Alex Muller

Happy Christmas to everyone out there – honestly, I’ve never had a 25th December where the web is used so much, with greetings over Facebook and instant messaging springing to mind… anyway, before I get back to the absolute awesomeness of the entire family crammed into a room that really isn’t big enough to hold them, the Christmas Wikipedia article actually made me burst out laughing this morning:

"This article documents a current event. Information may change rapidly as the event progresses."

Merry Christmas, and a very happy New Year.

I love being able to post about Christmas presents safe in the knowledge that the person concerned will never ever read this :-)

The Nokia 2630 is an absolutely gorgeous phone. Sure, it might not be as flashy or desirable as an iPhone, but we’re talking about a very different target market here. And damn, does this get the job done, ticks all the boxes – yes, I know these specs won’t appeal to most of the (tech-savvy) people reading this, but I don’t care; camera (albeit VGA), Bluetooth 2.0, an FM radio, and it’s incredibly thin. The UI is classic Nokia, which makes it really easy to use, and the text is sufficiently large that even the (kinda) ageing recipient will be able to read it easily.

The best part: just £50, including a tenner of Vodafone "Pay as you talk" top-up. If I ever need a phone in a hurry, I’m going straight for one of these.

Attached photo is by liewcf on Flickr, Creative Commons license

I’m sure friends of mine will be absolutely shocked to hear this, but I’ve fallen in love with Apple all over again. After taking my flickering MacBook to the Regent Street Genius Bar for the third time, they caved and completely replaced it for me. The only catch (so far as I can tell now) was that I had to get the tube to Brent Cross, but apart from that they were absolutely fantastic.

So I now have a MacBook that’s 0.2 GHz faster, has a 40 GB larger hard drive, and an X3100 instead of a GMA950. Oh, and the screen doesn’t flicker anymore :-)

By the way, to all the people on the northern most (Edgware branch) of the Northern Line, please try and smile just a little bit more… you all look so crazily depressed.

Taken from Transport for London’s online "Journey history" feature, which allows you to see where you’ve been on your Oyster card, at what time, and how much it cost (by the way, it’s a fantastic feature – except for this).

For legal reasons we are only able to display up to eight weeks of data.

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p>Allow me to translate: for legal reasons, we can only show you where you’ve been for the past eight weeks. Jeez, just imagine what would happen if I could see where I travelled to nine weeks ago…

End of school term means hardly any work to do, so I spent the evening playing with (learning?) my dad’s Nikon D80, seeing as I had pretty much no clue how to use it before now. I’ve been through Lifehacker’s tutorials (part one and part two) on mastering your digital SLR in both Program and Manual mode.

(more…)

I believe that if a company seriously impresses me in a certain area, it’s worth giving them as much praise as I can about it – in that hope that it might just cause other companies to improve. To that end, this blog went down for a couple of hours last night because of a MySQL issue with the shared server it’s running on… and, here comes the plug: I sent Bluehost a support ticket, which they replied to within half a day.

The response I got was fast, polite, friendly and personal – a lot more than it needed to be, at least. Perhaps it’s a sad realisation of just how rubbish companies can be to their customers these days, but the fact that Bluehost were so great gave me a nice feeling inside. And I don’t care how that sounds.

Recommended, without a doubt.

Last night I went to see Hellogoodbye, Say Anything, Go:Audio and Sherwood at the Carling Academy Brixton. Honestly, first gig I’ve ever been to, and it was so much fun. I actually can’t hear a thing right now, which isn’t great – but long-term, that’s got to be worth it.

Made Up Stories wasn’t bad, coming from a band I’d never heard of before, and Say Anything ending with Alive With The Glory of Love was… I want to use the word awesome, but feel like I’ve been saying it too much recently.

And then Hellogoodbye came on. To put it one way, you’d be pretty hard pressed to make me find a song that they played that wasn’t fantastic. I’m completely wow’ed, a shock and awe kinda moment. Everyone warned me that once I started listening to the "normal" songs again they just wouldn’t do it anymore, and now I see how right people were. They sound tinny and unfulfilling, which is such a shame – the associated positive effect is that I’ll just have to go and see them again live sometime – the negative is that this is their last tour for a while, to give them time to work on a new album.

Little update: Somebody’s posted three (1, 2, 3) videos on YouTube

Yeah, I know the image is of the The Maccabees from Nov ’06 – just happens to be nicely (CC) licensed from Scott Roberts on Flickr

Link found on GTBacchus‘ user page on Wikipedia (clicky pic for bigger, as everywhere…)

Just a quick note to say many thanks to Jeremy Keith, who came to St Paul’s last Tuesday (the 4th) to talk about Designing the Social Web. It was fantastically well received by all, and I wish I’d had the chance to stay and chat over lunch afterwards…

Jeremy’s written something about the day on his blog, for those interested.

This was slightly too long to tweet about, but I needed to get it out of my system:

If somebody has a disgusting habit, I can cope.

If somebody has a disgusting habit and proceeds to drop their litter from it all over the place, I get really irritated.

For some reason, a cigarette packet outside Gunnersbury tube station today pushed me over the edge a little bit. No worries, I didn’t do anything weird. It just made me think about it.