Yearly Archives: 2006

9rules has eaten my content

The observant of you (at least of those of you who actually visit the site and don’t just read it via RSS) might have noticed a few colourful leaf logos sprouting around the place. So far that is the only change that has been made to Bright Meadow to make my new lords and masters happy and I don’t anticipate any more changes either. I got the member agreement to sign last Saturday and access to the promised land (forums) on Monday and it has been a real eye-opener of a week as far as I am concerned.

Now it is one thing to be told “we have the best content on the web, we have the best people on the web”, and quite another to suddenly be surrounded by these people who are witty, smart, motivated, and in a league of their own. I’m not sure why I am surprised, especially when you consider that the people already in the network were the driving reason behind me wanting to join in the first place, but I’ve never been one to think through the consequences of my actions. Choosing where I did my undergrad by sticking a pin in a list sure gave a certain frison of excitement to the whole experience, but also led to three years of being mildly depressed by the pervasive greyness of the North. It also probably wasn’t the wisest thing I ever did, getting into a relationship with a guy bare months before he had to leave the country, but at the same time I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Not thinking things through has a history for me of either working out shockingly badly, or abso-fucking-lutley brilliantly.

I didn’t really think through this whole 9rules gig. Oh sure, I agonized endlessly over whether I wanted to get in, but I didn’t think further to what came after. Mainly this is because I honestly didn’t think I stood a fluffy-kitten-in-hell’s chance of getting selected, but also because of my afore mentioned inability to plan things through.

So here I am, suddenly a member of the network prided on having the best content and people around. This begs to make you infer that I am one of the best. Only, I compare what I’ve done here with what is essentially a personal blog, with what other people have done – redesigning Flock is only the latest in a long line of things that spring to mind – and I find myself lacking. I’m now gonna be standing alongside the movers and shakers of my digital world and find myself unable to give even a little wiggle.

As if I didn’t have a rather robust inferiority complex already.

I feel mildly guilty about the post I made last night about the Moving Pixies (reference being to the pixies that lived in our old office and came out at night to mess things up). It was pants and I knew even as I went to sleep that I shouldn’t have posted it. I threw it together in five minutes flat from a germ of an idea I had had at lunchtime and, well, you saw the resulting mess. Still, the post will stand as a testament to something Dewayne and Rob talked about in the comments of last Sunday’s Roast – the need to spend time over what you write.

Time, alas, is one thing that has been sadly lacking this past week. I have found myself engrossed, reading the words of fellow 9rulers (the day I don’t get a buzz out of saying that phrase is the day I leave), getting involved in conversations, and generally just marveling at the caliber of people 9rules has managed to gather under its banner. I’ve been inspired to write constantly this week but whenever I sit down at the keyboard I find myself lured away by the bookmark to the forums. Every day this week I’ve been merrily surfing away, chasing down links and thoughts, only to catch a glimpse at the clock and notice that it is near 1 am and that I have to be up at 6.30 for work. This leaves me with one option – scribble the idea down and pray that I will remember what I wanted to say when I finally get back to it. The orange post-it notes are rapidly covering my pin board.

Not that all these ideas buzzing around my skull is a bad thing, but is unusual for me to have so many ideas hanging around in the green room. And I love it.

illyna turned round to me today and said “so basically your complaining because it is too good?!”

Yes, yes I am. I am suffering from a chronic lack of sleep and it is all 9rules fault. The posts this past week on the blog have, frankly, sucked and (again) I know firmly who I am blaming. I look at what I’ve achieved so far and am proud at how far I’ve come, then I look at what’s around me and sigh because there is so much more I could be doing.

This isn’t a call for “oh, don’t be silly Cas, Bright Meadow is great” comments (though a few would be nice every now and then 😉 ). It’s an honest evaluation of the situation as I see it. I don’t blog for profit. I don’t blog for work. I got asked a time or two when I was thinking about submitting why I wanted to join a network and at that time it was a question I couldn’t really answer. I decided it was something I would have to try before I knew either way.

I remember the conversations we used to have in the courtyard last year. The sun was shining, we were armed with endless cups of tea, and we all had a seemingly never-ending capacity to find things to talk about so we didn’t have to go back to our respective research. So many ideas got kicked back and forth, many goof-ball, many more that made me question my world. I didn’t just get a tan whilst we were sitting out there avoiding work, I learnt new things, and more importantly had an absolute blast doing it. At the same time, in the midst of all this seemingly irrelevant chatter, I found ideas for my own research crystalizing and I saw new and exciting avenues of investigation opening up.

