on the internetz.
Made a bad tactical decision last night and set my alarm apparently 30 minutes too late to get Glastonbury tickets today. Arse. They all sold out in three hours online, mainly because the website worked this time! Damn technology.
Still, one door closes and another opens, so this paves the way for popping my Burning Man cherry later in summer. Better start getting my techno goggles built…
Hmm… so Christopher Eccleston has decided to quit Dr Who after only doing one series. Ah well. Maybe if Orbital come out of retirement for this year’s Glastonbury (tickets on sale this Sunday BTW) they could convince him to stay? Just a thought.
Meanwhile Spring has decided to arrive in New York. Well, for at least a few days. Yesterday was gorgeously sunny and for some reason someone had set up hundreds of big orange balloons high above Williamsburg. Guess it was some kind of homage to the departed ‘big orange flaps’ of Central Park. Very cool.
Another earthquake has just hit off Indonesia, just south of where the boxing day earthquake triggered the devastating tsunami only a few months ago. At least this time there is some warning, so hopefully it won’t cause as much death and destruction. Fingers crossed… {:(
Just watched the pilot of the new Dr Who. Very strange. I was pretty excited after reading some of the buzz about it, however it’s not that great – sorry folks.
The basic plot revolves around a plastic based race of bad special effects taking over the world, well, London anyway in classic Anglo-centric Dr Who style. Had some good moments but it reeks of BBC low budget Sci Fi without the innocence of the old days low budget BBC sci fi when at least they had an excuse. Why is it that you give someone at the Beeb a special effects budget just so they can waste it on re-designing a perfectly good logo to look better suited for a dodgy chain store? And since when does the Tardis interior need re-decorating? Argh!
On the plus side the script has some great moments and Christopher Eccleston, an inspired choice that I’m sure Orbital is ecstatic about, plays a great, if slightly grating, mix of chirpy northerner (“Many planets have a north”) and psycho alien action hero. His intensity saves the show as well as the world. Billie Piper was also quite entertaining in her role as shop girl with no prospects who decides to run away from her life with a bloke she just met. Sounds like a usual night down any English pub to me.
Still, it’s good to know that Tom Baker, the best Doctor ever, still pulls in some regular money for voice overs on the awesome Little Britain. Now those guys would make great aliens…
Ah, you just gotta applaud the antics of that lovable rogue banksy. This time he’s been sneaking into major New York art museums and hanging up his own work. I first became a fan of his intellectual grafitti/stencil style down in Melbourne, home of prolific outdoor stencil art galleries. Good to see he’s going from strength to strength.
Had a weird synchronicity moment last night. Went down to the galaxy diner after my photography class where we had a long conversation about an abortive hiking trip in Wales to Bron-y-aur, the cottage where Robert Plant and Jimmy Page wrote most of Led Zep 3. Stepped out to see what was on at Irving Plaza next door and turns out it was Robert Plant. Go figure. Just reminded me I need to be more on top of the local concert scene.
Today I decided to work in my local coffee shop, fix in the ‘burg, rather than in the office. The reason for this was simple – I get more work done when I’m not at work! Now why is this? You’d think a coffee shop filled with people would be more distracting, sometimes full of very cute distractions, but somehow it isn’t. There’s something very relaxing about a mass of people just getting on with their own thing around each other who have minimal reasons to interact. That and the phone doesn’t ring all day for other people in the office of course.
Anyway, I was so productive today in amongst all the madness that I found time to move all 1500 odd emails out of my main inbox into sensible folders – a handy thing to do given I’m sitting on top of three major projects at the mo. It was pretty astounding some of the topics of conversation from a year ago, sometimes exact duplicates of conversations I had last week, others completely off elsewhere.
Of course this still means I have umpteen thousand emails floating around somewhere in my filing, it’s just that they’re not in my inbox. The whole packrat gene runs strong in my family – with G’ette being the only one to have apparently gotten over its siren call. As for me I still have boxes of crap here (after only a year of being here), back in storage in England and at my godparents in Melbourne, Australia! I know it will be useful someday…
Yesterday I noticed that Google had added a ‘Click here to join Gmail’ link to the front of their site. This is a change from their registration invite process to date, and indicated they were ready to go out there full steam. However today that link has disappeared and the front page of Gmail has no ‘Sign up’ link visible. Strange.
