New Adventures in Technology

We are now in New York.

Wednesday was a very long day. We got up at 3:30am UK time, and didn’t arrive at our hotel until the sort of time we would normally be thinking of going to bed. Despite this, we went to Starbucks for a coffee (there are no coffee making facilities in our room), and then wandered to Times Square to look at the pretty lights and generally marvel at how big and alive everything feels. We then went to the restaurant next to our hotel to grab food and drink before getting a stupidly early night (8pm NY time, which felt like 1am).

Thursday (Christmas Eve) involved a lot of shopping (or rather wandering around shops and not buying a lot). We also saw lots of Christmas celebrations which made me realise how bad the UK is at celebrating Christmas. I managed to stay up until 10pm, and seem to have slipped back into a half decent sleeping pattern.

Today (so far) we have wandered around Central Park, taken lots of photographs, and eaten delicious bagels. Tomorrow we plan on doing more shopping (proper shopping this time) along with a visit to the Museum of Modern Art to see Tim Burton’s exhibition.

All in all, I think I like this city. Some things about it are strange though. I really like the hotel we’re in, but it does lack a bar (there is a mini bar, but with no price list I’m not risking it), and we could really do with a way to make coffee in the room. On the bright side, we’re a stones throw from Starbucks and about 20 places to eat and drink, so it’s hardly a massive chore to go out, explore, and try out lots of different nice food (on Wednesday I had the best pizza I’ve had for ages, and everything we’ve eaten so far has been great).

The first batch of photos should be on Facebook soon.

I’d considered moving my email to Google Apps for a while. Largely because most of the webspace I have here is taken up with this blog, and I found myself having to use complicated backup methods to ensure I didn’t lose mail. So on Friday night I set up teknostatik.org with Google Apps (Mail, Calendar and Docs only at present), and I now have 8Gb of email storage (as well as a backup of everything useful from the last 5 years). I’ve also configured all my other addresses to point at the new domain, so that anything I get sent will still reach me (I had a couple of mail blips recently, the last one on Thursday/Friday), but anything new I send out will come from andy @ teknostatik.org. While I’m still using Thunderbird at present, I do have the option of the gmail interface should I choose, and I think I’ve managed to set up IMAP so it works exactly as it did before.

So yes, all change here, but hopefully a change for the better.

I think I might have already written about Mozilla Weave, but as there is a new version out today I think it warrants a mention. Weave does one small thing, but does it very well. That small thing is that it takes your preferences, history, bookmarks, tabs and saved passwords (if you have saved passwords) and syncs them with other instances of Firefox. I find this invaluable, as I often hop between my main workstation and my netbook, and it basically lets me bookmark things for later and have them show up on all my computers. Between this and Dropbox, I pretty much have access to everything important wherever I am, which helps with productivity, and ensures (theoretically) that I don’t forget things.

• The Complete Guide to Google Wave
• Lots of Google Wave bots 

Hopefully the first link will give people more of an idea what it is all about, and the second link will give some idea of the scope of what it is capable of doing with a bit of tweaking.

This week I’ve largely been:

• Listening to the new albums by The Flaming Lips, Atlas Sound, Charlotte Hatherley and Broadcast (all of which I’m really enjoying)
• Updating my main workstation to Ubuntu 9.10
• Learning about Google Wave
• Trying to juggle various work tasks (and not dropping anything hopefully).

Oh, and I still hate this time of year. Even though we had no annoying begging children this year, there is still the firework-hating dog to deal with.

I’ve just watched the latest two episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Yes, it’s kids TV, but it’s also something any Doctor Who fan needs to watch.

It’s on iPlayer as of now:

Episode 1
Episode 2

At various points in the last few days I’ve been fairly convinced that I’m ill. I’ve had a sore throat, various wheezing fits, and a general sense of tiredness that sleep does not fix.  The annoying thing is that each “episode” only lasts a few hours and then I feel fine again. Maybe it’s my super-immune system kicking in, or maybe I just need a holiday and I’m not ill at all.

In other (more relevant) news, I’ve been losing myself in the new Flaming Lips album for days. It’s epic (over an hour and a half if you download the iTunes version), and a very challenging listen, but if you like music that makes you think and that is a little (lot) to the left of the mainstream then I’d very much recommend it. I’m also liking the new Califone album (for those times when I need to be soothed rather than challenged), but have otherwise not bought a great deal of new music recently.

Of course, by “recently” I mean this month.

To me, Windows 7 doesn’t seem much of an improvement on Vista. What is does do is return to making me think that the look and feel was modelled on a child’s toy. With XP it was Fisher Price, with Vista it was some flashy Japanese toy that looked good but no-one played with. And with 7 it is Lego. Just look at the dock and tell me I’m not right.

What with Snow Leopard being underwhelming, and Windows 7 not exactly making me want to switch back, I think Ubuntu 9.10 has me totally sold in the Autumn 2009 OS wars.

But there again, I’m ever so slightly biased.

I’ve written about this before, but after reading the whole book this weekend I thought it was worth another mention.

It’s a book about communities, written by Jono Bacon (Ubuntu’s Community Manager). What I like about it is that it gives a great insight on what it is like to be part of a community where creative people work together to make something great, but where the reward is not financial. I think anyone who is involved in any sort of voluntary activity would get something out of it, and I’m certainly looking at my own community involvement in a new light as a result of reading it.

The Art of Community is available to buy (or to download for free) from http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/.

I’m really taken with the debut album by The Big Pink. It reminds me of all sorts of other things, but above all it sounds like a record that really belongs on 4AD records. I’m partly reminded of The Wolfgang Press and Dif Juz, but also a lot of 90’s shoegazing bands.

It’s certainly well worth 11 emusic credits, and probably worth a lot more than that.