The Sun came out in Wales!
Monthly Archives: March 2005
Chavtastic
I tried drunkun blogging via my mobile last night, but I think I was too drunk to manage it. Fortunately I’m still drunk now, so I guess I’ll have acheived half of the task if I manage to post this before giving up.
I can’t find my toothpaste this morning. It’s not in the bathroom. I must have done something with it last night. But why would I hide my toothpaste from myself? And as for the daffodils, I don’t know where they came from. But I think I remember picking them from somewhere. Possibly.
There would be photos, but I can’t get them off my phone due to lack of a bluetooth adapter. And I feel slightly sick.
Must. Drink. Less.
The Mobile Tube
Anybody who enjoys the relative peace and harmony of travelling on the tube should enjoy it while they can, because come 2008 it will no longer be free from the chatter of people talking away on their mobiles.
I say screw the mobile networks and stick a bunch of wireless access points down there instead. Give it a few years and our mobiles should all be able to route data via these wireless networks, which will no doubt prove far cheaper to install and to run than traditional mobile networks or over-hyped flakey 3G systems. And that’s in addition to being able to use laptops or palmtop devices without any additional hardware being needed to connect.
So come on Ken – give us free net access on the tube! What better way to start bridging the digital divide in London, at least?
Welcome to Part Three
Just a quick post before I nip off to the gym, in case you’re wondering why wabson looks so different.
I’m now using WordPress. I’ve had it with Movable Type, and will probably post a long rant about why this is quite soon. But not now. Did I mention I’m going to the gym? 😉
The old version (with comments closed) is here.
Comment Spam
I’ve just spent half an hour deleting around a thousand comments off the blogs hosted on wabson.org.
The buck stops here. When I get a chance I’ll be installing WordPress and looking into migrating over onto that for my blogging needs. WordPress 1.5 was released a couple of days ago and looks like it has some really innovative features for dealing with comments that I’m keen to try out.
Lets just hope I have more luck than Laurie has had so far in setting up MT 3 😉
Synchronousnous and Spring
(Yes, it’s a word!)
It seems the joys of Spring are not just confined to London. Today is a beautiful day on campus, with warm weather (sixteen degrees, apparently), blue skies and the smell of freshly cut grass drifting through the air.
Forty five minutes ago I was sitting on the piazza in the sun eating ice cream. Now I’m back in the office, where we have the windows open (albeit 20 feet above me) and a cool breeze is drifting across me as I type.
Today will be one of those days where I make sure I get out of the office early. Here’s hoping there’ll be lots more days like this between now and September.
Still Evil
So Apple are in the news again this week, this time for further crippling the Rendezvous technology built into iTunes that allows people to stream music each other across a local network. The Register have a big long rant about this and how moves such as this are reducing the freedoms we enjoy when listening to music. Go them!
So all in all, Apple are still evil. I guess much in the same way that Starbucks are evil, but we ignore it because they make nice things that we all like to consume. Where Starbucks exploit third world plantation workers, Apple use artificial technological barriers to restrict the civil liberties of rich Westerners like us. And a handful of fat-cat American executives get rich in both cases.
Turbines
Another Welsh sunset.
P-O-L-Y
There was much chanting at the Varsity match last night between the Warwick and Cov rubgy teams. And we won! The final score was 14-29, which apparently was to be expected given that Cov haven’t won the annual match for about 20 years now.
I got a couple of OK-ish photos inbetween the action, with the motion blur as the players ran up and down the pitch. The idea of capturing the passing of time in a photo is something that’s always seemed quite cool to me. It’s not something you get in photos very often.
And now for something slightly more positive
I’m still annoyed at the whole software patents thing, don’t get me wrong. But something else in the news I’ve been reading this evening caught my eye.
So via the as always excellent ZDNet comes an article about the UK software supplier whose intranet has been ranked in the top ten in the world by a study carried out by Jakob Nielsen’s Nielsen Norman Group.
In a nutshell, the company have it seems, applied a radical new approach to the management of their intranet site, using a Wikipedia-style model whereby employees are encouraged to contribute to the site, with enormous success.
This is interesting for two main reasons. Firstly, it completely goes against the traditional model of intranet design, and secondly, it’s similar to a concept I’ve been working on recently at work. I’ll spare you the details of all that here, but suffice to say the concepts have me interested enough to be doing background research in my spare time 🙂