The Beach and Censorship
These two topics are not related.
As an update to friends and family, Rob took me to the beach to camp for my birthday. It was fun, and also sandy. And sometimes wet. I am opposed to wet clothing and especially combining it with sand. But despite all that, I had an amazing time. Thanks Rob! And thanks to everyone else that did a little something for my birthday. It was great!
Onto the censorship part. A couple of things have been bouncing around in the news, the limited news, that I read online. China’s firewall. And now Iran doing the same thing. China tells Google to take porn out of its search results. Google agrees to it. Iran wants to monitor all online information transfer of its citizens, so Nokia and Siemens team up to do it. China wants filtering software that will do basically the same thing, and some company agrees to do it.
If there’s one thing I firmly believe in, it’s freedom. Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. Freedom of the press. The power of the people! It really upsets me that these attempts to make Brave New World real are succeeding in any way.
“I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.” – Emiliano Zapata
Filed under: Family, Friends, Life, Technology | Leave a Comment
Tags: beach, birthday, censorship, china, freedom, google, iran, nokia, siemens
The Everything Home Page
Lately I’ve been exploring the wonderful world of customised homepages. There’s the Google homepage, iGoogle. I’ve heard complaints that it doesn’t load as fast as the regular Google homepage, which is a problem for people who more often than not are pulling up their browser simply to search in Google for something. If you’re like me, you won’t be using most of the little applications available to you. You might want to see all your latest news in one place, rather than having to click through multiple websites. And you might want to access all your social networking sites in one place, but with all the functionality.
There are some other takes out there on the customised Google homepage. For example, Netvibes and Pageflakes both use the Google search bar at the top. I’m not sure what the load times typically are, but Netvibes seemed to load pretty quickly, and Pageflakes did give me a little trouble. It seems that Netvibes is an all-around better version of Pageflakes. Users can have multiple homepages with multiple tabs, create public pages for others to view, and there’s the premium version that businesses can use to make their custom homepage easily adopted by others.
Though Pageflakes seems to offer more design customisation for the average user, Netvibes has prettier themes to choose from and offers unique options for advanced business versions. Pageflakes will accept CSS customising, but Netvibes seemed to be more of a pain when it comes to things like that. How do I round the corners on my tabs? Give them gradients? Make them transparent? The little things that make page designs look modern and sleek can’t easily be done without selecting from an already available theme. All in all, I’d say Netvibes is certainly doing the best so far.
There’s another option that seems to fall in a category of its own. Symbaloo is a customised homepage that looks more like your iPhone home screen than the usual customised homepage. There’s a middle block that loads the Google search bar, quite quickly. And you can move around little squares that can serve simply as bookmarks or load search bars for other sections or websites in that middle block. There are additional pages for a news feed that loads blocks of image. When you hover over the images, you can get the headline and lead. You can also load your news and blog feeds in a separate window, but it serves simply as a list, without the presentation functionality of Netvibes. It would be really great for Symbaloo to add a news page where you choose the sources it pulls from, so you could end up with a page of image blocks that have all art news from design blogs of your choice.
But then, after considering those four, I stumbled upon something quite different. Streamy.com has a completely different interface and a cleaner approach to loading your blog and news feeds, with images. It integrates AIM, Google chat, and an internal Streamy chat function among others. You can make friends with other Streamy users and easily share articles from your feeds with them, by dragging and dropping.
There’s a news feed that always has the news. You can’t escape it, and you probably shouldn’t. There’s a people section, allowing you to see your contacts and send messages to them. There’s also the handy group section. Finally, a place where you can create groups and very easily share interesting articles and bits of news with those groups and discuss them.
You can easily add an advanced Twitter application that works within it, as well as one for Digg and Facebook. What’s more, Streamy connects directly with your Facebook account, and your account with Streamy is based on it. The list of these applications includes: Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, FriendFeed, AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo, and Live.
What seems to be missing is integrated applications like Skype, YouTube, Facebook Chat, WordPress, Blogger, Google Maps, and hey, what about an email client? The major lacking area seems to be the homepage aspect of it. It would be nice to have a homepage with the weather, a calendar, a to-do list, and a notepad function. And even some widgets to help me get around town, like the tube map or the Transport for London journey planner. Those are the ones I seem to use the most. A bookmark section would also be useful for me to navigate to the things I can’t integrate into Streamy.
The ideal doesn’t exist yet. But I’d say it’s a combination of Streamy, Symbaloo, and Netvibes. Here’s what I would combine:
Streamy
- integrated chat applications, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc.
