Valuing Video Chat

I haven't heard a lot of enthusiasm from the Tech-press over Facebook and Google's recently announced plans to implement video-chat into their social networks, and a recent post on TrustTommy questioned the focus on these services, when there's still plenty of work yet to be done on the basics (such as worthy mobile apps).

The comment I posted on his almost week-old post got no feedback, so I thought I'd expand my thoughts here, which should dovetail nicely with my recent reflections on my long-distance relationship, and my openly declared affection for Google's services.

Basically, video-chat is pretty much the most important thing my internet connection brings me, mostly due to that pesky long distance relationship I'm in. Human interaction is just richer when you can see who you're talking to. I don't just mean reading body language and facial expressions - I feel rewarded when I make my girlfriend smile, and punished when she gives me a withering look, meaning her ongoing behaviour modification can continue in earnest despite our lack of physical proximity.

At present, I'm in a state of transition, spending the Summer with my ladyfriend before moving onto Canada with a work permit, and even though I'm living in the same house as my number one reason for having Skype, I'm still getting regular use out of it to talk to those back in the motherland.

Before I left, I was genuinely concerned that my 18 month old nephew would forget about me in my absence, but a few Skype calls was all it took to assuage this fear. Even though his vocabulary is insufficient to hold a conversation, he happily sits on my brother's lap in front of the computer, warbling at the low-bitrate video stream that he recognises as his uncle. Thanks to the video-chat, I even get to see the pictures he's drawn of us hanging out, like old times!

The next step is convincing his father for a high-quality scan for my fridge

Moving aside from the touchy-feely stuff, consider for a moment the current state of Ireland, and the new generation of Irish diaspora. I think it's safe to say that video-chatting will enjoy a greater prominence than ever before, thanks to how accessible it will be in the years to come.

Facebook is one of those things that almost everybody who has the internet uses (including begrudgers like me), so even the luddites incapable of navigating to Skype.com and downloading the appropriate software will be able to avail of video-chat goodness, integrated almost seamlessly with the existing instant-messaging service they use to while away their evenings (this assumes that they are able to successfully click 'yes' to installing the necessary java applet). Friends of mine embarking on international excursions talked about 'setting up Skype' as if it's a major chore, so the lowering of this barrier is definitely a good thing.



The most recent video-chat development that I'm excited about is Google +'s group-video chat, in which up to 10 (ten!) users can hang out with a video feed each (once again, Google makes me happy by rolling out free feature that trumps the paid-model offerred by competitors). I've only tested it with one other user (you're still better off with Google Talk or Skype for a one-on-one conversation), but there's a lot of smart ideas at play, the best being how the main video window will change to highlight whoever is talking (or talking the loudest if you're in a rabble).

Video, text-chat, and synchronised YouTube watching (which didn't work when I tested it with Fin.ie earlier) for a group of friends sounds like a good time, particularly since keeping in touch with a large group of people is hard work. Consider the way it is today for the world-adventurers you surely know: connect to someone on Skype, tell them all your news, then connect to someone else, and repeat half the conversation - to date my diplomatic way to avoid this has been to not pick any favourites and not tell anyone anything, Google +'s hangout feature gives me hope that I can catch up on my scattered college buddies in a fun, casual forum.

Et toi, reader? Are there any features about the bold new frontiers of social-networking that excite you?

Confessions of a Google Lover

I like to think that I'm a rational creature who likes and dislikes things for rational reasons, but when I find myself openly begrudging something popular, I worry that I'm falling into the same kind of lazy thinking exhibited by 'alternative' people who valorize going against popular opinion. If you've ever watched one of your hipster friends clumsily trying to justify their about-face on how they feel about bands like Green-Day, you should have a fair idea of the type of archetype I'm trying to avoid.

Of course, even though these people often can't articulate tangible reasons for disliking popular things, they too have convinced themselves of their rationality. When I posted late last month griping about Facebook's shortcomings I was cognizant that I would be seen to conform to hipster-type, so I intended to post a twin-piece as soon as possible, extolling the merits of another popular online service.

It may be six months late, but here goes:

I love Google. I use as many of their services as I can. I'll leave the privacy-concerns to the bubble-bursting commenters and focus on what I love about what they do for right now:

For a start, the essential services are free. By 'free', I mean 'ad-supported', but not in an intrusive way.

More importantly, the quality is rock solid - Gmail is almost universally lauded as one of the best e-mail clients there is, on or offline. Google Voice's call clarity tends to be better than Skype's, Google Reader has a clean interface to organise my RSS feeds from any web-connected device, and has a layer of social-integration for those rare moments that I want to share something with friends or see what they're recommending.

