fire and forget

In which I give the world a new word: 2.0mance.

Love in 140 characters: It’s 2.0mance

My 2.0mance is going pretty well. A lazy Sunday afternoon conversation about bands with terrible names prompted a blog post from her. When she mentioned the use of song lyrics in an article on Facebook status no-nos, what else could I do but quote the Smiths on my profile? I said “Fail” out loud once too often and next thing she’s written up the memes the Web should grow out of.

I’m still figuring out where the line is, though.

There have been many times in my life when I’ve wanted to go back in time a few days and punch old-timey Rich in the back of the head. Often on Fridays, while racing to hit a deadline I should really have written by Wednesday, or on Sundays while nursing an empty wallet and a hangover the size of a house (actually that one could be any day).

But sometimes, just sometimes, old-timey Rich comes through for me. On the rare occasion I discover a tenner in a shirt pocket, or log into CMS and discover I’ve already filed the tedious product specs, I could kiss the guy. Today, having called in sick (man-flu update: phlegm production has slowed 30% to re-task for uncontrollable coughing) I discover in the freezer some cheese and bacon grill things. Old-timey Rich just earned himself a hug.

I’ve just read that the reason England was seeded for Italia ‘90 was so FIFA could put us in a group that played all its games on islands — Sicily and Sardinia — in order to keep the English hooligan element contained. Well I never.

And, because you can never see this too many times:

My blog is broken. That’ll teach me for being lazy and punting video embeds instead of proper posts. And which post is it that catastrophically rockets to the top and stays there? Yes, it’s the borderline xenophobic one insulting an entire city.

If You See Something’s take on Google Chrome:

Google Releases New Chrome Browser

Panel three is genius.

Things I’ve learnt in Japan:

- Nobody jaywalks. The crossings don’t have buttons. Even at 7.30am the cars wait for each other and the pedestrians wait too. In Tokyo they do the same, until one guy crosses — and it’s always a guy — and then everyone crosses. Apparently it’s a curse if the trailing folk die.

- hand over your business or credit card with both hands.

- don’t slam the cab doors. Apparently they’re automatic.

I’m not about taking the piss out of non-English speakers and their hilarious Engrish, but I can’t help but smile at some of the linguistically bizarre T-shirts being sported by clearly oblivious folks here in Hong Kong and Japan. It started with a teenager rocking a shirt that read ’sympathetic death cancer’ — which to be fair could be a punk band I’m not hardcore enough to know about — and continued with ‘The music jumped. I fitted to the sound’. But my favourite was spotted on a portly chap wandering through the lobby of hella-posh Intercontinental hotel: “You need some crack and a fuckin’ blowjob”.

Well, yes. Either’s fine.

Currently sat in the Cathay Pacific business class lounge in Taipei airport, Taiwan. So that’s Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and Japan in one week. Tech hack on tour!

Won’t be around much next week, as I am invading the Far East. Tomorrow I’m flying to Hong Kong to look at Epson projectors. On Wednesday we get bussed over to mainland China for a day trip, during which we have to try not to look like journalists, and then we hit Tokyo Godzilla-style. We’ll be in the hotel from Lost In Translation. Back Sunday for three days, then off to Germany for IFA.

It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

Update: Couldn’t get hold of Lost In Translation before I went — no time to torrent even if I did understand torrenting, and iTunes don’t have it. Then I get back and bosh: three quid in Asda which I’d only wandered into on a whim. Obviously life really does have a funny way of helping you out (which reminds me).

This guy is no more genuinely an English and Drama teacher than I am. Also, he should be ashamed of himself for mugging at the camera about how great Barclay’s new Personal Reserve option is. Basically it means if you go over your overdraft limit, Barclays charge you — revolutionary! — which Squinty McFucktard tells us is a personal favour from those kind-hearted multibillionaire dictator-sponsoring can’t-be-bothered-to-open-on-a-Saturday chiselling shitehawks.

