Wheelz Online

I was introduced last week to twitter.  The basic idea of this service is that you have 140 characters to write about what you are doing at that very moment.  I have to confess, its very addictive as not only do you put on what you are doing but  you can also search others and see what people around the globe are doing.  By adding people you follow their days and they can also follow yours so you make a big community of people who can see what is happening in the world at any time.  If anyone wants to follow me on their twitter account, just search for wheelz24

I’ll update more about what i’ve been doing soon I promise.

As a power user and web designer I tend to use multiple monitors on my pc all the time.  And logically I decided to try the same on my macbook.  Now, i know its only a notebook computer but there is a miniDV out and my monitor on my desk is a DVI input.  So off down to the Apple store I went.  I picked up a miniDV to DVI converter and also while I was there I bought a wireless keyboard because I thought if I can hook it up to a full size monitor I could use it at my desk most of the time and I would need a keyboard that doesn’t require me looking at the macbook screen all the time.

So I get home with my good and wired the mac up to the monitor and hey presto! mac on my monitor.  Great I thought.  Then it came to configuring it.  Two options are presented; either cloned screens, which I can’t really see the point of, or expanding the desktop onto both monitors.  The later option is how I configure my PCs to use multiple monitors.

Here is where I have cause to complain about OSX for the first time.  Sure you can have multiple monitors but the laptop screen has to be screen 1 with the apple bar, icons, and taskbar on it.  Now if I’m setting it up with a larger screen, I want to be able to make that screen the No.1 monitor so that all the applications open on it then I can choose what to send down to my mac screen.  I wanted to be able to have my laptop screen with mail and ical on it and use the main screen for Dreamweaver/Flash and Photoshop and have the dock on it, but this is not to be.  If anyone does know how to get over this then please do add a comment and tell me how to do it.

Just when I thought that reading blogs was getting a bit boring, your friend and mine John Dvorak has posted an article which suggests that we are heading for another dot com burst that eclipses the scale of 1999.  You can read the article here.

What I think he fails to realise is that in the original dotcom bubble, the people who were creating the bubble and also died when it burst were startups and VCs.  But the ‘web 2.0′ (I hate that term) is more about social networking, so once a site it up and running, it gets taken over by the ordinary person therefore surviving as long as people want it to.  He takes a pop at “everything from YouTube to the local church has a social-networking angle”.  But the church has a purpose - namely to keep that church’s congregation in touch with each other.  It’s not meant to be the size of YouTube.

Once again Mr Dvorak is predicting the fall of the internet while missing the point of all the things he critisises.

When I first got into web development, my manager at the time gave me a book by Jakob Nielson.  It was something about usability.  I read it from cover to cover back then and I thought I had learn’t a lot.  As time has gone by, i’ve kept an eye on what he writes on his website and it seems to me that he’s more and more out of touch with the living world.  I first noticed this when i read a long article saying that pdf is the devil, and as time goes by I pay less attention to his ramblings.

But wandering around the blogsphere today, i found that he had written ‘an article’ on the evils of blogs and how people should all write interesting and thought provoking articles instead.  I’ve only one thing to say to The Jakob.  Sod off…  I don’t particularly want to write articles and most of the blogs i read would be worse off if they contained articles rather than entries of peoples thoughts and ideas.  So I say today that I give no more attention to him than many other know-it-all’s of the web development world.  Jakob your out of touch now.

As you may know, I have worked for the same company for eight years now and during that time i’ve moved office 3 times, lost all my original work colleages and made few friends because i’m in a small office off the beaten path.  But then 5 years ago I was offered the chance to work on an online project because it had been known that i was a web designer.  So fast forward 5 years and what have I achieved?  Well I still havent managed to educate the people I work with about timescales and managing online projects, I’ve been part of a team that has won 2 major national online learning awards, and still not got any formal recognition from the management.

OK, so I work in the public sector, so there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that I am going to be able to get a payrise out of all the work and recognition.  But a new job title would have been nice.  It starts to get embarrassing when you go to a web conference and have to say that you are a ‘management analyst’  rather than anything to do with new media.  So what do I do?  Well the only thing I can - I lie.  This makes me feel uneasy as I don’t think I should have to lie to my peers about what my company thinks of me.

All this thinking has come about after reading an article on Jeffery Zeldman’s blog about the unsung people of web development.  Its an interesting and is written 10 times better than I could ever do, so please go and have a read.

