#236 a norwich blog

#236, now updated quarterly! I was hooked with an brand new iMac at work, so the most important thing was to take advantage of the Intel chipset and install several operating systems.

Mac OS and Windows at the same time! Courtesy of Unity mode in VMware Fusion. I have an Ubuntu build on it too but don’t really know what to do with that.

As for the rest of the iMac, the glossy screen is ok, not as bad as some reviews suggest, but it does makes flat colours look like gradients more than non-glossy LCD displays do.

The mighty mouse is the worst mouse I’ve ever used, it requires magic fingers to click the button you actually want, I have to use it as a one-button mouse. The keyboard however is my favourite keyboard ever.

Overall, I’d happily buy an iMac for myself, and here’s a quick film recommendation:

Eastern Promises

I associate David Cronenberg with his old stuff like Videodrome and Naked Lunch, so Eastern Promises was surprisingly serious. (I’ve not seen A History of Violence but I gather that’s a “proper” film too.)

My verdict: very good, but it’s probably best seen knowing as little as possible about the story. I’ll write no more, just trust me. Or look it up on a review site. 8/10.

Remember the start of Trainspotting where Renton does the “choose life” monologue? Back in ‘96 I thought it was just a bunch of made-up activities that only applied to EastEnders characters. I realise now that it was actually a checklist of things I would be doing over the next ten years. Most items are ticked off, just in time for my twenty-seventh birthday later this week.

But enough of that, Rez is coming up on Xbox Live Arcade. While I have played it to death on the PS2 already, I fancy getting it again for the achievement points and proving to the world that I can get the ultimate butterfly ending.

Until then, I’ll consider a third run through Rapture in the fantastic videogaming experience that is Bioshock. It should have been tougher though, gets far too easy about halfway through, even on hard.

PS. This just in – if you’re using the Compare People app on Facebook you definitely want to read this. Or just remove the evil being from your applications. Privacy violations are bad mmkay.

Update 16/04/08: I’ve binned the sociable plugin, so most of this post is irrelevant.

You may notice the presence of two new icons under each post that look something like this:

If you know what these are, click them. Do it! Otherwise, keep reading for your web2.0 / social media lesson for the day.

First icon: vote for the post on Digg.

Digg is a news site where articles are submitted and voted for by the public. The more votes an article gets, the higher up the listings it goes. The truth: as an end user Digg is crap, I’m just hoping to fluke some search engine rankings off this.

Second icon: bookmark the article in your del.icio.us account.

Del.icio.us is a great social bookmarking site, very useful even without the social aspect. Unlike Digg, I recommend using it. In short in allows you to bookmark websites and organise them by tags, groups etc. The best thing is being able to access bookmarks from anywhere, not just the browser you saved them in.

Also, any shared bookmarks can be viewed and searched by anyone. If you’re looking for something specific then searching del.icio.us can be more effective than Google, despite the flawed nature of tags.

On the social media subject, I take back everything bad I’ve said about Facebook. It’s actually quite impressive, just initially confusing. Myspace is still shit.

Any questions?

Another new design for the blog! Though if you saw old versions of unfunked you’ll know it’s an update of an old design.

Just to prove that I don’t always live the rockstar dream of fish fingers and champagne, tonight I prepared this humble dinner:

It’s turkey tikka. I even had to settle for rum as an accompaniment.

Last.fm tags are unpredictable at best. “Electronic” played me grunge, “electronica” kicked up some indie, then “drum and bass” yielded detroit house. After trying a few more I’ve concluded that listening to any tag-based station is equivalent to putting all of last.fm’s playlist on random.

In my experience tags are messy beasts, user generated content has the inherent problem of users. To quote Peep Show’s Super Hans, “People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust people”.

At risk of alienating my faithful audience…

Posh fluff Emily’s eviction from Big Brother for “using a racially offensive word” gets tagged with “unnecessary”. Shame on gutless Channel 4 for bowing to political correctness, even though they showed the Diana car crash special. Anyway, I didn’t think anyone was even offended by “nigger” these days. Nas says it all the time on his “Nastradamus” CD, you’ll probably find that tagged under folk rock on last.fm.

Apparently Blogtipping has nothing to do with pushing blogs over while they sleep. It’s actually a made up thing where I recommend another blog to you, the humble reader.

On with the show. This recommendation goes to Mr Biffo’s Blog, the internet home of Paul Rose, aka Mr Biffo. He has written for a bunch of TV programmes that I’ve never seen, more importantly he used to write for Digitiser on Teletext, a feature that bought me years of joy. Here is the Wikipedia entry on Digitiser.

Mr Biffo’s Blog doesn’t adhere to a specific topic, this matters not to me as I follow it for his entertaining written style. Recently it’s mostly been promoting his book “Confessions of a Chatroom Freak“, which I have dutifully ordered. Before that it was plugging his TV pilot for Biffovision, I wasn’t very keen on that except for Scranton-K.

That is all. This “blogtipping” lark feels a lot like brown-tonguing, I’ll be back when I’ve cleaned my teeth. Sorry about all the links, look at them as further reading for when you’re bored at work / home / prison.

Footnotes: In the hall of made-up-words fame, blogtipping is no rungleflot. I quite fancy a pair of these:

If I made up a word which currently returns no search results and then typed it into this here blog, how long would it take to show up in Google? Let’s find out (with an internal link for prosperity)… rungleflot!

While I’m in target audience mode, I may as well suggest taking the web design survey over at A List Apart. Hopefully the results will prove something that will be useful to mankind me.

Bonus link for making it this far. If you’ve ever sat in MacDonalds wishing that your burger looked like the glorious backlit photograph behind the counter, this is for you: Adverts vs Reality.

I was always under the impression that PC World were a nightmare for returns. This is possibly based on something I heard from a friend of a friend a very long time ago, but people always remember bad experiences even when they were those of others.

Anyway, I bought a new router from them because my current one has become sentient and decides that I don’t always need wireless. I wouldn’t usually use PC World but they have the good-on-paper D-Link DSL-924 at a competitive price.

Medium-length story short, the new router’s admin software did not like Mac browsers. Back to the store, “this won’t work with my Mac”, refunded. I expected that to be much more difficult.

Voila, a positive customer service experience. Well done PC World, even though your TV adverts do suck.

In order to keep up with the Joneses 2.0, I’ve sorted out a del.icio.us account. For the uninitiated, it’s like favourites but stored on the internet for all to witness, like digital laundry.

If the prospect of rooting through my bookmarks excites you then I suggest you click right here. Perhaps you would just like to know what else has been tagged with “Norwich blog“. You could use this kind of knowledge to spark fascinating conversations at cocktail parties.

Someone “tagged” me today, I had to pass up on being part of “the premier social networking destination for the Millennial Generation”. Another antisocial networking site, another stain of the internet. LiveJournal friends, MySpace lovers, Facebook, Faceparty, FaceSpace. Find friends, browse victims, StalkSpace, Preybook.

I would like this for my birthday. I found it in Monkey.