This that and the other...

Been a while I know.
Here's the news:
- Bought a house with K. Its in Bedfordview - close to where we stay at the moment. Didn't intend to buy it - put in a stupid offer that was accepted, got a bit of buyers remorse and tried to back out of it, but in the end, we decided that it was a good step in the right direction. There goes that ski trip next year...
- K's mom dropped in for a surprise visit two weeks ago. Was good seeing her again. She's in London at the moment visiting with K's aunt before stopping back in SA for a couple of days on her way back to Aus. Speaking of Aus - shame, being a rugby fan must be kak at the moment :-)
- Went to Moyo Melrose Arch this evening with K, her boss and some potential clients. Reason for the trip is that they are negotiating an oil and gas contract in Tanzania at the moment. Sean and Aron seemed like nice guys - hopefully K gets the contract.
- Squash is going well - killed my opponent in the summer league match on Tuesday, 9-3; 9-7; 9-1. Have my club champs match tomorrow against Keith. From past experience, I should take it comfortably. Although, that's what the All Black's thought I guess.
- Played 2 rounds of golf this past weekend. It was tough. I mean, a round of golf on the weekend is a treat, but two rounds! Managed some half decent scores of 88 and 85. Be careful Sean Morgan - this weekend is going to be deadly for you.
- On the work front - all good. Has been a bit slow for my liking over the past few weeks, but some nice ideas floating around, and some killer projects on the horizon.
- Oh, went to the AV/Sony Expo last week. Lusting over the Sony HD DV Cam's. Some great equipment on show. Pity about the purchase procedure though - what a shambles. If you buy anything, including the HDMI cable that I got from the Ellies stand for like 80 bucks, you fill out a form, go to the exit, pay for your goods and then wait for them to be delivered to the till at the exit. You do that for every purchase. I understand the security concerns, but what a joke!
- Finally, will be wearing my Bok golf shirt with pride tomorrow. Ole, Ole Ole Ole.

My iTunes...Apple's answer to Facebook apps

Being an ardent follower of the social networking wave that is sweeping the globe at the moment, and having worked on some local social networking initiatives, I found it quite interesting to read about Apple's latest initiative - MyiTunes. They're hoping to get users to drive more traffic to the iTunes store by developing a couple of nifty widgets. From what I can make out, MyiTunes is a set of widgets that can be added to your blog, allowing you to display your latest iTunes purchases, reviews and favourite artists (in the form of an artists cloud) - based on your interaction with the iTunes website. I can see this as a big hit in countries that can actually make iTunes purchases - and a big competitor to such Facebook apps as the "iLike" app.

Speaking of iTunes - have just read that Google will be launching a competitive service called gBox. Non-DRM mp3's for 99c (US that is).

Shock Horror - The Internet Isn't Backed Up!

No more blogging...You Tube'ing, Facebook'ing, Flickr'ing :-)

Wimax trial disappointment

I signed up for the MWEB wimax trials a couple of weeks ago, and the guys came around to install today. Seems like I'm not in the right area though, as they could only get a maximum of 2 bars out of ten in signal strength.
Was looking forward to some uncapped bandwidth as part of the trial, but I guess I'll have to make do with my adsl connection for the time being.

iPhone Launch problems

Seems like there are a couple of glitches with activation on the new iPhone keyboards. From Adrian Kingsley-Hughes:

The iPhone keyboard issues seem to be a moot point compared to the activation hassles that early iPhone adopters are facing. A poll over at Engadget suggests that over 38% of the 9,000 respondents to the poll are suffering from activation problems and have an iBrick to show for their cash.

Eh eh - iBrick - gotta love it.

iPhone launches in 12 days...

If you haven't heard yet, the iPhone launches in just under two weeks. June 29th to be exact - in the US first, and then Europe, Asia and the rest of the world. Its not very clear when the first batch will be shipped to SA yet, but you can be sure of one thing - getting your hands on one of these puppies will only happen with some serious influence over the next few months.

From what I have been able to read so far, they will retail from around 499USD, and Apple will be shipping somewhere in the region of 3 millions units for launch. So what's the big deal? Why would you want one:

- Well, its another slick looking device from apple for starters.
- Comes with contacts and calendaring functionality - much like any other new mobile phone.
- It got a built in 2 megapixel camera - still not the unique selling feature.
- It can do email. Ok, so which device released in the last few years can't?
- Its an iPod. Yes, an iPod. That's music and video. Making sense now?
- Oh, and it doesn't have any buttons. Its all driven through a revolutionary multi-touch interface.

If you still need convincing, check out these adverts on the iPhone site.

Facebook: Social Networking Tool, or Big Brother?

Came across an interesting video, originally found in an article posted on Groogle, but available on YouTube now, on what Facebook is potentially capable of, given the amount of information that they are collecting. Conspiracy theory? You decide.

