Test post using the Windows Live Writer application. So far… so good. It seems to use the MT API to actually retrieve the styles of the blog. Very impressive.
On the left is a complete idiot (who’s NOT me), getting drawn on in Tottenham Court Road last week. Despite having a good look, there didn’t seem to be any TV camera’s around (ruling out the Jackass theory), nor anyone else other than amused passers-by.
One of the nice things at Skype’s shiny new office in London is a fantastic wall of emoticons on one of the stairwells – I wanted to take a shot with my cameraphone and post it online but wasn’t sure if that was cool or not (I am, after all, a newbie there).
However, the Life at Skype blog has posted a short article about it now that shows it in all its glory, thus saving me the bother!
So, I’ve officially been a Skype-r for 3 weeks now, and what an er, ‘interesting’ few weeks it’s been, what with the heat, travel and illness:
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| Week 1: London | Week 2: Tallinn | Week 3: Hospital |
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Do I win a prize? I think that’s reasonable… I should add I didn’t actually fall ill in Tallinn, but I didn’t really get a whole lot done when I got there.
Not your usual wildlife, originally uploaded by Mark McLaughlin.
There’s a stray budgie spending a fair bit of time in my back garden these days. Whether he’s escaped or someone let him go is anyone’s guess. but he seems happy enough hanging with the rest of the bird gang.
Whilst it’s still fresh in my mind, here are a bunch of notes I collaborated on using SubEthaEdit at today’s Carson Systems hosted The Future of Web Apps summit held in London today.
Further and more detailed notes from these and the later afternoon sessions are available at Steve Marshall‘s site.
If you’re in the UK feeling a bit put out that your Gmail (er, I mean Google Mail) account doesn’t seem to feature the new Web Clips functionality, then the easy way to remedy that is to go to your Gmail “Settings” link at the top of the interface and then select your “Gmail display language” to be English (US).
Web app immedi.at takes a RSS or Atom feed specified by the user (selected via a small bookmarklet) and then sends alerts to the IM application of your choice when the feed is updated. Currently AIM, MSN Messenger, Jabber and ICQ are supported.
At first glance, the idea is awesome, although it might get a little bit overkill with some more popular sites – say Slashdot or BBC News, but it does do exactly what it says on the tin.
However, the killer app might just be a combining it with a keyword based feed such as my earlier Yahoo! News over RSS article, alerting you to stories from multiple sources based on topics of your choice.
Currently the service appears to pick up its feeds via autodetecting the URL’s in the selected site’s meta tags, but with a little tweaking it might not be too difficult to point it in the direction of a XML file. (The system is very much in beta right now, so the functionality might well appear in the coming weeks nonetheless.)
Bump and indeed ouch. After just over three years and 24,000 miles I finally succumbed to the road (and indeed the black ice as well).
The amazing thing was that the whole accident was a bit of a non-event. I was slowing down some distance away from a T-Junction doing around 40mph and the back wheel just went and that was that – the bike sloped to the floor and I went bouncing down the lanes of Fifield.
I’m fairly sure the scoot itself is going to be a write-off; nearly every panel on the right hand side was either broken, scratched or scuffed and past experiences with Aprilia spares, particularly as the original Atlantic isn’t a current model, suggest that will be the case.
As for me, I’m not a write-off just yet. I do have the joy of four stitches just above my top lip and those funny little Steri-Strips across my nose, making it seem I’ve done a few rounds with Mike Tyson.
So my biking future is looking quiet for the time being. I’m trying to sneak in a cheeky little Vespa for the summer, but I think I’m resigned to finally taking driving lessons and getting a car licence.
Korn‘s new video Twisted Transistor was released earlier this month to mixed reviews. The basic concept of the video is a fun and ironic one – replace a the members of a rock band with hip-hop stars as they get more MTV airplay – but so much of the clip is taken up with in-jokes and poor efforts at a Christopher Guest style ‘mockumentary’ that the idea gets diluted and drawn out and ultimately, you wonder what the point of it all is.
To my mind, playing out the track with those four guys without making a big deal over it, completely throwing the viewer and leaving them with a “Wait a minute, isn’t that Snoop Dogg & Xzibit?” would have been far more clever. All that aside, if you’ve followed the band for any reasonable length of time the general idea is still quite a giggle, not to mention that Snoop is an inspired choice to play Munky.
In preparation for their new album the band have updated their website too, with a suitably over-the-top festival of Flash that laughs in the face of Merlin Mann‘s idea that label and artist sites already have Too Much Flash (Merlin’s in the right here, though.) Your average 14-year-old Korn fan will literally spooge over it; those who are a bit older will sit through the load screens and awkward menu’s and wonder if it’s the late 90′s again.
(Of course, the truly old farties like myself will go, “Wait, wasn’t there a game called The 7th Guest that looked almost exactly the same as this about 10 years ago?”)