Author: @bazbt3

Husband, father. 2 cats, 1 dog. Cleveland Browns fan. Engineer. English. Prefers asynchronous chat (unreliable). Bought first computer 1981, asking silly questions online since 1997.

Order

There are a lot of things in this life that a good Getting Things Done (GTD) or reminder app will help with when attempting to sustain (or create) a sense or order in one's life.

Order is important.

Quite why I used the Amazon Prime Now delivery service – instead of going to the shop – to order the following escapes me. Necessary, yet…

In order of ordering:

  • A 1kg box of shortbread biscuits,

  • A box of Thorntons chocolates (445g or thereabouts),

  • A squeezy bottle of tomato ketchup (unfortunately Heinz, it's all they have).

In Betweeners

Elaborating on (or maybe not, it's not my place to say) my 'Between' post yesterday, @matigo provided some nicely written (as-ever) insights into a modern curse..

'Curse' is my cruel trick; a word, a hook to drag you in. Oops!

Social burnout.

Most here will have a social networking networking history, may even identify personally with Jason's words… For me it's a case of 'the wrong time of year'.

For you…?

Choice. While I had only IRC and MS Chat, that's all I used. IRC was a one-day thing for me; i can't recall any actual interactions at all. Literally one day. I got online and, within the first month explored every protocol and service available to me as a new Microsoft Network (MSN) customer.

Incidentally, I forgot to mention ICQ in my blog post; a service I used mainly to connect to people I already knew online. In real time. Mine was, probably still is, a 6-digit user ID.

Nowadays though we've dozens of places we can go to express ourselves. There are social networks, forums, niche services… There we can chat about our desires, hopes, dreams… with other like-minded people, hopefully without troublemakers intervening. Most of us want a quiet life when we want a quiet life.

Yes, that.

So, App.net (ADN); it's a place with lots of good memories, good people, but it's been let down by its founders and those in search of a bigger audience.

Now mine's not a massive criticism. I'm hardly there at all, my feeling's more one of a remembrance of the emotional baggage stemming from the SOTN post, the frankly-ridiculous antagonism (I'll never understand why people don't simply block) and the network's inevitable subsequent decline.

And guilt.

I'm not doing #QuoteSunday (always a low-engagement thing) in part due to IFTTT's ADN support shutting down, nor am I running #ThemeMonday (once an entirely different proposition.)

That reminds me, I should really move the #ThemeMonday page at my site and replace it with… Sometime.

I must examine my other social network profiles linking to ADN, to see whether I must move them to where I'm most comfortable calling my social hub.

Or must I?

A perhaps-telling FYI; Last year, despite others not doing, I upgraded my ADN account to 'Developer'. More of a statement of intent, a gesture, an attempt to pay back in… I developed nothing of course but got a vague sense of wellbeing, and a hammer to add to my bio. THIS year I downgraded. To an 'ordinary' paid user account. Not all the way to '40'.

Hollow.

But here I am at 10C, with a Premium account paid-up until 2017 (over the top of Jason's invite) developing an 'app' for 10C. How odd.

So, back to the blog post. Burnout maybe, but I'm happy to call 10centuries.org (10C) home.

One thing to bear in mind; I'm crap at publicising stuff; hence the one successful invite. Kinda successful, I'm hoping the guy I invited will spend a bit more time at 10C…

And that others will follow. There's nothing to lose. No ads, no spam. Really.

And here be (more) Adventures! Maybe.

Insurance

Car insurance: I got home today, opened the insurance company letter, and sat. Quickly.

They think I'll be paying more than £130 per year extra to them.

Ah, no.

A quick price comparison site search shows that, if I'm careful choosing the cover, I could get a policy £500 cheaper than I'd be paying if I allowed inertia to dictate terms.

RAC Insurance: yourselves you can go and fu[CARRIER LOST]

Between

It would be fair to say that I'm between social networks. I don't mean I'm not participating, no. I mean that I'm inhabiting the void between those I used to be active in. Ok, ok, I'm bouncing about in either the Venn diagram voids or the overlaps between services. Or both.

It's an odd sensation.

So, my past:

  • MSN Chat, from early 1997 until autumn 1998 was my entry point into online chat. It was easy. I fell into the What's Cooking Online (WCOL) room entirely by accident and stayed there for a while,
  • Facebook appeared in my life around 2008. It's still there, though you wouldn't know I'd been around since then were you to look at my 'Friends' list. They're pretty-much all people I know, see?
  • btinternet.chatter grabbed me in 1998 as a BT phone customer with the related btinternet ISP, once I'd spread my wings away from the cosy MSN. Though it was shut down some time ago, I occasionally attempt to keep in touch with the lovely people who inhabited it. Closure notwithstanding it's been around 11 years since I was last active there anyway,
  • Twitter, we all know about Twitter; it was my home from 2010 until…
  • I discovered App.net, early in April 2013. A great community, lovely people, an ad-free and owner-meddling-free environment; I can't quite figure out why I'm not there right now…
  • 10Centuries.org is where I 'am' right now though, more of a dipper than prolific. Great people (a number* from ADN) and a comfortable, spam and ad-free environment. The network, as I'm sure you've heard me say, is in an invite-only phase right now. I have some.

