We're off away for a couple of days There's a small clue as to where in the picture below.
So, we'll be after having tea with Mrs Doyle, sippin' a few pints with Father Jack and a bit of a wander to see what's what. After that, we'll be coming back.
my lo-fi ears are listening to Grazed Knees/Snow Patrol
|W|P|109917669421457406|W|P|Half term sojourn|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com
...or Happy Halloween, if you care to contradict my youngest sprog. We're not big on the imported tradition of trick or treating in this house. This is in no way meant as a slur on those that choose the true Wiccan path, simply a reaction to the commercialisation and it's temporary appropriation by budding blackmailers each autumn.
In this neck of the woods, any little toe-rag wearing a 99p mask or combined witches hate and nylon wig seems to qualify as a bone fide trick-or-treater. They wander the local estates mob-handed, seemingly in groups that never fall below three digits, bashing on doors and demanding treats with menaces. Years back, a sweet or novelty was proferred to each and the mob went about their business in a fairly amiable manner. Nowadays, offering anything less than a PlayStation 2, a fully tricked out BMX bike or an all-inclusive family holiday to Florida is seen as a snub and an invitation to make the householders night a living hell. This being the case, we have taken a neutral stance and simply do not answer the door - as someone always buzzes them through the communal door - to anyone, preferring to spend the evening wondering if the car still has wheels and the cats have avoided ritual sacrifice at the hands of pre-pubescent diabolists.
That said, yesterday our assembled brood threw themselves unbidden into a frenzy of creative activity. Dress in suitably dark dressing-up outfits, accessorised with long stick-on nails and the odd witch's hat, they produced and amazing array of ghoulish pictures and posters to decorate the flat. Even the youngest sprog joined in, producing her first ever all-by-myself picture of a ghostly pumpkin face. Halfway through this Vision On-on-acid session, SWMBO arrives home from the supermarket with a corker of a pumpkin. This beauty was duly dissected and carved into the superb Jack O'Lantern you can see above. The pumpkin flesh we scooped out was used to make a cracking soup, a second portion of which I have just had for lunch. My gift this Halloween to a loyal readership, who never complain when I fail to post for days, is the recipe for this most autumnal of soups. Enjoy.
Pumpkin Soup for six
50g/2 oz butter
1 large onion, thinly sliced
500g/1lb pumpkin, peeled, deseeded and cut into chunks
250g/8 0z potatoes, thinly sliced (peeling's too much hassle)
1 clove of garlic, peeled and crushed
A sprig of fresh or 1 tsp dried thyme
1.2 litres/2 pints chicken stock
4 tblsp lemon juice
150ml/¼ pint double cream
salt and pepper
- Melt butter in large saucepan and fry onions over a low heat until soft.
- Add pumpkin, potatoes, thyme and garlic, then cover the pan and cook slowly on a low heat for 20 minutes by which time the vegetables should be soft.
- Add the stock and salt and pepper to taste, brining to the boil before reducing heat to a slow simmer for another 10 minutes.
- Reduce the soup to a purée using a blender, processor or a sieve and return to the pan, along with the lemon.
- Stir in cream and heat through, taking care not to boil.
- Serve with warm bread.
Yum yum pig's bum! The recipe based on one culled from Hamlyn's 'The Complete Cook', a superb 600 page compendium which, with me in mind, a friend kindly grabbed from one of those £5-for-any-book shops that spring up all over the West End, only to disappear just as quickly.
* Toe rag is a term that, disputedly, originated in and around the docks a quarter mile from where I sit. Toe rag was the moniker given to those stevedors who unloaded the grain for the local mills. These dockers wrapped hessian or cloth around their trouser cuffs puttee-style to prevent spilt grain dropping into their boots. The alternative, which is equally likely, is that it refers to the cloths that shoeless (transported?) convicts wrapped their feet in. Given the disparaging nature of the term and it's use in Australia, I suspect the latter is more likely.
my lo-fi ears are listening to Sweet Surrender/Sarah McLachlan
|W|P|109914226250954695|W|P|Happy Hello Ian|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com
Ian McKenzie|W|P|Big round face. No hair. Silly grin. Hello Ian? I'm not sure if I should take this personally??? 8-^"Before we start, I need to talk to you about David Essex and breasts..."
