Richard’s blog

Being in Paris to meet Seesmic friends once more today. we went to Dune, cafe/bar where we spent many hours eating various types of meat, drinking wine and seesmicing from laptops and mobile phones. Many photographs were taking. We could see each other without the intermediary of the webcam. It was good.

I’ve met a few new people and made more friends. Vinvin was there, Fred2baro, xtelle, Beatrice,

The event started when i met fred2baro at paris Gare de Lyon. He told me Keziah Jones was playing at one of the metro stations. He’s one of the artists i saw at the Caribana a few months ago. Djamel wasin the crowd for a short moment Once i get to a proper laptop it will be easier to find the relevant videos and upload my own.

Re: @seesmictable : Le Bar est ouvert! …. et pendant ce temps la…

Fin de Fin du du seesmeetup follower cafedune svp

Lifestreaming is not something the mainstream understand yet. they’re still getting to grips with the idea of lost anonimity on a place like facebook. This is visible through the creation of the facebook group to cry about the new facebook.

I’m an early adopter and I love new ways of connecting with people and that’s why I’m sitting in an appartment in Paris after spending a fun night with 20 friends from seesmic (or so). They’re all friends I met through social media. In particular I met them through Seesmic. Imagine posting a video that anyone and everyone can see. I like to describe it as video instant messaging. Record a video of yourself talking about something and wait for your friends to answer in video form

There area number of features on the new facebook that are similar to those of jaiku. These are rss integration, status updates (as in twitter) and commenting. They’re all things that I’ve been playing with for months now. It’s part of my daily life. I understand and embrace this change.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for those I met in the physical world to start tweeting and seesmicing or using jaiku. Will it be a year or two? They did take a year to finally get to facebook after all.

This weekend I’ll be in Paris for another seesmeetup x, an opportunity for French speakers to meet in person after getting to know each other online. They’re good fun.

Seesmeet’up a PARIS le samedi 6?

See some of you there

It’s not often that you see me seated at a PC running windows but when Google Chrome 9was released that’s the OS of choice. I had to test it and so far there are a few features I find of interest.

These featres are seen when looking at the Google Chrome most visited page. Here you can see the 9 most often visited sites as thumbnails. Drag those thumbnails up to the bar above and you’ve got bookmarks for quick access at a later time. This window also displays the search and recent bookmarks tab. So far so good.

As with firefox there is site guessing text that appears for suggested URL’s and for those you may have visited. Type in your username and password and you’ve got the option to save the password once you’re logged in. Very useful for those of us spending our time on a minimum of ten websites a day.

With the tabbing feature I was able to open at least fourty tabs at a time with one minor problem. There was no manner of telling which site was on which tab. As a result they may need to think about creating a list view of tabs, or even implement what we saw in versions of operat ten years ago, the option to resize tabs within the browser. It may be of value.

In the search and URL bar there’s the star, click on it and you can bookmark a page, add the title you want. The usual shortcut keys do the same thing.

Click on the page tab at the right of the search bar and you’ve got one option of particular interest. “Create Application shortuct”. Select this option and you’re given thre options, Desktop, Start Menu and Quicklaunch bar. There, now you’ve got the app as a shortcut link, great for getting straight to the web application you want in one quick move. That may be for twitter, your blog, twitter or any other website you find of interest.

The final feature is the task manager. It allows you to see which websites are open and how many resources they’re using. The three collumns are Memory, CPU and network. It allows you to understand which page is slowing down your system, or if you open several tabs at once which tab has finished loading.

Overall it’s an interesting product and it’s dissapointing that I had to test it on an older windows machine rather than my laptop but so far my opinion of the browser is not that bad. I’d like to see a tab counter implemented as well as a thumbnail view of all the currently opened tabs for quick selection of the site or page I want to see.

When I started reading Made in England by Gentlemen 4 the blog was about technology but over the past few months the subject of the blog has changed. It’s now a blog about walking, and it’s not just any walk. They had decided to spend several months walking the Continental Divide trail and blogging the entire trip.

What I’ve enjoyed are the images and some of the comments. It’s a picture adventure of beautiful lanscapes. It’s just two friends who walk, occasionaly teamed up by a GF or a brother and father before continuing on the journey.

It’s something I’d like to do. Every day I walk for an hour or two, covering about 12 kilometers. It’s nothing in contrast but it’s an important part of my daily routine. It’s been part of my daily routine for years now, since the IB. I love the solitude of the walk. It’s a moment where you’re in your thoughts and the only distraction is the music or podcast you’re listening to. It’s a moment when day dreams and dreams form and where other ideas come to an end.

It’s a point of refreshing the mind.

It’s also about pleasure and endurance. When you start walking every day walking jsut two or three kilometers could seem tiring, then 5-6. Eventually as you get more and more used to the walk you’re taking so the loop gets bigger and the more you need that walk. It’s one of those enjoyable things.

