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Born in a factory somewhere in the manufacturing world of a design by Carlton this badminton racket survived only two outings before it met an untimely end. We shall shed no tears. Mourn not. We have to move on. There is nothing to be gained by dwelling on what may have been. It is what it is. It is no more.
RIP Carlton KINESIS. Length 670mm, frame weight 86g, balance even, flex medium. Delivered on a Monday, smashed on the following Saturday.
Just had Waitrose on the dog and bone saying the kecks are ready. They didn’t actually use those words. I translated for you. The woman on the other end of the phone actually said “Mr Davies it’s Waitrose dry cleaners here. Your trousers are ready to collect.”
I’ve started to use a lot more natural language on this blog. Eased into it. I don’t think you could be reading through back issues of posts and say to yourselves “hey he’s started to change his style”. There wasn’t one of those transformational moments.
Makes you think about the use of language though. In one sense it surely doesn’t matter what words are used. As long as people understand what you are trying to say. Wft, fyi, btw, atb, brb, lol,swalk. Most people will know what I’m on about there. At least most people whose native tongue is English. Oh and below a certain age, except for the last acronym in which case it may well only be people above a certain age that get it.
The extent to which the language used almost depends on how far you can push it before people begin to not understand what you are trying to say. knowworramean? Grammatical conventions should also evolve. why does it matter that we have to use upper case for the first letter after a full stop (that’s a period for those over the pond – I realise that I overstepped the limits if comprehension there for some). the full stop informs that the end of the sentence has been reach thus allowing the reader to draw mental breath.
I may still chose to start someone’s name with upper case but it isn’t absolutely necessary. tref or Tref. You still understand what I’m trying to say.
In the interest of research I herewith request that you leave a comment with an alternative word for trousers. One go per comment. There are two prizes on offer. A pint of beer goes to the person with the most variants and another pint goes to whoever leaves the last comment with a word for trousers. All entries must be in English and in the event of a dispute you must be able to somehow prove common usage of your word. If beer is not your thing I’ll stretch to a small sherry. Prizes must collected in person.
More good reeds:
rong spelins
All you tech heads out there think your stuff is cool don’t you? Your tablet computers, new phones, operating systems and other stuff my grandmother would not have heard of. No new product introduction can compare with what you see in this picture.
It’s new life coming into the apple tree we planted in our back garden a couple of years ago. It will grow and produce apples. More apples than the two we got last year. They were two good ones. Two of the best.
The only good Apple is one that grew on a tree. Read into that what you like:) It’s the weekend and what does the weekend mean? Jobs list. Jobs that don’t get done during the week. Things like clean out the car1 because we are off on holiday. Mow the lawn for the first time this year. Take Kid4 to a badminton tournament.
When all that is done I should be able to relax a little. Maybe stroll into the Bailgate. Bump in to a few people I know and talk about nothing. Look in a shop window.
I do need want to buy a Leatherman. I had two but they both got nicked. With a leather man if you have a bit of string that needs cutting there is no problem. Need to tighten a screw? Hey that’s easy. Simply chose the correct screwdriver bit and you’re away. Stone in your horse’s hoof. The Leatherman will have something for it. Chop down that enormous tree that gradually grew in the middle of your back garden and before you realised was taller than the house…
My memory was jogged re my Leatherman shortage when strolling round the new GO Outdoors shop that’s opened just down the road from us. Doing a bit of bag procurement I was. There is a half decent range of Leathermans Leathermen on display. I noted the top of the range model had £30 knocked off if I had a discount card, which I do. However a quick search noted that I could get it with a further £30 knocked off from Amazon. I didn’t make that impulse buy.
This week I revisited the Amazon store with a view to making a one click purchase. I didn’t make that purchase because I found out that the model I had my eye on wasn’t the top of the range after all. There was a titanium version. Gordon Bennet! That made sense to me. However the titanium version was about £130.
So this was my dilemma. Feed the kids/buy them shoes/go on a family holiday/pay off the mortgage/fund a cure for stupidity or buy the Leatherman. Well I am going to buy the Leatherman but I will wait until I have a piece of string that needs cutting. Then I’ll feel I bought it because I needed it and it won’t have been such an extravagance.
Anyway gotta go. I have to prepare to take a kid somewhere and then build up the mental strength to clean the car…
1Whether it needs it or not – actually even I think it needs doing!
Wilkinson Sword Hydro – the ultimate razor?
In the run up to Christmas Kid4 scours the online free give away offers for presents for the family. Very resourceful.
One of these offers has just come through: a Wilkinson Sword Hydro 5 blade razor job. It looks very good quality albeit over 3 months late. I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth especially if it is going to give me a shave or two but you do have to wonder about the marketing of this offer.
Either it proved to be more popular than their wildest dreams and they ran out of stock very quickly or their planning was v poor and the execution terrible. If the first was the case it’s interesting to note that their manufacturing lead times would appear to be around 3 months. Seems a lot for a bit of plastic even if it did come personalised.
Whichever is the case I am going to end up using it because I have it, it has 5 blades and it was free. I will of course report back so that you, the unshaven masses, can benefit from the experience. It will be quite annoying if I end up thinking it is good becasuse I will have to go out and buy more blades and you can bet your bottom peseta that they are even more expensive than my usual quad blades.