- approach to news and blog feeds
- ability to have contacts and groups
- sleek design with easy navigation
Symbaloo
- visual approach to news feed
- functionality of search bars
- simple bookmarking format
Netvibes
- customisation of design
- interesting collection of widgets
- visual presentation formats for feeds
- opportunity for business and brand formats
Now can someone out there make it happen?
Filed under: Technology | Leave a Comment
Tags: aim, blogger, blogs, bookmarks, css, customisation, design, digg, email, facebook, feeds, flickr, friendfeed, functionality, google, google chat, groups, home page, igoogle, live, netvibes, news, pageflakes, rss, skype, streamy, symbaloo, twitter, widgets, wordpress, yahoo, youtube
Mouse Caught
We’ve caught the mouse, 4 nights into the traps. And we have a lovely video of it for you here!
Filed under: Life | Leave a Comment
Tags: catch, caught, mouse, mousetrap, youtube
A Really Really Smart Mouse
Our latest expedition has been trying to catch a mouse. A few weeks back, Rob thought he saw a mouse in the kitchen, but he wasn’t sure. Then later on he insisted he saw it again, but I wasn’t so sure. He’s not leaving droppings, so how to know for sure?
Then, again, he saw it, with me just behind him, but I missed it. So we set up a trap, no no, not a deadly one. I found a blog online with an interesting idea. Put a tube over the edge of the counter with food on the end, and a bucket underneath. Mouse goes through the tube to get the food, offsets the balance, and falls.
It didn’t work. But we got plenty of mouse action on video. Every night we’ve been trying different methods. Particularly methods that involve us watching him on Skype. We want to catch him so bad that when we do, we’ll miss the chase.
Ok, computer is set, trap is set, time to wait.
Filed under: Life | Leave a Comment
Tags: mouse, mousetrap, skype
Cool Sites
Here are some cool sites I’ve discovered recently:
Tumblr – A sort of blog that integrates text, photos, quotes, links, chats, audio, and video in an interesting format.
Storytlr – Another interesting blogging site.
VisualCV – Let’s you provide a CV with attachments of all kinds (not just a visual portfolio). You can also indicate the exact level of your skills.
UnBlab – Brief email, a new way to view your inbox and keep it all simple. Right now, you have to signup and wait for an invite. I’m still waiting for mine.
Box – File storage that you can share. Also very useful for publishing and subscribing to iCal calendars. To find out how to do it, look here. Also, since the service has been updated, you’ll need to change the publish URL from https://www.box.net/dav to http://www.box.net/dav.
Moo – Custom business cards, mini cards, post cards, stickers, greeting cards, and notecards at a decent price. They also have some interesting accessories for them.
FontStruct – A cool interface for designing fonts. Especially good for beginners who just want to get a feel for it and a better understanding of how it’s done.
Filed under: Life | Leave a Comment
Tags: box, fontstruct, moo, storytlr, tumblr, unblab, visualcv
New Blog Location!
I know, I know, I just started this, and I’m already changing the location. Fact is, I now have a website, my very own .co.uk and that is where my blog is now hosted.
Filed under: Life | Leave a Comment
Margate
Photo courtesy of telegraph.co.uk
I didn’t know much about Margate until this week’s episode of The Apprentice aired, and I probably still don’t – except that it could be a great family destination or gay destination. Maybe?
One team decided to re-brand Margate as a gay destination, which was a great strategy, backed up with solid reasons for doing it. But when it came to actually doing it, they were tiptoeing around with the strategy.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from taking Account Planning, it’s don’t tiptoe with your strategy! If you’ve got it, and it’s brilliant, do it, give it your all!
Unfortunately, the team with the brilliant idea lacked the creative execution to win, which is a terrible shame. It let’s you see how important creative is, and that the two must really work together for a success.
When you look at the other team, it’s not as easy to see that they would’ve done better with a better strategy (because they did win, and there were only a few comments made on the strategy), but I’m glad BBC left in those comments about the lack of re-branding and the lack of bravery in their strategy.
If you’re American and haven’t seen it, you might be able to see a recap here.
Filed under: Advertising, Life, Work | Leave a Comment
Tags: account planning, creative, Margate, re-branding, strategy, The Apprentice
Margate in the UK
Photo courtesy of telegraph.co.uk
I didn’t know much about Margate until this week’s episode of The Apprentice aired, and I probably still don’t – except that it could be a great family destination or gay destination. Maybe?
One team decided to re-brand Margate as a gay destination, which was a great strategy, backed up with solid reasons for doing it. But when it came to actually doing it, they were tiptoeing around with the strategy.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from taking Account Planning, it’s don’t tiptoe with your strategy! If you’ve got it, and it’s brilliant, do it, give it your all!
