What do you do when you spot another blogger?

On the train home from work today I looked up from my iPod and did a double-take – right in front of me was a fellow Berkhamsted blogger (if I can still call myself that, given my lack of recent posts) whom I recognised from his numerous Flickr photos. My first thought was to say hello and introduce myself, but I quickly realised how wierd this would be! I really had nothing to talk about other than the fact that we had both uploaded various photos to the Berkhamsted Flickr group and he had made me an admin many months back. It’s a strange feeling, thinking that it isn’t the first time that you have met someone and wanting to say “hi” but actually having nothing more of any real interest to say.

This happened to me before when I spotted the Station Master (of the now defunct Station Master’s Weblog fame) at one of the tube stations that I use on my commute – again, I thought of saying “hi” but had nothing to really talk about other than the fact that I read his blog. Not many avenues of conversation there.

Nobody wants to come across as a stalker!

Rock, paper, scissors

Top marks to a colleague of mine who pointed me to this short note on whether the rules of rock, paper and scissors really make sense.

Addicted to Facebook

After just two days I have to admit that I’m already addicted to Facebook like it’s some kind of drug. It’s really amazing – it takes the concepts of Friends Reunited and blogging, adds a slick appearance and easy accessibility and cross-references pretty much everything you do on the site to make a completely absorbing experience.

I can’t help myself from logging in from my mobile phone at least half a dozen times a day to see what people are up to, see what messages have been left and to change my ’status message’. By being so quick and easy to use you really get a sense of what your friends are up to and already I feel as though I’m back in contact socially where I had been a bit of an email recluse before.

I’ve also just switched to using Gmail for my personal mail (with all its fantastic spam-filtering goodness) and the slick mobile Gmail application on my mobile so I’m really going to be back in contact now. Time to upgrade my mobile tariff!

Disclaimer

The disclaimer on this blog made me laugh – it’s not what it seems at first glance.

A new Apple Crumble

I’ve now moved over from my old web host to a blog hosted on the WordPress.com site.  I’d been thinking about making a change for a while after reading Rob Newman’s web page about moving to an eco-friendly web hosting company.  I had a bit of a browse around but I couldn’t really see anything that was aimed at someone who wanted webspace primarily for blogging – ie quite cheap and with some kind of guarantee that Movable Type would work.  I had problems a while back with my current host when I upgraded Movable Type in that certain Perl modules that I needed weren’t available – it took a few emails to convince them that any good web host would accomodate installing the module I required.

Having thought about it even more, I realised that I’ve not had that much time to blog recently and I started to question the value I was getting.  I’ve written around 250 posts since April 2004 so at £105 for a year’s posting it has cost me over £1 a post!  It’s not that I can’t afford it, but with a baby on the way I’ve started to think a lot more about the fact that what I’m spending is longer really my own money any more.  Expectant put it very well in his post back in November and it reflects exactly how I’m feeling.  A free blog seems like the answer to me.

My first thought was to head to TypePad, which is a hosted version of Movable Type – the blog software I am familiar with – but it turns out that you have to pay quite a bit for that as well so I wasn’t saving that much cash.  A little more delving revealed WordPress.com – a free host – and it has been surprisingly easy to migrate over to this site.  Yes, it’s a little more limited in that I don’t have complete control over the site (or the code…or what types of files I can post…) and yes it’s ugly (for now at least until I can grab some of Mat’s time to help me with the CSS that is), but it is free, has good features built in and seems to have a very enthusiastic and honest company behind it. Ultimately it should just leave me to worry about writing entries and not all of the other gumpf that goes with running a website which will be no bad thing as my free time gets limited when the baby arrives.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time this week fixing images, links, documents etc and moving the videos over to YouTube (which hopefully doesn’t impact the integrity of the original posts).  If you find a problem, please leave a comment or email me about it!  Thanks.

A whole new world

Many thanks to Ray for sending me a link to the reviews of Peter Andre’s and Katie Price’s album A Whole New World. Very amusing indeed. I won’t ask why Ray was looking at the album’s page in the first place…

Extreme Ironing

I felt very proud of myself when I released my copy of Extreme Ironing behind some fitted sheets in the linen section of John Lewis. I feel even better now it’s on its way to South Africa! I think I’m addicted to BookCrossing…

BookCrossing

Top marks to my wife for letting me know about the brilliant service at BookCrossing.com. The idea behind the site is that you log a book and get a unique identification number for it which you then write onto a label or even just write by hand into the book. The text is something like this:

“I’ve registered this book at BookCrossing.com so I can track its journey through this world. Please go to www.BookCrossing.com/123-456789 to let me know you found it, then read it and/or pass it on for someone else to enjoy. Thank you!”

You then leave your book somewhere in the wild for somebody else to pick up. They can then go onto the website and register that they picked it up. Once they’re done with it, they can pass it on to the next person or leave it somewhere.

If you don’t fancy writing the text by hand you can download some cool labels instead and even buy special plastic bags to put them in so books left outside won’t get wet.

I’ve no idea why I find things like this so interesting but I know that it plays completely to my geeky tendencies. I’ve just labelled up a couple of books that we found we had two copies of here at home and we plan to release them tomorrow. I’ll put a permanent link on the right-hand-side of the blog that will show all the books I’ve released. Brilliant.

Easy computer assistance across the web

Have you ever tried talking someone through how to resolve a computer problem over the phone? I recently used Fog Creek’s Copilot software to help my father-in-law when he called me with a problem. It was incredibly simple – I signed up for a day pass and was given a small exe file to download along with a passcode which I had to share with my father-in-law. Once he had the code he went to the Copilot homepage, downloaded and ran the small file on his side and I then took control of his computer!

It was fantastic. He’d just bought himself an external USB hard drive and some backup software and I was walking him through how to format the disk over the telephone. The problem I had was in trying to remember exactly where the correct menu items were and what boxes to check in order to do the format – I was imagining windows as he described them to me and at a couple of points I didn’t understand what options he was being presented with at all. By using Copilot it was problem solved – with his desktop in front of me it took me about five seconds to navigate to the appropriate place and get the format started, all the time while he watched and I talked him through what I was doing.

It’s not dirt cheap – I think the session cost me about £5.50 – but it’s not crazy money either and it does last for 24 hours. Instead of trying to walk through things verbally and not being sure if we’d got to where we needed to be, Copilot saved us a lot of time and him a lot of headache. Next time your friend or relative calls you for some computer assistance this may be worth a go.

Colley’s got a blog!

After much badgering at the John Martyn gig we went to last week, my good friend James Colley has started up his own blog at www.colley.me.uk. I’m stevgog for his next post already!

(Erm, follow the link and you’ll see what I mean…)