27Dinner-Jozi, May 2007

Attended my first 27dinner event last night. Wanted to attend the March event, but already had made plans by that stage. Anyway, so what is a 27dinner event you're asking? Well, its kinda like First Tuesday, but its a dinner event. Held on the 27th of each month, alternating between Cape Town and Jozi, the event is open to anyone who wants to attend, but has a special focus on New Media, blogging, marketing, and other tech related trends and topics. The idea is to get like minded people in the same space to discuss ideas and network over food and wine.
The 27May-Jozi event took place at Primi Piatti, The Zone in Rosebank, and whilst I wasn't blown away with the speakers, it was definitely worthwhile attending.
Colin Daniels spoke about the hype surrounding Bullardgate before turning everyone's attention to The Times, the daily paper that will be made available to Sunday Times subscribers from June (or was that July?) of this year. Colin looks after the online strategy for The Times, so he shared some of his vision for how The Times would like to engage their readers in the online space, and then use that to feed back into the paper. We'll see how successful that turns out to be in the coming months.
Next up was Erik Hersman from White African. He spoke about mashups and taking existing widgets/gadgets and other interesting pieces of code, and putting them to good use in web and mobile driven applications.
Finally, Vinny Lingham who runs Incubeta in Cape Town, spoke about some of his new projects, which include setting up a small Venture Capital firm that will fund startups in SA, as well as a product that he has been working on called Synthasite. The interesting thing about Vinny, is that he sits on the Yahoo advisory board, so he's a big deal in the online space in SA at the moment.
I'll definitely be attending the July dinner.

Facebook

If you haven't yet discovered Facebook, then you'd better, quick! Its another social networking utility that allows you to quickly discover and connect with friends from all over the world, and its currently sweeping through friends and acquaintances around me. Here's a little scenario:

Wednesday: I send Phil an invite to LinkedIn (a networking utility for establishing and maintaining business connections and relationships). Phil in turn sends me an invite to Facebook. I sign up on Facebook and discover that K's sister, who lives in Perth, has also recently signed up. So i add her as a friend.
Thursday: I'm going through the functionality of the site, and stumble across a "find friends" tool. Quickly type in my school, and find that Richard has also signed up to Facebook within the last day or so. I add him as a friend. I then go through the list of companies that I have worked at, and find Dave has a profile. I add him as a friend. Bear in mind now, that these are all people that I see fairly regularly, and besides Dave, nobody has mentioned that they have recently signed up to Facebook.
Friday: I am asked by Francois to be his "friend" on facebook. I do some more searches, and come across Matthew, a guy that I did my honours with and haven't seen for 8 years. He also happens to be friends with Dave's friend Andrew. I know Andrew well, so add him as a friend. Matthew sees this through facebook and adds me as a friend. Marc, another guy from my honours course adds me, and I send Ronald an invite. Suddenly, within the space of 3 days, I have connected with people that I know, from the UK to Australia.

So the point of the post of course, is to a). make you aware of this online wave of social networking utilities that is sweeping across the globe, and b). to encourage you to get your own Facebook profile, and connect.

The Web (2.0) Explained...

Came across this video on YouTube and thought it would make a good post. It explains the evolution of the Web from early days, where content and presentation was important, to the evolved Web (or Web 2.0 as it sometimes referred to) that we know today - an information ecosystem moulded by, and for, its users.

Facelift

You may notice some subtle differences in the blog from today - thats because the folks at Blogger have been working on a new version of the blogger tool for a while now, and I decided that it was time to upgrade to the new version from today.
Some of the new features include:
- Labels: which allow me to tag each piece of content, so that you can view similiar content by clicking on the tag at the bottom of each post - or by using the "Tag" menu in the right hand toolbar.
- Email Posts: there is a little email icon at the end of each post - if you find an article that you think someone else would like to read, feel free to use this icon to email the post to them.
- Enhanced Archive: The use of expandable archive lists makes it easy to filter posts by month or year.
- Profile View: K leaves most of the posting to me. I'm not the only who noticed that - the Blogger guys also saw that I'm the active poster on this site, so they took the liberty of placing my profile up there. I could change it, but I won't. Maybe it'll get K to post something, just to see if her profile appears back up there :-)

There are a bunch of other features that I haven't activated yet. Maybe another day.

Lost...?

Check this out: www.lost.eu/f8d3

The Vaio

Oh, forgot to mention...bought me a Sony Vaio today :-)
Yup...VGN FE28GP - Duo Core, 2 Ghz Centrino, 120GB HDD and 1024MB RAM - this puppy just purrs.
In the words of the Foo Fighters - Its times like these....

Site worthy of a visit...

Every once in a while, you come across a website that blows your mind away. If you haven't ever visited Pandora, you've been seriously missing out.

It really is one of the cleverest uses of technology and music (my two big passions) that I have ever seen. Basically, the guys at Pandora have been working on something called the "Music Genome Project" for the past few years. They've taken thousands of songs, and stripped them down into what they sound like - not who they are sung by or what genre they belong to - but the actual sound of the song. They've then tagged these songs with the categories that they have defined, and provided a tool that allows you to listen to a song, say whether you like it or not, and then based on your decision, they will recommend another song, and another, and another...