It’s early days yet, but already I get that same feeling around 9rules. Fun, because even the serious stuff should be fun, but in the background scarily intelligent and driven people kicking ideas around. Yes, they’re mainly making it up as they go along, but they make it look easy. I am in awe. These are people I admire and, perhaps more importantly, respect. I’m realizing I don’t need any other reason to be in a network. Blogging alone is great but every now and then it’s nice to know there’s someone out there who will get your back should you need it.

Call me silly, but I’m taking this as a call to step up my game.

Moving Pixies

The strangest things go missing when you move office. As a by-the-by, 24 hours from notification you have to move office to being fully installed in the new office has to be a record. And I mean 24 hours – confirmation of move 14:30 Tuesday. Confirmation of where moving to 08:30 Wednesday morning. Everything in truck by 10:30. Everything networked back together in new location by 14:00 Wednesday afternoon. Our in-house movers rule.

But anyway the oddest things are missing.

A blank piece of plastic that used to cover the space where a floppy disk drive could be on my computer.

Two of our eight rubbish bins.

Half a foot rest.

The washing-up liquid.

We also seemed to have gained a printer and computer base-unit – just waiting on the panicked emails from whoever they really belong to!

But yes, our in-house movers are really rather good at their job. Next time I move flat, I’m gonna see if they’ll move my stuff for me! I mean, we had a George Clooney and an Andrew Flintoff look-alike on the team, so it can’t be that bad 😉

I was wrong. My apologies to Microsoft

This is just so typical of me. I finally get accepted into a shiny network on the basis of great content and… I stop writing content. In my defense, enough manure has hit the fan at work today to fertilize the entire of the Home Counties. But that really is no excuse. I’ve set myself a goal of trying to do a post a day (or at least every other day), and I do hate to fail at things, so —

I’ve been a bit mean about Windows in the past, and I stick to my guns — I much prefer the Apple experience. But I always admit when I’m wrong, and I was wrong about something.

With the Tiger version of OSX, Apple released something called ‘Spotlight’ that searches the entire hard drive in new and exciting ways. It automatically searches for any instance of a word WITHIN documents. Know you saved something, sometime, about “yellow submarines” but can’t remember what the document was called? What sort of document it was (jpg, pdf, txt or doc)? Or where you saved it? Type ‘yellow submarine’ into Spotlight, and it will find it for you. Quickly.

(Ok, in the case of my machine, not too quickly, but that’s my bad for having an elderly PowerBook without the RAM really needed, and installing the new OS over the top of the old, instead of a fresh install. I know I have to at least wipe the HD and start over, upgrade the memory, but… *sigh* Part of me is experiencing an almost masochistic glee in seeing how far I can push the poor computer).

Spotlight was a feature I fell in love with the moment I used it — whilst I am quite anal about filenaming conventions, there’s always that one document you can’t remember what you called or where you saved it. Since I started using Spotlight, I used Finder (a bit like Windows Explorer) less and less to drill down through the hierarchical folder structure.

And I gloated over Windows users, saying that they didn’t have this option to search within files.

Um. Turns out I was wrong *blush* In XP at least, it is possible. So the process is not as simple and intuitive as with the Mac – five to ten mouse clicks and keystrokes as opposed to two – but then that’s hardly new when comparing Windows and Mac. So yeah, I was wrong. It is possible to search within files using Windows Explorer. If you’re curious, the option is lurking somewhere in the advanced search settings. In the process of discovering this little feature (all because Moose told me to stop gloating because Windows users actually already had this functionality) I also managed to turn off the annoying little dog that pops up when you do a search on the computers at work.

Bit of a win-win situation really, even if it does mean my geek hat is slipping slightly.

Bugger. Something about Windows I can no longer complain about.

The little things

It’s the simplest things that can bugger up a girl’s attempts at healthy eating. Like brushing your teeth before settling down to enjoy a nice kiki and raspberry breakfast smoothie.

*sigh*

Today is going to be a very blonde day, I can feel it.

