Month: August 2009

Stitching together social networking

Posted on by Andy

I don’t think I’m addicted to these things, but I do use social networking a fair bit.

On the microblogging front I use Twitter (mostly posting via Identi.ca).

For the classic social networking stuff I’m on Facebook and LinkedIn.

I’m scrobbling my audio to last.fm, there is of course this blog receiving occasional posts and I’ve been on IRC for far too long. I’m also on Jabber.

I’m reasonably happy with how this is all stitched together from a publishing point of view, but how are people supposed to find each other on all of these?

Out of the networks I’m in, Facebook is probably the easiest way for you to find people since you can see who knows who and work from there, but then are you supposed to put their names into the search of every other thing you are on? Or are you supposed to tell people everything you’re on every time you add them to any of them? This is clearly stupid.

I once heard about FOAF and how it was supposed to solve all of this. Hardly anyone else seems to have heard about that.

OpenID seems promising. At least once each person has a canonical URL that identifies them, they could put some machine-readable thing on there (like FOAF) that enumerates every other social network they are in so you can see what overlaps.

So why don’t more of these services do this? Is it because the commercial ones (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo, …) are scared of acknowledging the existence of Other Places To Point Your Eyeballs? Maybe the revolution could start by something like Identi.ca reading some FOAF from your OpenID provider to tell other Identi.ca users what social circles you mingle in and how they overlap with theirs?

And no I don’t yet use OpenID, because I don’t actually have a use for it yet, but if someone like Identi.ca did this then I would!

lastminute.com strangeness

Posted on by Andy

I booked a hotel on lastminute.com and accidentally did 4 nights when I meant to do 5. Well actually what I did was I booked Eurostar for 5 nights when I meant to do 4, and Eurostar is not refundable or amendable, so the “best” thing to do was take an extra day of holiday. Doh.

Anyway, I asked lastminute what to do and they said to book the extra night as a separate order and they’d get the hotel to merge them.

This I did, and it ended up £4 cheaper than the 5 nights would have done to begin with.

wtf.

Still, good going lastminute.com, thanks for being more helpful than Eurostar!

Advice to Somerset House Summer Screen visitors

Posted on by Andy

Somerset House for the last few years has screened some open air movies each summer. Here’s some advice if you’re going.

  • Do arrive 2+ hours before the movie starts when the doors open, as space goes quickly and you’ll want to stake your claim. Have a picnic.
  • Do not bring any glass bottles, they’ll only make you decant it all into plastic cups before entry.
  • Do bring a blanket and some cushions to sit on. There’s no seats, just the stone floor of the courtyard. They sell blankets and cushions at extortionate prices.
  • Do bring plenty of food and drink, otherwise you’ll have to pay extortionate prices at their (cash only) bar.
  • Do get cash out first, if you’re going to give them money. They don’t accept plastic and have no cash machines, and there is no re-admittance.
  • Do get your junk food first and bring it in. Pizza Express, Krispy Kreme and Caffé Nero are all nearby if you crave them, but there is no re-admittance.
  • Do bring umbrellaswaterproofs. This is British Summer – it might rain (or hail!). That would be pretty miserable and I’m not sure I’d stay in that, but bring them anyway!
  • Do bring extra layers of clothing and maybe an extra blanket. Sitting still at night can be cold even in the summer.

We only failed at bit at the last one, having brought only one extra layer of clothing, but it wasn’t too bad. Experience highly recommended!

ow ow ow

Posted on by Andy

For the last 2 days I’ve been feeling shooting pains in one part of my head, a bit like a migraine. My eye on the same side felt a bit sore as well but I couldn’t see anything really wrong with it. It seemed to get better if I took my glasses off for a while, but then when I’m doing that I’m usually asleep, so I thought I was just tired or stressed or something.

This morning it got really irritating and my eye felt worse also so I went and had a good look at it, rolling my eye around a bit. What I found was an eyelash stuck under the bottom of the orb of my eye. By rolling my eye upward as far as I could I could just see (with my other eye!) the end of the eyelash poking out between the eyeball and the socket.

I managed to fish it out with a cotton wool pokey stick thing and I feel so much better now, but the thing that gets me is that the eyelash poking my eye or whatever was causing me pain that felt like it was actually inside my skull near the crown of my head.

So next time you have shooting pain inside your skull it may not be the alien implant activating your killing spree, but instead just something stuck in your eye.