So began one of the many editions of Home Truths I have enjoyed over the last six or so years. Of all the mornings to sleep in and miss the show, today with it's tribute to John Peel, was not the day to pick. Luckily, the BBC's Listen Again website provides for muppets like me by providing streamed playbacks for several days after broadcast. I have just listened to today's show, which was presented by Roger McGough, and was comprised of just a small sample of the many stories the show has covered. All of which served as a fitting tribute to a man who has brought both cutting edge music and personal oral testimony to the radio listeners for over 35 years.
my lo-fi ears are sadly not listening to John Peel
A skeleton riding a recumbent
UPS Package Tracking shows that my iPod has now completed the following steps in the replacement process: 'despatch > box > label > collect > despatch > arrive > swap > relabel >despatch >get lost > get found > deliver 3 times whilst I'm out > return to lose somewhere in depot. When I tracked my case via Apple's support site and after a little farting around to get Apple to recognise my case and despatch numbers, I was presented with the Repair Status Detail page which is a little sparse and far from clear. First, the sequence of events declares that all dates are shown in "MM/DD/YYYY" format but the actual dates show as "/2/04/10/2" as in the screenshot below:
Taking an educated guess, this is meant to represent 10/22/2004. If that's the case then these chaps are clairvoyant...because I didn't ring them until the 23rd. No matter, entries in the table mean that Apple, like UPS, acknowledge they have my iPod.
However, the actual status messages are brief and a little vague, not to mention seemingly in reverse order, if one reads from top to bottom as convention dictates. A hunt around the Apple site reveals a Repair Status Terminology cribsheet to help mere mortals like me decypher their case status reports. Using this, and inverting the order above, I can tell you that the current sitrep for my iPod is as follows:
Unit Received: The unit has been received at the repair depot. - Replacement ordered: no definition supplied in cribsheet - should I worry?
Repair Requested: Repair has been requested - Repair? what happened to 'replacement'? Order Created: An order has been created for a replacement unit - is this not the same as 'Replacement ordered'? Or am I getting a replacement that has been previously repaired? Order Created:An order has been created for a replacement unit - are they sending me two repaired/replacement iPods by way of an apology for my original new iPod dying after just six weeks? Item Shipped: The unit has been shipped back to the customer, Apple Service Provider, or the Apple Store - bloody hell, I'm in danger of being impressed. Item Shipped: The unit has been shipped back to the customer, Apple Service Provider, or the Apple Store - So you've said. That's all well and good but seeing as all the entries show the same date, namely the unfathomable /2/04/10/2, this information is of little use. Putting my cynicism to one side and taking the status as gospel, this is not bad, all things considered. There again, it bloody should be considering the original purchase price and the fact that the product failed after just 40 days of moderate use. Ironically, given my concern about how long this was all going to take, I am now worried that UPS will try and deliver over the next few days whilst I'm away in Dublin, thereby giving them every opportunity to fulfill the 'deliver 3 times whilst I'm out > return to lose somewhere in depot' part of my scenario. Stay iTuned for more.
|W|P|109905938561191462|W|P| iUpdate #2: You speaka Applese?|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com
10/29/2004 01:59:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P| When it is one of the most widely used and recognised diagrams in the world. Nicholas Crane has written a short but informative feature about the London Underground map/diagram and how it has helped shape London and Londoner's perceptions of how their city looks.
If you'd prefer pictures, GeoffTech's excellent site has more than a few versions of the Tub Map - some serious, like the geographically correct version, some less so like the Have I Got News For You version and some just plain silly like this one.
|W|P|109905477168816445|W|P|When is a map not a map?|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com10/27/2004 03:29:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P| 
John Peel 1939 - 2004
"The Monday evening show the weekend after the Hillsborough tragedy was a piece of broadcasting I'll never forget. He said nothing at the start of his show. He just played a record. A long slow record. It was Aretha Franklin's heart breaking gospel version of You'll Never Walk Alone. I looked through the glass from my adjacent studio and John was just weeping. Silently. So were all of us - his listeners. Nothing more needed to be said." Nicky Campbell of BBC Five Live.