Maybe I’ll let Anne decide which is best for smooth cheeks. I was going to finish this post with the sign off “something for the weekend?” but I don’t bother shaving at the weekend. A hangover from my old rugby playing days when I needed to look as rugged as possible on a Saturday afternoon.
So on Monday morning you shall know. If I remember.
Ciao bebe (strokes his non existent beard and rides off into the sunset)…
Other posts mentioning the word shave:
UC for small business (boring considering this is the weekend:)
In my house I’m known as Last Minute Paulie, as ‘Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?’ is a motto one could easily associate with me. Rather than get the lawn mower out this week, for instance, I’ve been happily watching the grass grow, employing the ready excuse of it being too damp while bestowing the virtues of a natural meadow look to the chap a couple of doors down who obviously doesn’t approve.
In spite of my proclivity to procrastinate, though, to ensure a good race day experience I am planning to be prepared way in advance. By that I mean sitting on my backside, browsing running websites for tips and not acting on them. As you would expect, of course, the advice to be had is entirely practical. Pace yourself…eat the right amounts of the right foods…make sure to use the facilities before the gun goes off…etcetera and so forth. I know, though, from my limited racing experience that these mostly-helpful websites will fail to mention the following:
Enjoy running on the road. In the first road race I ever took part in I was almost overwhelmed at the realization that the road was closed especially for me and my fellow racers, and with every race since I have enjoyed the same feeling. In fact, this is almost worth the entry fee alone, especially as the local residents have no doubt been moaning about it on social media for a few weeks prior.
Just been to PC World to buy a new 32Gig SD card. As you know my old one was jiggered by my camera/phone/SGS4/intergalactic-slow-software-communicator (if not catch up with the story here and here)
Permit me to be flabbergasted but these things now come with up to 128GB of storage! FGHJOweroijhlkjhlklnnnggg1. Now I don’t think I need 128GB. I’ve only got about 50GB on my Drive athough that doesn’t include music and photos.
This is the point when someone usually chips in and says “that’s more storage than ever existed on the whole planet before 1983” or “that’s more storage than they had on board all the space shuttles and all the Apollo missions ever including Apollo 13!”
I think at this stage that storage tech would appear to be outpacing the media tech destined for storage and also the battery technology destined to power the mobile media players (ie c/p/S/i above). Mind you it is a fair bet, knowing the people I know that someone will come back and tell me that he has to carry several 128GB SD cards around in case some of his main storage runs out (Tom Bird? 🙂 ).
I bought a 32GB job for about £19. It’ll do me for now.
PS when will they be quoting how many UHD videos a card will store. I spoke to a guy in PC World who told me they weren’t selling many 4K TVs.
PPS I know some smart person will also tell me I could have bought the 32GB card for 25 pence online but I didn’t want to wait ok? 🙂
1 Sound of me being flabbergasted
2 Applicants for membership of the extreme abbreviators club should leave a comment. We meet evry mnth in gd pb cld rhdtfpt in htbrftp.
Yesterday my SD card blew up on the Samsung Galaxy S4. Not literally of course otherwise the nature of this post would be different. It would probably be ringed with a thick black border mourning the passing of one of the brightest prospects ever to have graced the Morning Star. Either that or it would be quite short as I might well have been typing one handed having been removed from the operating theatre via intensive care to a big ward where I would have felt quite out of place being young and full of life.
Last night I spent some time on the Netgear ReadyNAS retrieving files. Except
According to some algorithm or other deep in its cockles, Facebook reports that 79 people of the oh-so-fine folk I am connected to via that social media behemoth posted birthday wishes to my wall on Monday (which, yes, was my birthday). On top of that, after I posted acknowledgement and thanks for all of that warm thoughtfulness quite a few others chimed in to make their good wishes known in the comments of my post. Thus, it is no April Fool’s joke to say that over 100 individuals, each with their own lives to lead and their own days to traverse end-to-end, had me in mind for at least a few moments and made the effort to let me know it. I consider this to be somewhat remarkable in itself, however when I take these well-wishers into account and realize that (a) a high percentage of them are people to whom I am not related, (b) I haven’t seen many of them in over 20 years, and (c) a little mental straining is needed to recall where we met …well, at that point it just gets me thinking.
Admittedly, I almost wiped my birthday data from Facebook a couple of days prior to the date, not because I am sensitive about getting older, but because I just didn’t feel up to dealing with what can only be considered an onslaught of contact. No doubt the majority of you reading this piece – and thank you for doing so – know exactly what I am referring to. Depending on where you live and how the time zones for your Facebook “Friends” break down, this onslaught can actually last for far long than the 24 hours it traditionally takes to move through one’s birthday. It begins with the Notifications. Each time someone writes a birthday greeting on your Facebook wall – and doing so is now so easy that a puppy can do it (and likely has…check youtube) – you receive a Notification stating such. And because we are all unabashedly self-centered, we immediately chase that Notification so we can see exactly what it was that someone wrote (more often than not, some variation of “Happy Birthday”…capitalized, not capitalized, ALL CAPS, with and without terminating punctuation, and so forth). Then, of course, because we are all inherently polite, we acknowledge the birthday greeting in some way, be it by clicking “Like” or actually using the Comment function to write something back. It is this exercise, which goes on over the course of a full rotation of the planet and then some, that had me pondering the three clicks needed to erase my Birth Date from my About|Basic Information. That said, I am truly glad I didn’t do so.
