Alex Muller

Been around for a while, but I only just saw it on the RealMac photo stream.

I don’t need to say anything more… the image accompanying this post does it all.

Grab one from http://www.faceyourmanga.com/.

I wish I could draw – might be something to practice and learn this year.

Email is really important to me, especially at the moment – I’m going to be moving a fair bit over the next few months, but my email can stay in one place (the cloud, if you don’t cringe every time you hear that). Like just about every geek, I’m in love with what Google have achieved with Gmail. The simplicity, while at the same time managing to offer every feature I could need along with bucket loads of storage (all for free) is amazing.

This one is a screenshot of the webmail system implemented at York University at the moment:

Wow. While I’m sure there were reasons for using this software, I’d be curious to know what advantages it offers over MS Exchange Server or Google Apps. Let’s be honest, it’s not as pretty as either of them.

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One thing that really concerns me is whether I’ll be able to hang onto my email for years to come. I’m a complete hoarder, so I have this irrational urge to want to keep every message received… which is why Gmail appeals so much.

For the last four years, I’ve had all my email from my school redirected to my ‘personal’ Gmail account. Having left school, I’m over the moon that I still have 524 emails about crap like my A Level choices. You won’t understand this unless you’re stupidly crazy-obsessive like me, but just to have the ability to be able to read any of that is great. I haven’t even started at York yet and I’ve already set up redirection using their online IT account system; I don’t want to leave the university and lose four years worth of correspondence with professors and friends.

What’s the absolute worst case scenario right now? That Google goes bump, or decides it can’t be arsed to keep Gmail ticking along anymore, but something tells me that won’t happen just yet. This is an issue that’s going to become even more important than it is right now: the ability for users to extract their data from a service and move somewhere else. Someone clever already took the idea and gave it a name.

I’ve opened (with difficulty) a student account with Natwest – anecdotally, it’s incredible to see how well they’ve done just by offering a free student railcard (which gives one third off train fares). The guy in Barclays tried to sell me on free cinema tickets… faced with a choice between cheaper travel between York and London (which I actually need to do) and watching the latest and greatest in a cheap cinema somewhere – well, it was obvious for me.

Also, we’re not allowed more than one student account, but nobody can really put their finger on the exact reason why. The (same) guy on the reception in Barclays was under the impression that the banks were doing it for our benefit; by not allowing us two interest-free overdrafts (which could get up to £3000), they’re not letting us financially ruin ourselves yet. After he consulted someone else, I was told it was for "tax reasons". How… specific.

Lastly, I’m no longer sure how this ‘one account only’ policy is enforced. Barclays said it was through direct communication between the major UK banks, but my Dad wonders whether that raises some interesting Data Protection Act problems. One of those things we’re not supposed to know.

Everything I’ve learnt at St Paul’s School (Wikipedia) has been on the same campus, from September 1998 until this summer, when I left for the final time. I started this post at the beginning of December 2007 in the hope that things would be fresher in my mind than they are now (that’s because it had a couple of paragraphs on everything I thought was wrong with the place; I decided I didn’t want those hanging around).

There are so many fantastic things that I need to list and, as much of a cliché as it sounds, I really don’t know where to begin. I do know that I’ll have run out of positive adjectives by the end of this post. The friends I’ve made have been the best, and we’ve had more awesome moments than I can remember. I really hate the fact that I’m listening to Eagles – Take It to the Limit while writing this, because it’s making me well up inside – that said, any song would probably do the same right now. The long lunches, sitting talking about such specific stereotypical rubbish as “girls” and “the weekend” for two hours, never failed to put a smile on my face. Conversations about sporks and Adam snorting salt won’t be forgotten any time soon.

The second great thing was the teaching staff. This is the place where I have to mention people, if only so that I remember them more clearly; Dr Gerry Leversha, my tutor for five years, who helped take care of just about every problem I ever had – one of the most intelligent, kind and considerate people in the place, and I was lucky to know him; David Smith, head of ICT since the beginning of 2007, has changed the department (and the way it’s thought of) for the better in so many ways; and finally Okan Avni, for dealing with my UCAS application fantastically, and not complaining when I kept on letting it get behind.

