Category: Uncategorized

Hello?
Help! I’m lost!
Oh. Where are you?
If I knew that, I wouldn’t be lost.
Oh, yeah. Fair point. How did you get where you are?
I walked.
Right. What can you see?
A big road. And a pub.
You’ll have to give me more to go on.
There are lots of big roads. And signs. And more roads. Very very big ones.
Sheepscar interchange. I’ll come and get you.

A little, anyway. I have dialup data working over a new Sony Ericsson z600, via O2. The trick – it turns out – was to completely ignore the O2 instructions and go from these. Heigh-ho.

Does anybody know what’s happened to MetaFilter? It seems to have been down for over a week, yet Google News returns no results.

[Update 18^th Feb: Jason says their server fan blew. Is there a computer equivalent of ‘Get well soon’?]

[Update 20^th Feb: There’s a status page here. It’s yo-yo time. 🙁

I’m sitting on hold waiting for Orange to call me back, since they’ve a large queue waiting for the Disconnections Unit. Still trying to find news of MetaFilter, I search Technorati (finding nothing); then, of course, I vanity search. Ooh, look at that – I’m up from one inbound blog link to a whole four, one of which is a chap called Chris Heathcote, whose blog I added to NetNewsWire recently. Then I find here that Chris was not only speaking at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference I’d wished I’d been at last week… he’s also a customer experience manager at… Orange.

Hang on… they’re calling…

For what it’s worth, Chris: the disconnection folks were excellent, and I’m going because Orange’s charge structure for data is horrible. HSD is far from cheap, and the GPRS rates are huge: O2 GPRS is cheaper than either, and billed more sensibly. Plus I can get the handset I want, and the sign-up package is excellent.

It’s nothing personal.

Every now and then, one wishes one was somewhere else entirely. Like, here, for example?

Does anyone use those bizarre stickers that come with blank video tapes? Not the spine or top labels, obviously – we all use those, but only about three years after we first record onto the tape, when we fish it out of the box and wonder what the hell we put on it.

No, tapes always seem to come with a range of other labels, most of which would appear, at first glance, to be of extremely limited use. On closer inspection, many appear of no use whatsoever. A TDK tape I stuck in my VCR not a moment ago, for example (second half of Angels in America for the recording of), has a handy little sticker of a chap wearing a suit, and sporting a fine moustache. And another of a woman with a bouffant Farah Fawcett-style hairdo.

I don’t recall ever using such stickers. Nor can I quite work out in what eventuality I might be tempted to. Anybody?

Orkut is the latest in a string of ‘community’ sites, and it’s been attracting plenty of press of late. Mostly, so far as I can tell, because it’s (a.) an unofficial Google research project, and Google is hip, and (b.) it’s not very good.

Membership is invitation-only, which means us plebs are kept out and only the genuinely worthy are allowed in, which is rather uncannily like not being on the guest list for a popular club and not having a friendly celebrity to hand (say, Mel C, for example – you know who you are). So, I’ve been reading the rants and the criticisms from blogdom with fairly idle interest, since I’m not part of ‘that’ set.

Only… someone’s just gone and invited me in. Which is nice and all – gosh, am I really a ‘somebody’? – except that one criticism of Orkut is its binary approach to connections. You’re either a ‘friend’ of somebody, or you don’t know them. Now, where I come from, ‘friend’ is an unequivocally positive term (or it’s used ironically, or in jest, or… well, anyway). And the guy who’s invited me in? Well, now…

I’m on a whole bunch of mailing lists. Friends’ lists, geek lists, flight-sim pilots’ lists, software testing lists. Some of them I even read. One I’ve more-or-less dropped off is run by The Omni Group, an American developer of spectacularly elegant software for Mac OS X. Their general discussion list is excellent, but it has its share of trolls – people who post rants, pick fights, or are generally belligerent. The online equivalent of Glasgow’s famous Neds.

One troll used to post anti-unix screeds that ran on for page after page of barely-intelligible rambling. He became somewhat notorious; as I recall, he’s known for similarly antisocial behaviour on some of the Perl lists. Anyway, at one point I took to running his posts through an automatic text summarising system, and reposting the result. This caused considerable mirth.

This is the guy who’s invited me into Orkut. He’s not my friend, I don’t know him – from his writings, I wouldn’t even like him. I have no desire to be associated with him via some spuriously coarse-grained ‘social software’ linking system. But I’m still quite keen to play with Orkut, out of semi-professional interest.

What do I do?

I just Googled the UK mac newsgroup for ‘ISP mobile phone,’ since I’m trying to work out how to secure bandwidth while I’m in Leeds. The first link poster’s sig-quote is from… uh, that’s me.

Does that make me a somebody?

At 6pm this evening, I finished clearing my desk at SMG (a process pleasantly slowed by chatting to Club Reps producer Lizzie, with whom I’ve shared an office these last few months. It’s been more than slightly bizarre, since the series we’re making couldn’t be less alike). At 6am tomorrow, I head down to Leeds to start the next gig. Which is exactly what I want to do, and I’m hugely excited about it. No, really I am.*

Meanwhile, Sim’s show Scrapheap Challenge: Scrappy Races finally got underway tonight, replacing the execrable Demolition Day in Channel 4’s schedules. Scrappy Races was a hoot. Perhaps it’s a while since I’ve seen Scrapheap itself, but I enjoyed this spin-off far more than the mother series. This despite basically nothing happening this week, as the teams put together their basic contraptions. Fun show – congrats all round.

• Had my fingers crossed.