Am I Spartacus?

At the weekend there, in the aftermath of Paul Chambers losing his appeal on the #twitterjoke this, there was a great outpouring of something on Twitter, thousands of people retweeting his original 'menacing' tweet about blowing up Nottingham's Robin Hood airport. It was a great show of solidarity.

But something bugged me, there was something that didn't feel right about tweeting

Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!! #IAmSpartacus

Its that bit at the end, appending the hashtag. Its incorrect, just as incorrect as getting the 'may be a joke twibbon'. Its a disclaimer and that's wrong. Twitter shouldn't need such things, the context is inherent to the medium.

Its like if in the original Spartacus scene, the folk joining in stood up and said "I'm Spartacus! Just kidding, I'm not really, you were right the first time". It agrees with the original charge.

If the sentiment you want to express is solidarity then don't undermine it by joking.

The show of solidarity would have been more profound without the #iamspartacus hashtag, and with a wider range of targets being menaced. "I've left a suitcase of explosives in Victoria Station, you have 28 minutes to find it", "A plane will crash in the next seven hours", "I just pushed a man under a train", etc, purposefully tying up so much of the security services' time in investigating 'menacing' messages on twitter, that the authorities would have no choice but to admit they were wrong, that the twitter medium is not to be taken seriously.

I had this similar idea a few months back, the NATO phonetic alphabet thing, Foxtrot, Bravo, November, etc, to do a similar alphabet using terrorist keywords. So, if any authorities are monitoring voice phonecalls, they'd be snowed under with assassinations, bombs, capture, hijackings and so on.

Thorn Dice

Am currently clearing my flat and loading up a storage container, so of course I'm getting distracted by cool things on the internet.

I was looking for a cool new hobby to get into, 3D printing seems neat, considering it can produce wonders such as these thorn dice.



I'm not a gamer any more, but WANT!

Revulsion of Desire

My heart, it swelled, I was so ready to love, the joy of the life we could have lead together.

But it wasn't to be.

I can't stand my HTC Desire, and I'm going to have to take it back to the Orange shop.

I got it yesterday, after awaiting for ages for the Orange online shop to have some in stock, I took the advice of the internet and went into Harrow to check out the high street shop. The gentleman who served me was friendly and helpful, he gently tried to persuade me to get the Samsung Galaxy instead, but my heart was set n a life with the HTC Desire.

Somehow I'm on the £15 a month Dolphin price plan, but regularly pay £40 a month, somehow although the internet shop says I'm entitled to an HTC Desire as a free upgrade, in real life I'd have to pay £50 to upgrade, but my heart was set on our life together, so £50 wasn't so bad. I handed over the money, was advised to charge it for ten hours before I used it and skipped merrily home.

But after a few hours with it, no, its not to be, and back to the shop it will go.

Before I go on, here is a small bullet-pointed list of the reasons why:-

• 9 hour battery life
• Cluttered up with irremovable Orange Apps
• Poor 3G signal
• Poor GPS signal
• Orange SafeGuard censor/filter thing
• Clunky user interface

Like the nice man said, I charged it up for ten hours, so it was the middle of the night when I started playing with it, and after a few hours I needed to charge it again. My last phone was a BlackBerry Curve, which when I first got it, had a battery life of ten days, more than a week. The HTC Desire, I'm going to have to charge it up every time I go near an power socket. Maybe some folk are used to crap battery lives, their phones always on the very foreskin of technology, but for me that kind of neediness is too much.

I'd be a little fucked without a phone, and so a short battery life is Thomas the Tank.

There are two Maps applications on the phone, google maps and Orange Maps, two app stores, the Android Marketplace and the Orange App Shop, there are a tonne of games. I'm not really a game kind of person. Sure, I'm addicted to Mario Galaxy 2 on the gf's Wii right now, and I have been dreaming of buying an Xbox 360 S 250Gb for months and months in the hope I'll be able to play Warriors and Project Gotham Racing 2 again, but on a phone, I don't want games.

No games on my phone please. Sadly you can't remove the Orange installed games, there's five of them taking up valuable program list real-estate. I have to scroll past them, any time I want to go into the program list, there's no way to get rid of them.

Similarly, the stocks and shares app, the weather app, and whatever the heck FootPrint is, there's no easy way to get rid of the or hide them. At least on the BlackBerry you could hide stuff, but on the Desire, nope.

I dunno, maybe only some of the unwanted apps are Orange-installed, and some are Android HTC affairs that are also locked. Either way, I don't care, it don't matter to me, all that matters is the only way to declutter the list of programs is to take it back to the shop an not bother with the Orange HTC Desire.

