Category Archives: Life

TWIT for life

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I feel like I owe Jason Bradbury a massive thank you. I have just had the most amazing weekend and it really is all thanks to him.

I joined twitter in September 2008. I knew some other people who had joined and thought I should grab myself a decent username in case I decided to start using the service, but I really didn’t take it any further than that. Around this same time I started reading Jase’s blog on his newly relaunched website (coinciding with the release of his first novel) and at some point after that he started tweeting and added a link to his twitter feed from his website. I discovered the link to Jase’s twitter feed one Friday lunch time and remembering the account I had created for myself decided to log in and take a closer look. I was amazed to see that Jason was exchanging messages with normal people and confused by the strange #ff that accompanied so many of the messages that were flying back and forth. I quickly discovered that #ff was short for follow friday and that this meant that people were recommending other people to follow. I was quite taken a back by this, after all, my previous experiences with social media were fairly limited and the tools I had used had a nasty habit of sustaining relationships that I would happily have left behind, but here was a tool with the power to connect me to new and exciting people. I followed three people on that day, Jason Bradbury, Becky Kingston and Wayne Thompson, at the time the thing that stuck in my mind was that Jase followed me back, if I had only known what was to come!

Over the next few weeks I began to check twitter more and more regularly, following more and more people, although tending to read far more than I posted, I couldn’t believe that anybody who didn’t know me would be interested in reading my thoughts. I began to follow one of my favourite wrestlers, Chris Jericho, and was enjoying reading the tweets that Chris was retweeting, they were like Chuckisms, but Jericho themed. I tried to think of something funny to tweet in the hope that Chris might retweet it and then I nailed it “@IAmJericho Chris Jericho future endeavoured Vince McMahon”. If you don’t know much about wrestling then you will just have to trust me that I nailed it. Chris did retweet my message and I was ecstatic… and then a strange thing happened, other people started retweeting it… and following me. For several days after my original tweet I received RTs and new followers. This gave me a new confidence to start conversing with people rather than just consuming the tweets of others. One of the people that I began talking to was Wayne, he seemed to be kind of like me, we talked about PlayStation games and the Gadget Show (some things never change bro ;) and Wayne added me on PSN.

Tweeting along to the Gadget Show has become something of a ritual for me and I thoroughly recommend it, I’ve met so many cool people in this way including a badger from outer space!

 

 

One day I was playing MW2 when Wayne invited me to join his party. I did and we had a few good games, I wasn’t as good as he was (some things never change bro ;), but I had fun. A few weeks later I was online again and Wayne invited me to join his party again, I did and was slightly surprised by the two other people also in the party, veedubhev and supermarioex. Wayne introduced us and explained to the others that I didn’t have a mic. We had some great games and exchanged some banter (I tended to be on the receiving end due to the lack of a mic) and this became such a regular occurrence that they invited me to join their TWIT clan and pushed me both to get a mic and to follow the rest of the clan. The rest is history, if it wasn’t for the fact that we all live so far apart, we would be inseparable, but modern technology means that we are all only a tweet/text/email away and can normally be found shoulder to shoulder, slaughtering the competition on CoD Black Ops.

This weekend was the first weekend that we were all in the same place at the same time. It was awesome. I spent the weekend with SMX, Wayne and his lovely fiance, we went to Gadget Show Live 2011 at the NEC on Friday (where we met up with a bunch of our other twitter friends) and traveled down to meet up with Hev and her beautiful daughter on the Saturday. So you see, it is all thanks to Jason and The Gadget Show that I met my three best friends and that is why I owe him a massive thank you. Thank you Jase, see you at the NEC in 2012!

Shameless plug: Jason Bradbury’s third novel is available now from all good book retailers. ;)

Political Apathy 8: The black post – proud to be locked by the force

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AV or FPTP:  Over the last few days I have had several discussions with various  people on the referendum on changing the electoral voting system from  FPTP to AV. I have taken one thing from these discussions, there is a  very real need for a series of televised debates on this subject. A lot  of the people I’ve spoken to have no idea what AV is, no idea what FPTP  is and no idea which one of these we currently use. The outcome of the  referendum will effect every single general election we have from now on  and the facts need to be presented in a forum where people will  struggle to avoid them.