In London I missed not having kilometers of paths to walk down. In London I would walk through central London from one part to another and I’d get to know the whole city. I’d get to see places and how they were linked. I often joked with friends that when you’re in London you should get to a tube station and walk away from it for as long as you’re not tired. Once you’re tired find the next tube station, get back to somewhere you know and travel in another direction.

After living for years in a place you get to know every street and every corner. Every place has a memory and you might even burst out laughing… well not quite. It would look strange. It’s familiarity. It’s that thing that the main character in L’auberge Espagnole talks about when he’s fresh into the city. “at first all the streets are unknown and resemble each other but at the end ever one of them has memories”. that’s when you’ve lived in a place long enough.

Do many of you walk far? Do you walk fast? Is the walk part of something you do everyday?

Today I went to Lausanne for a flashmob waterfight and I enjoyed it. I also got a little wet as you can tell from the second or third video. It was great fun.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

I love it, whilst all the photographers were standing on the sidelines I was right in the middle of the crowd watching as everyone got splashed. I got soaked quite a few times but it’s really fun. Everyone should be in a flashmob water fight at least three or four times in their life, if not more.

It’s the third of a series of waterfights. The first two events took place earlier in summer by the lakeside both in Lausanne and Geneva.

Yestereday night when I should have been sleeping I downloaded a web server x for the Nokia N95 8GB and so far it’s been a lot of fun (albeit a little slow). It has blogging, messaging, photo galleries and more and here’s a little run down of what the interesting features are.

if you’re logged in then you see a number of features:

Blogging x:
This feature allows you to write blog posts and post them. Commenting is possible.

Camera x:
There are two options, the first one allows you to take pictures remotely. I can take pictures from my laptop when I want to.

The second is photo requesting. this feature allows for those visiting your website to ask for a picture of something, for example “I want a picture of the restaurant”. Take the phone, take a picture of the restaurant and send it to the person that may be coming soon.

The Gallery:
The gallery has three options. The first of these options is that you select which pictures you want to share. The second option is to share all phone memory pictures whilst the third is to share all memory card pictures.

Guestbook
I haven’t played with this feature yet but it’s pretty self explanatory.

Contact me x.
There are two ways by which for someone to contact you from the mobile site. the first is by short IM and the second is by SMS. Both of these work quite well even with slow connection speeds.

Presence x
The presence Availability information consists of “Active profile - Silent”, in other words that the phone is silent. That would mean there’s little chance I’ll hear the phone if you call. “Calendar availability - Available lets you know that I’m available. “Call state - Call inactive” means that you can call me since I am not currently using the phone.

Webchat
allows those on the site to chat with the web server user.

Calendar x
The calendar is a quick way to see what events are planned and for when

Messaging:
It’s a nice way of seeing the messages people have sent you and when, in other words you can see all the sms you’ve received on your phone remotely. It’s not something you’d share with the world. Unread messages appear in bold.

Phone Log.
Allows you to see all phone traffic on your phone with the usual three distinctions

Contacts, allows you to see all your contacts.

Conclusion

With more ubiquitous wifi and more forgiving data plans we can expect more and more people to carry the webserver with them. If I take pictures of an event you can connect to my phone and look at the pictures I’ve taken. It’s also an easy way of sharing those embarrasing photos with friends. There’s no video support yet but that’s sure to come and there are other options ready already.

Editing from the phone is fast so blogging from the phone makes more sense than via a laptop, in relation that part of your site. There is also an RSS feed which means that those following you can automatically download any content you generate for viewing when your phone is out of range of free wifi or you select not to use the data plan.

The downside is that it uses battery and the connection drops fairly frequently. Data plans that are only a few megabytes large would soon end up costing you more than it’s worth. The connection speeds are slow so doing anything is laborious.

For more information 2

I currently have a web server running on the n95 but it’s only active when I have free wifi. It’s to see what capabilities there are and so far it’s good. It’s a little slow though.

Whilst the connection is unstable and slow I decided to take the phone and Qik some landscapes from La Dole in Switzerland. Here are a few streams. As more people enjoy streaming live video from interesting locations so this will become a more common site.

What I hope to do next is go to some of the higher peaks and stream from there too. Overtime we could have a nice collection of footage.

Jaiku 10 is up and running once more, from the google servers and it’s faster. It’s also lost no features. In fact it’s gained one thing which will make some you happy. All those who already have unlimited invites so if you’re interested in trying Jaiku from it’s servers, send me a message by e-mail or a DM with your e-mail address and I’ll send you the invite.

In fact just leave a comment and I’ll see your e-mail address that way. Don’t leave it in the comment box itself though.

It only took six days, that’s like a leap year in normal people days.