The original Gmail signup model started by offering invites to people on Blogger, a recent Google acquisition. This invite, which I took up, gave a select group of people of controllable size access to the site so Gmail could test itself. All being well, as it seemed to be, they went onto the next step – giving everyone on the site three invites they could send to their friends. This I duely did, inviting a few folk along. Then a bit later, three more invites were added to the bundle, for me and the people I’d invited. This carried on for a while, with varying lengths of time between new allocations of invites. Now I have a bundle of 50 invites sitting there should I choose to use them.
What’s great about this model is that Gmail knew at all points in the process how many people could potentially sign up. There was never a ‘big bang’ release risk for them. Obviously this doesn’t work for all new systems but it makes a lot of sense, especially when you look at sites like fotolog that were constantly going down under the weight of new members (mainly from Brazil for some reason) and having to put in place premium charges suddenly. The other benefit of this model is that you’ve acquired a great net of connectivity between people, of the kind that friendster and others would kill for.
With this new open registration offering to anyone and everyone Google is obviously almost ready to go completely out in the world. Wonder how many people they got onboard that made them take off the offer so quickly?
The algebraist – iain m banks. Iain M returns with another Sci-Fi epic, this time not ostensibly set in the Culture galaxy, but in a similar future environment of dispersed humans (a and r) and many other races. The main storyline revolves around Seer Taak, a researcher into the almost eternal Dwellers who live in large gas planets all over the galaxy, his quest is to find the location of a mythical set of hyperspace portals that noone knows about except the dwellers. In the background is the usual set of wildly imagined Banks characters and races, a galaxy spanning war and the strange vein of comedy provided by the dwellers themselves. Banks has always suffered from a flaw in his Sci-Fi writing, in that it is either full of wonderfully detailed characters and interactions (Player of Games), or classic Sci-Fi schlock plots with amazing concepts (their names escape me because they’re generally not so memorable). Unfortunately, aside from the sections involving the intimate following of Taak’s adventures with the dwellings, a side jaunt into a childhood trauma and an initially fascinating but ultimately dull ‘villain’ the whole book falls squarely into the last category. There is a lot of good, interesting writing in there but it’s surrounded by the backdrop of a boring old galaxy filled with bureaucracy and long journies with lots of soul searching. Maybe that was a dramatic device Banks employed to increase interest in the one on ones with Taak, but I don’t think it works. The first half is a struggle to get through, the last half is definately the best, but the resolution is trite to the extreme and ultimately unsatisfying. Not one of his best.
So after a bit of cajooling Google has decided to let me back into their search results. I’m now back to page two on a search for ‘matt hobbs’ after being relegated to nowhere on the first 12 pages of results!
So what caused this temporary disappearence? Especially since I’d been in the top three results for a while? Well it looks like Google took offense at my hidden CSS description of myself that said ‘Matt Hobbs’ a lot. So I took that off and asked them nicely to stop blacklisting me and they did. Ta Mr Google.
Of course being Google, rather than warn you of your mis-deeds you just disappear from the results. Luckily for me the few people who read this know where I am, but imagine if I was a business advised by someone to use that trick to get better results? A very scary prospect indeed that makes you realise how tentative awareness is on the web as a whole.
Meanwhile, in other news, I believe I’ve now finally recovered from my trip down to CTIA in New Orleans last weekend. Great fun, lots of free booze industry parties, some dodgy incriminating photos and a greater awareness of the mobile space and how people within it act (especially when drunk). Wish I’d stayed down there longer – as it really made me realise I need a holiday!! This was also brought back home when I realised it’s been a year to the day since I got back from Thailand after over a year of travelling round the world, and hence over a year since I’d last been diving… time to rectify that.
Just found this great site called Overheard in New York, buzarrely while I was trying to find the times Fix coffee in Billyburg opens (gotta love Google sometimes). This has now inspired me to add a set of New York related links to my side bar in honor (no ‘u’ intended) of the city I live in.