Google products tend to have a sense of humour - on the occasions that Google's services have thrown up error messages, they tend to be quirky ones, like when Google Wave (RIP) went belly-up on me one time:

A goofy error message that tells me how to fix the problem? A nice way to assuage the inconvenience of having to refresh the page, eh?

Also, when sending my girlfriend bloated text messages, most composing applications will tell me when I'm spilling over into more than one SMS, but Google Voice does it differently - have a look at the remaining-character count as I continue to prattle:

Keep prattling on and it throws its arms up at you in protest - a sensible deterrent to rambling text messages

There are new features rolled out all the freaking time. Part of the glory of having the applications on the web is that the updating process isn't very jarring - every now and again I'll log onto Google Docs to see that some new feature has been added:

Priority Inbox on Gmail, Mobile-View on Blogger, Google Instant search - they are constantly tinkering and improving on the bread-and-butter of the basic online experience, and I like to see the progress.

These seamless-updates aren't just for web-apps either, Google Chrome, my web browser of choice, updates itself in the background - if I leave Chrome running for five days solid, I'll get a prompt to restart the browser if there are updates ready to go - this is how I wish it was for 90% of the software I use.

Attention to detail: This is great software, and it shows when you consider the effort that goes into localisation. Look at the difference between the 'Options' page on Windows XP running Chrome in US English, and my Mac running Chrome in British English:

Firstly, they adhere to the Mac parlance of referring to 'options' as 'preferences', but 'Under the Bonnet'/Hood?' C'mon! That's a loving touch right there. It warms the cockles of my hearts every time I see it.

~~~

There's much I haven't touched on here for the sake of keeping this at a reasonable length - I could fill another blog entry about Android and cloud-syncing stuff, but I'll cut off the gushing for now.

I surely seem like a die-hard fan here, but the most significant contribution that Google makes is competition. They have all the money in the world to pursue projects with big budgets, which is great news for those (like me) who shop around. Google Voice has successfully supplanted Skype as my go-to VOIP solution, and how could they fail? In addition to a competitive feature set (that includes Gmail integration, a US phone number, voice-mail transcription, free texts to US numbers), they also offerred free voicecalls to the US for the entirety of 2011. That, friends, is a no-brainer.

Gmail's killer feature when it launched was 1GB of storage - at the time (if I recall correctly) Yahoo! Mail was giving me 250MB (Hotmail was bragging about 100MB not long before) - look at the major providers now - space is rarely an issue, and it's from Google pushing along the competition.

I like talking to people who dislike Google for good reasons - and there are plenty of valid reasons for not liking the company, but the products they put out are top-notch, and even if you don't partake yourself, you can surely admit to benefitting from Google's participation in the service-provider arms race, whether you use e-mail, a mobile phone, or even a TV.

If that hasn't convinced you somewhat, just remember - if you don't love Google, the hipsters win.

Me and My Kindle 3: After the honeymoon

I've been using my Kindle 3 regularly for three months now, and I've already posted my initial impressions, but as I continue to pick up on tips and tricks, I figure it's only right to pass them on.

When I travel to the states, my smartphone becomes a dumbphone unless I want to pay Vodafone's extortionate fees:

€30 a day for 50MB? It takes a serious set of cojones to call this "Great Value"

This, of course, is totally unfeasible. Since I paid the extra $50 for the 3G model, I get "free" worldwide wireless internet through my Kindle. I was aware of how limited and clumsy the browser was before I made the purchase, but I figured that janky web browsing is better than none at all.

Facebook is fine for whiling away a few minutes in an airport terminal, but the browser makes it a chore. Likewise, pecking out e-mails in Gmail is more of a pain than it ought to be with the Kindle's Qwerty keyboard, but it's good to know that if there's something that requires an immediate reply, I won't be off the grid when I have my Kindle with me.

The true revelation came when I accessed Google Reader - I didn't consider that it would be a viable alternative to a native RSS reader, but it works quite elegantly. The keyboard shortcuts work (press 'f' to get full-screen, 'j'/'k' for previous/next), and the text is very comfortable once you crank it up to 125%.

There are a few shortcomings. Naturally, the pictures will be grayscale, and flash content won't load, so you won't be watching videos or playing games, but you shouldn't have expected that anyhow. Since the browser doesn't support multiple tabs or windows, it will scold you for trying to click on an external link on the desktop-version. If you're intending on reading through RSS feeds that only give the first paragraph, you'll need to fire up the mobile version (reader.google.com/i) to successfully navigate away from the current page.

Don't want to see this? Load reader.google.com/i 

This might not sound ideal, but with a very slight amount of effort, your Kindle becomes a self-updating newspaper and magazine of sorts, which I find very exciting (and much more palatable than paying a few dollars to subscribe to a blog that's normally free). It reminds me of a futuristic sci-fi movie I saw aeons ago that showed old men reading electronic newspapers that automatically updated. Realizing you're holding a piece of the future you once dreamed about is a thrill for any person.

Since a lot of my enthusiasm stems from how this purchase saves me from spending money to entertain myself, I should mention that Google Voice works through the Kindle browser. Setting up a Google Voice number is a little awkward if you don't live in the States, but once you have it, you can use any web-connected device to send and receive texts. This was a bit of a relief during my sojourn abroad, as I knew that if the plan changed, I'd be able to send and receive text messages and figure out a Plan B without having to spend a fortune in roaming charges.

Free texts to the US? Don't mind if I do!

As far as usability goes, it does sting to have to interrupt reading for the sake of take offs and landing, but the convenience of being able to download Michael Shermer's 'The Mind of the Market' from the tarmac made up for that somewhat. The atrocious audio-player feature is a wretched addition that I can't even ignore - while walking through Newark Airport I heard the familiar tune of the fantastic Skepticality podcast. For a thrilling instant I thought someone was piping it out over the Airport's PA, but then realized that my Kindle's Alt & Space keys had somehow depressed simultaneously in my backpack and triggered the playback.

I've been reading through a book I got for Christmas over the past few nights, and I've been missing my Kindle sorely. My finger twitches when I see a word I don't recognize, but there's no built in dictionary to look it up with. I want to highlight certain phrases and expressions but I have no tools to hand to do so. Last night I fell asleep while reading, and this morning I realized I didn't put in the bookmark. I feel like a big baby for admitting it, but sacrificing comfort to facilitate turning pages isn't an experience that fills me with nostalgia. To those who ask if the Kindle is a barrier to immersing yourself in a book, I would suggest that it's less intrusive than a bound hard-copy.

The Kindle is the best way to read a book, and now that I've experienced it, the ways I was perfectly contented with a few months ago seem unreasonably anachronistic by comparison.