Cosmetics testing: You may not know that the European Union promised that from 2013 the sale of animal tested cosmetics would be banned. However, now the people who make the decisions want to push this back by 10 years!?! Forgive me for engaging smug mode here, but my MP, Caroline Lucas, had tabled an Early Day Motion on this subject before I even knew about it. The EU cannot be allowed to kick this commitment into the long grass.

Fuel  duty: I’ve read so much recently about fuel prices. Yeah, crude oil is  getting more expensive and yeah, fighting in countries like Libya is  going to make the price somewhat unstable, but get used to it, this is a  fact of life that is here to stay. As oil reserves run out, there will  be more demand and prices will increase. But what’s with increasing the tax on petrol? That’s just kicking folks when they are down, especially with VAT having been increased to 20%. I agree with Caroline Lucas that the government shouldn’t subsidize the price of petrol, but it’s wrong to suggest that not increasing the tax even further equates to a subsidy. I understand the logic, that the government could raise additional money from the increased fuel duty and could use this to ease the strain of the cuts in other areas, but it just doesn’t follow that this should come from motorists. Maybe some money could be clawed back from the bankers who are already back to getting bonuses, or companies like British Gas who are announcing record profits whilst insisting that record prices are beyond their control.

I am a mutant

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I am a mutant. I was bitten by a radioactive spider during a school trip and… I’m lying. I don’t have any superpowers, I’m just colour blind. I’m not full on grey scale colour blind, I am Tritanomalous and Deuteranomalous, or more simply I am red/green and blue/green colour blind. Being colour blind has a very negligible effect on my life, 99% of the time I don’t notice and it doesn’t matter when I confuse colours. Notable exceptions include the “green” light on new style temporary traffic lights which I perceive as blue, the coloured bands on resistors (again, apologies to the electronics lab tech during my time at uni) and my trainers with the “blue” strap on them – my Mum requested this one was added in after I had her spend an afternoon looking for trainers with a green strap.

Anyway, enough about me, this post is for you. Okay, a little bit more about me first… I am a software/web developer and because I am colour blind I am aware of certain issues/limitations which other folk will often completely fail to consider when designing User Interfaces.

Colour Choice: Lets start with the biggest potential mistake: colour choice, you need to consider where colours are in the spectrum. I found this website which allows you to generate and compare colour palettes, but it has the added bonus of allowing you to see how your colour scheme looks to people with the various flavours of colour blindness. What looks complementary to you may look incredibly odd, or worse still completely identical, to me.

Colour Mass: But it’s not just about colour swatches, you need to consider the amount of colour that is used because colour mass also effects perception. A thin line of a certain colour may actually appear as black to someone who is colour blind, whereas a slightly thicker line will be able to be perceived without problem. In exactly the same way, colours can get lost in the “noise” of other colours if too many are grouped together.

Texture: Another important point to consider is that the texture of an item can really effect how a colour blind person perceives it. A printed design mock up can look completely different to the design as viewed on a screen, and different again when viewed on a different screen. Textures and materials do effect colour perception.

Consider this post on “Better car brake lights” by Mark Cossey. Hopefully you can now see that using escalating colours to indicate how severely the car is decelerating would be dangerous, whereas flashing lights would be without problem to the majority of colour blind people. This is why in general, I don’t think that you should ever use colour alone to present information to users, an additional albeit slight change in appearance will make your design much more accessible to both colour blind and regular sighted users.

Armed with the information in this post, you should be able to appreciate the absolute best thing about being colour blind: some forms of camouflage are completely ineffective when used against colour blind people. If only this applied to Call of Duty!

Another day, another deathbot

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Iran has unveiled it’s first in-house deathbot, but before everyone lines up to pat the defense department on the back for their sterling efforts, lets spare a thought for the marketing department who managed to come up with this description of said deathbot:

This jet is a messenger of honour and human generosity and a saviour of mankind, before being a messenger of death for enemies of mankind

You just know that the person who came up with that was wearing a suit paired with really, really shiny shoes.