The fact that 30,000 users have emailed the BBC's tribute page in under 24 hours is testament not only to John Peel's broad appeal but the fact that he has singlehandedly helped increase the muscial awareness most of Britain's youth in the last 30 years. Rather than blather on myself, please check the links to some excellent content care of his long time employer, the BBC.
MAIN STORIES
TRIBUTES
OBITUARY
IN PICTURES
RADIOVIDEOBBC Radio One|W|P|109888739982420750|W|P|You'll be missed, John Peel|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com
10/28/2004 05:42:00 pm|W|P| zoe|W|P|a great loss indeed.10/28/2004 08:38:00 pm|W|P| Kenny|W|P|A terrible loss of a Giant among men. I've had the Joy Division out in honour. Without Peel, I probably wouldn't have heard of half the bands I so love now.10/27/2004 12:11:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P| ...to make UPS a healthy profit? In one fell swoop earlier today, a courier arrived at my place and assisted me in completing the 'despatch > box > label > collect > despatch...' phase of renewing my deceased iPod. OK, maybe I'm easily impressed but it was a good start. Whilst I track the '>arrive > swap > relabel >despatch >get lost > get found > deliver 3 times whilst I'm out > return to lose somewhere in depot' phases via the UPS and Apple (if it's working again) online tracking services, you might like to ponder on the following tit-bit offered by the aforementioned UPS guy and the logical statistical implication. When I asked him how often he does this 'hand over the box and instructions on how to mail my iPod to oblivion' thing, he snorted and said "Pah, about 10-15 times a day at the moment". Closing the door, I suddenly thought 'Hang on, if that's true and he's just one courier from one depot in one major city then...WTF!'
Let's, as they say in the States, do the math and don't worry, it's my worst subject so this'll be very rudimentary. The UPS web site's European facts page gives their European fleet size as being 'more than 9,700 (package cars, vans, tractors and motorcycles)'. Let's halve that to 4,850 for trunk (not local) vehicles, vehicles in repair and otherwise not likely to pick iPods up. Let's be generous and halve it again to 2,425 for those vehicles only carrying business-to-business packages and halve it once again to 1,212 to remove those consumer market vehicles operating in rural/less populated areas where iPod ownership is likely to be correspondingly lower. Now let's assume that my friendly courier was having a bad day and like most of us on a bad day was looking for sympathy. So we'll take his 15 dead iPods a day as an exaggeration and halve that to just 7 as well. If we mulitply his dead iPod figure by the number of colleagues driving the remaining vehicles it could just mean that an entirely hypothetical and imaginary parallel universe, eight and a half thousand imaginary iPods are being returned each day. Even if you halve that and then...well, you get my drift.
Whichever way one looks at it, if this guy was being even halfway honest - and the forums and mail lists would indicate iPods have issues by the bucket load - my experience may be more common than Apple, whose Q4 profits have soared on the back of selling 5.7 million iPods, might care to admit.
|W|P|109883230224825156|W|P|iUpdate #1: how many dead iPods does it take...|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com10/26/2004 11:22:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P| The Horniman Museum and Gardens is like a badly kept secret - you'd keep it all to yourself except for the fact that everyone else seems to know about it too!
Overseas visitors and those less familiar with the bits of London not served by the Tube may never have heard of The Horniman but it is truly one of our best museums. The tea trader Frederick Horniman amassed a collection of natural history specimens and cultural artefacts from around the World during Victoria's reign. Horniman sought to bring the world back to his home in South East London and he opened part of it to the public. Soon the collections grew too big for the family home and Horniman commissioned Charles Townsend to design and build a museum to house them all. This opened in 1901 and Horniman gifted the museum and the surrounding park to the people of London. The original collections comprised natural history specimens, cultural artefacts and musical instruments. Over the last 100 years this free museum has increased the musical and ethnological collections tenfold and further building have been added in the last few years.
