Category: Favourites

I’m finally in the newest of the new, much touted Facebook killer that is Google+, and instead of going through it’s pros and cons, I’m in the more sentimental view of social networking of yesteryear. Firstly I’ll say it’s not a Facebook killer for two reasons, a) it’s only a week old and b) it’s clearly a work in progress, and the only thing that will kill Facebook is Facebook it’s self. Social networks are fickle, cynical and cyclical at best, nothing lasts forever, ask SixDegrees, Friendster and MySpace, everything rises to a rousing crescendo and eventually the wave breaks, it just depends on how high the water mark that’s left is.

Flickr is a great example, from my experience at least, 2004 to 2007 was it’s peak time, the owners cashed in and it more or less fell stagnant, not that it wasn’t worked on by Yahoo, but after a few years of uploading, favouriting and commenting on pictures, as well as active groups, it just fell off the proverbial cliff fast. Just last month I was debating on renewing my Pro account, I only did because I had Getty royalties money in my PayPal account. I’ve barely been on the actual site since 2007, a combination of smartphone emailing or using an app to upload random pictures and using the Flickr uploader for mass dumps as well as moving from the imploding Atlanta area group to Charlotte where there wasn’t as many social events gave me no reason to check back. I still use it, mostly out of habit and, sadly, I’m invested to the tune of almost 6,300 pictures that I can’t be bothered re-uploading to another site that will most likely end up the same as Flickr.

Facebook, I know a few people who are or have already approached burn out on the whole encompassing Facebook experience. I found I’ve went in cycles, didn’t really use it when I was first invited, had the same contacts as Flickr, Twitter and the APWBWGTTD mob were very social anyways, then old school friends found me and I caught up with them for a while then another lull, then old SixDegrees people found me and again I was active before the next lull, even now I don’t do much, my feed is mostly information pulled in from 3rd party applications like Flickr, Foursquare, YouTube etc. Not even the lure of chat and video calling can do much to lure me back, I’ve went on many large purges of my friends list because I honestly can’t be bothered with other people’s lives. Petty reasons too, like if your profile pic was of either your kid or pet, you were gone like yesterday.

Twitter is the only one that’s really lasted, I’ve been there since September 2006, I take great pride in my early adopter status of the 4 digit user id I have (5628). And to some extent Google+ feels like Twitter did in those early days, it’s only the hardcore nerds who are in there, there’s no businesses trying to push their wares to you, no bots spamming links, just people. Signal is high, noise is low and I know it won’t stay that way, as soon as it’s open the inevitable hoardes will descend upon it and it’ll be just like everywhere else. Then something new will come along and we’ll all move en masse to there and wonder what’s the next thing that’s ready to come down the pike…

It’s not a Facebook killer, the only thing Google+ is is a Google+ killer.

No, not in the “oohhhhh, get me!” way, more in the “nobody gets me and here’s why” train of thought…

It’s sometimes funny how something so innocuous can trigger a search that explains everything. I’ve been back for 6 months now, back with my family who would, supposedly, take care of me after my American dream turned super sour but as yet it’s been difficult work… They don’t get me. They try but I’m always compared, rather unfairly, to the actions of my brother, and most of the advice I’m getting is based on what he would and could do. Fair enough, I’ve not really been in their day-to-day lives for the best part of seven years, I’d like to think I’ve changed but the reality is I’m the same I ever was and ever will be.

It’s always been labels, oh he’s a shy guy, oh he’s just quiet and unassuming, oh he’s this and that. No, I’m just an extreme introvert.

I realised this yesterday when I was filling out an application for a sales position with a mobile phone provider as I’m long past the part where I can be choosy about jobs and just take anything out there, there was a 15 part scenario questionnaire that, basically, I answered as I’d expect to be treated but was deemed unworthy enough to continue. I’ve always stated that I’d much rather get a job I’d be happy in as I’m more concerned about my mental health than money right now, but what do you do if your personality just doesn’t allow it? I hate talking to people I don’t know, how can I ever expect to succeed in a sales environment? My brother, going back to that comparison, can talk and talk and talk to anybody about anything, but I doubt he could thrive in a job that would require him not to talk to anyone, that’s my ideal job. I’m happiest when I can put on headphones and shut out the world for 8 hours a day and I’ve been very lucky that every job I’ve had since 2003 allowed me to do just that, at least most of the day.