With great power there must also come great responsibility

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In the same week that the story of Jessi Slaughter came to light, this post appeared on Engadget.

Free speech is a right that everyone should be entitled to, but when you say something, it’s all on you if it offends/upsets people. If you say something that a lot of people find offensive/upsetting then you can expect a lot of people to tell you about it and you have to except that they might do that in a way that you find offensive and upsetting.

So you are responsible for what you say, but what if someone provides you with a stage? With maybe the exception of reporting on something upsetting/offensive as a news item, the stage provider is effectively endorsing the content of your message. It is a reflection on them. Websites such as YouTube have a right to uphold their standards by refusing to post, or by removing videos containing content that they find objectionable. This is not censorship. You have the right to free speech, not to have people agree with you. The important point here is that the judgment call on what is acceptable lies with the stage provider, even if they use popular opinion to make their decision on where the threshold of acceptability lies.

In the case of Jessi Slaughter who is a minor (yes, I know that’s not her real name), her parents take on the responsibility for not protecting her from the full horror of the internet and the responsibility for not policing what she was saying*, she did instigate the entire episode after all.

In exactly the same way, Apple and Google have the right to refuse to allow apps containing content that they find objectionable in their respective app stores (the rejection of apps for the purpose of gaining/maintaining market control is an issue for another post). You want Nazi wallpaper on your smart phone, go do it, but don’t expect Apple/Google to help you.

I wrote this post because freedom of the internet is one of those subjects that people like to convince themselves is full of grey areas, when really it isn’t. The internet is as self policing as the spoken word, it’s just that people don’t like having to make the decision on what is black and what is white because they are making clear where their own threshold of acceptability is and other people might disagree.

*Despite what one of the talking heads on GMA said, rap music is not responsible for Jessi Slaughter’s actions.

House Syndrome (Quick to the point, to the point no faking).

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The theme of this short but sweet post is fakery, inspired by a week filled with it (and full of it).

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I think the Apple press conference on Antenna Gate was perfect. It was such an Apple thing to do. Steve Jobs rolled up on the stage and called out all of the media for their part in spinning the story into an international headline. The videos of the other smart phones being death gripped were cool, I don’t care how many companies release rebuttal statements – if the videos were in any way unfair or inaccurate they would be suing, and they aren’t.  To silence the remaining dissenters (fanboys), Steveo offered free cases or free returns; an immediate smack down to the haters drawing parallels between Vista and iPhone 4.

My point is that I just don’t have time for the perennial Salesman type: from the guy packaged in the clothes he thinks you think he should be wearing, to the sensationlist news reporter or politician looking to spin a situation in a favourable light. I guess that’s why I like Twitter, because I have been able to build up a stable of people who are real, who are opinionated in a good way and who are able to hold sometimes polar opposite opinions and yet co-exist with each other. I am unapologetically honest because life is easier that way. I speak my mind and sometimes it gets me into trouble, but hey, that’s me – take it or leave it.

When Gregory House met Vanilla Ice.

[Note: Dear future me. Please don't forget any of the things that inspired this post.]

Dot Robot: Literary awesomeness

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I have just finished reading Dot Robot, the first book in the techno thriller trilogy by Jason Bradbury*. I rarely read fiction, I’m more of a biography or software textbook kind of guy. The last piece of fiction I consumed was a few years ago, it was the first novel penned by Mick Foley, wrestling superstar and New York Times best-selling autobiographer, so the bar was set quite high for the man from The Gadget Show. Have no fear though because Dot Robot is the very definition of a page turner, it’s awesome. I’m a self confessed geek, so the premise of the story of Dot Robot was like every dream I’ve ever had (except for the ones with Megan Fox in them ;-), a tale of good vs evil, played out in a world of gadgets, computers and the internet. I think Dot Robot is supposed to be for kids, but so is The Simpsons and for me, like The Simpsons, Dot Robot manages to pull off the difficult task of simultaneously appealing to young and er… not so young (hey – I’m far from old).