Current additional attractions include "The Spirit of The Sufi: Troubadours of Allah", a collection of superb photographs in and around the sufi shrines of the Indus valley taken by German Horst Friedrichs. For the kids during half term and for an additional charge (£12 for 2 adults + four kids), 'Dinomites' will bring them face to face with 'life-size' baby and juvenile dinosaurs shown in suitably prehistoric settings, Fact sheets, information boards, soundtracks, a quiz and a great 'put the scales and plates on the stegasaurus' model help liven things up for the 'been there, done it' Jurassic Park smart alecs & alexia. When the appeal of educational enlightenment wears off, you can head outside. The park with its small animal enclosure, rose garden and large sloping grass area are well kept and provide space for kids to let off steam and charge about. As with all museums who need to make ends meet, there's the usual shop (though, commendably, they have resisted making folks exit through the shop unlike so many places these days) and a cafe that is pretty expensive. As a family of six we expect to pay more than most but two pots of tea, four cold drinks and six pastries cost us an eye-watering £15, making us wish we'd brought a picnic lunch to enjoy in the beautiful Victorian conservatory (virtual tour here), which sadly my T610 phone's camera cannot do justice to.
Don't let this put you off visiting because this museum is great, has a unique collection of Native American and African cultural artifacts and is blissfully uncrowded compared to it's big brothers in Kensington - which is why it was voted the Good Britain Guide's Museum of the Year and London Family Attraction of the Year in 2004. Just make sure that you don't tell anyone else.
also posted to the London Metblog.
|W|P|109882935767141171|W|P|A hidden gem worth seeking out|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com10/24/2004 12:20:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P| Having finally rid myself of the company car, I have spent a few weeks getting to grips with the combined timetables of the Docklands Light Railway, the London Underground and First Great Western Link. Whilst I have experienced the odd delay, on the whole the experience has been a positive one and has gone a long way to exorcising the demons of nightmare commutes into the West End from Sutton back in the '80s. On Thursday, the final piece in the commuting jigsaw fell into place with the arrival at the local bike shop of my new Brompton, identical to the brochure shot below. Or was until I swapped the seat post for a telescopic one, added some Cateye lights and Brompton's ingenious front pannier.
All this happened a day too late for me to show off the Brommie to the assembled monthly gathering of the Tower Hamlets Wheelers earlier this week. The Wheelers are a very active local borough group affliliate of the London Cycling Campaign and you will find a wealth of information, advice, advocacy, links and contacts on their site. After a few pints of foaming ale following the meeting, I rode back to the island with the Wheeler's coordinator, Owen, through a full-on down pour. Soaked to the sink in seconds, I was soon seeking out the biggest puddles like a six year old on a new trike.
To finish on the same energetic theme, I am now less of a lazy illegitimate of late and have supplemented my bike usage with what almost resembles a regular schedule of training runs. Despite lingering lower back aches, I have been slowly getting into some sort of shape to tackle the Nike 10k night run in London next month. I was keen to pick up tips from fellow competitor Paula Radcliffe but I have to say that, and call me old-fashioned if you want but, wearing American Tan pop-socks and sitting on the kerb don't seem to be the way to get to the finish first.
my lo-fi ears are listening to Do Your Thang/Basement Jaxx
|W|P|109861682353311398|W|P|Does this mean I'm a biathlete?|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com10/24/2004 11:25:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P| 
Life with the iPod has been great and groovy, easing my commute and blocking out waffle at the office when I've needed to focus. Until one evening earlier this week that is when it froze/hung/stopped being an iPod and would not do anything other than display the Apple symbol and the dreaded Exclamation Folder icon. Placing an ear to the beast, I could hear the drive ceaselessly cycling up to speed and then stopping, whilst displaying the last song that played. Tried the reset thing but to no avail so tried the 'drain completely and hope it comes back to life' thing but still no luck. After four frustrating attempts to log a return and replace service via Apple's web site (where I got a 'We're sorry we can't process your request' message during the SSL session), I then spent a pleasant enough ½ hour jumping through hoops and waiting on hold (with dire 'world' music rumbling on) for a call centre guy called Tarquin (name changed to protect the oblivious) in Cork to tell me that he had "checked with the technical authorisers who have evaluated this case and have agreed that your iPod is not usable". In my mind, what actually happened was that this:
- Tarquin, listened to my lengthy description of the steps I had taken to try and resurrect my Pod by following Apple's own troubleshooting guides and a variety of forum posts by those suffering similar problems.
- He then wrote "blowk's eyepod browk" on the back of his Cork Municipal Traction Co. bus ticket and scrabbled around for his inter-departmental phone list.