I struggle to build rapports with people, I’ve never really been a social person, it took me quite a few months to open up to the people at the APWBWGTTD meetings, in fact I had to sort of drag Robyn to the first one (and that landed me in more trouble than I care to go into) I went to in June 2005 so I’d at least have someone to talk to, a crutch of sorts. It wasn’t until the December 2005 one, some 6 months later I felt comfortable to go alone. I had very few friends in Charlotte, it wasn’t until a few years of living there I felt comfortable to go to tweetups, actually the first social event I went to was the WordCamp in November 2008, I’d been living in Charlotte since January 2007, nearly two years.

Now Robyn was an extrovert, she could mingle at parties with the best of them, but she also got me, she knew I was uncomfortable in large groups of people and she tried to help me as best as she could but invariably I’d end up separated from her and feel rather lost and have the urge to go home. A good example is a birthday party of one of her co-workers we went to in June 2008. I knew everyone there, I had met them before multiple times, but I still wasn’t comfortable without my crutch. Unfortunately as it was June, it was stinking hot outside, but nearly everyone had made their way out there, I’d rather stay inside in the cool air conditioned air but I was struggling as Robyn was outside with her co-workers, things came to a head as the hours past and I was ready to go home but, of course, Robyn wasn’t ready so we ended up in an argument.

Sadly the one person in the world who got me decided it was too much and here I am, I think that why I still wear my wedding ring, it’s still a connection to that person I’m still technically married to, because as soon as we’re divorced and I have to take it off then I’m all alone in this world. Misunderstood, as usual.

Eight minutes after coming on as a substitute in his 14th game for Chelsea, Fernando Torres finally scored a goal, thus ending my silly little joke site turned social media experiment. The total time of his barren spell (not counting time with Liverpool and Spain) was an astonishing 12 hours and 12 minutes, just over eight full 90 minute games worth of play.

So what did my site finally rack up as of yesterday? Around 425,000 visitors in just under 3 weeks all brought in by seeding single links on Twitter and Facebook, admittedly it was a subject that caught people’s attention causing it to snowball around the world (the only region that didn’t register a single visit was the Sahara part of Africa (Libya, Chad, Niger, Mali and Guinea)).

So the numbers:

337,000 unique visitors, not too shabby if I do say so myself. and thanks to adding the Facebook Like button I was able to gleam information about the shares and likes on Facebook.

This gave me just over 30,000 combined likes and shares, down from my unscientific search which provided just over 70,000. I’m unsure about the 40,000 discrepancy in the numbers, but again my search method is completely un-scientific…

And finally, the key demographics:

No surprises that it was younger men aged 18-24 who were sharing and liking this.

It was a silly but enjoyable few weeks, but all good things must come to an end…

There’s an old adage that says “misery loves company” and I can say this is quite true when surrounding Fernando Torres’ futility in front of goal since his £50M transfer from Liverpool to Chelsea.

During the first leg of the Champions League quarter final match between Chelsea and Manchester United, Torres was snatching at chances and on a whim I checked to see if www.hasfernandotorresscoredforchelsea.com was available, and as it was I purchased it and put together a quick single serving site that answered this particular question.

Has Fernando Torres Scored For Chelsea?

The answer is obviously a resounding no, so to supplement this I trawled through his stats for this season at Soccer Base and put a little line of game and minutes just for giggles. At the end of the game I posted the link to Twitter and Facebook expecting nothing (or very little) in return. To my surprise the Daily Mirror football Twitter feed picked it up (describing it as “treads all over the border between idiocy and genius”) and from there it snowballed…

A few hours after launch it racked up nearly 3,000 visits and I was a giggling mess, I’d be happy if it ended there but no, the next day was in the 12,000 range. It averaged around 10,000/day up until Monday night when Andy Carroll (the man Liverpool bought for £35M to replace Torres) scored… I quickly bought www.hasandycarrollscoredforliverpool.com for comparison sake, both site got tweeted to hell and back Monday night. The Andy Carroll site peaked fast and died down by Wednesday averaging 10,000/day over Monday and Tuesday.