tldr: Get a Kindle with 3G, then use Google's webapps to squeeze even more value out of it. It's awesome.

Google Latitude - Reports from beyond the velvet rope

Back in May, I treated myself to the HTC Desire, which runs on Google's Android operating system. One of the benefits of this operating system is that it acts as an intravenous delivery system for Google's rather nifty mobile applications. The Gmail client is solid, the Google Maps with turn-by-turn directions has saved me countless hours wandering around badly laid out Irish cities, and Google Translate allows me to swear at my phone and have it translated into a foreign language, instantly rescuing me from boring conversations at parties!

Google Latitude is a rather unusual service from the search giants that makes known your (phone's) current location to anyone you've granted access. Pretty simple idea, but Google have built some cool features on top of this simple idea.

Since I have an Android phone, and most of my friends don't, I feel like (for the first time) the cool guy who has been to the exclusive club, so I want to share with you plebs what kind of exotic delights you're missing out on.

Exotic delights like a handy pie-chart representation of how you spend your time:

(See the gap between July and August? That was my blogging hiatus)

Ever wondered "What's the furthest I've been from home?"

5,145 miles for me! (Since May 2010, anyhow)

Can't remember all those countries you've been to? Now you don't have to!

This barren map makes me want to spend obscene amounts of money to add a bit of colour

What are the places I visit most often? (Do I spend more time at my mother's or father's house?)

No wonder I spend more time at my mother's - look at the extra amenities!

Latitude can also be used to trigger proximity alerts. These SMS or E-mail alerts can trigger when you or your friend "are at an unusual place, filtering out routine alert cases at home or work", or "are at a routine place but at an unusual time". Neat! Hopefully things like this increase the amount of "chance encounters" with the kind of friends I'd hope to run into.

Bored? Why not watch a sped up version of the last 500 locations you've visited? Just click on the 'play' arrow in the top right corner of the map and watch your life being pissed away by going to work, driving around, going home, and sleeping over and over and over again!

The service as a whole is cool, but it's not quite perfect. I was immediately offended when it suggested that I spend a mere 22 hours a week at work on average, but I realised that Latitude thinks I'm half a mile away from my current position when I disable the GPS on my phone to save battery. It's no wonder that the 'out' slice of my pie-chart is so meaty. Also, saving the last 500 locations in the history might sound like plenty, but in practice it only goes back a few days - if your phone pings your location every few minutes for a couple of hours, each ping is logged as a separate location. If each recorded 'location' represented a different set of coordinates, the history feature would be much more useful.

Well, what about the privacy implications? I had only planned on leaving Latitude switched on long enough to populate the dashboard with some information, but now I'm starting to enjoy it. The amount of consideration that Google has put into privacy seems almost excessive, even in light of the Google Buzz fiasco. By default, e-mails are sent out monthly with the subject line: "Reminder - You are sharing your location with Latitude applications", which is a good thing too, because I had almost forgotten about it after I first activated it.

If you want to throw caution to the wind and share your location with everyone, you can create a location badge, which you can put on your blog for your fourteen yearly visitors not to give a shit about. Google is wise enough to offer a pared-down functionality, in which only city-level data is shared.

So far, I only have one one friend set up on Latitude, and it's been novel checking the widget on my phone and seeing how far away he is from my current position. I take it he enjoys the novelty too. Mere moments after I touched down in Shannon after a fortnight in the States, I got a text message from him that read "Welcome home!" Creepy.

Amazon - We Sell Book's

On a recent trip to Barnes & Noble, my ladyfriend and I got an impressive demo of the Nook, and we were both quite taken by the idea of an e-book reader. She's since dropped some blatant hints about her desire to have one, so I've decided to start paying attention to this burgeoning gadget-category.

After a few weeks of seeing Nooks and Kindles at every turn (it was a few weeks full of airport departure lounges, hotel lobbies, and cafés) I'm starting to believe that e-books are in fact 'the future'.

As soon as I decided to start paying attention to the technology, Amazon unveiled their newest iteration of the Kindle, so I decided to check out the official video detailing why it was worth the cash. It's a fairly typical video for this type of product: the main points appear as text on screen as a soothing male voice dishes out the impressive facts, and the Kindle pirouettes around on screen flirtatiously from different angles. Sadly, I was only able to enjoy this gadget-porn for about 78 seconds before an unwelcome visitor presented itself to me:

Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!

Begone, misplaced apostrophe! You don't belong here! You'd think that the largest purveyor of the written-word in the world would know where to put a shagging inverted-comma, right?

Of course they do:

These are the kind of silly mistakes that pedants like me use as excuses to ruin Christmasses. (Ask my girlfriend about the year when she really wanted an iPod, and ended up with a Sansa instead)

(Okay, maybe these are the kind of silly mistakes that pedants like me use to make themselves feel smarter than a huge corporation that earns more in one hour of operation than they will in their entire lives.)


Update: Gamma Goblin kindly pointed out in the comments that this matter isn't as black and white as I'd like to believe. The prick.

I pay my Apple-taxes, damnit!