Websites that carry adverts are typically paid based in terms of £/$/E1 per 1k page impressions. The more visitors the more page impressions and the longer you can keep them on site browsing through different articles the better. It’s all about dosh.
If you look at any particular post you see many inducements to stay in the site. “Related articles” or “More from the Telegraph”. You will see that recently we have started to add such links on trefor.net and are in the process of getting to grips with whether this can be automated when the new site goes live.
It’s quite amusing therefore when reading a serious article on calls for DCMS Minster Maria Miller to resign to see that the Telegraph’s presumably automated system of determining which links to include come up with what appear to be “female” related posts. They don’t appear particularly relevant unless the Telegraph knows something we don’t2.
I make no comment here on whether Mrs Miller should be sacked or not.
Related posts:
Weekend gardening tips
Next time you eat a kebab
Tractors tractors tractors
1Pounds $hillings and pEnce
2The screenshots are from the mobile version of the site which seems to have different links to the desktop site but hey…
I have a large plastic box with a lid (you know the type you can buy from the local DIY ‘shed’ or independent hardware store) filled with various cables, adapters, a backup ADSL router, an old US Robotics dial up modem that connects via good ol’ RS-232, and — most interestingly of all, I think — two Iomega zip drives (a 100 MB drive that connects via parallel, and a 750 MB USB drive).
Along with the goodies mentioned, I also have an opened box of 100 MB disks and an unopened still-in-shrink-wrap box of 750 MB disks. At the time I bought these disks USB flash sticks weren’t so prevalent and neither was broadband. I bought them as a backup solution for the Pentium 166 PC I had at the time but never really got round to setting up a backup procedure. And y the time I retired that machine I had USB sticks bigger than its hard drive (a whopping 2.1 GB) so data transfer was no problem.
So I feel I am holding an important bit of computing history in my hands, but I am also wondering what is best to do with the Iomega zip drives considering that the company is apparently no more and that these days the drives only appear on eBay.
All suggestions welcome, and I’ll get the camera out tomorrow and add a picture.
As an additional note to my previous post it would appear that all the content on my SD card has been wiped. I’ll have to check it when I get home in case it is just the phone not seeing it. It’s not just the music but around 1,200 photos and videos.
Is this a problem? Nooo. It is an irritation because I’ll have to reload the music from my NAS box backup. The photos will also be safe on the NAS box and also in Google+ (I’ve checked). Doesn’t engender confidence though.
At the same time I said yes to a Samsung software update and now some of the cookies have disappeared. I’m having to re-enter credentials on Twitter though not on Facebook or LinkedIn. Odd. Must be having a bad hair day. I need a haircut anyway. Perhaps I’ll nip out this pm and get it done:).
I’m getting a message from my Samsung Galaxy S4 saying SD card unexpectedly removed.
My thought go something like this. “Omg not more hardware problems with a Samsung Galaxy.” In the past I’ve had a plethora of USB connector problems, “water damage” problems (not!), screen problems. I’ve even had an SD card problem where I hard to replace the SD card becasue it was corrupting some of my photos including some imporatant ones with the kids at a Test match at Trent Bridge.
Now it looks like another but different SD card problem looming. I’m not naturally a pessimist but nowadays Samsung phones seem to do that to me. I’ve gone from a big fan, principally because they were the main alternative to me becoming an Apple zombie, to looking forward to when I have to change to a Nexus.
Reality is that all these gadgets are probably made in the same factories, looking down on a rice field somewhere where the a green eyed yellow idol casts its shadow1. I doubt there is much difference in reliability between brands.
The point is that whilst they tend to only last a year or two these devices are not cheap throwaway gadgets. They typically cost four or five hundred pounds each (doing a quick conversion that’s four or five hundred dollars to American readers).
They must think we are mugs. Or zombies. We probably are. There is no point in fighting it. Yes master.
It has to evolve to the way the Chromebook is going. Devices have to be cheap enough for it not to matter if they break, drown, are lost or stolen. You might think that mobile phones are already a commodity but at he high end and at those prices I’m not sure that is accurate despite the fact that the devices are manufactured in very high volumes.
I guess the problem there is that one you move to just competing on price you have to find other markets to grow your business but it will inevitably happen in the mobile word and perhaps the sooner it does the better. They are already finding it hard to introduce new ideas whenever a new model is launched so innovation must be slowing down. Bring on the disposable mobile phone and beam me up Scotty2.
Other relevant posts:
Samsung Galaxy S3 not charging problem
Samsung Galaxy S4 faulty USB socket
1 Now I’m starting to lose the plot – I heard the poem the green eyed yellow idol on Desert Island Discs this week and I couldn’t think of any another flowery vegetable related words 🙂
2 In other words it’ll probably be a while yet – I’m sure if I was that bothered I could work when. It’s just a manufacturing cost curve.
