Posts (page 2)
What's your favorite way to keep in touch? Phone, snail mail, email, text message, Vox, _____ ?
Email, almost certainly - none of the others feel that good.
I don't think I actually tasted outside air yesterday. Like all good geeks, the chance to spend a day indoors playing World of Warcraft was too much to miss out on. One of the problems with having a girlfriend who's an even bigger geek than me is that it makes temptations like that all too easy to give in to...
But what the hell, it was fun. And today, we plan to make pie.
What books are on your nightstand?
There's always a long queue of books that are by the bed, waiting to be read. At the moment, these:
What movie would you really recommend renting or seeing this weekend?
Pirates of the Carribean. A bit on the long side, and doesn't have a proper ending - but worth it for the MAD fights.
This weekend is a bank holiday in the UK, and as we'd found out that the schedule on the project we're working on has been extended, I decided to take the Friday off too. And, to cap it all, Kim was able to get the day off too, so we managed to mooch around together.
So on Friday, we did some long-overdue chores: heading down to the post office to collect three parcels I had (all from Amazon), followed by a rather nice (and rather cheap) fried breakfast in a local greasy spoon. Kim tried to get three pictures that she's been wanting framed for ages sorted out, only to find that the local framer actually isn't open at any time that she gets near the door.
The rest of the day was spent idling, mooching around the house and doing odd little chores. For me, this involved getting the download software for our PVR (a Humax 9200 - highly recommended) installed on one of the Windows machines, so I can now download stuff and burn it on to DVD for archives. I'd actually love to have things set up so that we can do this and keep the archives on the PC, but that will have to wait for the terabyte array that we'll no doubt install one day (Kim is obsessed with having more storage than you possibly imagine - no bad thing, really.
Today we've been on a whizzy trip down to Canterbury, to visit Kim's parents and get their broadband installed, which is why how I'm typing this while sat on their sofa - even though the connection is only 1Mb (twice as fast as my original broadband!) it's still more than good enough for the kind of things that they do. There's a download cap (of course) but it's something reasonable.
It also means that they can upload lots of photos to Flickr of Kim when she was a very cute little child, such as this one:
Now isn't that the cutest thing ever? :)
Hopefully, we'll get back to London this evening so that I can carry out my latest project: reinstalling Linux (again) on the Sony laptop, this time as a second operating system rather than a first one.
Does anyone know if there's an API that lets you post to Vox from client software?
What's the nerdiest thing about you?
The fact that there are currently two computers lying on the bed with me.
What was (or is) your favorite subject in school?
I didn't really go to school all that much. My attendance record started to slip the moment I started secondary school, and gradually got worse - I used to make myself ill in order to avoid school. By the time I reached the third year, my lack of attendance was so bad that I ended up seeing a child psychiatrist, who treated me perfectly.
What did he do? He made it my choice as to whether I went. He gave me three options. I could move to another ordinary school; he could sign me off as unfit to attend, and I'd never have to go again; or he could place me at a special school, one where if I didn't want to go, I didn't have to. I chose the last option, because although I didn't like school, I loved learning. It worked because he gave me the choice: I made my own decisions, and effectively became responsible for my own schooling.
So I went, and after a few more years ended up with a first class honours degree, a dislike of schooling in general - and a feeling that I was dreadfully lucky to be around at a point when schools like the one I ended up at were well funded. In today's school system, I doubt very much that I'd have had the option.
Oh, and favourite subject? All of them. I always was a renaissance man.
What albums are in heavy rotation for you right now?
I didn't expect to like Vox. Despite having accounts on virtually every kind of social network, I'm not really a huge fan of either the concept or the way that they've been implemented. But Vox, which acts like a smart cross between LiveJournal, TypePad, and Friendster, is something that I've really grown to like.
Why? First of all, it has an indefinable community feel to it. You're not invited to join hokey groups or email lists: it's just you, your friends and "neighbours" (I refuse to use the Americanism!). The way that it integrates books, photos, and so on is sweet. At first, I didn't like the way that it cross-posted to TypePad (I wanted whole posts, without the "On Vox" tag), but now I like it - it delivers a nice seperation between personal posts and "work" posts, if that's what you're using your TypePad blog for. That delivers more of a rounded feel to my TypePad blog - it becomes a little more than the sum of its parts.
For most of these things, I start using them in a bang and end up with a whimper. With Vox, I can see the opposite happening.