On Tuesday Chelsea and Manchester United faced off again and Torres didn’t have any luck again and suffered the indignity of being substituted at half time, this caused a massive spike in visitors to the 50,000 range which continued through last night peaking at just under 60,000. My giggling continues.

Facebook has the highest number of referrers so a quick unscientific search leads me to these numbers.

I’m rather impressed by a couple of quick silly domain purchases and a few links on Twitter and Facebook. The only downside is I have to maintain the Torres site until he finally scores…

As a follow up to my own Burned Out on Google Doodles, it seems there is now a sort of backlash against the last one celebrating the 119th anniversary of the Ice Cream Sundae.

The main points of contention is as follows:

1. Is it really the 119th anniversary of the Ice Cream Sundae?
2. Google UK completely ignored Mother’s Day over here with it

I would also add the 119th anniversary of the Ice Cream Sundae is kind of a silly anniversary to observe, if you’re doing that then you might as well do it every yea, which then falls into the category of “was it kind-of/sort-of sneaky advertising the upcoming new release of Android (often speculated to be call… Ice Cream, or maybe Ice Cream Sundae if you follow the FroYo way of thinking)”.

Either way we’re now at 56 Doodles this year with only 94 days gone in 2011.

Since moving back to the UK I had to get rid of my US iPhone, and it was with much sadness as I’d had use of an iPhone on a daily basis for over 3 years. I could have kept it and tried to unlock it but it was too much hassle, and, to be honest, I needed the money it was worth…

Now, you say, why not just get a iPhone over here? Well, as I was without a regular source of income I decided to forgo a monthly contract and go with a pay as you go phone and a PAYG iPhone is a ridiculous amount, and I had a bad user experience with an iPhone 4 in the US. So I opted for a HTC Wildfire, a low end Android device, so a period of adjustment was required. First thing to get used to was the new “desktop” which HTC call Sense, this is the shiny interface you can add widgets to, coming from the iPhone environment of pages of icons and a static dock, it was quite a change. Soon enough I had filled my 7 pages with useful widgets like a music player, scrollable messages, weather and contacts.

Now the differences, Android handles notifications so much better than the iPhone, instead of an annoying pop up each time you get a text, Facebook message, tweet mention or whatever, you get a little alert icon in the top bar with a brief description, hold that bar and drag it down and you get a list of your notifications, as well as a list of items that may be running (like current song playing for example). Much nicer, less obtrusive. Being a Google phone, apps like Maps are far superior to the iPhone equivalent, with Maps you also get Google Navigation, free turn-by-turn directions. This proved to be most helpful when I drove to Cambridge last month. You can also get a Car Mode, I have it setup so when the phone connects to the car stereo via bluetooth, it jumps over to car mode, which is a simplified interface with large buttons to operate items you’re most likely to need while driving, like navigation, music, phone and contacts.

You can also link contacts with their Facebook, Flickr and Twitter profiles so when you open up their contact info, you can view all their updates without ever opening up another app. Though one slight downside is when you add your Facebook info to sync, it then add all your friends with phone numbers entered into Facebook into your contact list, but a little fiddling can filter these.

There are a few things I miss from the iPhone, like visual voicemail (you can get this via apps but I don’t trust a third-party to handle this), the ability to take screenshots on the device (for Android you have to download a bunch of development tools to do this), and apps like Instagram and Angry Birds (Angry Birds is available for Android but not for my device as the screen is too small). I’ve noticed a few apps that aren’t available for my device for a multitude of reasons, that would be my one real gripe about it, the Android fragmentation. And the upgrade support for Android is surprisingly short, usually you get one software upgrade, rarely do you get two. So my device was upgraded from Android 2.1 (Eclair) to 2.2 (Froyo), it’s unlikely to get 2.3/4 (Gingerbread) despite being less than a year old, Apple on the other hand give you two iOS updates.

Would I go back to an iPhone? Possibly. Would I get another Android? Maybe. Both are good and bad in their own ways, Android is easily personalised but iPhone offers a better user experience (at least in my opinion), that said I’m pretty happy with my Wildfire…

Press the red button, ubiquitous for interactive TV in the UK. The interactive TV revolution began in August 1999 when Sky Sports broadcast an interactive version of Arsenal vs. Manchester United that allowed viewers to change camera angles and later added a fans commentary stream, since then a whole slew of sporting events have been made better by the red button.