The “big” news this morning is that Vodafone are planning on opening 150 shops in the UK creating 1,400 jobs in 2014.
This is an interesting PR headline. The reason Vodafone will be opening the shops is because people want to touch and feel a phone in a shop and check out the different tariff options with a real person. Trying to decide on a mobile package can be a nightmare (how much bandwidth etc).
The big high street retailers such as Carphone Warehouse offer this facility but they are not fixed to a specific network. Because of this the networks have to dangle big marketing subsidies to them to make them want to sell their services. For someone like Carphone Warehouse I imagine it will probably be in the tens of millions of pounds a year. You might think the shop is giving you a good deal but it is the cash being injected by the network that is making it possible.
So the Voda thinking will be to have more control over the offers and direct contact with Joe public which in theory should also give them more control over their spend. That they want to do this is understandable even though there is an obvious additional fixed overhead of running retail premises.
What nobody has bothered to report is that in creating 1,400 new jobs the chances are that they are just moving the jobs from the independent retailers to Vodafone themselves. The market won’t be any bigger. The money is just moving around and the jobs are following.
I don’t really have an axe to grind here. Just observing…
PS the header photo is an old one – it was easier to link to that than find a new one:)
Oh joy. I keep falling over sites that autoplay videos, and some — I’m looking at you, Facebook — do not appear to have a simple option to switch off this, er..uh, ‘option’. Ignoring some of the real basics are the spurious claims that our bandwidth is being protected with such tricks as video ceasing to play when the screen is scrolled down, or “it only works when you are connected to wifi”.
First, the video by playing has already consumed some of my precious bandwidth. You can’t just mine these bits at home, you know; data bits are a commodity that have to be bought and paid for. I will press the Play button if I want a video to play, otherwise autoplay is actually forcing me to (a) view something I probably don’t want to view, and (b) causing me to pay for the privilege of viewing that something I don’t want to view, which is on the whole, utter dross. And it is usually advertising dross at that, funded by “someone” to reach an unwilling and hence unresponsive audience. You, oh advertiser, may have money to chuck down the proverbial drain, but many of us out here who are paying to receive your video message do not!
Second, what on earth has a wifi connection got to do with it all? Apart from moving the video dross onto a marginally cheaper option than mobile (i.e., by using my fibre, cable or landline-based broadband tariff instead), someone still needs to pay for the bits received. And for those on satellite dishes it makes no difference how video is configured to play, the consumer is going to be extremely cross to find their monthly data allowance munched through regardless of the pain this can cause to the unwillingly disconnected.
Travel Communications Survey Report 2014, a new survey released last week, shows that although customer service and staff productivity to be at the top of the list of concerns by those in the British travel industry, only 9% of the businesses are currently implementing some form of unified communications technology. The survey, performed by leading unified communications provider, Elitetele.com and UC manufacturer Swyx, in conjunction with Travolution magazine, breaks the entire pool down as follows:
9% Implementing unified communications in their business
18% Know of UC, but have not yet applied it in their business
13% Know of UC, but do not understand how its potential benefits
60% Are completely unaware of what unified communications is
Yes, you correctly read that last bullet point. When asked about unified communications, SIXTY PERCENT of the travel executives surveyed responded by stating that they have no knowledge or awareness of UC whatsoever! And curiously enough, despite this lack of UC understanding this same pool cited cost as the prime showstopper to upgrading their systems, while also forwarding the notion that improving customer service and the flow of communication amongst the business Holy Trinity (staff, customers and suppliers) are more important than cost reduction.
Clearly, there is a significant amount of confusion amongst UK travel industry technology decision makers with regard to unified communications system pricing, installation, and maintenance. The Travel Communications Survey Report 2014 acknowledges this fact, too, placing it at the center of their conclusions, saying “…we presume that because unified communications technology is ‘new’ and marketed as an ‘upgrade’ companies may believe it to be more expensive when it actually isn’t. The platform evolved to simplify cost management and save money and resources across IT and telephony.”
Following my first attempt at setting up a Bitcoin wallet I decided that having provided my email address this didn’t make me anonymous enough so I started again.
I had considered using the Tor network to make it “totally” anonymous but figured this was totally over the top so I just opened an incognito window and signed on without providing an email address. The downside of this level of anonymity is that it becomes much harder to recover a lost password so there is an element of risk.
Everything has to be written down on paper and not kept on your PC. I don’t have a printer hooked up to my PC so I couldn’t even print any password details. I can email the home printer but that would send the info via Gmail and then via HPs own email server which is not trusted. Neither is Gmail really even though it is encrypted.
It wasn’t just a complex password that had to be written down. Bitcoin addresses, wallet IDs and the mnemonic that have to be recorded are all extremely long and with my handwriting prone to mistakes. I had to differentiate between upper and lower case text by underscoring the lower case to make sure that a “b” for example wouldn’t be mistaken for a six in future. I backed up the wallet recovery file somewhere secure.
Once set up I bought a Bitcoin from Dan Howitt in the office next door. Dan’s business is Bitcoin – check out his post on the recent HMRC VAT announcement here. Dan transferred one Bitcoin, priced at £292 (E352) to my Bitcoin wallet and sent me an invoice. I then sent Dan’s business the cash via internet bank xfer. We were both happy.
