Chawlk

1. Drawar
2. Fenxy
3. Decaflon
4. Two Credits
5. Wriging
6. Loose Suits
7. Chixe
8. Dud3s
9. Wing Colors

 

Ok, June 30th - end of this month.

I've barely played it though - stuff gets in the way :(

I'll make an effort to get some pac-time in though :)

It's a fair cop

Link for anyone who can't use google :p ;)

Well, it's amazing what you turn up when you look!

I remember a while back Remember The Milk added a Google Calender option to add tasks to the calender - that worked alright, but what I've just found is their firefox extension to add them to Gmail

This is quite impressive after an initial look around.

The 360 warranty is 3 years now isn't it. I think if I had 3 years out of it and it blew up I'd have got my money's worth out of it.

The other thing, is that if you look at the Wikipedia page for the 360, you can see a list of the different revisions the box went through - you can bet that the problems with the early ones were sorted out in the newer revisions. One of the revisions was to use processors that have a smaller size and kick out less heat. A lot of these problem boxes sent back to MS will have been analysed to death to find out the cause and that information used to revise the next version.

Short of giving them away and making the guarantee infinite, the current deals seem like a steal really considering what you get - even if you only get 3 years use out of it (which I think is highly unlikely given the constant revision that goes in to the making of them).

@Right On - People will change to an ISP that does the job for them. You can already buy films from the XBL movie store and in the UK, most cable companies do on-demand delivery and British Telecom have their own IPTV platform (which also works with Xbox 360). These things are here now as long as you don't buy bottom rung broadband packages with poor limits. People are using things like the BBC iPlayer and the ISP's moan that that put a lot of extra traffic on the network, but it's seen as the way things are going - an opportunity - not something to try and nip in the bud and discourage.

Personally, I have a 330GB monthly limit on my mid-range package and I struggle to go anywhere near that by a huge margin. If it ever became a problem I'd swap.

You have to put these things in to perspective. While they will be replaced under warranty, there is no financial risk, so you may as well just buy one and enjoy it.

As for Blue Ray, that's a different argument, but I have no intention of buying a new DVD format - broadband is getting faster and faster and downloads and other on-demand mechanisms are going to make disks of any kind a waste of time and space.

Hmmm, well I'm old enough to remember and have bought plenty of vinyl (and I mean plenty - it got a bit silly really!). The main reason for buying it was the music. It was nice when the package was well done and the artwork was nice - I appreciated it - but it was a secondary consideration after the music.

I made the change to CD's fairly early, during a time of people moaning about them being small and the artwork not having as much impact as something 4 times the size. And now we have almost done away with physical product all together and if you buy an album online, you get some files, sometimes including a PDF for the booklet that would have come with the CD.

This is progress and good progress. I could get sentimental that I miss having shelves full of stuff gather dust, or I could just be happy that it's in my power to listen to anything in my collection at the click of a mouse or a button press on a remote control (thanks to a Squeezebox).

Because compact discs and vinyl are effectively dead, then there's no reason why each album released can't have a dedicated web site so that your music player can pick up dynamic information about it and large high resolution images as it's being played. There is a lot of scope for this kind of thing really.

So good riddance old physical products as far as I'm concerned.

I still get excited when albums are released by artists who I know go away and take time to make something they love.

I love some of the text that appears - like "Game characters can be customized with glasses, scraggly goatees and pale skin" hehe :)

There are a lot of things that people say will make a big difference to your life that get dismissed but really do make a big difference.

Stopping smoking, having meals at regular times (especially not skipping breakfast) and enough sleep.

Because you get used to how you feel and that is then your bar for what is normal, you don't appreciate that you could feel better. Only by doing these things do you really begin to reap the benefits.

With regard to sleep in particular, I saw a BBC documentary a few years ago where scientists were putting forward the theory that you accumulate a sleep debt as you go along, and even if you decide to start sleeping more hours in order to get back to normal, that sleep dept has to be paid before any benefits will kick in. You're effectively running in a more zombie like state to what you could be doing when your body isn't recovered and running at full power!