Ooh, I downloaded a bar-code reader app. Its great, you just point it at any barcode on anything, and it'll read it. 2D barcodes too, so you can see what all those cool internet folk are really saying in their 2D barcode avatars. I spent a joyful few hours going through the gf's cosmetic collection, scanning barcodes then searching for how much these potions cost online.

Maybe I'm a dirty perve, but its so much fun.

GLEE!!!!

But is it enough fun to keep the phone, to spend my life with it forever?

I downloaded the FourSquare app and we headed off to Brent Cross. On day I shall be mayor of all of London, with my Blackberry I was making good progress, alas it didn't have GPS, so I was always in the vague area, but with the HTC Desire from Orange, it would know exactly where I was.

That was the plan, that's what was supposed to happen, but no no.

Wandering round Brent Cross there was no GPS signal, and barely any 3G signal, I couldn't even update Twitter to moan about it. My little FourSquare dreams of skipping hand in hand with my Desire through clothes shops and coffee bars, came tumbling down. The grim reality of silence and shite signal strength.

Ah, in the old days of my BlackBerry Curve I'd spend hours on google reader, catching up with the world, reading blogs, frothing at the injustices of the world. Hours at work would fly by, with muted snorts and sniggers, evening with loved ones spent smiling and nodding and vaguely agreeing with whatever they were prattling on about whilst I was in my own little world.

With the Desire's larger screen and fast 3G connection and cool pinching zooming in type things the world ought to have been a more beautiful place. But no, my dreams were dashed again, as soon as I sign into google reader, I get some blocking screen from something called Orange SafeGuard, that is to protect me from things only over 18 year olds can view.

I'm a youthful looking chap, even with a couple of grey hairs, the folk at work reckon I'm a good decade younger than my ID has it, so its understandable that Orange SafeGuard would try to protect me. I have a healthy appetite for porn though, redtube, youporn and pornhub being my choice video sites, and Curvy, Menage a 3 and Chester 5000 XYV being my choice of rude webcomics, so I clicked through to get the SafeGuard thing removed, only to have my dreams dashed once more with a broken link, so I couldn't actually remove SafeGuard.

Strangely though, the next time I logged into Google Reader, I had no problem. That kind of inconsistency frustrates me.

Hours pass, and I've installed a few new apps, and had my dreams dashed by them, and I think its about time to tidy up the desktop from the standard on, move things around a bit, and that experience was clunky too. I couldn't find how to delete apps and widgets from the desktop so I had to start a new clean slate, and then if I made a mistake and placed an app where it wasn't wanted, I couldn't shift it, and had to start again. Maybe there's an easy way of doing it, but with the rest of the shite I've put up with the thing, I can't be arsed.

Not everyone has these problems, some people enjoy using the HTC Desires, I've seen them, they're satisfied.

I'm not though.

I painted a beautiful picture in a heid of life with an HTC Desire, and this thing from Orange don't match it. It doesn't come close, it is a worse experience than my two year old BlackBerry Curve. And so, back to the shop it'll go.

Then what?

On Twitter @marksany is the herald of the iPhone. I have given this though. I like the idea of the iPhoniverse, the Apple life. I'd want an old school iPhone 3GS rather than the iPhone4, that antenna business hasn't been resolved satisfactorily.

But no, its not going to happen, I'm not at a point in my life where I can embrace the iPhone. I'm typing this blogpost on my Acer Aspire One net book, running Ubuntu. There's no iTune on Ubuntu. I have no Apple Mac, and my old Windows desktop 'puter is about to be packed away, and unlikely to ever reappear. Without some kind of home computer to 'tether' (if you will) the iPhone to I'd be missing a chunk of the iPhone experience. Its unsatisfactory.

I could be wrong.

I often am.

In fact, one of the main points of this blogpost is incorrect. It is possible to remove the Orange-installed apps from their HTC Desire. I can re-flash the memory with the uncorrupted Android OS. People off of Android fora all over the internet have done it. It voids the Orange warranty, but it resolves the issue. It requires a Windows PC, but it does resolve the issue. I'm unwilling to try. I've had the HTC Desire from Orange for just over 24 hours, and I think I prefer my old BlackBerry Curve.

Its possible, I guess, that in the next few days @conorfromorange might announce that the new version of the Android software, Froyo, is coming out to Orange users, and without is the removable of all the frustrating apps and shite that annoys me so.