The whole point of the project, is to allow the user to build up a "station" of the type of music they like, and then go out and buy the albums (or buy them online if you want). Pure genius.

This site...as a graph!

This image represents the structure of the blog that you are reading (well, technically it has changed since uploading this image, and this blog entry). Confused...? Let me explain. Some guy has written an algorithm that reads the source code of your website, and translates it into an image (check out the site here). The image depicted (click image to enlarge), represents the source code of our blog. In terms of a key, this is what the colours mean:

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Latest from Sony

Ok, so I know I'm a bit of a gadget freak, but how cool is this...
Its the new Sony Mylo handheld music, video, photo, Instant Messaging, Browsing and Skype all-in-one gadget. Check out the clip.

Podcasting...

There is a whole world out there, just waiting to be listened to. Everything from news reports, personal messages, music compilations and poetry, to sporting tips, training techniques and technology lectures. Yup, what I'm referring to, are podcasts.

So, what's a podcast then...? Well, I guess you could say that it is a recording (usually audio, but could also be video) that is available for download, usually to a device like an iPod, for instant, or offline listening. The term podcast is derived from the process of "broadcasting" to "iPods". The difference between a podcast, and any other download though, is that podcasts are usually subscribed to, and the latest content is then delivered to you.

Podcasting has been around for about 2 years now, but South Africans have been quite oblivious to the technology, largely because of the lack of a decent broadband offering. With the explosion of ADSL over the past year or so in SA, podcasting is gaining popularity - so much so that I now read that Tony Leon will be adding podcasting to his list of "campaign tactics", and that Derek The Bandit has also resorted to providing one show a month, via podcast. Check it out here, its pretty good actually.

So anyway, I've found quite a couple of decent podcast sites and resources, so here are a couple, if you're interested in listening:

- no iPod required : an introduction to podcasting
- www.podcast.net : the ultimate podcast directory site, literally hundreds of thousands of recordings.
- MTBcast.com : Mountain biking news
- Active.com : Sporting/Training tips and interviews
- SoundRepublic : DTB's site
- The Onion Radio News : List of "The Onion News" podcasts on podcast.net. One that is worth listening to is - "President Bush Escapes From Weekly Bath"

Oh, also found this interesting snippet on the popularity of podcasting in Wikipedia:
The word about podcasting rapidly spread through the already-popular weblogs of Curry, Winer and other early podcasters and podcast-listeners. Fellow blogger and technology columnist Doc Searls began keeping track of how many "hits" Google found for the word "podcasts" on September 28, 2004. On that day, the result was 24 hits. There were 526 hits on September 30, then 2,750 three days later. The number doubled every few days, passing 100,000 by October 18. A year later, Google found more than 100,000,000 hits on the word "podcasts."

Imagining the Google Future

If you have the time, take a look at this article - its written by some top technology journalists and strategists, and takes a look at four scenario's of where Google may be heading. Scenario 2 seems most likely to me. It talks about the possibly of Google becoming "the" internet. Given the technology, the speed at which web pages are stored and indexed, and their current bank of servers (some 150,000 machines), the scenario paints a picture of people going directly to Google, their a Google browser, and retrieving their information, rather than simply using Google as the search engine - making it more efficient to use that the internet that we know today. Some of the other scenarios seem a little more creative, but they are all equally interesting.

IM Chat is cool, but voice is better...

Since having ADSL installed a month or two back, our lives have changed somewhat. I was warned by colleagues from work - "once you get ADSL, there is no turning back". Anyway, it has made the world of difference to the way we work now - as we're always "connected". If you've ever used MSN, the benefits of being online all the time, especially from home, are quite nice as we have quite a few friends and family members overseas, and the easiest form of communication is via MSN messenger. Take last weekend for example, both K and I were chatting to her dad, who lives in Perth, on two separate laptops. Or the regular chats that I have with Gary (who lives and works in China), our mutual friend and best man at our wedding. Like I said, IM (Instant Messenger) chat is pretty cool, but with an ADSL connection now, we thought we'd give Skype a try. Skype is an application, not too dissimiliar to MSN, that allows you to setup a list of contacts, and then make voice calls to the contacts, using the internet to carry the call. What's better of course, is that its all free. Ok, you do obviously pay for your ADSL every month, but that's a fixed cost now, whether we make use of it or not. Cutting a long story short, we called Gary yesterday and had a 20 minute conversation with him - with surprisingly good quality sound. Every now and then, there was a bit of a break in the speech, but it was simply buffered, and not distored as a cellphone call can become when out of range. We also put a call through to our mate Ronald Tweedie, who lives in Chester in the UK - again, great quality voice conversation, that cost us nothing. Now the trick is to convince K's folks to get a broadband connection at home :-)