The experience of reading this book really was like riding a roller coaster, a gripping, multi-emotional, twisting and turning journey, that at one point actually had me so mad that I was completely unable to put the book down. The bottom line is that if you are a geek, of any age and/or sex, you need to read this book, but just be sure that you have the next in the series available for when you finish it, I didn’t and the suspense of the cliff hanger finish of book one is killing me!

* Jase is such a top bloke that he actually sent me a signed copy of his book!

But what about the Cheerleader!?!

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It’s been a bad week for fans of serial television shows; Flash Forward, Heroes and Law & Order have all been canceled. I’m sure that the people that made the decisions to cancel these shows thought that they were doing the right thing, but I just can’t see it. Let me qualify that, even if from a business perspective, the falling advertising revenues were making the shows less profitable, or even not profitable at all, they shouldn’t have been canceled like that *clicks fingers*.

The people watching these shows invest hours of their lives in them and they simply are not going to do that if the shows keep getting canceled without the stories being properly resolved. I specifically have not watched Flash Forward because I couldn’t see it surviving past one or two seasons and can say the same for Stargate Universe. The Stargate franchise is a brilliant example of the two ways in which things can go wrong, on the one hand you’ve got SG-1, where towards the end the story arcs were crippled by the seemingly constant threat of cancellation, everything felt like it was under developed so that it could be wrapped up in a couple of episodes. On the other extreme you have Atlantis, which showed no signs of death until suddenly an attempt was made to wrap everything up in a couple of episodes. In both cases, the stories and characters that viewers had invested so much time in were gone without an acceptable resolution. Television executives please note, straight to DVD movies are not an acceptable appeasement for this, even if they help to ease the pain.

I guess we’ll just have to add Heroes to the ever increasing list of awesome shows that died too soon.

Political Apathy 7: The fall of the Empire (look, an Ewok)

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So I’ve made my decision on who to vote for and just thought you might be interested to know who I’ve picked and why.

Right off the bat I’m going to say that the leaders debates have proven to be most thought provoking for me (I am really looking forward to Mr Dimbleby and the Beeb showing ITV and Sky how it should be done though). I’ll be honest and say that I was concerned about these debates originally, specifically because:

  1. Not all of the leaders of the UK political parties were getting to take part: This concern was fully justified, lots of talk about immigration from outside of the EU, but no debate about immigration within the EU. I don’t think they could have gotten away with this if UKIP were involved. Also, the Lib Dems position on Trident would have been challenged. “We won’t replace Trident!”, sounds good and it’s what the Lib Dems were shouting, but “We won’t replace Trident directly, but might get something else similar.” doesn’t sound as good. My biggest beef in this area was the fact that the Digital Economy Bill didn’t get mentioned once!
  2. I was worried that there wouldn’t be any real debate, just lots of reading of prepared statements: I was delighted to see that this was not the case.
  3. I was worried that 2 would mean that Darth Cameron would be thriving whilst Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg drowned: Erm yeah, I needn’t gave worried. First round: Nick wins, GB was on the ropes, Darth Cameron was on the canvas. Second round: Nick wins on points, despite Dave getting one of Murdoch’s Minions to tag team with him (GB did much better too).

The debates were not the only source from which I drew my information. I have had an array of pamphlets, leaflets (what is the difference between a pamphlet and a leaflet?) and other “stuff” deposited through my letterbox recently and I have read all of it. The Greens and the Tories did quite a good job here, Labour did a terrible job and here’s why:

  1. As I have previously noted here I was annoyed by the leaflets that presented the 2005 election results as evidence for the Greens being unable to take the Brighton Pavilion seat. I’m not stupid, do not treat me like I am.
  2. They addressed everything to me *and* my brother!?! We are two separate people who are so far apart in our beliefs that you wouldn’t believe we were raised by the same parents, or on the same planet even. He does not care about politics, in fact it scares me that people as ignorant as him get a vote at all, please treat us as individuals. I’m not saying send two letters, but maybe just address it to me.