Sunday Roast: sitting in the back of the class with the safety scissors and the glitter

So this is my last Sunday Roast before I join 9rules. Once I hit “publish” on this post I’m off to sign on the dotted line in blood and make the requisite tweaks to the sidebar so I can be compliant to the wishes of my new masters. Mwhahahahaaa. Enjoy this, the last ‘Roast from freedom. Sob. 😉 *1*

The NYT has an interesting piece on how digital publishing is affecting the traditional book. Nothing new, per se, but a nice round up of the situation as it stands. Hardly surprisingly, you do get the impression that the author is a fan of the traditional publishing model.

Good news for everyone who owns an MP3 player – it is now safe to copy CDs to computers and MP3 players. You what now? I hear a lot of you scream. Yes, copying music from a CD to your iPod or similar has, up till now, technically put you at risk of prosecution. (I do have this great image in my head of crack BPI operatives swooping down on everyone with an iPod because how else were you gonna fill it up if not illegally?) Now though, so long as it is for your own consumption, you’re gonna be OK. I mean, none of us share music, right?

Six months in, I am severely disillusioned by my hosting company, which kinda makes me wish I’d read this article on what to look for in a web-host before I forked over the credit card details. You’d think I’d have learnt by now, some services are cheap for a reason. Still won’t be making that mistake again!

It almost wouldn’t be a ‘Roast without a link to Darren. This week we have two! Oooh, I do spoil y’all.
Firstly, an article on the gender differential in blogging sparked my brain into working. As a female blogger I would say I have noticed more men out there than women, but I’m used to that from the field I’ve been working in lately, so it doesn’t seem too unusual. That in itself got me thinking on a whole host of things that might work themselves into a post in the near future. With regards comments I know I have a reluctance to post comments. It’s something I’m trying to overcome, but whether that reluctance is just personal reticence, or because I am female… Well, therein lies an entire PhD all to itself.

The second ProBlogger offering of the week, was a slightly worrisome piece on how no-one links to the linkers. Suddenly, my lackluster technorati standing makes sense! Then again, it’s just one post a week so 😛 I enjoy the Sunday Roast even if no one else does. There were some good points made in the comments of this post, one I agree with totally. I always go for the original source if I can find it.

I love Flickr for many reasons, but mainly because of the amazing images you can stumble across, such as this great photoset of photographs taken by a soldier in the aftermath of WWII. Some of the pictures are beautiful, some of the pictures (especially the Hiroshima ones) are heart rending.

If you use WordPress do you know how to back up your database? I’ve had a few server-side hiccups lately and the only thing that stopped me from having a bigger heart attack than I did was the knowledge I had a backup that was only a few days old. I use the plugin method as it requires the least amount of fussing with the back-end of things. If I was feeling even cleverer, I would set up automatic daily backups then I’d never have to worry again.

Apparently, more people watch Freeview than analogue TV. Not my Mum. She couldn’t, even if she wanted to. The very nice man told her she would have to fork out for a sky dish and watch ‘Skyview’ which is slightly different to Freeview – some of the channels you receive are different. Other than that, she’s still all confused why she can’t just stay with her analogue signal. It works fine, is much less susceptible to weather, and doesn’t require her to bolt more aerials to the side of her house. Personally, I like Freeview because of the extra channels (FilmFour is coming soon!), but am still at a loss to understand why we are switching in the first place.

David Pogue has a bit more on Vista’s system requirements, and dear lord does it need a beast of a computer! And five different versions of the OS? You just know that whichever one you end up getting, you’re gonna wind up wanting a feature it doesn’t support. Switch people, switch now!
And note the p.p.s. – yes David, comments are good 😀

I have a pledge for you, my readers, and that pledge is this: Bright Meadow will be a football-free zone for the entirety of the World Cup. But for those of you obsessed with the bloody game, I will leave you with this link to some pretty footballs.

Seems like everyone is having a hard time keeping up with the RSS these days. I like David’s approach, but just know I lack the self discipline to follow it. I do like his description of the ‘personal blogs’ he reads:

There are a number of people on the Internet that I just find fascinating, and I follow them because they are personally inspiring… I read these blogs purely because I enjoy them.

A few years back I had to use a wheelchair for a while and one thing that struck me even then was how cumbersome and antiquated the design of a basic chair is. The Trikinetic K2 on the other hand, is a chair for the spaceage.

And… I’ve just realised I’ve spent the past two hours on this post. Definitely time to get dressed and go for a walk in the sunshine.

Endnotes:
*1*I’m really all giddy with excitement, but I’m British, and we much prefer cynicism and sarcasm to letting onto our real emotions. Excited as a very excited thing, that’s me. 😀Back