays is more important than ever.

Got to take the Rough with the Smooth I guess, but I could really do with a bit of Smooth right now.

#whatami?

Continuing the theme, these new search strings are leaving me feeling a little left out. Being over 45 years of age I am acutely aware that I’m not at the vanguard of the internet’s evolution any more. I used to be an early adopter of any new internet technology or social meme: I was an early user of Facebook when my kids were lost in the doldrums of Bebo, and I used my credit card online before the early Fraud Demons subsided. But now I seem to treat new memes and developments in Social Media with stick-in-the-mud cynicism. For instance I resisted getting the Twitter bug for as long as I could, dismissing it as a fad for peple too lazy to blog. But I have finally succumbed and I “get it” now.

So, just when I was pulling a muscle trying to pat myself on the back for returning to with-itness along come #thesethings. As I said before, these strings preceded by a hash sign are a recent meme that social networks have picked up, and they’re supposed to help you gather content on a given subject. The idea is this: you put the tag in your blog post, Facebook comments and Tweets, and you instantly get a seat on the gravy train that is a Twitter Trend. I’m convinced some people just pepper their Tweets with #thesethings to look cool.

Oops, there I go again being a miserable old git about it; that way danger lies. I’m starting to sound like a dinosaur and we all know what happened to them!

#thesethings are OK I guess, and I’m doing my best to embrace them, but I continue to have two problems that leave me feeling left out:

1. Am I allowed to start one?

What are the rules? Who can start one? I know I could post a Tweet containing #obesity (just to pick a personal example), but unless others pick it up and start copying it it will quickly look silly all on its own and I’ll feel like the misfit on the bus whose suggestion of Anarchy In The UK brings the sing-song to a silent, glaring halt. No, there must be a sage group of #Elders who consider applications and then decide which get the seal of approval. So I’m safe as long as I just follow trends and don’t try actually starting one.

2. They don’t explain themselves

I always thought the point of a search term was to help you find out about it, yet #thesethings seems to do anything but. Oh yes, they’ll help you find thousands of Tweets talking around this mystery subject, but if you’re not already at the party you’re left peering in through the window, the disco lights dancing on your hopeful face. Let me give you an example:

Sample Tweets returned on searching for #140conf

chatterboxapp @ajleon glad you got a picture of the monkeys while they still were around. Alas they have all found better homes now. #140conf

hellemans RT @marlooz Ok people joke is over, please give me back my laptop… #140conf #missinglaptop

rahulnambiar @maheshmurthy Do use the @cleartrip @kiruba case study at #140conf http://bit.ly/Jmzul

See what I mean? This all started when Twitter listed #140conf as a Twitter Trend, so naturally I searched on it to try and find out what 140conf was about. But what you get is a stream of cliquey allusions all RT-ing and @-ing each other and using those once-useful-but-lately-annoying shortened urls. So now that these Tweeters have had the benefit of being part of the #140conf Club and using bit.ly to keep their Tweets short and sweet, it is apparently now my job to a) backtrack all the RT’s and @’s to get the rest of the thread, b) to visit http://bit.ly/Jmzul to see what the hell he’s talking about, and finally c) go look up 140conf on Google, which last step would have gotten me where I wanted to be in the first place, only quicker.

Damn, slipping back into GOM (Grumpy Old Man) mode again. #bugger

What The Hell Does That Mean?

Welcome to the first in what may or may not become a series of posts about “trends” on the web that confuse, irritate, or just plain scare me because they throw my advancing age into sharp relief.

Number One: The Hashtag.

I hang around on Facebook and Twitter quite a bit and have been seeing #thisthing more and more recently. If you go to Twitter you’ll see a list of “Twitter Trends” on the right hand side of the page containing several of these. Today they include #iremember and #iranelection.

#iremember is a string that people use to precede things they… erm… remember from the olden days. My friend Joe says this #tag is included to make searching more rewarding, but I don’t follow that logic myself. What additional results are you going to get by searching for “#iremember” than for “iremember”? None, that’s how many.

For three hours I thought that #iranelection referred to a group of people who each ran their own elections, until with an embarrassed sigh I realised it was referring to the recent election in Iran.

My pont is, if you want to talk about the Iran Election why not use the phrase “Iran Election”? Why the need to invent this new fangled “#iranelection”? Where does it get you, apart from pissing off middle-aged users like me?

Perhaps that’s reason enough.

Funny Starbucks Story That Never Was

Here’s my problem with writing: I have a great idea for a story or a blog post and I spend days thinking about it — how funny it’s going to be, how I’m going to give it my own unique perspective, and I envision flopping down on a leather sofa and spontaneously banging out this masterpiece in ten minutes flat. Of course I know that in reality if I did that it would be total crap and I’d end up being angry with myself for squandering the opportunity. So I do what I’ve been doing for the last few months: not writing it at all.

