Thursday, July 31, 2003

an excellent article about mobile blogging with a good selection of blog links. interesting about police closing down media centres. This convergence of phones / cameras / and internet is really going to change democracy for the better IMHO
An interesting titbit here about out the SMS messaging centre in Mumbai India was shut down so that demonstrators couldnt use it! So take your carrier pigeons next time you demonstrate or maybe use a 802.11 access point Umm wonder if you can buy a pda/phone with both GSM and 802.11 technology built in.
And this surely must have a huge future - "With Project Hive you can easily publish short articles and pictures of demonstrations or direct actions with your mobile phone or pda. This is useful because you often don't have a computer around you in some situations"
A mobile blog for demonstrators at the recent G8 meeting with photos from picture phones. Fantastique!!!!

Just getting into this new method of social networking using the internet (digital) to meet like minded people and then meet in more conventional ways (analog).

I recently joined ecademy who send me a monthly newsletter which contained an article on social networking I then went here clicking through Ross Mayfield's blog ion this took me to this fascinating site and concept called meetup, this allows you to join special interest groups in your city. The fascinating thing about the london blogging group is that the meeting place is decided by the attendees by voting. a very clever use of the technology.

Really think that this is the next big thing, maybe even the next political party!

Wednesday, July 30, 2003

Interesting article here about installing a new operating system in 8 minutes and yes you are right its NOT aMicrosoft product! Its the new Lindows 4.0 it gets a very favourable review for ease of use etc and for less than $50.

Friday, July 25, 2003

Went to my first event with the folks at ecademy they had very interesting speakers from five dating companies operating in the UK, Date the UK, Match. SpeedDater, Chemistry, JakeTM

Simon from date the UK gave an interesting insight into how fast things happen on the net. Within 10 months of putting the site up they attracted over 75,000 folks and revenues over £500K. Wow! Insights are that the male/female ratio is 2:1 that folks go on line on rainy days and their new site www.sexintheuk.com attracted 1678 members (no pun intended) in 4 days. Apparently the rate was driven by carefully getting site google wise!

The guy from match pulled a hat trick by finding someone in audience who had met and married from match! Which in a crowd of 200+ is pretty good. They have just bought udate which to me always got much worst results. In fact I met Suzanne through Match!

Speedater was started by a couple of redundant publishing guys, explained what a waste of money adverising in Metro was for them. The other interesting statistic is that by narrowing age gap of folks attending it increases participation although as is typical, apparently, offline events always attract a male female ratio of 1:2.

Chemistry is a different idea, they organise parties with ideas like a polaroid gallery etc interestingly more females than males puts a bit of alimit, all events are 1:1 he put this down to women been more organised at planning events in future wereas guys leave it till last minute.

Jake is for the gay community although I suspect it would also work more generally, they organise like a couple of small events a week and online chat dating. The site is done so it looks like a regular work site.

A very exhausting evening met loads of new people just need to get organised like Thomas Power and keep everything in a black book. Or even better print of delegate list first!
A very sad but very true story here about how the UK has become a client state of the USA which makes the very good point that we UK citizens would have more rights if we really were the 51st state. I just wonder how much of the anti EU stuff is actually the UK government covering up the fact that we can never be a true member of europe whilst we retain being a client state. Thus denying our full rights as EU citizens. It must be very painful for Blair etal sitting on such a pointed fence!

Thursday, July 24, 2003

Came back home to find all my potted plants in courtyard are wilting due to the Gardena T14e Electronic Water timer has eaten its way through a PP9 battery in a month or so. Here are the arcane codes you have to re-enter to program the Gardena T14e !
00 no program,
01 3 mins of water 4 times a day,
02 3 mins water twice a day,
03 15 mins twice a day,
04 3 mins once a day,
05 5 mins once a day
06 30 mins once a day
07 60 mins once a day
08 5 mins every 48 hours
09 30 mins every 48 hours
10 60 mins every 48 hours
11 30 mins every 3 days
12 60 mins every 3 days
13 60 mins every week
14 120mins every 7 days
They are easy to remember arent they!

Friday, July 11, 2003

Well here we are in sunny Les Gets on the first day of our summer hols, very pleasant to! The question is - why do the french cleaners of the apartment always take all the loo rolls and washing up liquid! Tomorrow its the Tour de France, well not me personally!

Thursday, July 10, 2003

Oh sheer bliss set my old geoff@cortexcontrollers.com (yes spammers its all yours now!) to bounce all mails with the result that my mail is now reduced to about 5 good mails a day. The spam was well over 100 mails a day at its worst. Even mailwasher was finding it hard to cope!. Very sympathetic response from all people I mailed with new address.

Tuesday, July 08, 2003

Suzanne pointed out that Czech Airlines flying from Stansted to Prague can be cheaper (sometimes) than Easyjet. I've entered it here Note that they have to send you conventional tickets
Regarding the banning of camera phones -And - with a delicious twist of irony - the latest to join the club is no less than the world's third-largest handset manufacturer, Samsung Electronics. The Korean consumer electronics giant has banned the use of camera phones from some of its most sensitive factories, fearing that they could be used for industrial espionage. Spotter Laurence Marchini, Editor
New looking PC here although a bit weird not giving it a better display. Fits in a bit with what I want around the house. however, it has a fan at the back!!!!!!