Unfortunately, the team with the brilliant idea lacked the creative execution to win, which is a terrible shame. It let’s you see how important creative is, and that the two must really work together for a success.
When you look at the other team, it’s not as easy to see that they would’ve done better with a better strategy (because they did win, and there were only a few comments made on the strategy), but I’m glad BBC left in those comments about the lack of re-branding and the lack of bravery in their strategy.
If you’re American and haven’t seen it, you might be able to see a recap here.
Filed under: Advertising, Life, Work | Leave a Comment
Tags: account planning, creative, Margate, re-branding, strategy, The Apprentice
Health in the UK
First of all, I’d like some comments back on this post if you have the time. Right now I’ve been thinking quite a bit about health and healthcare perceptions in the United Kingdom as opposed to the United States.
I have to admit I haven’t been watching much TV here, so if you do watch TV here, I’d like to hear from you on whether or not you see a lot of pharmaceutical advertising, where you see it, what it’s like, et cetera.
I got to talking a bit with Jessica who I used to work with, and we’re trying to understand the differences in how British people and American people think about health. I think some main differences will stem from the type of healthcare system, considering that here in the UK we have socialized health care, but private health care is also available for many employees and those that can afford it.
I have noticed that there isn’t a lot of medicine in our household, except of course the bag full that I brought from America for my allergies and the colds I’m always getting. Rob doesn’t seem to visit the doctor a whole lot, and he hasn’t been to a dentist in 5 years.
Which leads me to dentistry in general. Americans have this perception of British people as having very little concern for their dental care and thus very bad teeth. I have to admit, teeth here are different from teeth in America.
For one thing, dental care does cost some money, as I’ve heard. I can’t confirm prices, but it doesn’t seem to fall under the umbrella of free health care. There doesn’t seem to be a very large concern here with the straightness of one’s teeth. While Americans are constantly putting braces in their children’s mouths and having wisdom teeth pulled, the Brits seem to just let it go.
There isn’t a whole lot of flossing go on it seems, but moreso it’s as though the Brits aren’t extremely educated on dental issues and how diseases arise and what leads to needing a root canal or having teeth pulled. It’s possible that it’s something else, and if so, do tell me.
One particular thing struck me this morning as I was brushing my teeth. The toothpaste Rob uses (and now me, since I’m out) is Tesco’s own store-brand toothpaste.
When you go into the dental care aisle at a store in the United States, the majority of tubes of toothpaste on the shelf are Crest, Colgate, and Aquafresh, who in recent years has increased shelf space do some new innovative products. You’ll probably also see some Arm & Hammer and maybe some other odd brands. What you won’t see (and correct me if I’m wrong because I’m going on memory) is Wal-Mart brand toothpaste or Target brand toothpaste.
For the most part, Americans don’t trust the store brand. It’s cheaper than everything else, it has uglier packaging than everything else, and we doubt its quality. Because we care so much about our teeth, we’re not about to put just any toothpaste in our mouths.
This seems to apply to all products in general. A lot more products at Tesco are store-brand, and more people buy them. The packaging is also something I’ve been impressed with. Compared to Wal-Mart, the packaging seems well thought out, eye catching, and functional.
What is it about the Brits?
Filed under: Advertising, Family, Life | Leave a Comment
Tags: Advertising, American, Aquafresh, Arm & Hammer, British, Colgate, Crest, dental care, dentistry, flossing, health, healthcare, medicine, pharmaceutical, Target, television, Tesco, toothpaste, United Kingdom, united states, Wal-Mart
Happy Birthday
This past weekend was Rob’s 28th birthday, and we had a few Yeadons in town to celebrate – Mutty and Pappie (or as I call them Mop and Pop) and his sister Katie.
Among our excursions was a trip to the Tower of London, which I had never heard of and doubt many Americans will have heard of. It’s a hefty fee to get in, but if you’re a student, a senior, or disabled, you get concessions (a discount). The best deal of all is to be a carer for a disabled person because you get in free!
Later that day we went to dinner at Vrisaki, which is a Greek restaurant just down the road, literally a three-minute walk from our flat. Apparently, it is the best Greek in London, and we were impressed. The atmosphere was nice, food great, and company brilliant. The review is right, you ought to fast before you go.
We also had trips to the Royal Air Force Museum and Hampstead Heath, followed by some wanderings.
Filed under: Family, Life | Leave a Comment
Tags: birthday, Greek, Hampstead Heath, restaurant, Royal Air Force Museum, Tower of London, Vrisaki
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