The acquisition process was not as simple as one might imagine but when you think of it if you buy foreign currency you usually hand over cash one way or another in exchange for travellers cheques or notes. It isn’t usually a purely electronic transaction. Also I think that not having a direct link with a bank account is a good thing here considering the nature of the beast.
There is a Blockchain Android App that allows you to carry your wallet on your phone. I looked at this but couldn’t really see how this was different to providing my email address – it asks you for all sorts of access permissions and Android in my mind is not that secure. See the screenshot.
So now I have a Bitcoin. Bought at £292 it is apparently worth £296 as I write. Well on the way to that holiday in Barbados. This is an experiment. I’m along for the ride and we shall see where it goes (probably not Barbados). When there is enough data I’ll stick regularly updated tracker on the site so that you can see whether it is Barbados, Skegness or stay at home:)
The Android tracker is from the Bitstamp Widget from the Google Play Store. You can see there has been a swing of $20 over the last 24 hours. No different to playing the stock market really. It’s all a roll of the dice.
So I have a Bitcoin. It is accompanied by paranoia about security but we are talking cash here and we have already seen examples of Bitcoins have gone missing (MtGox) so I don’t think the paranoia is unwarranted.
If anyone has personal Bitcoin stories feel free to share.
Ciao amigos…
Ambitions come and go, and they generally tend to go unfulfilled as a sense of reality creeps up as you mature. Of course, the dreams are still there, though you do have to alter them accordingly. I’ll no longer be a 100m world record holder, but in theory I could be the world darts champion. I’m never going to present the Radio 1 breakfast show, but I understand that community radio is a much more creative experience than being required to play Rihanna on a loop (although less popular).
Since I first knew there was a top 40 music chart I have wanted to have a Number One hit. My brilliantly named first band, The Streaky Boneheads, was formed in drama class at school, and because we had no instruments we mimed them and our visions were big. Naturally, the band split as we parted ways into employment and further education. The Number One ambition still gnaws away at me, though, and with bands having come and gone I now resort to ideas for novelty records, something that annoys most music lovers but that a a fad has the potential to grab the attention of the few thousand people needed to become a Number One recording artist in 2014.
Given a spare ten minutes I can be found sprawling over, downloading, experimenting with, and quickly uninstalling, some app or other that may or may not be the key to producing a chart topper. This habit is what led me to the Google Play Algorithm that suggested I try DroidBeat Synth. The product had good feedback so I gave it a spin.
To quote the late, great, Factory Records genius, Tony Wilson, what I got out of DroidBeat Synth was “like listening to a headache”. Droidbeat describes itself as a simple open source app, so with the right programming and patience I’m sure that someone could engineer the existing sounds into something preferable, like the scratching of nails down a blackboard. It’s not for me, though, as I’m very much the end user – a want-to-push-a-button-to-play-the-drums kind of musician.
DroidBeat Synth is significant for me, though, as its the first time in two years of regular app installation that I have seen the screen at the left.
They don’t want anything from me, and I find that very refreshing. Even so, I got rid of the app and now I’m off to get The Streaky Boneheads back together for a comeback tour of pubs with good dartboards. Wish us luck!
Paul Tyler presents Lincoln A to Z on Siren FM
@lincolnatoz
Sat in Alexanders coffeeshop/bar/restaurant whilst kid2 has a hairdo. Alexanders has wifi, fair play. The wifi is giving me 34Megs down and nearly 9Megs up, very fair play.
This shouldn’t be news in this day and age but getting those kinds of speeds is still a delight. It’s made even better by the fact that everyone else in the gaff are of the ladies with idle moments out shopping variety. They are chatting using the old analogue mouth and ears method rather than the in vogue “talk to the person sat next to you via IM”. The upshot is that I have all the bandwidth to myself. Salright innit:)
The last time I sat in a caff with wifi1 was at the Harbour Lights in Peel in the Isle of Man. We follow each other on twitter (@harbour_lights). I tweeted how good it was and to my surprise the waitress came over and told me the tea and crumpets were on the house. Read that blog here.
Alexanders also has a twitter account @Alexanderscafe but they haven’t used it for yonks so I doubt the same ploy would work again. It wasn’t deliberately planned the first time anyway 🙂 Doesn’t matter. I’m happy to pay for my cuppa. The atmosphere is nice and it’s a good place to hang out whilst a hairdo is being done.
Other wonderful wifi stories:
No mobile networks but wifi saves the day
The view from my table at Alexanders. Uploading and editing pics is a dream with this wifi.
1 not really but it sounded good for the purpose of this storyline
PS the speedtest shot is the only bit of the speedtest.net screen that isn’t plastered in adverts. I’m not letting those freeloading broadband companies have a free advertising ride on trefor.net nosiree:)
Who among the teeming throng hasn’t at some point or another had the thought, “Instant Messaging sure is a marvelous thing…no idea what I’d do without it…but really, by this point shouldn’t I be able to seamlessly carry on an IM conversation via Yahoo! Messenger with a contact using Google Talk? Or AOL AIM? Skype? And vice-versa? And do I really need to subscribe to all of these services – and lest I forget to mention Windows Live Messenger, Facebook Chat, Twitter, and so many others — to ensure real-time IM reachability?”