Still, at least Labour tried. When I receive the Lib Dem end of term report card I will be entering “Could try harder.” in the general comments box; not a single piece of Lib Dem propaganda was received.

Political Detritous

I was quite convinced I was going to vote Green until the Green manifesto came out. If the Conservative spending cuts will risk the recovery from recession, then the Greens policies will certainly kill it. Just picking on one point, how can doubling the price of petrol be even a remotely sensible idea? I applaud the desire to protect the environment but you have to have the infrastructure to support mass migration to public transport before you stop the average family from being able to afford a car. What happens when nobody is buying petrol? How will the public transport be funded then? With huge taxes?

I was seriously wavering. I don’t dislike any of the PPCs in Brighton Pavilion, they all seem like nice people (I follow them all on Twitter) and then I sat down and really thought about it.

I cannot vote for Labour. Labour have had 13 years in power and have achieved some great things (like the minimum wage), but they have also made some major mistakes, worse still, they plan on making some more:

  1. University fees.
  2. ID cards.
  3. Digital economy bill.
  4. Unprecedented levels of debt (no more boom and bust eh Gordon?).
  5. Misleading everyone about the evidence to support going to war in Iraq.
  6. My current Labour MP has been an epic fail. I wrote to him about the DE Bill, I only ever got a response saying “I got your letter” and he didn’t bother with the main debate (maybe if it had effected Cyprus).

I cannot vote for the Conservatives, Darth Cameron might be a Sith, but I assure you that his light sabre is blue. Anyone who thinks that in a period where “tough decisions need to be made” to reduce levels of debt that an inheritance tax break for properties worth £2000000.00 is important is either high on crack or a Conservative. The only proof I needed of Dave’s intentions was to watch a guy from Varndean School ask him about fox hunting, the question was not about whether the law was well written, or whether people were flouting it, or whether the police were failing to enforce it properly, or if it was taking up to much of their time, but these were the answers he gave. We don’t need time in parliament for a free vote on this issue, we’ve done it already. If the law needs to be improved to make things easier for the police then discuss those changes, but of course he doesn’t want to do that because he is completely in favour of hunting foxes, badgers, otters and probably people on welfare too (OK, I made that last one up).

I cannot vote for the Liberal Democrats. I am not amongst the number of people noticing the Lib Dems for the first time during the debates. It’s like the Ewoks emerging from the forest, they might be Ewoks, and Ewoks are immensely cool, but they do not have a chance of winning the seat of Brighton Pavilion and my vote would be wasted if lavished upon them, allowing Labour and the Conservatives a better chance of winning it.

I cannot vote for Labour, the Conservatives or the Lib Dems because they were all engaged in the expenses scandal and none of you are sorry for what you did, just sorry you got caught.

Back to the Greens. Caroline Lucas will never (or at least not in the coming parliament) be in a position to put the more extreme aspects of the Green manifesto in to place, but she won’t ever be whipped and will be able to promote fairness (proportional representation ftw), consideration of the environment, animal rights and civil liberties in a sort of Jiminy Cricket like role and so she gets my vote, but she didn’t win it, everyone else lost it.

Political Apathy 6: Epic Fail

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Every time one of the ‘major’ parties does/says/announces something it usually just helps to remind me how out of touch they are. I received a letter from Nancy Platts today (Nancy is the Labour PPC for Brighton Pavilion), the basic jist of which was that if I voted Green I risked letting in the Tories (this fact was in big bold letters at the bottom of the page).

  1. The voting figures from the last General Election are ancient. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, including a set of European elections that at worst suggest that the Greens have made significant gains.
  2. No I wouldn’t support Labour’s plan to change the voting system. Why switch one flawed system with another? Do it properly and give us proportional representation where every single vote counts, or don’t bother at all.
  3. Would I prefer a Labour or Conservative government? Well, that’s like asking me if I’d rather be poked in the eye, or kicked in the nuts… I’m not that crazy about either option.

Bottom line, this letter did nothing to dissuade me from voting Green, in fact, in strengthened my resolve even more. Epic. Fail.