Wimbledon? Choose which court you wanted to see. Golf? Watch pairings or individual holes. Champions League? Choose which group match you wanted. Olympics? Choose your event. Cricket and Rugby? Choose camera angles and commentary. Super Bowl? Choose if you wanted the US or UK commentary. The list goes on and on…

I’m currently watching the Wales vs. Ireland 6 Nations match that comes with no fewer than 5 commentary streams, one of which is the referee’s mic which makes for interesting hearing at times. It got me thinking that interactive TV wasn’t really as ubiquitous in the United States, at least not in my experience. The closest thing was DirecTV’s channel mix which pulled feeds from separate channels rather than having it all on the one feed. Instead of flipping between feeds it just bumped you to that particular channel.

NBC offers an interactive experience on their website, they offer multiple camera angles for Sunday Night Football Extra and the opportunity to watch 4 streams at once or picture in picture during the Olympics but as it’s on their website it can’t really be thought of as interactive TV.

I’m very surprised, we’re entering our 12th year of interactive TV in the UK, but yet it hasn’t quite gotten any traction stateside, I thought they would be all over thise…

Another day, another Google Doodle, our 44th this year so far. Remember when these used to be special, now there is practically a new one every other day. Hard not to get tired of them…

Today’s is for International Woman’s Day, a couple of day ago it was Will Eisner’s 94th Birthday, a few days before that it was St. David’s Day. It’s starting to spiral out of control…

Compare the numbers:

1998: 3 Doodles
1999: 5 Doodles
2000: 33 Doodles (bumped up by being a Summer Olympic year)
2001: 22 Doodles
2002: 47 Doodles (Winter Olympic and FIFA World Cup year)
2003: 39 Doodles
2004: 24 Doodles (Summer Olympic year)
2005: 44 Doodles
2006: 58 Doodles (Winter Olympic and FIFA World Cup year)
2007: 36 Doodles
2008: 151 Doodles (Summer Olympic Year)
2009: 197 Doodles
2010: 271 Doodles (Winter Olympic and FIFA World Cup year, also the first interactive Google Doodle in the form of PacMan)
2011: (so far) 44 Doodles

Growth year over year, and it must be noted that you don’t see every Doodle as some are only shown in selected countries. How soon before the Doodle overtakes the Google logo?

A few day ago I heard the first rumblings of what could be a great spectacle, but now I can’t help feel it’s a recipe for disaster… I am, of course, talking about the proposed Rangers vs. Celtic “friendly” at Fenway Park in Boston.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m so there, but while I read more about Red Sox officials saying how they handle rivalries like Sawks vs. Yanks at Fenway, I’m thinking they are completely unprepared in every sense… Simply put, there is no rivalry in America that comes within a million miles of Rangers vs. Celtic, they claim games like Red Sox vs. Yankees, but at the end of the day, those fans sit together in peace and harmony at both stadiums. Try that with these two teams and you’ll end up with a proverbial bloodbath. It’s not just a game, it’s religious, it’s political, it’s life and death and that’s not just hyperbole.

Fenway Park is a nice baseball stadium, a little cramped, holding only around 37,000, some say it has poor sightlines, and it’s jammed into a city neighbourhood with plenty of bars within spitting distance. How can they possibly try to segregate these fans? In fact how can they even begin to sell tickets publicly? I’d love for it to happen, but there is still a lot of unanswered questions right now.

I’ll be the first to admit that me and Robyn are kinda dumb, we laugh at wildly inappropriate things and make up increasingly bizarre conversations as we go. Some have been documented and tonight was another classic…

But first, I need to set the stage. We’re whittling down the TiVo season pass list as it’s spiralled out of control over the years, and at the very bottom there was one listed just as “(5 WTVI)” nothing more, nothing less.