Just two weeks ago, I documented the untimely demise of my Xbox 360, and here I am again blogging about another moribund piece of cherished consumer electronics.

When I tried to wake my MacBook Pro from sleep this morning, the screen remained black. The harddrive spun up, the fans kicked in, and the backlit keyboard responded as it should, but the screen showed nothing.

I ran through the usual steps I go through when something goes amiss, but to no avail. I went poking through some forums, and after a joyless half hour of troubleshooting, I came to the conclusion that the graphics card had gone tits up.

Apple customer care were fantastic, and told me to bring it to my local reseller for a free replacement of the defective parts, and [after assuring me that I'd be looked after if the local repair guys royally cocked up this job the same way they did the last] I brought the computer in for a test. Sure enough, it failed, and I was told they'd have the computer back to me in full working order by Wednesday at the latest.

I bought my computer in January 2008, and paid just under €2,000 for it. A non-Apple notebook with the same specs would have cost €500 less. Since getting the computer, I've had issues with dead pixels on the display (graciously fixed by Apple even though my computer was one month out of warranty), intermittent difficulties with the LCD backlight not wanting to turn on, and a kernel panic caused by something as banal as installing outdated printer drivers on the (self-proclaimed) "world's best operating system". No more than 18 months after first getting the computer, I noticed that the body of the machine seemed to be expanding in the heat, resulting in a number of unsightly bulges and protrusions around the seams, and when I lay my palms down to use the keyboard, I hear the housing click underneath my hand.

At times I wondered how Apple could justify the premium they charge for their computers, but really, my MacBook Pro is the best computer I've ever owned, and likely the best money I've ever spent. It's amazing to think that all my grievances about a computer that's 30 months old can be cataloged in a single blog entry. I have a far less sophisticated understanding of the Mac's operating system than I did any of my Windows-based PCs, but I feel as though I don't need to really understand it in order to get the performance I expect. I can recall the handful of times my Mac crashed, and I can remember specifically what caused these issues, which I consider 'progress' for operating system stability.

I love my MacBook, but I'm not an Apple fan. I'm going to try and get another 30 months of use out of this computer (5 years is a lofty goal for any piece of tech), and once it's time for a new computer, I'm going to buy whatever offers the least hassle for the user.

In other news, it's my birthday tomorrow, so I'm taking the recent self-destruction of my prized possessions a little more personally than usual.

A matter of self-Ctrl

Since getting her new Dell Inspiron 1545 in December, I’ve been listening to a steady trickle of complaints from my girlfriend about how it seems to have a life of its own. Browser tabs opening and closing, text randomly being cut and pasted, and most upsettingly: windows closing without warning, eviscerating filled text boxes.

I give my girlfriend more credit than most (as she generally deserves it more than most) but experience has shown that whenever anyone starts complaining about a “stupid computer”, a stupid user is most likely to be the culprit. Since the problem only occurred intermittently during typing, and as every one of the seemingly autonomous actions the computer was taking could be prompted by holding Ctrl and pressing a certain key, I quickly arrived at the conclusion that she was accidentally hitting the ctrl key during her furious typing sessions.

When I tried typing on her computer, I had no difficulties, and while I was never thrashing out long essays or blog posts, it galvanised the notion that user-error was to blame, not a malevolent computer exercising its free will. I explained to her about all the Ctrl-key related shortcuts, and told her to be more careful with how she rested her hands on the keyboard, and congratulated myself on another mystery solved.

About two months later, she brought up the issue again. I stood over her, dictating an absurd narrative that spoke highly of me, and she hammered away at the keys at a frenetic pace that left me little time to ponder synonyms for ‘magnanimous’. Eventually, the font on the screen flashed blue then disappeared. She screamed a triumphant “A-HA!” and pointed at the screen. I told her that she had hit ‘Ctrl-A’ to ‘select all’, then kept typing, and that she should ‘Ctrl-Z’ to get her work back. Her 'proof' debunked, I saw fit to reiterate the ‘hotkey’ lesson from before, blaming her woes on a misplaced pinkie. She glumly accepted my diagnosis.

Two more months passed by, and after a busy semester and a half of typing on this laptop, she told me again that she was still having trouble. She had been filling in some schoolwork into an online form and the window closed on her, setting her back a few minutes. After she provided a swift rebuttal to my light scolding for not doing her work on Word then copying/pasting, I decided I should humour her with some troubleshooting over the phone.

Even though it had been the first thing I did when I was setting up her computer, I talked her through the steps of disabling Stickykeys. She got to the appropriate screen, and sure enough, all the relevant boxes were unchecked, except one, which related to ‘Function keys’. I told her to disable it to see if it made a difference. She quickly rattled off some text, and observed no issues. She seemed enthused, optimistic, and above all, grateful that I stopped trying to convince her that her sloppy typing style was causing the trouble.

It was nice to see her so happy.

I got a text message from her the following day – her text messages are generally characterised by tongue-in-cheek petnames and frenzied over-punctuation – the message I got that day did not match her trademark style:

Had no troubles today, but I did trigger a load of shortcuts right after we talked yesterday. It’s my right pinky finger hitting control. I’ll have to change my typing habits