Yes, that is one large mouthful of a thought, but it should be easy enough to chew and swallow.
Numerous times over the past 15+ years the effort has been made to establish a unified standard for Internet-based instant messaging, and all of these efforts have thus far come to naught. Entrenched proprietary protocols die hard, after all, and with such integrated services as IP telephony, video conferencing, desktop sharing, and file transfer thrown into the IM provider mix (to name but a few) the potential for absolute and utter world communication dominance is such that no one major player is ever likely to champion a true standardization. No, “the greater good” will never be enough of a reason to hasten such a sea change. Instead, it will require either (1) a scenario in which instigating such a protocol will benefit all parties, (2) an irresistible push/pull prompted by a powerful outside party (government?), or (3) good old-fashioned fish-eat-smaller-fish empire building.
Now to be fair, there is some light in the sky these days regarding inter-network IM capability. For instance, with Yahoo Messenger you can add and communicate with contacts using Windows Live™ Messenger, and you can add your AOL AIM contacts into Google Talk. Such functionalities, however, are the result of agreements reached between the networks, agreements in which a bridging of two (or more) proprietary protocols has been put in place not to open communication up but to simply extend one IM provider’s boundaries to include those within another’s.
7 a day is the new 5 a day. If you’re not on 7 you’re gonna die. Sooner. Bet a lot of you aren’t even on 5. That makes it a lot worse. C’mon. Chips don’t count you know. Especially if they are with a KFC variety meal or a Big Mac. Kebabs might have salad and chilli sauce but the fat content of the “meat” sends the cholesterol meter into a frenzy.
Pull yourself together. You just need to believe you can do it. Your body is your temple:)
‘Course it does help to have a wife who is a wonderful cook and who has despatched me to the office with a container of her home made vegetable soup. I think I detected a few bits of bacon in there too. Yum. Just what you need for lunch after a session in the pool followed by a walk to work.
Other food related posts:
Food for thought
EU goes bananas
Best topping for a pancake
PS onion bhajis are ok provided they are eaten as a starter before a mixed balti with plain naan or a meat madras washed down with plenty of Kingfisher lager and there is no letter z in the month.
Darn it. A short while ago I upgraded the dog and bone to Android 4.4.2. Previously I had removed irritating notifications that kept me looking at the device to see if new messages had arrived.
Invariably they had so I was looking at stuff on the phone every hour of the day, including when I was asleep1. I removed notifications from my life and began to get a better night’s sleep.
Now the doggone notifications have returned. How crap is that? I’ve had to back in to settings and untick the tick box again. For each application now notifying me where once there was none. Urgh. Uh?! Fnaagnn.
Btw you can see from the first screenshot that the name of my Phone is jacques (lower case j). I know you won’t tell anyone. Each new phone gets a different name for car mobile kit purposes. Hey…
You can see the screenshot with the checked notification box here.
C’mon Samsung. Not good enough. I’m assuming it’s your fault. Get your act together.
Other Android upgrade type posts:
I dreamt last night I was upgrading to Android 4.3
Comparison of Samsung firmware versus base Android
1 Bit of poetic license there – I wandered lonely through the cloud crowd
Happy to introduce Kory Kessel as the first editor (not counting me) of trefor.net . Here is his bio wot he wrote.
Kory Kessel’s 25+ years in high-tech span a remarkable roster of companies both large and small, and include such universally recognized brands as Grey Advertising, Dell, IBM, and Apple. His past successes, though, are not limited to ubiquitous commercial giants, as he has also completed government contracts for the Texas Education Agency, co-founded a London-based Internet gaming start-up (Quingo), and led the documentation effort for a first-generation mobile Internet services platform.
More recently, Kory has found himself deeply interred in Internet-based communications, serving a long stint as Jeff Pulver’s communication specialist for his various companies and ventures (e.g., Free World Dialup, Pulver.com, pulvermedia). He has also written (and ghost-written) a bevy of industry-specific white papers and articles on a freelance basis.
First among Kory’s achievements in information architecture is helping to develop and then subsequently documenting Apple Computer’s first PowerBook support and service program in 1993. Soon after he joined Dell, helping to lead the company’s nascent intranet initiative. His chief accomplishment at Dell, though, was serving as a key member of the IT team that conceptualized and then built the company’ first data warehouse, a project that comprised not only the construction of global financial and human resources databases, but also included the development and deployment of a proprietary suite of reporting software applications.
A proud Chicagoan by birth, a Texan by transplant, and a New Yorker by choice, Kory has made his home in Paris since 19991. He has a foodie’s soul, goes in heavily for sport, is an aficionado of jazz (pre-electric) and blues, and is constantly focused on his photography with a considered aspiration for eventual relevance in that field.
With his wide and varied background in technology Kory is going to be a great asset to the site. If trefor.net was a place where suits were worn and the CEO put out encouraging messages to the troops I’d be saying to you all “join me in welcoming Kory to the business and please say hello to him if you see him in the corridor.” Well I’m not that kind of guy and this is not that kind of business.