I’m actually developing a grudging respect for Barclays: every time I think there’s no way they could make me hate them more, they pull something out of the bag. I’m glad I pissed that two grand they gave me up the wall. That’ll bloody learn ‘em.

Update: And, it turns out, this is the post that broke my blog! Bastaaaards!

The excitement I felt about flying in a helicopter over the Nevada desert and into the Grand Canyon earlier this year was somewhat tempered by the fact we had to weigh ourselves first. The results of that particular weigh-in have seen me spend a lot of time in the gym lately. Having overindulged in the largesse of SmartPlanet and its Easter Egg taste test yesterday, I spent a particularly long session in the gym. Unfortunately, what’s good for the body isn’t always good for the mind, as it nearly drove me nuts.

I can live with the uptempo four-to-the-floor eurodisco technotronic housey trancey bobbins they pump into the place to keep you motivated. It doesn’t bother me that lazy, lazy iTunes and the usurpation of Gideon Coe’s morning slot on BBC 6music by the moronic George Lamb have sapped my motivation to seek out new music. After all, the gym has a choice of channels on the personal screens mounted on each torture device, if I just buy some new headphones, or failing that steal some from Nate.

I can even live with the subtitles on Sky News, even if they do appear to be added by illiterate monkeys with some kind of autocompletion software that has replaced most everyday words with obscure place names. It is live after all, and occasionally spices up dull news stories with non sequiteurs so hilariously random that they can only make the world a better place.

No, what bothers me is the (insert gym chain here)’s recommended artist of the month. For me, recommending music implies that the listener may not be aware of the artist, and will benefit from the wisdom you are about to impart, having been lucky enough to to stumble across an aural delight so wonderful you feel compelled to share it. Gym chain has done the world an enormous aural favour by recomending a little-known starlet-in-the-making who might, just might be the next big thing in 2008: Rihanna.

Yes, that Rihanna; the Brit Award nominee and Grammy winner who was at Number 1 in the hit parade for 10 whole weeks and has been as inescapable as taxes, death and encroaching global meteorological catastrophe for most of the last twelve months. Watch this space, you heard it first in the gymnasium.

Oh, and I’ve lost a stone since Vegas.

Update: this morning I made the mistake of thinking a Sky newsreader had described a “patch of calm” in the Middle East, when thanks to the illiterate monkeys I learned that the region was in fact in “a patch of come.” Classic.

Man, Christmas sucks. I can never think of anything I want so I always ask for money these days, towards whatever indulgence I’m currently craving. It’s nice to reach a point when if you want something you can just go out and buy it. So last week I went a spent a month’s rent on a MacBook, and I love it so much I may get drunk and try to sleep with it. But the folks have chipped in to buy me a watch, it’s shiny.

The Christmas holiday was ace this year, actually. Facebook facilitated a couple of loooong overdue trips to the pub with the lads from school. It’s been six years since I saw the fellas from St Anselm’s, which I left eleven years ago — good God! I went in thinking now I’m a journalist (the reason I haven’t posted in, like, six months) I’ll definitely have the coolest job. So there’s a guy working for a credit card company, OK, a guy working in PR, not bad. “So what are you doing these days Rich?” “Oh, I’m a journalist. How about you?”

“I’m a nuclear engineer on a particle accelerator.”
“I’m a tree protection officer.”
“I’m a geologist and I work in a goldmine in Armenia.”

Gah, you talented bunch of bastards.

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I’ve just been doing some ego surfing, and discovered that a chap named Richard Trenholm was awarded a posthumous Distinguished Service Cross in Korea. Kind of puts things into perspective.

I like it.

The newly unveiled official logo of the 2012 London Olympics isn’t perfect: It’s a bit too fragmented. I agree with one comment I read that suggested the logo evokes a map of London’s boroughs, harshly divided. So I would like to see the four sections being a bit less opposed to each other, and that funny little block in the centre merged into the others in a more harmonious fashion. And I’m not sure about the placement or the font of ‘London.’

Otherwise, I like the thinking behind it: to avoid the obvious.