“It’s my right pinky finger”. “I did trigger a load of shortcuts”. She was finally taking responsibility for her typing quirks – I should have felt relieved, and yet, this crestfallen text message broke my little heart.

Realizing I had broke my girlfriend flipped a switch in my head, surely there’s some problem with the laptop – nobody could have these kind of issues five months later, especially not a good typist like her. My girlfriend's too smart for this kind of stuff.

For the first time ever, I googled the problem.

Son of a bitch! I hadn’t even finished typing and the problem was popping up at me. Within fourteen seconds of beginning the investigation, I had found a sure-fire solution.

Dozens of people were crying bloody murder about the problem, many of whom had resorted to sending the computer back to Dell up to four times for repair / replacement. In the end, what solved it for them was disabling a setting on the touchpad that makes the computer act as though the Ctrl key has been pressed.

Bugger. All the vitriol and anguish thrown around on the Dell support forums, and I treated my girlfriend’s gently raised-issues as an opportunity to pontificate on ‘hotkeys’ used by ‘powerusers’.

I don’t know what the lesson is to be learnt here. Maybe it’s that I’m capable of being a good boyfriend to my girlfriend, but it only kicks in after I’ve broken her spirit, leaving me to remould her as I see fit.

Misadventures in Twitter

I signed up for Twitter at the same time as a few of my friends, but six months later, few of them are tweeting regularly - indeed, some of them haven't done anything on Twitter since that first week of use. After lamenting at @jmeehan5's lack of tweeting, he scoffed at what a pointless waste of time Twitter was - my response was an unsure "I've found uses for it", but I didn't have any examples to hand.

I've been on twitter since March, and according to my profile page, I've posted 201 tweets, follow 50 users, and have 43 followers (I gave up on pruning the spammers over a month ago). As is typical of this misanthropic blogger, I've engaged little with other Twitterers - only partly because I'm not entirely au fait with the lingo and etiquette, yet I've found uses for Twitter that no other web service (that I'm aware of ) can match:

Manual Videogame Matchmaking

Since getting a decent broadband connection I've been enjoying online gaming on my Xbox 360, and when my friends aren't in the mood for a game, it's rarely difficult to get a game going with randomers since most developers appreciate how difficult it is for gamers to make acquaintances. Since Halo 3:ODST's multiplayer mode didn't come with a matchmaking system, I used twitter to find some playmates:

I got about six replies, and after suffering through ten minutes of a game with a piss-poor connection, I threw in the towel. Chalk it up as a failure, but ten minutes of gameplay with a shoddy connection was better than what I'd have got without Twitter, and once the number of people around me with Twitter / Xboxes increases, so will my chances of finding a suitable match. [Sure, I could have gone to a gaming forum, but that'd require registration and hassle!]

Tapping into your social brain

I didn't do so well with maths in school, and even though I can manage numbers in my head fine, I'm functionally retarded when it comes to theorems and formulas and whatnot. So last week, when I needed a smart person to help with a matter at work, I asked Twitter, knowing that my intelligent friends would be able to steer me right.

The problem arose from a missing invoice - €827.50 was paid for X amount of goods @ €6.50, and Y amount at €4.50, how could I figure it out how much of X and Y were needed?

I got 5 responses - 1 from a non-follower who was interested in the hashtag. Each reply told me that my equation made no sense, and didn't help my problem all that much, but it gave me hope for any future legitimate mathematical quandaries I may find myself in (perhaps once I bone up on my maths language).

Reading the [potential] customer's mind

After bemoaning how Floola turned 14.3GB of my iPod's HDD space from 'Music' to 'Other' on Twitter one evening, I got a response from CopyTrans, shilling their alternative software:

Useful? Potentially - I didn't bother to click the link they sent, but being able to see what internet users are saying about yours and your competitor's products online is a boon for any business.

Appreciating those stalwart bloggers

Okay, indulge me on this one - after noticing an additional flurry of hits on my blog from strange places, I saw that it was because @NiallOK took a shine to my post about Matthew McConaughey's campaign to lean against every woman in Hollywood and shared it on Twitter:

I got quite a kick out of seeing this, which was amplified by seeing the people who were kind enough to propagate it. As a blogger, this kind of genuine reaction to a blog entry shows me that shorter blog entries that can be appreciated by more people with less investment will get shared, but five-thousand-word, self-indulgent, esoteric rants about how stupid the word 'sweater' is just turn people off coming back... But where's the fun in that?

Tomorrow, as an early Christmas present to my regular readers, I'll post part one of my 4,000 word treatise on the absurdity of manners! [I kid!]

People who take online IQ tests are retarded

It's day four of my iPod-touch ownership, meaning I'm still goofing around with my new toy to see what it can do, which is why I bothered to download a free 'What's your IQ' app from the Top 25 Free section.

I wasn't exactly expecting a rigorous, scientific evaluation of my IQ level, but I wasn't expecting this level of farce - have a read of the screenshots and tell me how you think you'd do:

Many of the questions seem to have been pulled from the 'idiot test' meme that travelled around primary school playgrounds in my youth, and while a compelling App could be made from such grist, multiple-choice questions essentially defy the point.

So what was my result?

My IQ is 164? Interesting. Flattering, even. I decided to go back through the quiz, getting all the questions wrong along the way and see what I got.

