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!).

< Content&Services > - Part 4

During the 7th hour of a 10 hour flight to Miami, Florida, the fasten seatbelt sign had been turned on, shining brightly in the ancient, dark, cramped, yet cosy, BA economy class of a Boeing 747. My sister and I are fighting passively over the limited foot and armrest space, staring at a screen no more than 4.5" big, writing this post after having watched one film, 2 TV shows, a documentary on renewable energy and sped through 4 chapters of "Great Expectations". Try doing all that in 7 hours! (Actually, It is quite easy...).

So, as one expects, we have an airplane post here, as most of the other posts in this series are (parts 1, 2 and 3). For those of you who do no know, this series consists of several rants about how content and service providers are, generally, evil twits, idiots and narrow-minded. To sum up in one word: money grabbing.

Oh look, a kid who has been kicking my chair for the past 7 hours has thrown up. Lovely. Time to get up and let the pros deal with it. Oh wait, I cannot get up, the fasten seatbelt sign is on; well then screw this, I am getting up anyway.

The Next Swipe

A Friday evening. A great, yet interesting week behind me, several challenges ahead of me, but ignoring all that, I am sitting on a plane destined for Vienna so I can attend a family gathering.

The regular readers will know what that means. Yes, through the sole fact that I am sitting on a plane in seat 9A, we have an airplane post here! However, this post, unlike all the others, will actually be positive and make good points about the future of the mobile system, rather than rant about problems! Yeh, sounds good, doesn't it? Well, it sounds good to me, and I hope it does for you to.

Just a quick update on things: the Wordpress migration will happen shortly after Christmas, once I get my hosting sorted out. I also may find it harder to post regularly for a few weeks, as I, like I said, have many challenges ahead, including the Toyota technology challenge and my bronze Duke of Edinburgh Award! The next few weeks are going to be very interesting...

Moving on to the topic at hand, my great vision! As I have said before, I like Windows Phone 7 (WP7). "Shock, horror, how could he!". It has a nice and intuitive UI along with a promising partnership with the largest mobile manufacturer worldwide, Nokia. Now, don't get me wrong, there is a reason why I said promising. WP7 has the obvious disadvantage of being a new platform, late into the game, so there are clearly not going to be any decent apps on it for a while. It's not going to take over the mobile phone market any time soon and it certainly will not be the first platform people think about when they are contemplating on which smartphone to buy. What I like specifically about the system is the improvement.

The Code of Blogging

For me to be writing a post on a Thursday evening is the strangest thing that has happened to me in a while, mostly because tonight is possibly the only night since the start of the new school year where I have no homework. This, however, is a special post, being a rare tangential post, of which I only have 2 currently, but before we get into the post, I have an update.

After careful deliberation, I have finally decided that I will migrate my blog to Wordpress and manage my own hosting. The biggest, and possibly most important reason is that I am able to manage the nitty-gritty details of the blog without using incomprehensible HTML editors. There are however, a few points I would like to make about Tubmblr. Firstly, I see now that it is not a blogging service, but a micro-blogging service, which is all about small and frequent posts. Although that might prove useful, the available time I have is nowhere near enough to do such a thing. Secondly, Tumblr is idiot proof. Yes, that is a good thing, for some people. For me, however, I like a challenge, something to aim for, something that makes me think, but being not outrageously improbable to accomplish, like coding the next great operating system in 24 hours, although some may be able to do so.

That is exactly what this post is going to look at and attempt to explain, from my perspective, the story of the code of blogging.

Sorry for the Mess!

I truly am.

The migration has been called off, again, for the time being.

Sitting in my bed at 10pm, I have a lot to worry about, a piece of coursework, some long overdue homework and, possibly most prominently, the many, many, suggestions I got for my new blogging service.

They all agree Blogger sucks, except one.

Two say Tumblr is great.

And the rest, including the highly persuasive Henry Dyer, shout (and occasionally threaten me[!]) with Wordpress.

So, the migration has been called off until I can clear my head about what to do. I am that temperamental with my decisions: i can never make my mind up! I shall most likely have decided by this weekend, with a migration before or on Christmas, depending whether I get hosting.

Just to be clear, we are DEFIANTLY moving away from blogger. There is no question about it. It was nice, but slightly annoying!

Wordpress or Tumblr: that is the question. Do I want 404 error customisation or free and idiot proof? Do I want bother managing hosting or just let the pros do it? Which one is the more sustainable service?

We shall see my friends, we shall see...

Pickture This: On A Venture

It’s a Friday evening, and as most often is the case, I am at home, working on a post, carefully crafting the metaphors, similes, paradoxes and forming a good, balanced argument about the forthcoming topic.

“Sorry?” I imagine you are saying. “A balanced argument?”.

The truth is that I have just come out of an intense English lesson, so my mind is full of useless poetry and non-fiction analytical skills, for which I shall have very little use for later in life. My writing is ok, right?

Moving swiftly on from what I imagine my parents are going to talk and painstakingly lay out why poetry analysis is useful to me about after reading this, I would like to introduce a new topic on this hallowed blog (bit of an overkill there? Thought so).

I have decided to follow, advise (where advice is requested) and cover the ventures the many pupils do at my school. Before you click away from this, please note this. The kids at my school are a bunch of “interesting ones”. May I present you with Henry Dyer, who calls himself speshul. He, as well as many others, like to make stuff: I make articles, others build CNC machines and Henry makes the Crystal Palace exchange and the school servers overheat with the constant OnLive streaming. See, technically we are all speshul. To define “ventures”, I am going to say it is anything that any pupil or member of staff makes and invests effort into, like the aforementioned CNC machine or the following, all with close collaboration and permission.