That probably sounds worse than the reality - normally if you've been burning the candle at both ends and feel extra tired, it can only take a matter of days before you feel normal again, but I bet that a month or so of planned sleep where you make sure you go to bed with enough time to get 7 or 8 hours would make you feel significantly better towards the end.

Of the three things mentioned at the top, I've done the smoking and meals thing - so maybe I'll experiment with the sleep thing too to see what difference it really makes to me. The first two made a huge difference in how I feel - both surprised me in how I felt as a result.

I think I've been playing it like the original PacMan too much and trying to conserve powerpills to get 4 ghosts with each one - that obviously doesn't matter if you can keep going and eating the ghosts. It seems to be a case of stay alive and just eat everything quickly!

I must admit that when it gets towards the end and I have a reserve of extra lives, I get blase about them.

It's amazing how much depth there is to something that looks simple on the surface!

That's impressive!

On the other hand, Apple has only 5% of the EU phone market and a lot of business is going to take a lot of convincing that the phone isn't just a pretty trinket rather than a work tool. Business bosses want their staff to be able to do their work, not have a portable game and music device that happens to be able to send and receive email.

Blackberry and Windows Mobile both have Exchange integration which feels professional and business like. Not 'Mobile Me' which sounds like a toy, even if it works as you'd hope. I'm unconvinced that anyone running their own Exchange server is going to choose Apple for mobile access. The only people who will benefit are the people who have one of these as a personal phone and need to access their work email in addition to their own personal stuff - and that will cost $90/year won't it? (bargain! :p)

That 5% is going to take a very long time to grow, in the mean time, the competitors will continue to learn and update their products.

From my personal point of view, the phone seems a bit big and has a poor camera which is worse than the first digital camera I bought several years ago. I think it's going to be a few more versions of this phone before anyone who hasn't got rose-tinted Apple glasses really thinks it's the killer product it believes it is.

That is bad news - but a challenge for sure! Once I moved in front of my mates I stopped playing it because it was in the bag! hehe.

It's a similar problem with putting titles to photos. I have well over 3,000 photos on Flickr and each one is individually titled. Sometimes mininal titles are used because I think it's funny that it looks like zero effort has gone in to it - so something like 'A Cow' suffices.

Other times, I'll have a photo that I like and will not upload it for a long time because I know it needs a title and I can't think of one - then inspiration will hit and up it goes.

With photos, it's easy to get away with avoiding titles all together. Some people remove titles all together and this is supposed to be an artistic choice, but I secretly think it's a way to avoid choosing! - I've seen people leave the original filename as their title or even rename them all to ".".

With over 3000 photos, coming up with unique titles because increasingly difficult, but when I look back at my very old photos, the titles are stale and boring compared to the more recent ones where I've made more of an effort.

Personally I like mixing it up with short titles, funny titles and bizarre titles that seem to make little sense (but actually do).

Because I then go on to post blog entries and they contain photos that I've already put titles to, then that title is probably easier to arrive at. But it's also true to say that when you're posting photos, people are less interested in the blog post title than looking at the pics! That's no reason not to try though :)

I look after IT for the organization I work for. Traditionally we've used Windows machines and will continue to do so. Any alternative is just a huge list of problems we could do without.

Despite the press and general anecdotal remarks Vista gets, from my point of view the Vista machines are far easier to manage than their XP counterparts. As a home Vista user, you tend to concentrate on the bits you can see and things that behave differently to what you were used to before with XP. But at work, Vista (we use almost entirely Vista Business 64bit) is the most stable and reliable our desktops and laptops have even been, and they're now better managed and looked after than ever before thanks to improvements built in to manage them and improved tools for doing that at the server end.

Anyone who needs to compete with Windows in business environments needs to get a whole range of facilities in place before it can be considered.

