Facebook just isn’t working for me — I think it’s designed for people with friends. If you’re happy to have all your updates, photos, conversations etc on the one site, and share that info with just your “friends” then perhaps it does work. But the fact is that I don’t want to keep all my info on Facebook, and I don’t want to just share it with only the my 4 Facebook friends. Smugmug or Flickr are better places for sharing photos. Gmail is better for chatting and email. GoodReads is probably a better place for ticking off the books you read. Perhaps the problems is that I’m pretty exclusive with my Facebook “friends” because I figure they should actually be real friends/family, not vague acquaintances, colleagues, distant relative or people I’ve met online.
FriendFeed is a pretty cool site which aggregates all the information from disparate sites into a single RSS feed for anyone to subscribe to. It works with Smugmug, Flickr, GoodReads, your Amazon wishlist, Last.fm, Twitter, etc. Here’s my feed. It seems like a better alternative to Facebook for just aggregating online info together. And I can even include my FriendFeed in Facebook for my few real friends.
Is FriendFeed the next Facebook-like fad? Yeah, probably. But I’ll go with it for the moment cos it doesn’t lock me in like Facebook.
I’m big into anything that means I don’t have to walk up and down the stairs at the moment. One of the annoying things was getting the laptop in the same place as the backup drive, which meant that I wasn’t actually making any backups. With lots of priceless baby pictures that kinda worries me. So I bought a 500GB Freecom Network Drive Pro which I can mount as a network drive which makes backups nice and easy, if a little slow.
The pro version also has some great features: you can mount an external USB drive to extend the storage (so I can make use of my old 320GB drive); you can FTP to the drive; there’s even a BitTorrent client to download your movies directly to the drive, if you’re into that sort of thing); and coolest of all, you can SSH into the drive since it’s just running linux. SSH is cool because it means that you can move files around the drive (or between the external and network drive) without incurring any sort of network overhead. Pretty sweet piece of kit.
As of yesterday, I’m off the crutches and learning to walk again. I broke my other femur as a child and had to learn to walk again when I was 2, so this is my third, and hopefully final, attempt. Currently my gait is quite similar to Edgar (Vincent D’Onofrio as the bug) in Men in Black
So, I’ve been out of work for the past 3 months since the accident but recently I haven’t been entirely idle. I’ve finished off the personal finance site I first talked about almost a year ago and I’ve also written 2 other Ruby-on-Rails websites and got them deployed. These aren’t fancy sites but they fill various personal needs. I’ll announce each site when I’m happy to let others play with them.
Ruby is actually a pretty cool language and Rails is certainly a reasonably quick framework to use (once you figure out the documentation and various magic incantations). It took a lot longer than I was hoping to learn the Ruby language and understand the Rails framework, but then I was only working on it occasionally and I’m not a web developer. It’s certainly better than writing Java code and adds another feather to my l33t programming skillz ;-) Java for work; Ruby for pleasure.
I’m not a big petrolhead and really don’t care much about fast cars but I always appreciate innovation. When Daewoo first entered the U.K. market they innovated not through product design (the cars were all bad Vauxhall knock-offs) but through customer service: Salesmen were paid a flat-rate instead of commission to encourage honest advice; and their warranties were something like 5 years, much longer than the competitors. Still, the cars were crap so I’d never consider buying one (although we drove one into the ground for 4 weeks across New Zealand).
Our old ‘99 Renault Clio was the most basic model going and yet still had a sunroof, CD player, steering wheel mounted radio controls, and an airbag (which saved my life). The corresponding Ford Fiesta wouldn’t have had any of those. Now we have a ‘06 Renault Scenic and some of the innovations really please me:
The radio/CD volume increases as the car goes faster to compensate for road/air noise.
There are storage compartments everywhere. Seriously, we found a new one last week. Drawers under the seats, compartments under the floor, pockets in the armrests, etc…
An electronic handbrake which replaces the manual one. For a hill-start, you put the handbrake on and then increase the clutch/accelerator and once the engine has enough power to hold the car, the handbrake automatically releases. Very, very handy.
The windscreen wipers come on automatically, as do the headlights.
The speedometer is digital. I wasn’t sure about this initially but we all know from school that radial gauges are great for showing rate-of-change over continuous values but digital is ideal for a family car where you’re most concerned about keeping to the speed limit than the acceleration.
The dashboard display shows exactly which door is open (so you don’t have to play lets-guess-which-door-is-open, is-it-this-one, no-its-not …). It can also
There’s no “key”, it’s just a card that slots into the dashboard. You push a big start button with the clutch depressed to start the engine — very futuristic. Also, if the drivers door hasn’t opened, it won’t start (I guess to prevent children starting the car)
The key card can also be used to open the car doors simply by touching the door handles.
The rear windows have built-in sun visors which pull up out of the doors to keep the sun off the children
Sure, some of these features are in other new-ish cars but it strikes me that innovation and small features that make the users life better are top priorities in Renault. In contrast, recent Fords aren’t half as innovative because they have a much bigger default market share .
P.S. yeah, I guess I could’ve summarised this post as “I love our new Scenic, it’s so cool”. And I haven’t even driven it yet.
Finally, after about 10years, someone has fixed Microsoft’s biggest UI failure in Windows: editing the system path. Previously, you had to edit this huge string, accurately, in a tiny text box, with no validation. Now you can use RedmondPath.
Here are a few things that have particularly annoyed me since Norah was born:
Baby monitors. Seriously, most people don’t own houses big enough or well-built enough that they can’t hear their baby crying. And even in circumstances where a monitor might be required, there is no justification for the “parent talkback” system. Seriously, you’re worried enough about you’re kid to listen to every grunt, groan and wheeze but you can’t be bothered to go and see what’s wrong with them? You’d rather talk to them over the intercom? I hate those things.
Baby-in-a-bucket. Why oh why would you put your baby in a bucket? I fume everytime I see this advertised in the shops, particularly the smug parents gathered around in a semicircle with their babies in these contraptions. I’ve no doubt that there’s perhaps some good reasoning and logic behind their design but they just look so ridiculous.
My daughter’s cries. This might sound harsh but I can’t stand her crying. She’s been out-of-sorts for the past 24hours so there’s been lots of bouts of uncontrollable crying for no apparent reason. I hate not being able to understand what’s wrong and help her. As I told her today, I’d love to debug the problem but all I get are blue screams of death. I can’t express how I hate those cries.
Norah was born yesterday, 5 weeks early by emergency c-section but both mum and baby are doing well now. She’s 6lb 3oz and a good healthy baby — although she’s in ICU until her lungs are ready for the big bad world. More photos in the gallery.
