The last Youtube video I post today - the problem with random web surfing.
I have Technojoy:
Archive for May, 2008
I know lego is awesome. You know lego is awesome. I even knew that some people were doing Eddie Izzard sketches in lego, which were, you know, awesome.
I didn’t know people were doing random film scene reenactments, which is, you know, awesome. Grosse Pointe Blank and Anchorman follow. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again - the Interwebs is wonderful.
If I wax particularly lyrical about Google Apps in the near future, it is because I think they’re awesome, but it is important readers understand that we’ve been appointed to handle the PR for Google Enterprise in the UK. This is the division of Google that helps businesses organise their information with its cloud-based productivity applications, its Enterprise Search products and its Geo applications.
You can imagine this is somewhat exciting for me, and my increasing use of Apps is one of the factors that has me wanting an EEE PC so much.
And, to answer your unasked questions, no, I haven’t met Larry, Sergey or Eric, but yes, I’ve been to the Googleplex in London, and yes, it is as awesome as you’d imagine.
I missed this film completely but Arvind’s been playing the soundtrack and can’t now get this song out of my head. Damnit.
Has anyone seen the movie? Any good? Arvind thought so…
Why is Technorati the only blog aggregation service to institute some measure of ‘authority‘? It seems ludicrous that every other blog search/aggregation engine gives such limited indication of whether anyone else is reading and linking to the bloggers that come up when you search for them. Given the existence of Google PageRank and the ability to search for the number of sites that “linkto” a site via a number of different search engines, you’d think more people would have built this in.
These sites need these ‘trust barometers’ in some sense so you have some gauge over whether the blogger whose post you’re reading is a spammer or other misanthrope, or is offering genuine insight/advice.
Are there other services I should be checking out?
I’m trying to be more diligent about diet and exercise at the moment, having had enough of being ludicrously unhealthy. Wii fit is helping a bit, but if you catch me at a moment of weakness, please snatch the cheeseburger/pizza/whatever out of my hands and slap me in the face with it, then try to pot it in the nearest bin. Also, if you want to play squash in West/Central London let me know.
Thank you very much.
This year marks the 10th year anniversary of my leaving school. There’s a reunion and all, and I’m trying to make up my mind as to whether I go.
On the plus side, a lot of what I went through falls into the category of “crucial, formative stuff” that’s made me who I am today, and I am very fond of a few of my peers and staff there.
On the minus side, the half dozen or so friends I had at school may or may not be going, and I didn’t have a lot in common with the remaining 100 or so folk in my year. Every encounter I’ve had with them since then has been very amicable… but, y’know, do I want to throw myself into a context where I (at least 10 years ago) categorically did not fit in?
Have any of you gone to these reunion things not knowing many people well? Did you have fun? Did you tell people you were a professional killer by trade? Were you at school with Minnie Driver?
Incidentally, it’s also the 10th year since I matriculated at college and I have no ambiguity about that party. I’m going in with bells on. But then — I see half of those friends on a weekly basis.
Postscript: TEN YEARS man. TEN YEARS.
I can’t find the “ten years” scene on YouTube so this will have to do.
So, apparently giving people something new to read is a good way to get visitors to your blog. Who’d have thunk it? Traffic has spiked like a slayer through the heart over the last couple of days.
More will follow.
Saw this video whilst scanning through anecdotes of Twitter’s uptime on its blog.
Control Lights with Twitter from Justin Wickett on Vimeo.
Interesting not because I think its a particularly useful application of Twitter to turn lights on and off, but because of the growing chatter around ‘IPv6′, a technology protocol understood by few people outside the networking but that will come to have more relevance as the Internet carries on its ongoing march.
Essentially, every Internet connected device there is has a unique address. In your case, it may be your broadband modem, and every other machine connected to that shares that IP address. This IP address under the protocol we currently use, IPv4, is a unique identifier of that device and takes the form of four three digit numbers separated by full stops. For example, 222.129.228.110. The upper limit on each three digit number is 255, I think due to some relationship between the way the protocol works and hexadecimal base.
What’s happening thanks to cheaper and cheaper technology allowing connectivity, more and more advanced devices supporting connectivity and the general all-around goodness of Broadband is that people have more and more devices they’d like to enable as unique devices on the Internet. You might already monitor an IP CCTV camera remotely, or login to Slingbox, or want to use Twitter to turn your bedroom lights or oven off.
Gradually, as these requirements grow we’ll use up the 4.3 or so billion addresses IPv4 allows and we’ll really need everything to switch up to IPv6 - which supports trillions. There’s been limited imperative to move over to IPv6 in the past as people genuinely haven’t been able to understand why they would every need more than 4.3 billion addresses. Well, the maths has gotten a little bit easier to understand thanks to growing ‘net penetration and an understanding of how we can use the net in different ways that makes things like giving a light bulb an IP address useful.
Which is pretty cool, from where I’m standing.
NB There’s absolutely no need for the light bulb in question here to have its own IP address, but it is the principle I’m talking about here, people. Sure, it’s just massive geeks doing this stuff now, but Facebook just had geeks on it for a while and look at it now…!
I went to the Grosvenor Victoria, a casino on the Edgeware Road, with James on Saturday. It was an interesting thing but I think I’m done with live poker for a little while.
Reasons being:
1) I don’t have the bankroll to play the averages. It may be a winnable game in the long term, especially as so many of the players don’t seem to really know what they’re doing, but you need to pay the rakes (an extortionate £3 per half hour for the 50p-£1 table of £25 NL holdem) and cope with what happens when the cards don’t come in. Which they didn’t at all on Saturday.
2) Poker’s fundamentally not that social a game. You’re trying to edge out your fellow players and part of that involves giving very little away about who you are and what you’re doing. I like the social aspect of the game played with friends and this neutered some of the fun for me.
3) I still haven’t worked out how to play cash game poker. It’s a very different beast to tournament poker which I vaguely understand after reading the Harrington books and 200 odd tournaments on Pokerstars, not to mention the odd live appearance at the (soon to be defunct?) Gutshot.
4) I don’t like the absence of women from the game. It’s somehow understandable from online poker (I guess you notice less), but the fact that the only women in the Vic were waitresses, cashiers, dealers and masseuses lent a slightly unnatural air to the evening for me.
Still, it was an interesting experience and definitely distracted me from the awfulness of Indy.
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