As I have said before on more than one occasion, I have spent a lot of the last  20 years or so setting up/designing/maintaining and being involved in a series of online projects themed around my boarding school and the young gentlemen, such as myself, who went there. A labour of love it may have been but a labour it was nonetheless. I don’t regret any of it but as some of you reading this may know, setting up things for others to use or enjoy online can be an empty business.

Inspiration & The Reality Gap

Pondering...

Firstly, you can’t do it quickly. You many have a brilliant idea, one you may visualize with crystal clarity in your head but if you ask any sort of creative person – say an author (ahem) – they will all agree that at this stage, you project is approximately 2% complete. This is often completely at odds with your own perceptions but I would have to throw my hat into the ring and agree with them. Many is the time I have been sitting at work or driving home in the car, when an absolute corker of an idea has filled my head, just above the nose. At this point, shamefully, my gas pedal hits the floor and speedbumps become a thing of skant concern. By the time I reach the end of my gravel driveway, bound up the front steps and allow my manservant to welcome me into the foyer of the family pile, the fire of inspiration is still burning fiercely. Hives removes my coat, the cat drops my slippers at my feet and I power up the PC. The harsh white glow of the screen then slaps some sense into me and most of the enthusiasm  fades like…well, like a sentence without an end.

For a lot of the time, that’s exactly what happens. During the year long gap in which I didn’t blog, that happened about 3 times a week. Now and again, it still happens. You just have to live with it. Now that the blog is up and running again, all I have to do is type and as you will have hopefully have seen, I manage it much more often. Thanks to Evernote, I don’t tend to drive home like a lunatic anymore either. If anyone ever solves the problems or fat fingers and a small touch screem, it will indeed be a perfect world.

If it ever becomes possible to forget that GTA Vice City and it’s tempting streets exist, then that will also be of great help to me.

I’ve drifted again haven’t I?

Well, what I am trying to say is that the first hurdle to creating online wonderment is that its a f**k of a lot of work, even to do it slightly well. To do it very well, you have to be 9 people or 1 genius.  I fit into neither camp. I take my time, get frustrated, Google a lot and copy other people. Don’t look so shocked. I suspect I am not alone.

The one hurdle I sometimes find it hardest to get over, is that some things are beyond me. This usually presents itself when I have spent an afternoon looking for inspiration. Common places for this are…actually going to stay secret, suffice to say there are sights and technical achievements to boggle the mind. Now, I can use Photoshop but its a huge oil-burning pig of a program. The manual for version 5 (the last one I read) might as well have been written in Latin. What the online help file for Photoshop CS5 must be like, I can only imagine. I usually use Fireworks to create my graphics, but even that is largely a closed book to me. I  do what I can and mostly what I need to do. It’s partly why I have never done this sort of thing professionally. I couldn’t stand the idea of being asked to do something I didn’t know how to do. Also, I use about 10% of Dreamweaver when coding HTML. I suspect I am not alone in this either.

Finally, you have to keep it alive. I know this to my cost and you ignore this key ingredient in your online project at your peril. It’s hard to be specific about anything other than my own stuff, but take this blog entry for example; once posted and I have Tweeted a notice of it’s newness to about 100 followers and put it on my Facebook page for 400 friends to see, I will get about 20 hits. Tomorrow, when people get to work, I’ll get about the same amount again. This week, I might make 100 hits. This is unique visitors and doesn’t include return visits. If I make no post next week, I might get another 10 hits and after that, maybe 5 a week until I post again. I can promise you one thing. No one is looking to advertise on my site. Unless you have invented iPlayer or iTunes (I think I see a pattern), a lot of people are not going to give a monkeys about what you have done. You could be really, really lucky like me and have a target audience, some of you whom like what you have done but mostly, you will be ignored. It’s a tough lesson, but all the hit counters and spinning visitor globes will not bring people to your site in droves.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. I once mentioned Gillian Anderson, Clint Eastwood and Pamela Anderson in a blog post (as a test) and got almost 300 hits in a week. This sort of experiment is frowned upon and the Google bots will soon find you out, so don’t try it (unless you are blogging about famous celebrities of the 80s or course). Quite what would happen if I mention Justin Bieber, Dancing On Ice, Lindsey Lohan or Red Nose Day,  I can only imagine. Oops.