There are too many others to mention that I could fill a book with names. To finish: Alex Wilson, Jenifer Ball, Richard Barker, Chris Fry, and even back to James Renshaw when I was an eleven year old learning Latin. David Emery deserves a mention; he was never really a teacher to me, but just such a brilliant person. Let’s face it, they’ve all had the fun of writing reports about me for the last nine years, so it’s only fair I get my chance to mention them now ;-)

I have no idea how to end this. No idea at all, so it’s going to be fast. How about just… thank you.

I’ve been messing about a bit with the time lapse movie feature that’s built into the Canon PowerShot G9 (a gorgeous camera, by the way, and I can’t wait to see what they do with the G10). Here are my efforts so far:

Jersey from Alex Muller on Vimeo. (more…)

A comparison between how Apple advertise their SMS application being used, and how it’s actually used (by me and a friend, at least…)

Spot the difference:

Our spelling and grammar is impeccable.

Looking over logs for this site, I saw someone found one of my old posts by searching Google for “i accepted a friend request of facebook from my pupil” (search). Incidentally, the post they landed on wasn’t exactly what they were looking for (friend facebook teacher pupil would have yielded much more relevant results).

Anyway, my question was going to be: how much of a privacy issue is Google Analytics? This isn’t anywhere near a major site, meaning my stats are much easier to go through on a person-by-person basis. It took five minutes to find out that this guy (or gal) found the site from Google using the above phrase, is in the Wallington area of London and was using Firefox on Windows at a screen resolution of 1024×768. Oh, and from a cable modem.

I don’t know whether this actually worries anyone. By the way, if I was getting 22.6 million uniques (watch out, Digg) I probably wouldn’t bother going through like this. And if it does bother you, you can install the Adblock Plus Firefox extension and then install The Tracking Filter list to remove all “tracking & privacy invasion” related things.

Seeing as people seem to be asking this the whole time at the moment, have a run-down of the Mac apps I need, use and love. And leave any I’ve forgotten in the comments if you feel like it. Because I’m a student, and we’re all totally stereotypically broke, I’m going to go for the free stuff…

Perian? Remember that we’re students, meaning that we’re all vile people who download movies illegally or watch porn or do some other video related crap with our computers. Install this open-source set of video codecs and watch your problems disappear. Also consider installing VLC as an alternative video player.

Growl? A system-wide notification system. I get pinged for instant messages, file downloads finishing, new things being posted to Twitter. It’s shiny, pretty and there’s no reason not to have it.

Adium? The best IM application out there. Really, I don’t even need to justify it. If you can find me something better today, I’ll eat something a lot more interesting than my hat.

Quicksilver? This takes some getting your head around. To start, think of it as a nicer Spotlight. Start playing with plugins and triggers (I’ll hand you over to Merlin Mann for that) and things only get better.

Firefox? Safari works, but I prefer this. Extensions win it for me, easily.

Google have some nice stuff for the Mac up on their site. Take a peek.

That’s my list. Let me know if I missed anything…

MobileChat’s a cool application for the iPhone, costing £1.79 – the killer feature is that it keeps your IM sessions open when you drop connectivity from the phone so that you can pick them up afterwards. Check out this video of my experience so far:

Yep. In the approximately four days I’ve had it, I’ve been able to connect to their servers exactly once: when testing it with my brother. This is the reason the App Store needs a refund mechanism.

Wednesday afternoon, Arnie, Michael and I saw a talk by Will Wright in the Regent Street Apple Store. Will is the creator of what EA is publicising as “the most anticipated game of 2008″ (perhaps a stretch, but it’s definitely a line for the ads to use), Spore. He spoke about the creation of the game, its reception so far and gave a quick demo.

I would quote what he said, but I didn’t have my journalist hat on at the time (read: couldn’t be arsed to take notes), so I’ll have to paraphrase. His development group took cues from (and this is a quote) “Facebook and Myspace” when designing the community and social interaction features of the game. In other words, God help us all. Disclaimer: God may or may not exist, depending on your preference du jour.

Judging by the figures he gave, Spore Creature Creator really has taken off. I’m remembering numbers like there being 1.5 million species on Earth, and so far Spore users have created 3.8 million. There’s a great graph he used that you can see on Flickr, which kind of shows the boom. Apparently what God managed in seven days, Spore users did in eighteen. And therefore they are 38% God.

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p>Spore is out this coming Friday (the 5th September) and I’m going to be doing my best to be getting my hands on a copy. As is my brother, but only after seeing what the Spore Penis Monster can do.