Interesting site here, that seems UK based, that reviews all the plug in TV cards for your PC. I'm sure this side of PC's will grow especially if you can set it to record programmes like the TiVo
Interesting website on the Millenium bridge here which explains why it wobbled (basically when we walk 10% of force is sideways rather than main force which, of cause, is up and down) apparently bridges have wobbled before but no one bothered to report it to engineers! Anyway its good to know that 200 engineers designing a bridge did get 'it sorted'. I wonder how many engineers Brunel employed for his bridges.

Sunday, July 06, 2003

A good story here about google and evil. Here is an interesting excerpt here:-
"What is this?" asks a visitor squinting at the form he must sign before proceeding to the cafeteria at Google's Mountain View, California, headquarters. "An NDA? To have lunch?"

The receptionist shrugs. "This is Google," she says. "They're crazy that way."

So much for free thinking folks!

Saturday, July 05, 2003

Here is the official UK government census website, with results broken into regions. So within Cambridge there are 2313 other males of my age, interestingly there are 170 more women then men in same range.

Friday, July 04, 2003

Interesting comments on the way that the RIAA are destroying the music industry here never realised the vast sums that are paid as a legalised "payola". I wonder what happens in UK?

Thursday, July 03, 2003

This has to be the future now I've added geoURL coordinates to my website I can use their find feature to find all sites close to mine in Cambridge. This is so awesome, to find fellow neighbouring bloggers. Obviously most of them university students but the sites are certainly very good. All these within one mile of me in Cambridge UK eg
Lisa de Araujo http://nicelytoasted.net/
Liz Batty http://www.singlelensreflex.co.uk/
Colin Hoad http://galileo.spaceports.com/~cjhoad/index.html
David Redhouse http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/~dir21/
Kevin O'Rourke http://www.caboose.org.uk/
Max Salvén http://max.salven.com/
Dave http://www.bopbopbop.net/rldd/index.php
Adrian McEwen http://chortle.org.uk/blog/mcfilter/

and in the future local shops etc etc
Stupid bloggerpro did it again. I had edited my site. Of cause this made it lose my blog. So I tried reposting the blog came up with stupid errors saying that it can't be published. So I removed all settings in publisher on blog, saying I was going to rehost it on their site! Then retyped in original ftp settings and hey presto it worked
Updated website with GeoURL coordinates
Now tried adding a RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed to my blog - will it screw everything up again?
Yep it did came up with this error:-
500 500-"STOR http://www.geoffjones.com/blogger_rss.xml" Command not understood
back to drawing board!
Thanks nick for this url of map a mobile an other UK based mobile phone location service to compete with fleet online who i blogged a while ago.
Last night Colin and I went to Jo's comedy madhouse at 55 Brewer Street. Soho. To see The Comedy Terrorist do his stuff.
The club is in the basement of the The Glasshouse Store. About 50 people turned up (Its a small basement room) to see him MC Phil Nichol, Lloydy the Illegal Streettrader, Phil Zimmerman, Larry Bernstein and The Hitman.
The Comedy Terrorist came in dressed as a Beefeater (well someone has to guard The queen) he started by reading The Sun's article on him, quite funny. He said the high point was screwing The Daily Mail readers for loads of money
Q. How do you pay of your mortgage, loans etc etc
A. Climb over the wall at Windsor Castle.
In his next sketch he was dressed in the orange jumpsuit of the prisoners at Guantanamo where he mocked Bush's Road Map of Palestine / Israel by producing a doctored Monopoly board - very funny! especially tipping in the centre a full ashtray and putting in the houses and comparing it to a township.

At the end he wore his tasteful pink dress. As he says he has a long way to go to capitalise on all the free publicity he has received (It was a spur of the moment thing) although actually as an MC he could be pretty good, I guess. He doesnt seem to have an agent. I have his mobile number if anyone needs to book him.

My favourite was Lloydy the illegal street trader - very funny. Lets hope Colin books him for his staff party.

A splendid evening, must do it more often, about one hour from my house to Soho and £12 train fare. A bargain night out in Soho.

ps The Beefeater image was taken by Colin using a Nokia 7250 mobile, its a 12K pixel image no flash.
tricked it - made it post to the blogger domain which it didnt allow! then re-entered previous settings to my website - and it worked. Obviously a bug in the blogger software. Problem is I destroyed my lovely blue template!

Wednesday, July 02, 2003

and still nothing
srill not getting in
well it published it somewhere but not at my site!
ok that did it, obviously fouling up at autologin
now remove ftp name and password
apparently dk.eos.net is some sort of java error - big help
keeps getting this error when trying to publish:
Current Status: There Were Errors in Publishing.
002 dk.eos.net.FtpError: Login incorrect

where is it getting the idea I want to publish to eos.net? from
blog keeps disappearing from my website after I've updated site directly - means I've to republish using blogger - very tedious

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

Just added comments to my blog using the enetation software from here seemed remarkably easy to do. Now to try it out!
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