The one thing I find hard to babble on about is…well, babbling on. You have to be able to write a bit; I can – write a bit that is – but I don’t do it very well, not on paper or screen at least. Most of us know what to say but either because we haven’t done very much of it since the age of 15 or perhaps because we never could in the first place, we can’t put into words. This is not a huge worry but it’s something you should be aware of. Most of your readers’ brains will work out what you want to say and very few will feel the need to tell you where you have gone wrong. In any case, you will be understood.

So, after struggle, torment, plagerism, manual reading, googing, relaxing, typing, patience, calmness, panic, frustration, desperation, defining your own creative limitation and often going for walk to clear you head, you are done.

Shouting At The World

There's only one really...

In a word, don’t bother. I pondered for a while before writing this paragraph and while the first sentence seems a little harsh, it rings true. Perhaps it didn’t 15 years ago when there were dozens of search engines, all eager for your content. Now there is just Google and to a lesser extent, Bing. Google is really the only one that matters and it’s bots will eventually index your online world and show it to the world. Well, they will show it to the world if they enter the right search terms. If they don’t, you webby work might as well be in a bin bag in the shed. Again, harsh but true.

But remember, you have friends – both Facebook and real, tell them and tell everyone on Twitter. That process alone will grab the attention of those who know and love you and who are eager to click a link whilst slurping the Kenco.

Of course, as I said before, I am lucky. My stuff was and is for a largely captive, ready made audience of old school friends. They are brilliant, receptive and sometimes embarrassingly grateful. I feel guilty sometimes because I get frustrated when they don’t use my site exactly the way I intended or because I wish they would contribute more but a swift kick up my own backside soon rids me of this. This swift kick is usually in the form of someone I haven’t spoken to in 20 years suddenly popping up or like this week when a well respected author of online content and the printed page finds the time to join my new forum and enters into a short correspondence.

So, don’t bother shouting. Do it because you want to and because a few other people might like to see what you do. Don’t worry if you don’t work on it for a while and don’t worry that your audience is getting frustrated or thinking less of you for not spending your Sunday afternoon banging away at your PC keyboard. They will still love you when you do come back, no matter how long that is. Go for a walk, go to Vice City or go and sit on someone else’s sofa watching X-Factor, eating chocolate muffins and trying to convince them they will be a great mother.

The more you do, the more you will have to think about and write about and the more likely you will be able to spend an hour typing 1600 words about yourself to no one in particular.

A bit like I have just done.

Twitter

Sometimes, the torment in which I writhe in an effort to get round to writing words here would astonish you. I do everything short of losing sleep, I really do. This guilt is very counterproductive and actually makes me feel worse. Then, all of a sudden I find myself sipping a strong, black Americano in the comfort of a Plymouth eatery. Mild boredom has set in between coffee arrival and food arrival, and as is my usual habit, I tap the screen of my awful HTC Legend (more on that later) and see what the world is up to. If you’ve been outside at any moment in the last 3 years, you may have noticed other people doing this. I used a bus recently and whilst my life dribbled away “waiting” for it to arrive, 8 out of the 9 people at the bus stop were tapping away on their phone. It’s not unusual and despite what some would have you believe, it does not represent the end of the world, any more than colour television did when it arrived.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Oh christ, another bloody tweeterer…”

I wasn’t sure I had heard it properly at first, but even before I could look up properly…

“Why don’t they just f**king talk to somebody real?”

In a perfect world, I would let rip with an incisive reposte that would leave the intolerant nutsack quivering in their Reeboks. Alas, a whole day later, I still haven’t thought of anything suitable (although I am starting to think “f**k off nutsack” has a certain ring to it) and in any case, he was a bigger than me and had he given chase, would probably have caught up with me in good time. Even allowing for the fact that his knuckles dragging on the ground would give me a sporting chance of reaching the Rover 214, my key fob is unreliable at best and I think it was Oscar Wilde who said, “it is better to shut the f**k up than to bleed to death on the bonnet of your car with the last syllable of a cutting witticism on your lips.”