110? Every question wrong is "slightly above average"? (unless I got one right accidentally like a retard). But please, Mr App, do continue! "Pretty impressive", you say? "None of these questions were easy", you reckon? Well, what have I learned about myself by doing this endeavour? "Keep your stomach and you can do anything".

(If only I knew what 'keeping my stomach' entailed.)

I had a look at the reviews on the App Store after, expecting to join my fellow nerds who were no doubt expectorating disdain for this celebration of mediocrity to tell the iPod Touching community to steer clear of it and stop prolonging its popularity.

I was mostly wrong:

The lesson I've learned today? Free, flattering Apps on the iPhone & iPod Touch are successful. Also, openly sharing your disgust at something free and so easily ignored is pretty pathetic, no matter what way you try to represent yourself.

Harvey Norman - Baiting & Switching?

I've talked about Harvey Norman before on this blog for committing lesser, apostrophe-related crimes, but my most recent visit to the local electrical superstore warrants another rebuking.

In what passes in my family as a rite-of-passage, I accompanied my younger brother to purchase a decent TV for his house in college, making sure to wear my hagglin' pants. After explaining the merits of HDTV standards, (Plasma vs LCD, Full HD vs HD Ready), we agreed on a specification of a 720P, 32", LCD TV, and he was willing to spend up to €500.

We started at Finucane's Electrical in Eastway Business Park, and identified a decent Samsung model for €600 that the pleasant salesman offered for €550. We said we'd look elsewhere before committing to it.

The next stop was Harvey Norman - they had all the 32" LCDs arranged in a row, making the job of picking out the best one a doddle - we instantly singled out the Philips 32PFL5404H as being the best on display, but the €600 asking price seemed a bit much.

The salesman who approached us was an older gentleman, who seemed to begrudge every comment I made. He tried to usher us towards the Full HD TVs, but I told my brother that the difference was barely distinguishable when using a 32" screen.

He spluttered and wheezed as he admonished my foolishness - "there's a world of difference between Full HD and HD Ready - over 2 megapixels..."[bullshit alarm went off here] he trailed off, possibly looking for more technical words to scare me off with.

I told him that I meant that the difference between 1080P and 720P would be scarcely discernible when dealing with smaller TVs - again he flared up to reproach this upstart who dares question the authority of The Television Salesman.

"No, no, no, no, no. It's 2 megapixels of difference!" He pointed deliberately at 2 TVs. "Look at the colours! Compare the brightness!"

Both TVs were 720P. He succeeded in convincing me that he knew less than I did about the technical stuff, but I wanted to see how useful he'd be about the price-tag.

"How good can you do on that Philips TV?"

"€600"

"C'mon - that's what the price tag says - you can do a hell of a lot better than that"

"€580"

"If you give it to us for €500 we'll take it home right now."

"No way - the best I can do is €570"

"€570? I saw it for much cheaper online"

"We don't compete with online."

"That's fine - if you won't compete with them I'll just get it online."

"Don't get it online. They won't look after you. What happens if it arrives broken in the box, then what?"

"You're telling me that you can't do any better than €570?"

He was visibly vexed, I thought I was getting somewhere.

"You're telling me that if I get a better price for this anywhere else, there's no point in coming back to you, because €570 is the absolute best you can do?"

The words hung in the air for a second, then the cogs started turning again:

"Nobody will compete with online. They don't pay taxes. They won't look after you."

"I'm not talking about online - I just want to know if I should come back to you if - say, Clancy's offer me a better deal."

"€570 is the best deal you're going to get in a real shop."

I thanked him for his time, and said we'd be back for it if we couldn't do any better.

I wrote down the model number and called Clancy's Electrical while still standing in Harvey Norman.

"Do you have a Philips 32PFL5404H in stock?"

"Yeah - it's going for €499"

"Could you make it €450?"

"Ummm... Sure."

It took one phonecall to knock €150 off the Harvey Norman price - we went and picked it up, and after we had the transaction completed, I told the (awfully nice) bloke that got it for us that Harvey Norman were looking for €150 more.

"Don't get me started on them - we dropped the price to €499 because we saw they advertised that TV for €449 - it's not the first time I've heard about something like this"

I took his comment with a grain of salt - but once I got home and opened the Limerick Leader, I couldn't help but notice the Harvey Norman ad pushing their big Sale event:

That TV for €449 looks familiar...


The model number listed underneath that TV? 32PFL5404H. The one that had a €600 price tag, and which was guarded by a surly internet-phobe who blatantly misleads customers with his non-expertise, while telling them that €120 more than the advertised price is the best deal they'll get in 'a real shop'.

Let's just consult the criteria by which Harvey Norman reckon they're top dogs:

Price: Beaten. Trounced, even.
Range: Matched.
Service: Beaten. Beaten to a bloody, surly pulp.

Twitter Spam: Hummingbird

Twitter sent me an exclamation-mark laden e-mail yesterday to draw my attention to the two new web-denizens who subscribed to my fun-sized narcissistic twaddlings. Feeling that the occasion called for a cursory glance at these two random people, I decided to have a look:


When I saw this, I did what I always do whenever an attractive woman shows interest in me - I reacted with a great deal of skepticism. I clicked through to their profiles to begin my investigation:

Superficially, things seemed to be in order, (in that all her tweets were of a purely superficial nature), but I found the lack of any tweets aimed at other members was a little odd.

When I noticed that essentially the same message had found its way onto both profiles, I knew something fishy was going on:

One click on a tinyurl later, and I'm reading about 'HummingBird: Professional Marketing Tools for Twitter', and trying to contain my mirth.