The outcry has been every bit as predictable as the proposed alternatives. Showing admirable journalistic rigour, most of the major papers (The Standard/Metro, the free gossip rags that litter the Tube, the Sun, and more) just recycled the user-generated content from the BBC’s website, which were, almost without exception, rubbish.

This week’s Coventry Telegraph featured a double-page article titled ‘Proof that a child can do better’. While the children came up with an admirable showing, they were all as predictable as the BBC readers’ efforts: lots of Union Jacks and London landmarks. Nothing wrong with that, you cry. I’m not suggesting for a second that the Union Jack should be kept off the logo because of nationalist associations. I just agree with the thinking behind the official logo that the Union Jack, Tower Bridge et al are just too literal.

As Sebastian Coe said, this logo is not a corporate brand. Almost all of the general public’s attempts have been literal, obvious, corporate brands. I thought Coe’s comment about avoiding polo shirts for doing the gardening in was quite self-aware for the Olympic folks in charge. With such politicians and corporate branding wonks, high-handed talking shop beaucratese of ‘engaging’ with the public is rarely coupled with meaningful action.

So by coming up with something that eschews the knee-jerk, lowest common denominator London landmark approach, the creators are challenging the public to think about the Olympics as a contemporary, exciting event.

Just look at previous logos: worthy, tasteful, respectable… and dull dull dull. So if they are a distillation of the Olympics, what does that say about the proceedings? I find athletics in general to be reaaally boring, but I like this logo.

And for anyone still clinging to the dream of a London landmark/Union Jack-related logo, look at the symbol of the last British Olympiad. Big Ben and the Olympic rings. Very worthy. Very tasteful. Very Respectable.

Very 1946.

Of course, I can’t ignore the elephant in the room: the small matter of the £400,000 bill. Which is by anyone’s standards, ludicrous. But the contrarian in me (who has had pretty much free reign over this post) can’t help asking:

What price great design (whether this is an example of it or not)?

A tasteful logo featuring the Olympic rings on a Union Jack might have appeased middle England, but would it have sold any T-shirts? What if the £400,000 gamble pays off?

Christ, I’m not even convincing myself on this one. £400 grand? You’re having a laugh. Selling all the T-shirts in the world wouldn’t redress this slap in the face to everyone involved in cash-strapped grassroots sport in this country. Hell, the world.

But I still like it. Kind of. Bring on the MySpace Olympics.

iGoogle is the personalised Google home page. It consists of the standard Google search page with your own elements added. Here you can display feeds of the latest contents from different websites of your choice, such as news stories or blog posts. You can also create tabbed pages, and access online tools such as Google Docs and Notebook.

The setup process is very simple. Get yourself a GMail account and you can use any Google service with the login. You don’t have to actually change email (although GMail is very good) because you just need the login. I don’t use GMail as I have a webmail thingy from my website hosting people (1and1: cheap and plenty of features).

Once you have a Google login, you can create your iGoogle homepage by dragging and dropping elements into your page. These are boxes of content, that you can rearrange at any time. Google provides all the usual news and entertainment-type stuff to choose from, as well as things like ‘thought for the day’ or ‘how to of the day’ or assorted flavours of ‘picture of the day’. These will obviously refresh every day so your homepage always has new and interesting things to look at.

The temptation at this stage is to load your page with exciting stuff. This will slow your page’s loading time down if you have loads of elements that need to contact other websites and refresh. I very quickly ditched the weather and Buddhist thought for the day…

The most-used element on my page is the Google Reader, an RSS feed reader. This lists new posts from all your favourite blogs or updates from sites that have RSS. Clicking on an entry title makes the content pop up in a comic-style speech bubble, which is a great touch that I love.

Also on my page is a ‘how to of the day’ which doesn’t get all that much use but is a bit of a laugh. I also have a headline news feed, but to be honest that’s more because I feel like I should.

