Monthly Archives: January 2008

I twitter therefore I am

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Eden ProjectI’ve now been twittering for a while. It started out as an experiment. So here are my observations so far:

  • I enjoy twittering.
  • I have built a group of “followers” who provide good feedback (9 at present).
  • I “follow” a small number of others (11 at present).
  • Two of these are organisations using twitter (BBCTech and Endgadget). I’m not sure how long they will survive. The noise to signal ratio is quite high.
  • I enjoy providing feedback to others but I tend to be a bit shy about it for some reason.
  • I normally only twitter in working hours. Twittering about my private life would be too time consuming.
  • I haven’t integrated twitter and facebook.
  • I am showing my twitter on my blog.
  • I still have no idea why I write what I write.

In many respects I use twitter as a diary notepad. If you want to see what I am doing then twitter is probably as good a place as any to find out.

The 11 people that I follow currently generate a lot of output. I work in teams that are a lot larger than that, I’m not sure how well it would scale if I got that same level of output from the larger team.

I can imagine a security person really struggling to get their head around the potential security risks of twitter, and hence the potential appropriate use policy. Suspect that it’s so difficult that they would just say – “don’t use it”.

I’ve tried a number of clients (Twitteroo, TwitBox, Twhirl). I’m settled on twirl for now.  There is still a lot of development to go with these tools and I suspect that we will start to see some clear leaders coming forward quite soon. I moved on from twitteroo because I started to get .net framework crashes on my primary PC and suspected twitteroo. Once I removed it I no longer got the crashes. I moved on quite quickly from Twitbox because URL’s weren’t click-able.

 

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Wearing White Headphones

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Jimmy and Grandad do podcastsMy present from my family at this Christmas time was an iPod Nano 8GB. So I have become the wearer of white headphones for now, that might change in the future because they aren’t the most comfortable or the best quality.

So far I’ve really enjoyed the experience.

The out-of-box experience was quite good, it certainly wasn’t flawless but it was good. It took me a little while to work out the iTunes setting for Album Art and was amazed at how long it too to synched up a few hundred photos.

I was intrigued by the reactions of a number of none technical people. They had a play, but soon put it down because they regarded it as too complicated.

For me, the best part of the iPod experience has to be the way that it handles podcasts. I listen to a lot of them but struggle to listen without interruption. The iPod is flawless in the way that it remembers what has en listened to and also how far through.

I’ve also bought myself an armband to wear down the gym. The weight feels just about right, it’s light enough that I don’t feel it dragging down on my arm so I can focus on doing my exercises and not on the technology.

8GB seems to be just about right, I’ve got over 6GB of audio on it at the moment so the 4GB would certainly have been too small. I don’t think I’ll do too much with video so I can’t see my requirements getting to much bigger for now.

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Happy New Year

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Sunset at Cap FrehelA belated Happy New Year to you all.

Today is my first day back at work after a really good Christmas and New Year break. It’s always a nice returning after the end of year break because the number of emails that need to be caught up on is always low.

Few other of my colleagues are in, most of them extending the break out to a full two weeks, so I’m using the opportunity to do some planning. I’m particularly planning how I’m going to continue the assimilation of the things that I learnt in my personal development training last year. It’s no good having the training if it’s not going to result in any changes.

I’ve also concluded that this is going to be a year of simplification, I’ve taken on too much clutter recently and it’s not helpful.