But that won't help the crap 3G and GPS signal that thwarted my FourSquare dreams and subsequent moaning, but would that be enough to keep me as an Orange customer?

I don't like having my emotions toyed with like this. I've dumped beautiful women for less.

I fear maybe I'm being stupid and ungrateful here, that the HTC Desire from Orange is a great phone, loved by thousands, why don't I love it? Why must I make a fuss, why can't I just accept it the way it is, embrace it tightly and love it like I've loved others before?

I handed over fifty quid for it, when other upgrade phones would have been free. I paid for it, and all I got was heartache, a big load of heartache.

My next madcap scheme

For the past week or so, since I decided to put the Glasgow Indie Eyespy Movie on hold, I've been having a bit of a dilemma about what my next 'thing' is going to be. I need a focus, I need a thing to do.

I was undecided between picking up the Teach Yourself Java book I'd acquired a few weeks back, or picking up my guitar again.

A friend had urged me to set up a Facebook fan page without specifying why, so I did and found that I could use it for posting videos and stuff, so maybe I could do something like my old video webcasty thing from Glasgow, but bang in the new decade, with just me playing guitar. Could I record a song every night? Even if its just a cover or something I'd written years ago. How long could I keep it going for? Would it become a thing that would help get me a slot at next years Indietracks? Would other people want to get involved? Some cute stripey-topped keyboard player, or a very tall bass player. Would it work?

On the other hand, learning Java would be useful, I could put it on my CV, or use it for building neat web apps, like one that would generate a heatmap for KML feeds from Foursquare, or some fancy automated way of compiling the list of videos from Indietracks bands by scraping some kind of feed. It could get me a well lush job guffawing all day on the internet and shedloads of money with which to redistribute to London's Indiepop music scene and purveyors of Xbox 360 Elites.

I couldn't decide, so I used the marvel that is AllOurIdeas.org. Its a simple organic poll engine I fell in love with a week or so ago when I tried to find out what was the most pressing civil liberties issue facing the UK government.

Neglecting the use of the word 'madcap' I put up the question "what should my next time wasting/life enriching scheme be?", along with three options:-

• Java
• Video webcasty things of my playing guitar
• Abusing other people's photies of Indietracks by using them to reenact South Park

The last option being a wildcard, cos I'm just a crazy kind of guy. AllOurIdeas allows respondents to add additional suggestions into the mix.

So after three days I find a clear favourite has emerged, one suggested by someone else.

They want me to have kids.

Could be difficult, cos its not really the sort of thing I can do on my own in my bedroom, like the other options, but if that's what the internet has decided for me, then so be it.

On the other hand, another received suggestion was to "quit the internet for a few weeks, see how evolve without it".

That would be weird.

Anyhoo, kids it is!

Hot or Not for everything with All Our Ideas

I found a link to a really cool website, its called www.allourideas.org and its the greatest innovation on the entire internet ever, trust me.

Its like Hot or Not, but for opinions. Here, take a look at http://www.allourideas.org/ukcivlib while I explain...

I've asked the question "What is the most pressing civil liberties issue facing the British Government?" And I've suggested three answers, smoking band, photography, cctv. The website offers you two answers at random and you can chose one of the other.

Or you can suggest something new, then the next people who visit the site can chose from those I suggested and those suggested by other people.

On the results page you can then see which answers are most popular and which are least popular.

In the case of the other week's government crowd-sourcing exercise in suggesting which laws to repeal, it was bogged down in thousands of irrelevant and dumb suggestions in a matter of hours. With All Our Ideas the best ones float to the top and the least popular ones sink.

Apparently the folk who created the site got the idea from KittenWars but the Hot Or Not site has been around for years. I'm just glad that someone has put together this sort of thing now.

It took me about thirty seconds to set up my http://www.allourideas.org/ukcivlib this sort of thing is easy now. let me know if there's any other neat questions out there.

London Bloggers Meetup:- Talk Talk

Wha, where, when... A month passes, I emerge from London's underground network, into Oxford Circus and Soho, only a few moments ago I was in darkest Wembley, eating Chinese and looking for my phone charger. The evening of the London Blogger's meetup has come round again.

I emerge blinking into the sunlight, looking for familiar sounding street names, and before long find myself outside the Talk Talk Customer Experience place. Large glass front, neon lights, there are many people inside.

I step in, fail to think of something amusing to write on a name tag, then go looking for people I know.

I find some and we chat. The talk covers many topics but one that sticks in ma heid is the Old Spice advert.