One of my initial gripes was that the Google search box we all know and love takes up a third of the screen, limiting the amount of personalised content you can have without having to scroll down. For example, if you’re signed up to a lot of blogs by prolific writers, you want your RSS reader set to display lots of post titles. But this means scrolling down. Fortunately Google Homepage Maximiser is an element that you can add to your page that allows you to hide the Google search box. FireFox has a search box in the top corner anyway so you won’t miss it.

The most useful element on my page is a LifeHacker feed. LifeHacker is a site dispensing hints and advice to get the most out of your computing. I frickin’ love this site. My FireFox is groaning under the weight of the many, many extensions I’ve learnt about from this site. They’re dead into Getting Things Done as well.

One such extension is iGoogle Sidebar. This tips iGoogle into the sheer bloody genius category. Installing it adds a button on your toolbar that opens your iGoogle page in a sidebar with one click. This means you can see your headlines and so on at a glance. It’s not that practical for actually reading things though - you have to resize the sidebar or the speech bubbles are too truncated to read.

The sidebar extension becomes an essential if you also use your homepage to tie together your Google online tools. I use Google Docs and Google Notebook all the time, and it’s great to have access to them in a handy sidebar.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets (previously known as Writely) is an online word processor. It’s basic but functional. It has a spellcheck which is all I need with ninety-nine per cent of the writing I do. I blog by bashing out my text in Docs, spellchecking it, and pasting it into ScribeFire (formerly Performancing). This is fast and easy but can lead to problems with superfluous HTML going all over the place, so I have to remember to paste the clear text into ScribeFire’s HTML editor.

Google Docs handily saves every ten seconds, and allows you to access all your saved versions and revisions. You can publish and collaborate on your documents too.

Google Notebook is a listmaking programme. My setup is based on the Getting Things Done model (another LifeHack). It’s great to have my Next Actions right there to add to or edit. It’s also useful to have my Projects folder handy. Just today I customised my MySpace profile to match the look of my blog by copying and pasting the colour values from my Project list in the sidebar, where I’d earlier noted them.

Is iGoogle better than other similar homepage systems? No idea. I haven’t tried any; iGoogle works so well.

Richard Herring is a funny man (stick around for the last line - it’s worth it).

It’s not too much to ask in life.

Whatever happened to the Longpigs, Bennett, and Joyrider? Where are all the indiedisco heroes?

Well, to be brutally honest, they didn’t exactly light up that many indiediscos back in the mid-to-late 90s, but they were just three of the bands on heavy rotation in my halls of residence bedroom.

I’ve forgotten more bands from that time than I could name now, but as I sit here ripping my CD collection, wandering song by song through my halcyon youth at the wrong end of the country at the wrong end of Britpop, I’m listening to the Warm Jets and lamenting that my copy of The Longpigs’ Blue Skies has vanished.

I miss the Liverpool Lomax. The first time I went there was to see Silver Sun, if I recall, and Satellite Beach, or maybe it was Carrie, or both, supported, and became the first in a line of going-nowhere outfits bashing away in dingy half-full venues to me and my going-nowhere friends. Who are now engineers and policemen.

Which is a clue: as my boss, at the Tower Bridge office where I work, is a former member of Tiger. So that’s what happens to the denizens of the indiedisco, and the lords of the pub backroom. We grow up and get jobs.

Looking back, I can honestly say that was the last thing I expected.

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Bizarre commuter rage incident this morning: Respectable-looking middle-aged commuter on packed train gets irate with respectable-looking middle-aged commuter who has one of those daft mini bikes. Irate Commuter has obviously been saving this up for a while as he rants “You do this every day, you have no regard for the other people who have to stand up on this busy train” to which Cyclist Commuter insouciantly rejoins “You’re being antisocial.”

This only winds up Irate Commuter further as he retorts “You’re being antisocial - look at the railway bylaws, only folding bikes are allowed and that’s not a folding bike!” Cyclist Commuter suggests that irate commuter is “being objectionable”, to which Irate Commuter spits in his face.

Brilliantly, this is greeted by a collective pantomime “GASP!” from the entire carriage.

Just goes to show, civilisation is just a thin veneer and we’re only one folding bicycle away from savagery.