The story in question was going to be about the pretentious airs that global coffee brands like Starbucks and Costa put on to entice you into their world of quality-coffee-which-has-to-have-an-Italian-theme-to-sound-more-worthy-than-it-is, and how this manifests itself in a marketing lingua franca that customers are expected to embrace. You can’t just ask for a large black coffee, you need to say, “I’d like to get a Venti Americano”. Then I was going to joke about getting my corporate multilingualism mixed up by going into Costa and asking for a Tall drink when, of course, I should have said Primo.

The moral of the story is that all I seem to be good at writing about is how hard I find it to write about stuff. Perhaps it’s time to revisit my idea for a self-help book.

Lucas’ Big Day

Today my nephew Lucas had his First Communion, along with around twenty of his classmates. The family turned out in force, to support him on his big day, and to eat & drink Laura out of house and home.

The photos:

Click for Slideshow

Swings & Roundabouts

That’s what we say to describe life’s little up’s and down’s. You might prefer “gotta take the rough with the smooth”, or, “the Good Lord giveth and he taketh away”. In fact, now I think about it, both of those make more sense than “Swings & roundabouts”, but that’s what I grew up with so we’re stuck with it.

The 12v lighter “accessory” socket in my car has been kaput for the last few weeks, ever since I plugged a cheap and nasty digital tyre inflator into it and immediately noticed a wisp of smoke and a smell of burning plastic. This morning I finally got around to taking the car in to get it fixed, expecting to spend around two hours and a hundred pounds there. Not a bit of it, the very helpful technician quickly identified the problem as being a blown fuse (I had looked for that myself and found nothing: the fuse in question was a different one from that indicated in the manual, so there). The outcome of the story is that my lighter socket is working again now and it didn’t cost me a bean.

That was the Swing.

The Roundabout came about an hour later. I’d gone home then out again, this time on the bike. There was a light shower falling and as I pulled up to park outside the DIY store I didn’t notice the mossy covering on the block-paved path. As I put my left foot down to park, it slipped to the side on the slimy surface, my balance went, and the considerable weight of my bike did the rest. I dropped it. As gently as I could manage but I dropped it all the same. It’s so heavy that I couldn’t pick it up again on my own, so it had to stay there lying on its side like a horse with a broken leg while I went off to seek help. Another pair of hands found, we got it back on two wheels and inspected the damage: a couple of small scratches on the bar end and the engine casing, and a snapped-off clutch lever.

Oh well…

DiddyNet At The Cricket

I’m writing this sat in seat J129 of the Compton Stand at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London. What could be better? A day off, clement weather, a day’s international cricket, and the internet on my netbook.

The Vodafone data network is great when you have a 3G connection — just as good as being at home. But when the signal drops down to GPRS it feels like going back to the old dialup days. Still, even when slow, having the netbook means I can be connected anywhere.

I know, let’s try to take a photo on the netbook’s webcam. Talk amongst yourselves for a couple of mins…

How’s That! Or rather, Owzat!?

Shutting me lid now. Can’t manage netbook and can of cider on lap simultaneous.

DiddyNet, Continued

Day Three of Dell Mini 9 netbook ownership and things are going pretty well, all told. My two main gripes are with the keyboard and the memory performance.

KEYBOARD
The smaller than normal (how much smaller? I suddenly wonder. But I don’t bother looking it up) keyboard is actually OK from a normal typing point of view — the normal letter and number keys may be a bit titchy but they’re all where your touchtyping fingers expect them to be. It’s the special keys in the bottom right that are really annoying. To save space, they’ve resized the ?/, right shift, and Up arrow keys so that three keys fit where two should, with the result that I have to have three goes at finding a question mark, and roughly half the time when I want shift I get an inadvertant Up, which can really slow down your typing when you suddenly find yourself back on the previous line.

MEMORY
You’d think that 1Gb of RAM would be enough for Windows XP Home to run a web browser, and email program and a Skype voice call wouldn’t you? And it does — for a while. But when the Mini has been running for a few hours it starts to complain of low virtual memory, and slows down. The best approach is to only run a couple of applications at a time. If you’re gentle with it it will repay you by serving up web pages promtply and sharply.

Wireless, Bluetooth, and 3G broadband via the embedded SIM card all work well, and with Internet Explorer in fullscreen mode the display is very nice, making it a diddy surfing machine extraordinaire.

I’m now thinking up wild, exotic places to surf, where I couldn’t surf before. Any suggestions?