Robyn: How can it record nothing?
Me: Maybe it’s like The Neverending Story, the nothing encroaching on Fantasia. Maybe we need to go to the swamp of sadness to find the answer?
Robyn: ATREYU!!!!
Me: ARTAX! YOU GOTTA KEEP BELIEVING!!!! DON’T GIVE IN!!!
Robyn: Retard…

Yep, that’s me…

Ever since I got my drivers license three years ago I’ve become very, very lazy, not that I wasn’t lazy before, but I used to walk everywhere and that was a good form of exercise. Back in Scotland I’d walk to the bus stop or train station to get into Glasgow to go to work or whatever, I’d walk to friends houses, I’d walk to my brother’s flat, I even once walked from Ibrox Stadium to Queen Street Station to avoid the inevitable post Rangers game crush on the underground. During my short stint in London I’d walk from the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel to Trafalgar Square just because and in Atlanta I walked a few places, like the 5 mile stretch of Shallowford Road in Marietta, from CNN Center to Midtown MARTA and from our condo in Sandy Springs to Perimeter Mall (and beyond) a great many times. I’ve walked nowhere since we moved to Charlotte.

So today I downloaded a free app for the iPhone called RunKeeper after Chris Owens was talking about it on Twitter and gave it a whirl on a little circuit of Cornelius and Davidson just to see…

For the most part it was pretty accurate, I needed to tweak the path out a little once I got home which upped my distance plodded from 3.25 miles to 3.31 miles. Overall a satisfactory experience, now I’m in the mood to beat the 57:10 it took me to complete it, I also need to work on a Plodcast playlist as I was just walking on shuffle, skipping tracks that didn’t get me going. A few surprising choices came up, like Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl has a great walking beat, especially as I was going up a bit of an incline on the Davidson/Cornelius border.

And oh yeah, I did this in 87°F (31°C) heat, so I worked up a crazy sweat, I won’t even tell you what my undershirt was like…

Well, the hooplah of the first Charlotte WordCamp is over. I found it to be a very interesting experience, as I mentioned before, I wasn’t really there to learn the basics, I was more interested in networking and things of that nature and all in all I think I succeeded as I managed to put faces to many twitter names.

The camp it’s self was very informative, the Promotion panel with Wayne Sutton, Lisa Hoffmann, Corey Creed and moderated by Donna Maria Coles Johnson was probably my highlight of the event (other than Mark Jaquith’s keynote speech/WordPress 2.7 preview/release of the latest WordPress 2.7 Beta which I missed some of due to ambient distractions (ie. someone turned the lights off and I nodded off for a few minutes)) as they had a lot of great ideas to pass along.

And there was some comedy to be had as one of the attendees got stuck in an elevator, sadly I know that feeling as I was stuck on my way to an interview back in Atlanta many moons ago.

Overall it was a great event, a great turnout and it has definitely inspired me to do more, so a big thanks goes out to Jason Keath who organised the whole thing as well as the volunteers who made the day run as smoothly as it did, as well as the Charlotte Observer who provided the location for us “new media” types to mingle.

I’m sitting at the Charlotte edition of WordCamp, sitting through the technology and design panel hoping this will spur me back into the blogging game, and so far it’s working as I’m here now, but mostly I’m here to network… So far, so good as I’ve met a ton of people I follow on Twitter.

So far it’s as boring as sin, but I consider myself an advanced WordPress user who knows how to bend it to my will. But everyone needs to start somewhere and you can’t please all the people all the time. I’m also surprised at the demographic of the attendees, I was expecting a younger/nerdish group but it’s a broad scale of young and old, and more power to them.

I’m also hopeful that I can network my way into a job, every major Charlotte company is here and I ain’t too proud to beg…

The election is a week away, so with some states still undecided a slew of musicians are hitting the road with Rock The Vote to, ummm, rock the vote, sorry, get out and vote… And, luckily for me, North Carolina is one of these states (along with Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota to name a few) so we were first in line for a night of Beastie Boys, Sheryl Crow and Santogold at Amos’ Southend, two of those are worth the price of admission…

As Amos’ doors opened at 6. I started by arriving at Tavern on the Tracks just before 5 and scored a parking space in their lot that would facilitate a quick getaway after wards. After getting some snacky dinner and hanging around for an hour or so I headed over to the show, unfortunately the queue was long outside, and it was freezing, not a good wait. Rock The Vote people were milling around asking if people were registered or if they had voted already, of course I was harassed but they soon learned I was an empty cause, and I also managed to flog my spare ticket for $40, so I was off to a good start already.

Santogold kicked the evening off and she was ok, not really my kind of thing but entertaining enough for an opening act. As would be the theme of the night, there was a lot of political monologues between songs, but hey, it’s a political event so what do you expect? Another notable thing about Santogold’s set was her backing dancers, 2 women wearing identical clothes and sunglasses who just stood there for a few minutes, offering up an occasional backing vocal before the busted out some crazy syncronised dancing. Very bizarre.