Yes friends, that's a $197 pricetag

It seems that absolutely every bandwagon will be jumped on by enterprising peddlars of nonsense who are happy to deceive for monetary gain - you should bear in mind that a viable business model to monetize Twitter has yet to materialise.

Perhaps I'm being a bit too harsh before really examining this product. Let's consult the 'is it a scam?' checklist:

#1. Does the product claim to reveal some arcane-knowledge kept from the public by a group conspiring to hold power?


#2. Does the product offer vague, specious information whilst implying that the product in question is the only thing keeping you from becoming a guru yourself?

Yes, they just said that "Dell and Woot.com are earning Millions of Dollars on Twitter"

#3. Does the product establish itself as a way to bypass hard work, generate instant satisfaction, or generally get-rich quick?


#4. Does the product feature statements that are heavy in superlatives but light on specifics?

• "Hummingbird is completely unmatched in power"
• "unmatched performance"
• "If you're comparing Hummingbird to all the little free apps & web sites that do a couple of functions at a snail's pace, you would be misleading yourself. I didn't create this software with the everyday user in mind... this is for the top dogs"
• "Literally I can tweet a link and get a few hundred hits within the minute"
• "Massively increase your ability to interact with an untapped gold mine of customers"
• "Hummingbird makes you #1 in your niche."

#5. Does the product feature endorsements from dubious sources?

Alan? Alan!? Who the @*€# is Alan?

#6. Does the product attempt to imply celebrity endorsement without explicitly stating it?

Well, they do show Digg founder Kevin Rose's Twitter page in their promotional video, that's got to count for something, right?


So that's six out of six - we could go through the others on the list, including "excessive use of buzzwords" and "poor grammar on the product information page", but I think it's safe to say that this could be considered a scam.

So what is the tool for? By my reckoning, it's a Twitter account manager that you can use to generate accounts, which can then follow you, which also reach out to legitimate accounts to draw more hits to the product page. What it also means is that there are dozens of profiles spewing out identical status updates to give the impression of authenticity at first glance.

When I typed one of the updates at random into the Twitter search engine, here's what I got:

(Note the use of attractive/slutty girls in the profile pics - it's possible that the program comes with a stockpile of 'em.)

So there you have it - the latest episode of my Twitter sleuthing. Now that I've got that off my chest, I'll be blocking these fake groupies, sadly causing my followers to drop back to single digits, so feel free to remedy that!

Twits are down with Christ

Early last month, I caved into the mounting media hype and signed up for a Twitter account, partly to ensure I’d get a half decent username before everybody else jumped on the bandwagon, but mostly out of curiosity.

I still don’t know what to do with my Twitter account – should I just contribute to the overload of chaff online by posting about old jumpers I find in my closet, or the chores I undertake on any given day? Should I use it as a privacy-free platform for talking with my friends (which is already facilitated by Facebook and Bebo)? Pimp my blog? Share cool links? All mind-bogglingly exciting possibilities.

Well, I've found at least one person out there who has a focused purpose for Twittering - they came up on my radar after becoming my eighth follower, and the excitement caused was only quelled when I inspected their profile. The name should have been enough, shown here next to the solitary tweet on the account:


Where does waytoheaven1522 link to? Why HeavenTruth.org, of course, the home of 'An Important Message Explaining the Truth About Going To Heaven'!

Come with me if you want to live

Yep, it's a load of twaddle about how you're a bad person, and some (conspicuously white) bearded bloke from Israel died just for you, and you're too much of a miserable fuck to even say thanks. He's so pissed about this lack of gratitude that he's lined up some bad men to poke you up the bum with hot pointy things (or if you're into that kind of thing, cold blunt things), but if you decide to go around telling everybody about how great he is, he'll give you an all-access pass to the greatest amusement park of all time, but with no lines! All you have to do is tell everybody about how great he is! Quite the sweet deal.

I've bookmarked the site, if only for the marvellous pictures that they provide, should Sully's Blog ever decide to have a caption competition.


After apparently coining the word 'tweetvangelism', then looking to see if people were using another word for the phenomenon, I did a Google search which lead me to a rather hilarious slice of web-real estate promoting Twitter Evangelism!

That's right, Twitter (among other sites) is the next frontier on which religious nuts (who mean well, bless their deluded hearts) will badger us incessantly. And why not? They've crunched the numbers, this Christ guy will have a lot more friends if they can tap into this lucrative 'social networking' craze.

The number of members of Social Networking websites today far exceed Dunbar's 150. Myspace alone, for example, has 168,112,249 members with more joining every day.

I urge you - don't pass up this opportunity to reach the world for Christ! The secular-world is employing this phenomenon to its great benefit. Why not the Church?

Too often, we Christians conclude that we need to avoid, like the plague, any practice with which we are either unfamiliar or uncomfortable. Where would be today if our Church Fathers refused to do that which they found uncomfortable?

The cherry on top?



They're selling this noble call to arms! If you want to join in the great online crusade for Christ, you'll have all you need to know for $7!

Seven dollars? I think I'll pass. Come back to me when the price is $9.95 and comes with a FREE!!! bottle of Soul-Clenze, valued at $15.95!

UPDATE 02/05/09: Twitter has blocked the account - swift justice like this makes me very happy indeed.

Suck it, Christ fans!