As a home user, you can pick and choose your OS and computer based on your own needs and preferences. At work it needs to do whatever is needed for your job - and these days that most likely means Windows related software unless you're in a niche of some kind.

I used to be a programmer and worked on a product that was multi-platform - DOS, Windows and various flavours of Unix. There were hundreds of customer sites using the Windows version, a few still used the DOS version and I was only ever aware of two running the Unix version. The Unix sites were harder to support due to the relative lack of skills compared to the amount of Windows knowledge you could find quickly. In all of this time (last 10/15 years), I was only asked once if any of the software we work on would work on a Mac and that was in the last two months.

If you start a business up and need some business software to manage it, using Windows will give you the choice of the best stuff. Using Windows also means that a fair proportion of the users will be at least familiar with Windows so get off to a flying start when learning to use the software.

Another problem is that with Apple, you're putting all of your eggs in the basket of one vendor. Nobody wants a dependency like that. Getting hardware, software and the operating systems from different places gives you a lot more buying power and options.

I'd love to see a working Mac network that actually runs some decent business software and is easily managed and maintained. I really can't imagine how that would be beneficial to anyone involved though.

It's much worse in the UK, Quicken isn't developed for the UK any more and Microsoft Money hasn't had a version out since 2004/2005 and support for that stops this month.

Chief Wiggum

They all come out at night. Or in this case, the day

And from The IT Crowd...

Roy: 'If you were a mass murderer what would you call yourself?'
Moss: 'I'd call myself The Gardener..and I'd leave a rose at the scene of every crime...'
Roy: 'And what would your murder weapon be?'
Moss: 'A Hammer...'

Give him a break, he's just been Earthquaked!

Flickr.

It isn't just a place to store photos. It's a major contact point for friends. There's nothing else like it for me.

The time zone thing caused me to go and look it up each time or just wander in to the room anyway to see if anything was happening (more likely!).

But then I discovered I could add extra clocks in Vista, so that made life easier. This one would be 2AM so it's not likely.

One thing I find slightly awkward is that clips seem to be the default view rather than notes so every time I move from one category to another within one of the sites, it changes back to clips and I have to click on the notes button again.

It'd be handy to have a user preference tick box for which of the two they'd prefer to be the first choice.

Or is there a navigational trick to avoid what I'm doing?

If it were a tree Chawlk would be the trunk and the other sites would be the branches

That's a very nice description :)

I'm quite impressed that it uses XMPP / Jabber and I've heard that it's going to be opened up so that you can use a regular client for it.

Hopefully between this and Google Chat (that is bundled in with Gmail so lots of people have it), an open standard for instant messaging will take over and eventually force the hand of the old closed networks.

I'd love to just use Jabber for everything and not have to worry about friends with accounts locked in to MSN or similar.

Well, I got in to it around 5 years ago, but the last 2 years haven't done much at all. This was due to all sorts of silly reasons (like having the worst summer ever last year where it just rained and rained all the time).

I'm intending to give my bike a bit of attention to make sure it's ok and get back in to it. I know it's going to be hard to get back in to it again though.

I've got loads of old mountain biking photos on Flickr and hope to add more when I get back on the bike this year.

In fact, it was probably the mountain biking that got me in to photography really. Photography doesn't keep you as fit as mountain biking though so I need to do both again!

It was a good laugh again. Cheers folks.

I like Robert Rankin. Although more for the humour than any fantasy/sci-fi element. It's probably very British, but I love story elements such as

a)everyone is more interested in a darts match at the local pub than an impending alien invasion
b)a planet where the TV was invented before the wheel
c)Guru type character driving a car that runs on water spotted filling up with 4star.
d)Elvis time travelling.
e)Reincarnated indian chief Sitting Bull working as a councillor in Brentford.

He describes his style as far fetched fiction. It is that. Ridiculous but funny. Pratchet wouldn't mention frotteurism in his books, Rankin would! :)

I like the sound of the smite button - I'll give all of my points back if you let me press it! :)

It's always worth stopping by deathlist.net - very entertaining!