- He called Miguel the Technical Authoriser, apologising profusely for interrupting him whilst he was blasting the living c**p out of some poor bugger in a networked Doom game, and asked him for his advice on this call he has on hold.
- Miguel says 'Damn it...wait...this is a tricky bit....' then proceeds to flame-throw Sandy in Palo Alto, mortar Andy Jr in Seattle and atomise Nguyen, who's hooked in via the mainframe at White Sands Missile Range.
- Blood-lust momentarily satisfied, Miguel tells Tarquin 'Sure, have him send it in, we'll just swap it for one of the others lying around here and tell him we spent $3,000 in man hours working to fix his $200 Pod'.
- Tarquin then nips to the loo, grabs his mung bean & organic huumous wrap from the communal fridge, not forgetting his mandarin smoothie and heads back to his workstation.
- Tarquin reconnects saying 'I'm sorry I was a bit longer than I anticipated' before regaling me with the fantastic news that a 'technical authoriser' has graciously agreed that Apple will take time out of their busy schedule to repair or replace my six-week-old iPod.
Once back with the 'good news', Tarquin then launched into a labarynthine description of their 'despatch > box > label > collect > despatch >arrive > swap > relabel >despatch >get lost > get found > deliver 3 times whilst I'm out > return to lose somewhere in depot' service. Comforted by this, I now await UPS delivery of the box and instructions on how to mail my iPod to oblivion. Stayed tuned for updates.
my lo-fi ears are listening to Heat/Balligomingo
|W|P|109861353435463941|W|P|Exclamation Folder Fun or It only took six weeks for my iPod to die|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com10/10/2004 08:58:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P| Haven't done this for a while. Here, without embellishment or alteration, are a few selected search terms that have brought folks to this blog:
snoochie boochies - evil hand
- gambas pil pil recipe
- hugh fearnley-whittingstall guardian weekend
- military equipment emergency aid bag for soldier in wool
- 'full body photo of kelly holmes'
- 2004 contacts mail address mr numbers in portugal
So unless I am getting repeated hits from a one-handed survivalist Kevin Smith movie fan who spends time on their smallholding by reading broadsheet newspapers, surrounded by questionable pictures of female athletes whilst wishing they hadn't lost the contact details for an Portuguese chef who makes great tapas, my readership is a very broad church.
'Soldier in wool'?
my lo-fi ears are listening to All The King's Horses/Joss Stone
|W|P|109743829582638839|W|P|Are you sure it's me you want?|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com10/10/2004 06:51:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P| Ten and How to BBQ a man are two great short films. 'Ten' shows just how easy it is to break all of the Ten Commandments before breakfast and 'How to BBQ a man' is a small but well formed study of social mores in the US 'burbs. Enjoy.
my lo-fi ears are listening to Run/Snow Patrol
|W|P|109743067872533826|W|P|Funny shorts|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com10/10/2004 11:58:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P| "Pete's books caused seismic public laughter on suburban trains, transatlantic planes, storm tossed ferries, in cheap student accommodation and very definitely on the London Underground." says Adrian Mealing, friend and tour manager of author and presenter Pete McCarthy in an interview today.
Very true, as fellow Jubilee passengers will attest having watched me snort and laugh my way to work and back this week whilst reading The Road To McCarthy. As I am halfway through the book, I was surprised and a little saddened to find two column inches in The Guardian announcing his death whilst supping my Sunday morning coffee just now.
McCarthy's death is not the only one to have registered with me this week. I found myself moved by particular images of Charlotte Wyatt and Ken Bigley. Putting aside the enormity of the decisions made regarding her future this week, to me it was Charlotte's wide eyed but blank expression that brought a lump to my throat. In an instant, I realised that, if the doctors' prognosis is correct, this tiny blank face masks an world of pain inside that is beyond my comprehesion - that I and millions of others were staring at the face of an infant that, in all probability, was experiencing unbearable suffering at the very same moment.
In stark and desperate contrast, Ken Bigley's tired, drawn and seemingly resigned features spoke wordlessly of an almost certain knowledge of what was to come. A face with downcast eyes, set against harsh orange overalls and heavy chains, is bisected by the wire cage to resemble some diabolic jigsaw. These separate instances have reminded me how dislocated and remote we have become from the human lives behind the sound bites and the images that flash before us on the television each day.