So, with my cheeks blushing in self-rightious anger, I ignored him. I wasn’t even on Twitter and was in fact trying to get the generously offered Free Wi-Fi to work. Had I achieved this, I would indeed have gone on Twitter but until Free Wi-Fi becomes even semi-usuable in this great land of ours, I am slightly hesitant to waste too much of my mobile data allowance.

Anyone wondering where I am going with this?

Well…Twitter. I love Twitter. I know loads of people who love Twitter as well. If you don’t like Twitter, shut the hell up and leave us alone. I completely fail to see how someone tapping their phone in virtual silence is any sort of inconvenience, annoyance or threat to you. There is more sense, intelligence, wit, empathy, tolerance and inight expressed online than you will ever know or experience.

Let’s analyse the specific comments of the dribbling, imbecile who had the good fortune to sit near me yesterday morning.”

“Why don’t they just f**king talk to somebody real?”

Twitter, my bird of choice.

This concept has always bothered me a little. If someone is not in the room with you, are they somehow not real? As I have said, the problem they seem to have with you, is that they are not talking to them. Really? Why would I talk to them? They don’t even believe that themselves, so what is the real problem? Is it really just that something is going on they don’t understand? Perhaps. Is it because they consider it impoliite? Hardly. A few minutes later, his companion’s own phone rang and she answered it and spoke at the sort of volume that would suggest she didn’t give a flying hoot about anyone else nearby.

In the end, I gave up. I could say that I wasn’t bothered about what he thought, but the paragraphs above would suggest otherwise. It did bother me but only in the way that most intolerance does. Those who know me will know that I am an not-uncritical evangelist for The Internet and the technology that surrounds it. I have long held that the best way to combat such intolerance is to ignore it and wait for it to disappear. This sometimes takes ages but it does happen. Forty years ago, people complained that colour television was too distracting and heralded the end of civilised society, when it was nothing more than a natural progression. I am not saying that everyone should shape up and start Twittering, Facebooking or Beebooing, just that they should do what every educated person should do about the world around them. Stay informed and decide for yourself, don’t just decide because The Daily Mail says you should.

In a detail that sounds almost perfect, said imbecile had in fact been reading The Daily Mail and it lay next to his plate, clumsily folded and ragged as only a free paper can be after 20 people have flicked through it. After they left, I took it and mainly because it was the only paper nearby, I began to read. It was only slightly more acidic and vile than when my last barber shop haircut had forced me to attempt a similarly ill-advised read. I only managed to get some way through a slightly cruel and amazingly ill-informed piece about Jonathan Ross and his “weird” family before my food arrived. I located the online version this morning before writing this and read it in it’s entirety. Please feel free to do so too.

Click here to read it.

I am assuming that the Ross family had nothing to do with the piece but I do hope it finds a permanent home on their fridge door.

Amongst the “evidence” of the family weirdness are the following…

1. Ross installed internet connections in every room of the house.

I think this is called Wi-Fi and I have a similarly elaborate setup in my own house, as I believe does about 54% of UK homes. The article makes more sport of their lavish expenditure, including (believe it or not!) a “home” cinema. Big deal. If we all could, we all would. The same applies to remote-controlled toilet seats. Go on..admit it…

2. The Ross family communicates via Twitter.

The clear implication here is that they don’t communicate in any other way. They don’t say it but it’s blindingly obvious that we are suppose to infer it. The simple fact is that they all use Twitter and follow each other on Twitter. This is far more astonishing in a positive sense than those who don’t Tweet will know. I know of one family who do this and it’s nothing sort of charming. An example is given where one his daughter asks her dad to bring her a glass of water via Twitter rather than go down an get it herself. I think this is what is known as “funny” and nothing else. I have followed Mr & Mrs Ross on Twitter from the beginning and their communications show nothing more than a happy bunch of people who have committed the cardinal public sin of being happy, loving each other and staying married for an awfully long time.

Incidentally, I regularly tweet with people at work who are only sat a few feet from me. This almost always makes them smile, as do their replies. I occasionally look out of the window to see if the sky has fallen in or if the moon has turned to blood. So far, nothing to worry about.

