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The Friend Zone

Something I came up with in a conversation earlier this evening…

I have a penthouse in the capital city of Friend-land, where everyone gets along. It’s got a fantastic view of the world outside the friend zone, where people are making out with each other and having relationships right in your face. sometimes they broadcast it on TV.

I think about selling the penthouse sometimes, but then I look around and think about what I could be losing, cause on the far side of relationship valley (full of roses and wonderfully starlit evening), I can see the trash-heap of failed romances. 

And the only reason I still think abot it, it because I can also see, in  the far, far distance on top of a hill in the sunny, happy countryside, the house with the nice garden and the kids playing in itm with an old couple sat outside on rocking chairs. And that signifes a relationship gone right.

…It might have been more poetic if I had spell checked it.

She’s Electric

From She’s Electric by Oasis…

She’s got a cousin

In fact she’s got ’bout a dozen

And she’s got one in the oven

But it’s nothing to do with me

I write this because it was only last week I realised that the song wasn’t talking about a cousin in the oven. I don’t know what took me so long, but not that verse doesn’t seem quite as wierd as it did before.

Wiiiiiiiii…

Fun. 🙂
Will explain later.

Happy Christmas 2

Ooh, mobile blogging!
And happy christmas! Again. 🙂

ARGH! BANKS!

I f***ing hate banks. Sorry for the self-censoring, but it’s true. They’re crap.

In an attempt to pay Nath the money I owe him for Prague I went to the NatWest and asked them to do a bank transfer. Now admittedly I wasn’t really expecting that to work, but it would have been nice to be able to transfer money from my NatWest account to Math’s HSBC account. Or not. "We can’t do that Sir, you’ll have to go to the HSBC."

So, I go to the HSBC. Now these are the people I’m trying to give the money to. "Sorry Sir, we can’t do that, you’ll have to go to the NatWest." GAH! Obviously I now enquire as to why I can’t transfer money from one bank to another.

Her – "This is a NatWest card."
Me – "And…"
Her – "This is HSBC."

I KNOW I’M IN THE HSBC! I swear that someone with a history of violence would have lost it at that point. As it was I started wondering about how much it’d cost to hold up the bank until they promised to transfer the sodding money into the account. How difficult can it be? Internet banking would do it. If it were a cheque (forged or not) it’d be fine. I could even use the machine in HSBC to withdraw cash and then walk the 10 meters to the counter to say "pay this in" and it’d work, so why the hell can’t the woman at the counter bloody do it?

Anyway, long story short – if someone contacts me with plans to do-over the HSBC in Aberystwyth, they can have some funding. All I ask in return is that they get sarcy with the woman behind the counter and get her to transfer money from the NatWest to the HSBC. Any actual theft that goes on will be your problem.

Oh yeah, and I should also point out that what the NatWest and HSBC refuse to do, Barclays will quite happily transfer money all over the place. It may be time to switch banks.

Private Blogs

Robert Scoble has been talking about blogs, and has an issue over whether private blogs (or blogs with no entries) are actual Blogs… Yes? No? Maybe, so?

From the public point of view a Blog is often explained via the use of the words Web Log. Logs in general can be as private or as public as anyone wants, so why should a Web Log be any different?

And at what stage does a blog become a (Private Log, Scoble’s creation) plog? A Spaces blog might not be accessible by you, but could be easily accessible by friends of the person who writes the blog. In theory, it might be accessible by everyone but you (very large friends list). Is it still private? Or is it only private when it isn’t being shared with anyone at all?

And where does this lead private or friends-only entries in a blog? LiveJournal have the ability to set the read permissions by entry, so maybe it’s just that the user hasn’t posted a "public" entry yet, but has posted 4 friends-only entries every day since they started. Are these blogs private because they have a few private entries? Or are they still public?

The line between public and private is a thin one at best and for what it’s worth I’m not really decided on the issue of whether Blogs can be private or not. What would we be saying if they’d just been called "Online Diarys" from the start? And what if they’d been called "Amatuer news columns"? People use them as both, so which is it? Where does Blogging fit in?

Let’s double killer delete

So, Vista. I’ll write a much longer blog on this at some point as soon as I’m not being blinded by swish graphics, but in the meantime, lets talk about Speech Recognition.

Last week (might have been longer ago) Microsoft demoed Vista’s speech recognition capabilities at a semi-private meeting. It did not go well. The trouble started when the presenter said "dear mom" and Vista wrote "dear aunt". And then the presenter attempted to do a correction using voise which resulted in "let’s double killer delete". No idea what was going on there, but there have been several explanations since.

Anyway, Long Zheng went away and tested the voice recognition capabilities himself and conveniently recorded a video of it. Unlike Microsoft’s own demo, this one rocks.

FrontRow

Apple have released something called Front Row which is very similar to Media Center, aart from the lack of TV functionality, Online Spotlight and anyway of extending it to use extra programs. Visually, it looks ok, but I’m not entirely certain that it looks as usable as Media Center. And the remote control worries me…

Ok, they’ve simplified it. 6 buttons instead of 46 (my Media Center remote has 46 buttons, but I think there may have been one after with a couple more). Fair enough, that’s all you’ll ever need to use their 10ft interface. Until they add TV because at that point another 10 buttons are needed to easily key in channel numbers. And a teletext button. And if they get interactive TV right (or fast-text) then another 4 for each of the colours used in that. There’s 20. I’ve just realised there’s no Stop button. So you can pause music, but can’t stop it completely?

I think I really need to see a live demo of this because I want to see how the many usability issues I can think of have been solved. Or if they haven’t been solved, then I want something to base my judgements on. I hate criticising something I haven’t used, but in this case…

I just think we should all expect better from Apple.

Web2Messenger.

I have one invite left. Who wants it?

And since Overdo linked to me, I’ve linked back…

I’m also falling off the bottom of the popular users list on Web2Messenger, so feel free to send random messages to me.

 

EDIT: Sorry, just gave my last invite away…