Well ok, I do know why I'm not active. I've spent more time programming/developing/attempting to fix and evolve my 10C client – and avoiding talking about it online – than being 'social'. Weird.

*100%.

SIM

Last year, amidst a mood of indecision, I decided to move my expired phone contract to the UK's budget MVNO 'Giffgaff'. It's cheap, user-friendly, 4G, and cheap.

Then, eventually, I started to compare my data speeds with others on different 4G networks, and the rot set in. 'Slow' is the order of the day.

The company I work for grabbed a very tempting mobile discount scheme from their new provider, but I looked around for a more customer-(wallet)-friendly alternative.

My deliberations bear fruit tomorrow; my new contract SIM arrived at the weekend, my current number will be ported between networks sometime during Wednesday.

I had a test of course. The uploads are 3 times my current network's, the downloads 10 times faster.

And I'm getting 3 times the data for the same price.

Which is nice.

Bugs

"Developing an application is not easy."

So I said earlier today, at a time I really couldn't see an end to the failures cascading through my application. It's the weirdest feeling, knowing there's nothing wrong with code; code that resolutely fails to work. And when it does work despite a total absence of things that should make it work, it's the weirdest feeling.

It feels like that scene in 'Men In Black', the one where we're shown to be an utterly-insignificant part of a hopefully more-advanced-than-us civilisation…

For providing the opportunity to exercise my brain, thanks must go to Jason Irwin – creator of the 10Centuries social network! My life would be a lot simpler right now without 10C. Incidentally, I have invites available if you want to have a social change!

Links:

My application.

10Centuries.org

I am @bazbt3.

Steps

A week and a half ago the Sony Lifelog app on my phone announced that I'd passed a milestone: 500,000 recorded steps.

Its not a massive total for the around 5-1/4 months I've been allowing the app to record my comings & goings. It averages less than 3,200 a day. But it means I'm on track for over a million in a year.

A step millionaire.

I'm wondering now what it would have been without the 2 days in London (>33,000) and without Ruby dog…

Thanks; to both bustling metropolis & our chomper.

Invisible

During winter the darker hours bring out the worst in people. I'm not talking about death, mayhem, increased criminality; it's a simple as a disregard for child and personal safety.

Every morning I've been seeing see cyclists ride along busy roads, black clothing, black bags, black bikes. Even on the wrong side of the road. Lights? None. Adults don't seem to care, and children… Well, surely parents and schoolteachers should be monitoring departures and arrivals?

There's a phrase. Most don't seem to know what it means, don't seem to care:

"Personal resonsibility"

noun,

modern, ambitious, ambiguous:

1. An overwhelming reliance on state initiatives to promote a sense of wellbeing in self.

Yesterday evening around 5pm, as I was driving home, I spotted a young man walking past a high hedge above a low wall. That is I eventually spotted him; his clothing (not camo) hid him very effectively. Though visibility was reduced by that time of day, by no means everyone had side- or headlights on…

And don't get me started on drivers of black cars – overwhelmingly the most common group to avoid side- and headlights entirely, Is it a part of the mindset involved in the purchasing decision?

Modern LED car sidelights are annoying too. Daytime running lights at the front, but absent entirely from the rear, bypass common sense entirely. Drivers get in the car safe in the knowledge that people in front can see them…

A stealth, Darwin-Awards-winning society, that's what we have.

Stand

Assembling a new, glass-shelved TV stand is very much like making love to, er…

The hardest bit isn't assembling the stand, a thing with pictogram instructions only – which suggests 2 people would be better at it than you.

The hardest bit isn't manoeuvring the TV on top of it from the old, plainly-incompatible stand rescued when the previous, mammoth, CRT TV eventually met its maker (figuratively!)

The hardest part isn't assembling the anti-tip safety strap behind the telly – which has been moved into a temporary but awkward-for-this-stage location.

No, the hardest part is figuring out which cable should be where to minimise the clutter from the myriad of modern device connections – clutter now painfully-obvious through clear glass.

I'd prepared, obviously, by disconnecting everything and laying it out around the room…

Useless.

So, in the time-honoured tradition of the British male when face-to-face with a certain defeat, I resorted to an anagram:

"Oh duck it, it's goof enough!"