Oh and before I forget, Twitter has a website but it is not A website. I just wanted to clear that up.

Android & Apple

My Phone - I hate it.

I am kind of hoping that the mighty Google spider doesn’t index this next bit and that hordes of nerdly open-source enthusiasts don’t fill my comment box in the same way the Doctor Who crowd did a few months back, when I dared to express an opinion.

Anyway, I have an HTC Legend and I hate it. I hate it because I hate Android. There, I said it.

“Why don’t you have an iPhone then?”, I hear 3 of you cry.

“Because I can’t afford one”.

This simple statement also answers the questions “why don’t you have an iPad”, “why don’t you have a Porsche” and many other similar enquiries.

Cost is pretty much it. I love my iPod and I would love an iPhone and an iPad but they are too expensive for me.

My HTC is my first monthly contract phone and it costs me £21 a month. Last time I checked, an iPhone would cost me about £60. So there we are. I could handle criticism of an iPhone on the basis of cost but on little other. They are beautiful and iPads are even more so. They just are.

I am not completely blind to the iPhone problems either. The “leather case” problem earlier in the lift of the iPhone 4 was laughable but it’s easily solved by doing something that every sensible person does anyway.

I love the argument “I would never buy an iPhone” or “I have never touched an iPhone”. An interesting perspective, if nothing else. Incidentally, I realise that my iPod is not an iPhone but it’s pretty close and I have used an iPhone. I know of what I speak – a little anyway.

My HTC phone crashes a lot. It gradually slows down until the only solution is to switch if off and on again. Memory is a constant concern and I find it amazing that so many people recommend a “task killer” to kill apps that haven’t closed properly.  These work a lot of the time but it would be nice if they weren’t needed in the first place. It’s not even that I play with a lot of features on my phone. On a daily basis, I check my Email, use Facebook & Twitter and look at a few websites in break time. Not exactly a heavy user but such activity regularly brings my phone to it’s knees. Not good at all. I have never had trouble getting a signal but sometimes the button just locks up. This happens both at the beginning and end of the call, often leaving you to wonder whether you have hung up at all.

The same apps are infinitely better on the iPhone/iPod than they are on Android. Facebook and Twitter are prime examples. The printed word hardly does this argument justice but there is really no competition. The official Twitter app on Android is so awful that most people don’t use it – me included. Incidentally, I would love to uninstall the Android Facebook app but you can’t. Uninstallation of apps actually requires a third-party app to be anything like usable. Guess what you do on the iPhone? You press the icon for a few seconds, tap the x in the top left corner and it’s gone. Better still, do it on iTunes when you get home.

Android itself. It’s open source and anyone can write an app and start selling it, unlike that evil overlord Apple who must approve every app before it’s allowed to be sold. Thank god they do. Have you seen the crap in the Android App Market? The Apple App Store is not perfect but jesus christ. Incidentally, some of the most popular apps in the Android store are complete launcher replacements. Hardly a ringing endorsement. If you want copyright-infringing sound boards, there’s only one place to go. Incidentally, there is a growing feeling online that the sheer number of different Android phones and configurations thereof will significantly hamper app development.

So I have an HTC but I hate it. In 8 months, I will upgrade and hopefully have an iPhone and this burning anger inside me will subside.

Libraries

That's not me, I'd never get up there.

The imminent plans to close many local libraries is a tragic reflection of the times in which we live. Either that or it’s something that was bound to happen sooner or later. When did you last go to the library? I can’t remember exactly but it must be something like 20 years or in other words, something like the time the Internet arrived in my house.  I took my mum to one on a semi-regular basis a few years ago but then she got hooked on audiobooks and that was that. This Christmas, she got a Kindle and I fear she has borrowed her last book.

I am not naive enought to suggest that the Internet has removed any need for libraries, just that it has removed it for a huge chunk of society. I suspect in a few years time, a Kindle or something similar will cost about £20, most books will be cheaply downloadable and we will look back wondering what all the fuss was about, much the same way that most people remember the board game, the fax machine, common decency, respect for elders and cartoons before the news in the evening.

