IMS_Blog

Those who understand what has gone on in Britain have the sense of being in one of those nightmares where you are crying out to warn someone of impending danger, but they cannot hear you. Read the rest of the rather excellent article to better understand what this self obsessed and control crazed government would do to this once free land, before they decide you’re not allowed to.

A couple of days ago I wanted to know the radius of the earth (I had a fair estimate in my head but just wanted to check it was roughly right). So I texted Google (64664). The reply back wasn’t the radius of the earth, but a message saying Google SMS isn’t available in the UK. It used to be! I think the last time I used it was in a Chinese restaurant a few weeks ago). The UK Google pages do say it’s not available but second hit on a quick search shows I’m not going mad (wikipedia agrees on it being in the UK). Come on Google, bring it back! Having calculator so available is damn useful, if nothing else.

Oh, and the radius of the earth? Well, I had 6400 kilometres in my head, which isn’t too far off, but it’s quite complicated.

It’s known Powergen are incompetent. At least it seems they’re beginning to do something about it. we believe that we can best achieve industry-leading customer service said their managing director. All I can say is they’ve got a hell of a long way to go to be industry leading.

Urm, judging from the police tape being strung outside it seems that the front doorstep may have become part of some form of crime scence. Oh well…

I quite like Lifehacker because they pretty often offer useful tips (though their obsession with “getting to done” is quite wearisome for those of us who don’t work that way). One of the things Lifehacker has given me is some quite cool software through their “download of the day”. Today’s download of the day is a Greasemonkey script to try and catch those occasions in GMail when you hit send having forgotten to actually attach the all important attachment. Thing is, I’m actually the author of that script (with a large nod to Jonathon Brodsky who wrote the original). Fame at last! Now I’ll just have to deal with all the inevitable bug reports…

So the big news is Google has released Picasa Web Albums (well, it’s still “invite only” but if you have a Google account…it took them a handful of hours from request to actual invite). I have a photo album online already but this is a simple way for the average person to share pics online (where’s the fun in the simple way though ;-) Also, whilst offering some cool features, it’s still Google’s normal mishmash of table layout, non-semantic markup). I was able to very quickly and simply use Picasa to create a test albumFlickr like offerings).

Picasa itself has had a few minor tweaks, mainly the renaming of “labels” to “albums”. Hello integration seems to have been hidden into the Email option (“Picasa Mail”). However, there’s also integration with Google Earth to geotag photographs, which is nice and shows that maybe Google are working towards some sort of coherence, which has seemed a bit lacking of late (on a similar note there’s also an upload to Google video option). There’s a few more cosmetic and usability tweaks too.

Picasa Web Albums is lacking in some things. Whilst albums have the now obligatory RSS feeds there’s no search as yet, but this is only a first release, so I expect that will come (search is what Google does after all). And that first release bit is actually the most interesting thing, for Picasa Web Albums is not marked “beta”!! It’s Picasa Web Albums, Test! This could be the start of Web2.5, or something.

So the BBC decided to stream world cup footage online, along with a hoopla about how this would let people stuck at work watch it (though they were careful not to use so many words to encourage such skiving). Now, we see the reason they like this idea. They’ve decided it all needs to be covered by a TV licence (so it’s the TV Licensing Authority, but that’s just semantics ). One of the most worrying things about this is how ready the press seem to be to simply regurgitate the licensing authorities press release without questioning. Indeed it was quite difficult in a quick search to find any sort of challenge.

Continue reading the rest of this post

Germany versus Costa Rica. Just about to start. It has begun.

And just in case you need yet another wall chart