Last week i undertook my first presentation role.  I spent an hour showing off the benefits and applications that Adobe’s Acrobat 8 can do for online learning.  Now, i’ve worked in online learning for nearly 5 years now and won many awards for my work during this time.  But the thing I’ve always struggled on is getting the ‘powers that be’ to let me incorporate PDF into the technologies used.  I think the PDF format still suffers up to a point with its perception of inaccessiblity which it used to have.

But since 7 and defiantly 8 now, PDF is a very accessible medium and I think after my presentation I’ve got them to accept it.  So now all I have to do is to put what it can do into practice.  What do you think about PDF, I would be interested to hear.

As I log into my work email this morning I get the message I’ve been waiting for.  I now have a place at @media 2007 Europe.  I first went to the @media event last year and had such a great time, both entertaining and interesting that I convinced my line manager to send me again.

So I hope that I get the chance to learn more about current trends this year from the likes of Tantek Celik, Dan Cederholme, Andy Clarke and Molly.  If anyone who reads this is going, please leave a comment and it would be good to hook-up sometime over the two days.

I was doing a spot of surfing some blogs I enjoy reading on web developments and I came across this post by Eric Meyer regarding diversity of speakers at conferences, and it seems like he’s had a lot of negative responses to his take on it. In a nutshell his post said that when he books a speaker to talk at a conference, he looks at the ability to deliver an interesting and useful seminar:

Well, I’m hereby bucking that trend. In my personal view, diversity is not of itself important, and I don’t feel that I have anything to address next time around. What’s important is technical expertise, speaking skills, professional stature, brand appropriateness, and marketability. That’s it. That’s always been the alpha and omega of my thinking, and it will continue to be so the next time, and time after that, and the time after that.

The point he was making was that there shouldn’t be a quota of female, black, white, hispanic etc just to satisfy the politically correct. Speaking as someone who attends one or two conferences a year, I agree totally with him. Why should I pay £400-£600 for two days and then have to listen to someone who is black/female/chinese/ pink with blue spots etc just because it looks wrong if you have too many white men delivering sessions. I want to be able to go and listen to Eric Meyer, Tantek Celik, Dan Cederholm, not because I only listen to men, but because they are top in their fields. Tantek was responsible for IE5 for the mac. Why should I have to listen to someone else talk about web browsers who doesn’t have that insight simply to fit a profile?

I apologise upfront if this sounds sexist/racist - it truly isn’t. If anything its merit-ist..

So, last week I opened my quaterly package from Microsoft which contained Vista Business and Office 2007.  I’ve been playing with Vista Beta 2 for months now, so I thought I had it sorted.  How much different could it be, it seemed that Beta 2 was pretty stable and had most of the final bits on it - or so I thought.

Friday night was spent installing the upgrade from XP.  After 3 hours of trying, my first impression is “Vista sucks”.  It seems that if anything crashed whilst you were logged in, you couldn’t then log out and shut down.  So I was forced to on more than one occasion kill the machine and re-boot.  By 11pm I’d had enough and went to bed.

Saturday morning I approached it with a new view.  I imediatly re-installed the upgrade, which in this edition won’t let you perform a clean install, rather you have to install it over a copy of XP.  But it was looking better than Friday night.  The main problem I found was that too many bits of my hardware still don’t have Vista drivers ready for them, so I spent most of the morning realising that my MoBo maker (Asus) had no drivers for Vista, Creative had only Beta Drivers for Vista and so on.

The final thing I want to moan about today is Windows Live Messenger.  It doesn’t work!!!  8.1 crashes your machine and then you get the problems mentioned earlier.  So at the moment, I don’t have Messenger on my machine to use.

I can see there are some good reasons to upgrade to Vista, the sidebar for one is very useful, but until they get the driver issues sorted it won’t be having a place on my main PC.

Here in the UK, there is a tv show on Channel 5 called “The Gadget Show”.  Its pretty good and it reviews gadgets which isn’t really suprising.  But it also looks at other things techie. One of the things which this series is working on is to campaign for blanket free wifi in major towns and cities in the UK.  Upto now, the only city which has got free wifi in the city is Norwich, which isn’t exactly a happening place (sorry people of Norwich, but it isn’t).

Anyway, the gadget show are asking people to sign up to give their support to the campaign and hopefully something will come out of it so that more towns can get this useful resource rather than having to pay £5 and buy a coffee to get online in the city.  You can sign up and give your support here.