Literature hasn’t died, knowledge hasn’t died and I am pretty sure Amazon would attest to the fact that books haven’t died. If you can listen to Stephen Fry read Harry Potter, one of his own books or actually anything at all out loud and still say that books are dead then you are a dullard.

The end of a lot of libraries can be sad and yet still be inevitable at the same time. I just think that, although inevitable, it’s just not time yet.

The Most Expensive Car In The World

Marooned

..and so I dribble to the end of one of the most full, stressfull, penniless and dismal months of my short young life. With no irony whatsover (considering the medium on which you are reading this), I won’t bore you with the minute details. A lot of you with whom I speak on regular basis will know about most of it. The maroon metal monstrosity pictured above played it’s part in no small measure. So far this year, I must have spent the best part of £1000 on it, despite only paying £595 about 3 years ago. The world is full of people willing to dish out advice when this happens but the answer is never so simple as most believe. “Get rid of it!” they yell. But you can’t “get rid” of a car that is broken can you? Who will take it? So, you fix it and then you don’t need to “get rid of it” at all. In fact, the thing you have just fixed is one more thing on it that is less likely to go wrong again. I use this dubious logic to convince myself that after this year’s repairs – the thermostat, clutch, exhaust and alternator will not go wrong again for ages. I know…I know…

Anyway, it’s booked in tomorrow at the garage next to work (I know…I know) that I have often spoken about. Yes, I always feel stupid in there but you have to understand that it’s very convenient and thanks to my kind friends, I won’t have to spend £25 on taxis. By this time tomorrow, I will be able to stop disconnecting the battery every time I park up at home, at work and anywhere else where I am going to be more than about 10 minutes. It’s amazing what you can put up with sometimes isn’t it? If it does have one downside, it’s that I  have to wait around at work so that all my colleagues have driven off before I lift the bonnet to fiddle with the battery. They are all really kind but you do get a bit fed up of “are you ok?” or “do you need a hand?”. It’s my fault really. I shouldn’t know so many nice people.

I shouldn’t knock it too much though. As is always the case in the middle of diversity like this, I have learnt so much. I can now disable and re-enable the immobiliser with consumate ease. I know where the fuse for the horn is, I know how to change the battery, I know how to tell if the battery is charged just by looking at it and I even finally got round to putting new batteries in my key fobs.

But you are right. I should get rid of it. But look at it..it’s 13 years old and it’s still so shiny. It still has new car smell. Still!

So one final thank you to the RAC men who have helped me these past few weeks. Most of you were friendly, kind and helpful. One of you wasn’t but in his defence, it was very early, very cold and I did jibber like an idiot in an effort to pretend I knew the first thing about motor vehicles. To say I have got my money’s worth out of an annual RAC membership this year would be something of an understatement.

So that’s what’s been happening. It is certainly the only part of it entertaining enough or amusing to post here.

Progress

Long time pals will have been watching this blog on an almost daily basis for signs that it is going to be a going concern anytime soon. Well, I have now finished putting the last seven years of blog posts in and like most such jobs, it was a drag. This is mostly my fault as I re-read most of them before putting them in. Some I left out as a result of sheer tediousness or irrelevance. Some of them were too short to bother and after reading and disregarding the third of forth such dribble, I remembered that my first blog template was a skinny, single-columned affair where such tiny snippets would have filled half a page. Most of them would barely fill a Tweet these days.

Some of the entries reflected how much has changed since in the last 5 years. I had few friends at work who read my blog and it was very much a school friends blog. This is by no means a bad thing but nowadays, many of my work friends read this and would be a bit bored and/or mystefied by talk of things boarding school. I did (unwisely) bitch about work on occasion too. Why I thought this was appropriate is a bit of a mystery.

There is no mention of my dad passing away although there is of his funeral a week later. Likewise, there is little mention of my being diagnosed of Diabetes but there is of my memorable visit to a medical “workshop” a few weeks later. On reflection, I probably didn’t feel like blogging about dad at the time. I suppose the same could be said of my medical bombshell too.

So I guess I am “back” now.  My next blog post will be the first concerning the writing of my book. If you didn’t know I was doing such a thing then you will no doubt be fascinated by what I have to share with you over the coming weeks. If you did know, then once again I promise that I will actually get on with it.