After a little break the Beastie Boys came out to much approval to introduce Sheryl Crow.

Sheryl Crow was good, really good. She came on to do a little solo song before hanging up the guitar to take on the bass and going through a few new songs, her latest CD is actually very good, I recommend it, as well as a few classics like “Can’t Cry Anymore”, “A Change Would Do You Good” and “Everyday Is A Winding Road” (see below for a video of that). I also think the Sheryl was my favourite performer of the night, don’t get me wrong, I like the Beastie Boys, but Sheryl seemed to capture the mood much better with a mostly acoustic set of songs you can chill to.

She was also the easiest to capture in picture as she doesn’t move around the stage much, compare that to the Beastie Boys who were bouncing here, there and everywhere… As a side note, it’s been about 9½ years since I last saw the Beastie Boys live in Glasgow, and they have put out one album in that space of time (four if you include The Sounds Of Science Anthology, Solid Gold Hits (a best of) and last years instrumental effort The Mix Up).

For three guys who are in their forties, the “Boys” haven’t lost a step in the live performance stakes, they played for over an hour in a set that did NOT include Sabotage, backed by Mix Master Mike, and everyone lapped it up. Non Sabotage aside, it was a very, very good time, live staples like “Root Down”, “Sure Shot”, “So What’cha Want?” and “Intergalactic” made sure everyone went home happy, but there was a weaird thing at the end where they didn’t go off stage to come back for the encore, then said they’d be back with the other artists, but once they went off, the house lights came up and show was over. Anyways, these guys were the hardest to photograph, poor light conditions and fast movement don’t mix, and I was so far back my flash would have been useless.

Overall it was $35 (plus fees) well spent, and I’d give a nice nod of thanks to Amos’ security staff for not turning my camera away at the door, his reasoning of overriding the “no cameras/recording devices” rule due to everyone having a camera phone was much appreciated, not just by me, but by a few people around me who were asking for copies of my pictures. Alas most were missed connections as it’s hard to get an email address while loud music is being played, you have nothing to write on and holding a big camera… I said they’d be on Flickr and as of right now they are still the only images of last night on there… So…

Get Out And Vote Tour ’08 (Set)

Originally uploaded by FLC.

We’ve had Josie for 3 months now, and she’s integrating well with Felix and Sally, and in many ways she’s become the cat we wanted Charlotte to be, but oh well. She’s really a fun little cat, but it’s hard to call her little now as she’s growing at a rate of knots, and we already have a variety of nicknames for her (most of which I’m sure confuse her no end) as she’s now called Josie, Josies, Josington, Josiniho, little girl, tabby tail, tabbington (these are due the the weird fact that she’s a black and white cat with a tabby cat tail, if it wasn’t for it’s growth spurt we’d swear it was a donor tail after some horrible accident) and so on and so on…

Everyone loves her, and she loves everyone. Doesn’t matter where she goes, to the vet or to the “Bed and Biscuit” while we were in Scotland, everyone adores her, everyone wants to take her home, and unlike Charlotte (who was so anti-people, she made an anti-social person seem like the life of the party) she’s not shy to run up on people and basically do that “love me” purr. And boy does she purr, out of control! She purrs so much at night she begins to drool like crazy…

Anyways, we’ve adjusted to the feeding frenzy of three cats as well as the inordinate amount of poo that comes from three cats, but as we were in Petsmart in Mooresville last week buying over 100 cans of cat food, someone from the Bed and Biscuit recognised us via Josie and asked if we wanted to help another cat who had been found outside.

And despite our initial refusal, he was brought in and soon enough we swore up and down it’s just a fostering and we’d find him a new home. But the poor little guy (still nameless, not wanting to make an emotional connection) was covered in fleas, as we found of when we tried to clean him and they all went to the higher ground, his face. So a flea treatment and a proper showering yesterday means he’s much cleaner, flea-free and generally looking like a nice little cat. But unfortunately our efforts to find him a home are proving to be a bit fruitless, so should we just become the crazy cat family and get another gaping maw to feed? Another few pounds of poo to clean up? Decisions, decisions…