There is a speaker, this evening a cycling Rob talking about podcasting. Its a very indepth talk, covering what hardware to use (the latest Zoom recordery thing), what software to use (audacity) and what services to use to host and cast your pod cast. More of the details are at this link here, but what sticks in my mind is RadioKate's interruption pointing out that Audioboo has new features that the cycling Rob didn't know about.

Crikey, that must be unsettling, having you talk corrected by an audience member. I keep wondering what I'd talk about if it was me up there, what would I say that would hold people's attention, could I even hold people's attention at all.

The short train of thought lead me to ponder, would Andy the LBM organiser consider hosting a special, where all the regular bloggery meetuppery people had to do a 60 second talk. Some deal with twenty slides in a minutes or something. Would that entertain?

Anyhoo, the evening was hosted by talktalk, they were generous with their nibbles and booze and net access, I feel a bit guilty for the blog posts what I wrote back in February its not their fault, its BT with their hellish slow line connections. I hope that it doesn't matter who I direct my frustration at, as long as I vent it.

Regular readers of my blog will know I'm currently trying to write a screenplay, in the vague hope that someone reads it and decides its the greatest and most imaginative thing ever and then goes on to shower me with money and makes it. This you already knew.

I had an idea, a wee cutaway flashforward scene, like what they drop in to Scrubs or Lost. The scene involves a familiar character mentioning someone they know, some significant person in their like that the film's main protagonist doesn't know, the the flash forward to four years in the future, the protagonist finds themselves at a party or blogger's meetup, completely unrelated to four years earlier, chatting with a person who gives away just enough information to identify them as the person their friend mentioned. Then suddenly back to the narative.

As is my usual 'thing' for these blogger meetups, here's a list of bloggery people I spoke to.

• Aref-Adib
• Nima
• Peter marshall - My London Diary
  
• Thomas debuzzy
• Tom - Flashboy
• RadioKate
• Pradeep - Blogger User
  
• James - Battle Theme London
• Angus
• Reyes
• Melissa - Miss Geeky
• As - BBC
• Anna - Completely Novel - cool book publishing site
• Phil - Red rocket
• Rob - Real cycling
  
• Anthony - Fresh Plastic
• Caroline - Caroline's Miscellany - London's historical curiousities
• Longhaired crazy seat slasher chap
  
• His less haired friend called Matt

And here's a list of folk I made vague eye contact with or possibly nodded at and they nodded recognition back

• Lolly - blog til you drop
• Tom - Tired of life
• Doreen owl elbows - Tasty Fever
  
• Andy Bargery - The Marketing Blagger
  
• Londoneer
• Tiki Chris
• Annie Mole
• Proactive paul
• Guitar churchy
  

And here's a graph showing how such lists compare with previous London Bloggers Meetups.

Well, I think I've set myself a new record, cheesy grins all round.

Titter, chortle, guffaw.

High end audio at Best Buy

As promised earlier, this weekend I made the epic journey to the new Best Buy store at the Lakeside retail park in Thurrock.

We made up a rhyme, "so much that I want to buy, that I cannot justify". Right now, at my stage in life I am skint and the only thing I can justify spending money is a mains lead for my old WD 500gb external hard drive. Alas modern drives of that capacity just run off usb, and have no additional power requirements. Best Buy had no spare mains lead department.

At home I currently have no broadband internet, I can only survive by going to a nearby friend's flat and using their wifi. If only there were a way to boost my friend's wifi, so I could use it from the other end of the corridor. At Best Buy I put this problem to their Geek Squad and as I'd previously predicted they sucked their teeth and said no.

With these issued addressed, I thought I'd have a look at their hi-fi and home cinema set ups as suggested at last week's bloggers meetup.

The first thing that struck me was their Loewe tv set up. It set my teeth on edge and made me sick a little in my mouth.

I've had dealings Loewe tvs before, in one of the setup menus there's some kind of image enhance setting that sounds great, but it fucks the picture. Its hard to describe how, but it does something to the lighting and motion that makes anything you watch look like it was done in a cheap American sit-com studio blue screen.

It doesn't matter what you're watch, James Bond or Avatar, it just looks crap, un-movie-like.

What pains me more is that people don't notice or object.

Its like when widescreen tellys and movies first came on the market, and in shops and home people would watch stuff with the wrong aspect ratio, so it was stretched or squashed - distorted, and folk would shrug, "its widescreen, its supposed to be like that"

No, its wrong. Its like you've broken the movie. Would you play a 33rpm record at 45rpm?