We don’t have corridors but we do have comments sections so feel free to say something in response to his posts. Nothing too soppy now. Just a firm handshake and a look in the eye:)
1 I think I first met him in a bar in London though I’m a bit hazy on that one.
This morning on my way in to work I bumped into Tom, kid3’s piano teacher. He reassured me that kid3 was doing very well which is good. We chatted for a bit as we walked along and went our separate ways.
Had I had to drive to work I would not have bumped into Tom. Nor would I have seen this notice over the ATM cashpoint outside Lloyds Bank. Now the vandalised cashpoint was not any particular inconvenience. The dusty old fiver in my wallet will do me for some time yet.
This does make you think about how much life is left in the “real” money game. The only place I absolutely need cash now is London, where not many taxis take cards or the Morning Star pub where Ness the landlady has a shiver running down her spine every time someone mentions “plastic”.
The trefor.net offices are in Sparkhouse at the University of Lincoln, right next to the Tower Bar and the Engine Shed. Being a student gaff the beer is very cheap but you always have to queue because all the students use cards and pay for drinks individually – a real bummer if there are ten of them in the “round”. A quick and comprehensive poll of the family student1 reveals that the breed typically only carries a fiver2 around in their pocket/wallet/purse/wad.
I still haven’t got round to setting up that Bitcoin wallet. That’ll be my next job. Hopefully my fiver will last until then.
More student posts:
What do students and CEOs have in common?
The changing entry-level job market
More Bitcoin posts:
HMRC gives green light to Bitcoin
Bitcoin bet or bubble bursting?
1Kid2
2Like father like daughter eh? 🙂
I can hardly have a conversation with anyone these days without being asked, “Hey Kory, what exactly is ‘Unified Communications’?” As such, I will attempt to provide a definitive answer to that oh-so-ubiquitous question by copiously leveraging/paraphrasing/appropriating/borrowing/stealing from various authoritative (or authoritative-ish, at least) online resources, using my handy-dandy search engine and my remarkable knack for pulling effective keyword criteria out of my noggin.
Here, as they say, goes nothin’.
Back in 2006, Unified Communications Strategies defined UC as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.”, and I daresay a crisper, more to-the-point description is not to be found anywhere. It has big words, a jargon-y swagger, and suffers not a lick for punctuation. Kinda dry, sure, but it is an excellent start, and when you consider that it was first floated some 8 years ago that really is all it needs to be. That is, except for its strict confinement to business.
Since first defining UC way back when, Unified Communications Strategies has fine-tuned their “foundational” definition, and today their quite useful publication What UC Is and Isn’t leads off with their New And Improved take on it all: “UC integrates real-time and non-real-time communications with business processes and requirements based on presence capabilities, presenting a consistent unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices and media types.” A more fleshed-out delineation of UC, to be sure, but still overwhelmingly business-centric.
A little less than a year ago RIC Services’ Rick McCharles offered his UC definition:
In at Radio1 the other day, as you do. It’s where all the kids hang out. Not a sign of a suit or tie. It’s on the top floor of Broadcasting House. There’s a helluva view down the middle of the building.
That’s the newsroom at the bottom there. You see those desks through the glass windows behind newsreaders. The newsroom has to be at the bottom because the news is always so heavy. They should have a separate edition where only good news was read out. Life is short…
At Radio1 they have a bit of a display highlighting their good bits. I went round it the wrong way so it didn’t quite flow as perhaps it should have. Ah well.
Whilst I was there I had lunch at the BBC canteen. Gammon, chips and veg with gravy. The mustard dispenser had nearly run out so I had to shake it upside down quite a bit to get the last bit. I didn’t bother letting them know although I should have. Someone else will have done it after me. You can’t have gammon without mustard can you? Also had a bottle of sparkling water. Fwiw.
The reception area wasn’t how I imagined it to be. In my mind it was a small space with a settee and an uniformed porter looking me up and down asking who I was there to see.
Instead it was a large reception area with many settees and lots of people milling round. Lots of programming hours to fill need lots of people. Innit? Can’t keep using the same ones in different shows can you even if they do use wigs and lots of make up? It’s a problem of their own creation. Had they kept the test card they would have had fewer hours to fill and there are enough repeats is it is. As far as I know.
The people in reception looked normal enough. Nobody in fancy dress. Maybe they didn’t get changed into their outfits until they got to their dressing rooms. Obvious really.
I don’t listen to Radio1 meself btw. It’s gone downhill since my day. They’ve moved all the good stuff onto Radio2 for some reason:).
Didn’t spot any celebs. Expect they were all in the green room guzzling back the gin and champagne. It’s also a problem that I probably wouldn’t recognise many celebs anyway. Not my problem. Love.
Had I seen a celeb I wouldn’t have a picture to show you. That wouldn’t have been cool. I leave that sort of thing to the Japanese and American tourists who not being from round ‘ere may not have recognised them either but wouldn’t have let that get between them and a good photo opportunity. “Dear Hank/Yoshi1 Here’s me with an A-Z2 lister. Love Mildred/Sushi3”
That’s it. Got a few more pics especially a long one like the one on the right but of the outside showing the famous BBC sign. However I don’t think I can sustain enough of a dialogue to run the length of a second long photo so I’ll hold that back for another idle moment when I’ve woken up early and popped downstairs to do stuff.