Whether by the ravages of terminal illness, the hands of an executioner or the deliberations of doctors and judges, the finality of an impending and untimely death is a reality that we hope is never visited upon ourselves, whether a child of 11 months or 62 years old, whether a family man or a solitary soul.
my lo-fi ears are listening to Little Friend/Nickelback
|W|P|109740591597929684|W|P|McCarthy, Wyatt and Bigley|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com10/09/2004 03:55:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P| Listening to music through earphones on London's Tube trains is a three-way exercise in balancing one's need to actually hear the music against the roar of the train without imposing one's taste taste in music on surrounding commuters. Whilst the iPod's earphones are more than capable of producing a decent enough quality of sound, the noise of the Tube is sufficient to cancel out the top end treble and the low end bass notes, leaving the listener with just mid-range waffle. To combat this, I took Emchi's advice and grabbed a pair of Sony Fontopia earbuds to plug into my iPod's remote cable.
With three different size earbuds to choose from, the Fontopias are designed to fit directly into the ear canal so that the tight fit provides a deep and fullsome bass and crisp trebles without the need to jam them into your ears with your fingers. Having just tried them with a quick ride out to London Bridge and back (for a liquid brunch at The Market Porter in Boro Market), my low-fi ears can vouch for the great sound quality and concur with the rave reviews elsewhere on the web, although they are more expensive than most. With that, I'm off to try them on the DLR whilst picking a sprog up from dance classes.
my lo-fi ears are listening to Sing It Back (Boris Musical Mix)/Moloko
|W|P|109733370335881990|W|P|Tube Train Tunes|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com10/06/2004 06:59:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P| Although I listen to my fair share of music, Sarah McLachlan is not an artist that I have heard before or even heard of. If she walked past me in the street, I'd be none the wiser. However, in the last four minutes or so, she has become an artist that I have admiration for because she made this video* for her song, World On Fire. When you have watched the video, stop and think about what could be achieved using the $10,000,000 prize paid out to Mojave Aerospace Ventures for getting SpaceShipOne into sub-orbital space a second time this week.
* iTunes required - via Tim Bray's ongoing and geekgrrl.
|W|P|109708558463601260|W|P|World On Fire - shame on us|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com10/04/2004 08:36:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P| A slow walk to the postbox this evening provided a moment of sensory contrast for, although it is warm enough to saunter comfortably in shirt sleeves, the smell of woodsmoke was in the air and for me that is inextricably tied to autumn. Whether or not it is the result of global warming, the weather does seem to be a little kooky these days. This morning, on the day that I returned to car-less commuting, howling winds and driving rain didn't bode well for a future that includes standing on platforms and walks between stations. Yet, in the finest 'If you don't like the British weather, just wait a minute' tradition, my bus and train journeys this afternoon were bathed in warm sunshine that had folks smiling and being pleasant to one another. I'm sure the encroaching winter chill will cause such behaviour to vanish like warmth from frost-nipped fingers but it was a nice way to ease back into world of communal travel. Talking of which, my hearty congratulations to the combined ranks of London Buses, First Great Western and London Underground for speeding me door-to-door in a little under one hour and fifteen minutes with good connections and minimum waiting. Let's hope it lasts...
my lo-fi ears are listening to Let's Get It On /Marvin Gaye
|W|P|109691857537800994|W|P|Woodsmoke and warm smiles|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com10/04/2004 08:05:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|"Once you say something is evil, you absolve people of responsibility, as though it is something that comes from outside over which they have no control." Taken from Sally Vincent's Guardian Interview of Jon Snow.|W|P|109691674579316290|W|P|I couldn't agree more|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com 10/03/2004 04:22:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P| Slowly but inexorably, a good number my online activities have moved to web-based tools in recent months, as the partial screengrab of my links bar below shows. Although there was no one conscious decision to do this, I suspect the desire to have access to all my main resources from any location had a lot to do with it - in short, if there's an internet-connected box with a screen, keyboard and mouse, I can function.