It amazes me that any shop anywhere manages to sell Loewe tvs.

At Best Buy they had several demonstration rooms for hi-fi, high end audio and home cinema.

A few times when I was young my pa took me to hi-fi shops, they were quiet, dusty places, lots of wood panelled speakers and turntables decked in smoked perspex. People studying specifications and quietly asking attendants if they could listen to certain systems.

When I worked at Linn Products and Roksan Audio, again, listening to things was a quiet and patient experience, setting up the system, listening to a piece of music, adjusting or changing the system, then listening again, comparing contrasting, adjusting and deciding.

Not so at Best Buy, demonstration rooms blasting out blockbuster movies, endless arrays of speakers blaring out whatever kids listen to these days.

My ears aren't delicate flowered but I couldn't bear to stand in the demoroom for more than a few seconds before retiring. It was just too stressful and unrelaxing.

Is a fight scene from Transformers 2 really the best thing for demonstration surround sound, or is it just designed to bewilder and confuse customers so they buy any old crap and escape as quickly as possible?

One of the demonstration room was kitted out with the walls decked with every single speaker they sold. Do you know how speakers work? They have a cone that moves in and out, to reproduce sound, how the cone moves is precisely controlled by the amplifier/ preamp playing whatever mp3/CD/record you're listening to. The waves of sound pressure come from the speaker, bouncing off walls and the floor and ceiling to varying degrees until they reach your ears. This is something people rarely need to consider, except if you work testing high end audio or if you are about to spend a lot of money on speakers. By a lot of money, I mean anything more than what you earn in a week.

Anyhoo, these waves of sound pressure will bounce off smooth surfaces and get absorbed by soft or furry surfaces, like carpets, curtains and sofas. Try listening to music with they curtains in your room open or closed, the music will sound different. Try standing in the corner and speaking and then moving into the middle of the room and doing the same, you'll sound very different. Imagine if the walls moved freely, this is essentially what happens if you have loads of speakers in one room and only listen to two at a time.

For each speaker for any room there will be a sweet setup, the distance its positioned from the walls, the angle it's toed in at, the distance it is from its partners.

In Best Buy you can't listen to any speakers or any sound system and make an accurate judgement about which sound better than others. No matter how much money you throw at them when you get those speakers home they're going to sound completely different to how they did at the store.

They may very likely sound better than they did in the store, they couldn't sound much worse. Best Buy's setup seems design to get the worst performance out speakers on the home cinema side of the store.

I might have got the wrong end of the stick with the speaker, mind, that in the demonstration room with hundreds decked out on the walls, you're not supposed to listen to them, and its merely just to see what they looked like. If that's the case then I apologise for the ranting of the previous few paragraphs.

Oddly though, on the other side of the building they get it right. In the games console demonstration room, the speakers are set up perfectly, the screen is set up great. They're doing it right. Pick any game you want to play, and you can have a go in the best gaming, video and audio environment I've seen in a long while.

It only half makes sense. In the gaming room, they're doing it right, but not trying to sell speakers or tvs, and in the home cinema/audio room, where they are trying to sell hardware, they're doing it wrong.

I fear there's nothing I can do to help them.
Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

Paul Chambers guilty and the twitter joke trial

Twitter just exploded a little bit.

Some months ago, a chap called Paul J Chambers was feeling frustrated that Robin Hood Airport in Nottingham was closed so he posted on Twitter the following message:-

Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week... otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!

Someone forwarded it to the authorities, who investigated and after some degree of wrangling in the British justice system he's been found guilty and fined £1,000.

Twitter is one of the greatest broadcasting media of the century, it's unwise to piss off the hive mind.

After Jack of Kent blogged, Twitter went crazy, with messages such as this one being retweeted all over the shop.

@caitlinmoran: Christ, if people are being fined £1k for making bad jokes on Twitter, I might as well start wanking tramps for change now #twitterjoketrial

There were rumblings about setting up a donation fund to pay the fine and any other costs incurred by Paul, Old Holborn, the rebellious blogosphere's failed PPC is on the case. But it may not be enough to satisfy the twitterers, they want blood, This message seems to be exploding a wee bit too.

RT @davelength: Retweet this is if you believe Keir Starmer should resign as Director of Public Prosecutions. #twitterjoketrial

Gotta wonder though, if only the jury at the trial had heard of Jury Nullification, then all the fuss could have been missed. Just cos someone broke the law, doesn't mean they're guilty if the law is an ass. Wasn't a jury trial, merely before magistrates.