Ciao amigos. Pinch and a punch…
PS Why was I there? Keep watching:)
PPS That’s my new Osprey bag on my shoulder
1,2,3As usual delete as you see fit.
View of Lincoln Cathedral from the same spot on the same day. With and without mist. I pass the building every day one the way to and from work. The clear view was taken this evening and the misty one this morning. The photo doesn’t quite give you the right feel for how warm the evening is but I was wearing shorts which was somewhat of a gamble on my way in first thing.
Other travel features:
Much of my work dconversations happen vi instant messaging. Becasue I tyoe very quickly I often make stanfdard typographical mistake htat arent corrected by spellschedker. Unless the typeo is totally outrageous I’vre got to teh point o not bother ing to coerect the mistake.
This might not be good practive but ordinarliy I am talkign to some one I know wekk. If it was a business email I’d take more carre but don’t bother for IM.
This is an interesting woindow opn the movement of language. In one sense as long as the person you are talking to can understand whayt you are saying why should it matter. I’m not suggesting I am a fan of this but clearly a am a proponent:)
I suspect that the probelm is made worse using hte Chromebook becasue hte keyboard is slightly smaller than the one I’ve spent years using so I often hit hte worng keys by mistake. It’s probably too late to change me now 🙂
Otehr spelin related posts:
Forgive me but I don’t hold the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in very high regard when it comes to technology issues. It’s a very personal thing, dating back to the Digital Economy Act, their blinkered approach and refusal to listen to anyone who wasn’t an ageing rock star (or paid by an ageing rock star).
Culture Secretary Maria Miller trumpeted something over the weekend that, according to the substantial press coverage at least, should reduce the current high volume of unwanted marketing and other nuisance calls.
I’m confident the plans announced will do very little to reduce the deluge I currently get.
Why? Because spammers have shown themselves time and time again to give not a toss about rules and regulations.
For example, I signed up to the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) years ago, and have recently re-added my numbers just in case. Little help it does.
To understand why one has to look at the economics. TPS is a for-profit money making service run by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA).
The DMA charge to query its database – around £2,200 per annum, plus VAT. So from the start there is a disincentive for Joe Bloggs Marketing Co Ltd to use it. Better subcontract the calling overseas, with a paper requirement to check TPS and full deniability if their agents get busted calling my housebound, blind and painfully immobile 98-year-old grandmother an hour after she goes to bed of an evening.
The Solution
Is painfully simple. Put a legal requirement on on Telephone Service Providers (TSPs) via the forthcoming legislative overhaul of the Communications Bill to provide, free of charge, effective call blocking tools.
You see, TSPs like BT, Virgin Media, Sky and the rest actually make money from nuisance calls through so-called termination charges. They get paid for putting the nuisance call through to you, so there is little real incentive for anyone in the industry to tackle the problem.
Subscribers like you and I can pay, around £5 per month (£60 per year) for the privilege of having nuisance calls blocked at the exchange – but I see that as blackmail; I pay enough already to rent a phone line. My service provider is making money from the misery of a nation by accepting termination charges from marketeers who hound me 12 hours a day.
Now, if every telephone service provider was obliged through their operator’s license to provide a free and effective nuisance call blocking service then it would be a different story.
Exchange-level blocking is far more powerful than the little black boxes one can buy to filter calls before they hit your handset.
For example, if the call originates in the UK, even if the caller withholds their number, the exchange still knows the ID of the originating caller.
BT therefore, if you pay them for the privilege, provide a blocking service that allows users to dial a special code immediately after a “number withheld” call to block further calls from that number, without affecting calls from your local doctor’s surgery, who happens to withhold their number when calling me.
By the way, what I said above about spammers ignoring rules and regulations, a rule prevents a marketing company calling you withholding their number. Yet this goes on day in, day out.
So a legal obligation on all telephone service providers to provide free blocking tools like the one I described from BT. We’ll all use it if it’s free, and marketeers will have to find a new way to inflict their pain.
After all the current Government, as per the DCMS, is a big fan of free blocking (switched on by default) when it comes to web pornography and the like.
But Miller and Co at the DCMS are probably too busy slapping themselves on the back for the positive press over the weekend to listen to my advice. After all, a DCMS minister openly ignored my advice after inviting me to give it face to face.
James Firth
Picture of a rib joint of beef before it went into the oven. Today we are having the works: beef (medium to rare), roast spuds and parsnips, carrots & swede, cheesy leaks and I might pop out to get some French beans cos kid4 likes them. I also have some nice beef stock for gravy and a new jar of Dijon mustard. No horseradish sauce – I don’t do it. As a starter we are having smoked salmon then a lemon torte for pud though we might have that after the cheese as I’ve bought a nice cabernet sauvignon and I like to finish the bottle with some cheese, a la mode Francais.
I have of course rung my own mam for a chat. We had our Mother’s Day conversation last weekend. I sent her a card a week early – got the weekend wrong. It was ok. She also got the weekend wrong and had just opened the card before I called her. Now you know where I get it from:)
Nom nom…