This being the case, the key to successfully doing this has to be a solid weapons-grade browser and on my PC, Firefox is my browser of choice and have done so for a good while now. Even when a site is totally IE-oriented (thankfully rare these days), I can use a handy Firefox extension to give me right click access to IE. With Firefox, I can open just one browser session and still have each service run in it's own tabbed window, leaving my taskbar far less cluttered (those who like this approach may also like to take a look at Exodus, which offers tabbed Jabber IM windows in a single session also). So what do I have tabbed in Firefox when I'm online? Here's a brief rundown:
- Gmail for email: the email beta that's better known than many fully fledged applications. I miss Thunderbird but there's no denying Gmail makes managing list and group mail a doddle.
- Blogger for blogging: with Blogger, if there's a problem other than spelling and composition, then it's their job to fix it, unless it is a problem with my server, then I call my friend and host and ask nicely. After that, it's as simple or as complex as my template tinkering makes it.
- Google Groups for Usenet: or more specifically the Google Groups2 beta, which is better laid out and more user friendly than it's predecessor and updates appreciably faster than before.
- Bloglines for RRS news and blog feeds: for a quick overview of my favourite 41 feeds, Bloglines is great and now includes facilities for webclipping, sharing favoured feeds, blogrolling and feed directory searches.
- Furl and del.icio.us for bookmarking and archiving: both offer slightly different ways in which users can create private or social bookmarks and/or retain links to, and copies of, web content for future use.
- MyPip for web-based bookmarks: the precusor to the above but still useful as a backup that carries the core links that I like to have access to.
So, what's the upshot? Ditch all those expensive apps and rely on web-based services entirely? Hmm - not quite; let's consider these:
- Access and availability: Web-based stuff can be a pain too - there's little more frustratin than when a server's down for maintenance or your ISP is playing up and you can't get at your stuff . On the whole, the services in the package above work well and downtime/inaccessibility is rare.
- Free but...for how long?: The list of killer free services that hook users, get them reliant and then move to a subscription-based model is a long one and drenched in tears fro some. However, the growing inclusion of unobtrusive text ads like those of AdSense seem to be changing this and an increasing number of services are pledging 'free for ever' on the back of such advertising. This brings me to...
- Security & privacy: much has been written regarding the Gmail's scanning-to-target-advertising and such like and, it seems, no amount of common sense or debate will placate the nay-sayers. For my part, and leaving aside SSL and ecommerce issues for now, if your stuff is so super-secret, I'd advise against having it anywhere close to the internet. Who was it that said if you wouldn't want to read it on the front page of the New York/London Times, then you shouldn't email/post it?
Quite simply, it's a matter of horses for courses and personal preference. If your online activities are confined to the odd hour or so in front of a home PC, then the applications that came with it will be more than enough. However, if like me your screen time is significant and spent at any one of several boxes running different OS and using different browsers and you want access to the same resources, it'll certainly make life easier most of the time.
my lo-fi ears are listening to Spunky/Eels
|W|P|109681694689195109|W|P|Toolbar Toolset|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com10/03/2004 02:03:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Jeremy Ruston has come up with an interesting take on the wiki. TiddlyWiki is wiki that runs in your browser without the need for server side stuff. Yup - a wiki that is just a web page crafted from HTML and Javascript. Very neat indeed - only wish I could think of a way to use it.|W|P|109680863268084926|W|P|TiddlyWiki|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com 10/01/2004 05:23:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Mrs Wann writes very convincingly on why it isn't a good idea to wind up a pregnant woman in her latest piece entitled Victoria Meldrew? Believe me, as I Dad four times over, I speak from 36 months of experience.|W|P|109664778891417543|W|P|Hell hath no fury like a woman |W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com 10/01/2004 11:51:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Requiem for a T3 chronicles the sad and watery demise of Squonk's T3. I have never come close to doing this with my Nutshell-protected T3 but an erstwhile colleague reported, on more than one occasion, that her cellphone had expired after a late night dunking in a nightclub toilet. The mind boggles.|W|P|109662789757288025|W|P|Squonk's gone plonk|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com 10/01/2004 08:51:00 pm|W|P| Ian McKenzie|W|P|If you have to take your cell phone to the loo...10/01/2004 11:22:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|“USA Today has come out with a new survey – apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population.” care of Ian's Messy Desk.|W|P|109662615940831208|W|P|What is it they say about statistics?|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com