A Merge, a Focus and a Conundrum

It has been a while since I have made a blog-update, but today I have some very exciting news to announce. Well, maybe not so exciting to you, but it is to me!

A few readers may know that I am running a recently set up blog on Tumblr called The{<}CompBlog (TheMiniCompBlog), where I post my mini-rants that are too big for Twitter. I have noticed during the 2 week operating span, the readers were coming from 2 completely different groups. I wanted to unify the reading experience, so, as a result, I am going to merge that blog with the regular TheCompBlog. Expect 2 new old posts from the {<} blog to be on here soon and expect more shorter articles more regularly.

Next on the agenda, is focus. What I have realised is that every successful tech blogger has some sort of topic he or she focuses on. MG Siegler from TechCrunch focuses on Apple, for instance. I feel that focusing on a company is too narrow minded and not a wide enough topic, so I am going to focus my blog posts on future and emerging technologies, which will allow me to retain the rant-style post while being of a slightly more uniform topic.

Don't worry! Not every post will focus on this! I still have a few radical views I want to complain about!

Finally, the conundrum. Most of my techie friends at school will know what I am talking about, and if you are not someone who is interested in blogging methods, I suggest you save some time by not reading this part.

I am facing a mental war between Tumblr and Wordpress, the 2 candidates for my blog. I am still not quite sure what my blog is about or what it stands for, making the decision a whole lot harder. Tumblr offers a wide variety of posting options, from a picture to a quote, while encouraging activity. Wordpress, however, is open source (so less likely to be bought) and is used by professionals everywhere as a data-management system for their sites.

The fight rages on with WordPress leading on the score chart. (yes, I have weird metaphors) But Tumblr is still standing with its multi-content posting. Who will take home TheCompBlog?

[Cue onslaught of block capital tweets from @direthoughts and @alex_forey…]

On The Air - Part 2

I ended the last post on a convenient cliff-hanger, right before the excitement of the Northumberland Folk show began. Nice touch, no?

So, the call came, “Transition and play ringding in 3, 2, 1, PLAY!”, and something went wrong, every single damn time (I exaggerate)! Once the ringding was done playing, the second call came, “Transition to blue microphone in 3, 2, 1) and the fun began.

At this time post-cake, the sugar was just setting in, so things went according to my well arranged (as always) plan, but after a few short minutes, small, little details started deviating, gradually leading to someone, usually me, saying something stupid that would throw the whole plot off course in a desperate attempt to steer the show back to the main story line. Examples include times when one character asked the character I was playing, “What are you doing here?” and I answered, “I don’t know”. Those three words changed the plot entirely to involving a bar, three new characters, the death of one older character and the inclusion of a clinic scene. Yes, I know, we are amazing. On the often occurring occasion, whenever one of my two colleagues wanted to spice up the story or were just plain bored, they would shout down the microphone, “Ooo, look! Another unknown character!” and throw the microphone across the room in the hope that someone would continue the story. This practice lead to several new characters; too many for three people to voice. As a result, we called in backup: an extra man. Unfortunately, this lead to even more petty arguments and even more complicated story lines. It ended up being the case that the loyal butler was some kind of thief or alcoholic, and the village idiot was some sort of intelligence agent, or something along the lines of that; I forget.

On The Air - Part 1

Two weeks late, I wish all of my readers a happy new year! At this stage, most bloggers will be stating what they want to see, do, experience, write or some other mostly irrelevant thing that no one really wants to read, but if you must know, I think this is the year information becomes standardized and universal APIs developed that allow inter-web/app communication, but that is for another time and post. There are very good reasons why I have not blogged lately, mainly due to slightly unsuspecting things, like my running around like a headless chicken all weekend trying to find volunteering work for my Duke of Edinburgh award, or sorting out my printed circuit board design for a school project that turned out to have a fundamental problem from the start, or just sorting out preparations for the smooth transition to Wordpress, which will happen once I manage to secure the £30 per year hosting cost [that is a larger problem than you might think!].

For now, however, lets move on to the bulk of todays post: the days when I was on the air. Now, this may seem a bit ambiguous to you; what the hell am I on about? Was I on TV? Radio? A big-name live podcast? To all those, I say no. I did something much more exciting than that, arguably.

What? Name one thing that can be more exciting than being on live TV, as I am sure many of you are thinking. To be honest, very few things are, but what I learned from my “on the air” experience is far more important to me than what live TV taught me (or could have taught me, If you want to be pedantic about it!).