Windows Media Center is very pretty (but I imagine I can't be bothered with it)
It found my NAS drive very easily
What's the deal with wireless networking?
My immediate gripes relates to the wireless networking. I boot up, setup, configure WEP keys, bang, connected. Download updates, reboot, boom, not connected. Only local access to the router, can't see the Internet. An amount of faffing about and I get back on the Internet eventually (but I don't know why it started working). From a quick search (on the old laptop) I discover that this seems to be a fairly wel known issue. Hurrumph.
Then: Two laptops side by side on the same desk. One says "Signal strength: Excellent", the other says "Signal strength: Poor". The Vista machine obviously has blocked ears. I'm hoping that when I upgrade to my new router things will improve. If I don't post for a while you'll know that its not gone well.
Oh and that task switcher thing is largeless pointless.
So, all in all, not too excited yet. More as it happens, but I might have to post from work.
I've not been blogging much lately. Mainly because I'm back working on the book in most of my spare time. Good news is that I've knocked off quite a bit of the To-Do list and I'm about to embark on the second re-read. Although I'll probably miss my self-imposed deadline for submission of the end March. Been doing quite a bit on Bimbogami too, its starting to look really good. I'm quite looking forward seeing it live. Started work on a new scottliddell.net, decided its going to be a photography only site. Luckily, I have plenty of content, just need to get it all down to web compatible sizes. As soon as the BM is submitted for rejection to a few places I'm going full bung at Terra Exitus, I'm really looking forward to the blank sheet of paper again.
"He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act."
So, there you go, nothing to blog about other than the reasons I haven't been blogging. Pathetic, but its content. Of a sort.
This post has a dual purpose. To ask Amazon to make a change to their website by implementing my idea and then to discuss whether or not me posting it here constitutes prior art when I take them to task for stealing my idea.
First, the idea.
Dear Amazon: Please stop the purchase of gifts from polluting my recommendations. Just because I buy my daughter an Elefun game doesn't mean I want you to suggest more. Find me good music instead. There is no point recommending this to me, the TV decides what she wants. Ditto for all the other gifts I've bought. Here's how you do it. Allow my to enter a list of people that I might buy gifts for. I'd also like to enter their birthday and whether or not I'm likely to but them a Christmas present. Then, when I buy a gift, I will tell you who it is for and you won't use that in my recommendations. Instead, you'll email me a month before their birthday/Xmas and tell me what I should buy them. In fact, maybe I should have a tickbox which says "Just send them something to the value of £x just in case I forget". OK, that's it, pretty simple. Get on with it guys, thanks. *
Prior Art Having this unremarkable idea and deciding to blog about it made me think if a blog post could ever be used as prior art in a patent discussion. Of course, Amazon will always be a good point of reference to discuss this because of their famous 1-click ordering patent. Obviously, the problem with a blog is that I can change the post date and make it look like I invented 1-click ordering on the day Tim Berners-Lee was born. So you have to think you start on pretty shaky ground. But I suspect there will be some underlying OS date that can act as proof, however difficult to get at that be. I dunno, maybe the bowels of Blogger would provide the clue, I doubt the dates on my webserver would help that much. Perhaps there needs to be a service for recording your ideas easily (in a Blogger) style but where the date is provable. Oh jeez, there goes another idea I can't prove the date of.
Website of the day: Well, given that I am currently languishing at the top of the top ten, I'm going to have to go for my latest bit of INternet fun, NewsBiscuit.
Track of the day: It is a singular pleasure when great songs you haven't heard for ages suddenly spring into life with the help of the randomiser, I nearly leapt out my chair to dance in the Student Union bar when Cruisers Creek came on. "There's a party going on down around here..."
* If you already do something like this then I'm not a chump, you've just not made it very obvious
On an unbelievably clear sky (for Edinburgh) last night, took some pictures of the lunar eclipse from the back garden. They're not great, my cheapo telephoto isn't really up to the job, if anyone knows of a better reason to get one of these, I'd love to hear it.
Something is really beginning to annoy me. Been investigating the next in my list of pointless web projects and, as ever, you spend a large amount of time hunting for a suitable domain. In a large number of cases they are often being used. That's fine. In a similarly large number of cases, they are registered, parked, not in use and likely to never be in use ever. They're not even for sale.
I don't mind if people grab a domain for something they are working on, its a sensible thing to do. But I think that in a lot of cases, nothing is ever going to happen. If they can't even be bothered to put up a 5 minute "coming soon" page (however ghastly that might be) you begin to think that is just a huge waste of good names that I could have to build dumbass sites on.
Perhaps a rethink of the domain registration strategy is necessary? I'd go for a use it or lose it policy. Not too draconian, maybe 6 months to add at least 1 page that represents content or it automatically goes back to being available.
And as for these people that register domains as a result of searches or other registrations, I'll get to you next. You know who you are. And would the idiots who registered scottliddell.com please realise that it will never make money, you've just embarrassed yourself.
During a brief, but ultimately successful, shave this morning, I had the radio on as usual. Listening to XFM as I sometimes do, you get the horror of radio ads. I heard one today for the FSA and specifically Money Made Clear. It was an expensive ad, known names doing the voice-overs, that comedian bloke that often gets naked on TV and Kevin Whateley. They paid a lot for it. When it came to the end, they clearly want you to go the website to find out more. In the not so distant past, this would have meant the ad trotting out the usual hamfisted "double-u, double-u, double-u, dot, blah-di-blah, forward slash banana-pants*". But this ad didn't do this, they just said search for "Money made clear". Now, this is maybe to save ad time (and therefore money) but I suspect advertisers may have discovered that no one ever remembers the URL from such a spiel. Trouble is, its a little open to exploitation. The poor sods at the FSA spend a fortune on radio ads to get search terms into all our heads and all you have to do is beat them at SEO for "Money made clear" and collect the hits. Isn't that right you clever people at two unnamed building societies (try it, you'll see what I mean!). Not to mention the cheapo loan company that appears to have paid for a sponsored link for that search term.
Does suggest that more work is required to integrate traditional ad media with the web.
