Jedis drink milk #SMXFact

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My last post ended up being almost a Dear Diary kind of deal, but that’s okay with me. I started this blog to chronicle my journey “to infinity and beyond” and that applies just as much to my personal life as it does to my professional one. And no, this post isn’t going to make much sense to most of my readership, but it will to the people that matter.

I don’t think I’ve actually gone to sleep before midnight a single day this week. I know, this is very unusual for me, but I guess when you’re having fun you don’t notice you’re tired. And I am having fun. I don’t enjoy change, but I know that it is necessary for me to push myself to try new things, to do things that make me feel uncomfortable, especially if the prize at the other end is… pretty awesome. Sometimes I want the ground to open up and swallow me, but pushing past that point makes me ROAR!

I was reminded this week just why I am so hard on myself: because it is so easy to settle, to find a neat little rut and stay there forever. I don’t think Obi Wan will ever realise how I grateful I am that he showed me the way of the Force. Thanks dude.

I can’t believe how much I’m missing my bro SMX. It wasn’t until he went away that I realised how much time we spend communicating (bro, we talk every day). Don’t get me wrong, the stand in SMX is doing an amazing job and my other bro has had more evenings off than usual, but it’s not the same. Sup’ Negro! When you get back I want you to FaceTime me immediately so we can shoot the breeze and marvel at the amazing power of milk. :)

Maybe I _am_ mad. ;)

The week that was.

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Wow what a week. This isn’t a particularly well thought out post, more a collection of thoughts for me to come back to in the future, but you’ll have to forgive me as I haven’t had more than about six hours sleep since Thursday.

So much stuff has happened. Not all of it good, but all of it exciting and new. Yep, that’s right, I’m doing stuff that’s exciting… and new. I’m trying not to mess things up, but as lot of it is new to me, I’m learning as I go along.

I know I can always be 100% honest with my friends without fear of reprisal. Just when I’m expecting to be told to stop being daft, they encourage me to keep finding my way in life. This week they really came through for me when I needed them. They know stuff that I haven’t shared with any other living creature – not even Beaver ;D. My poor iPhone has taken a real beating this week too, but I guess that’s what happens when you refresh your tweets ten times a second. Free advice: a watched phone never bleeps.

I was totally honoured this week to be asked to speak at my friends wedding, I don’t think they even realised how much it meant to me that they would ask and I know they’ll love it when I lay down Corinthians over SMX beat boxing. I’m kidding guys… or am I! 125 days until Cornwall, 161 days until Christmas and 177 days until Florida. I’m super nervous and super excited.

I’ve spent the week with Gold Cobra on repeat (seventy spins in a week) and wearing my red Yankees cap. As my bro so aptly pointed out, I’m stuck in the 90s. Actually said cap has disintegrated so I’ve got to get a new one.

I’ve spent the week being a proper a grown up and a little kid at the same time, but I’ve traveled this emotional roller coaster of a week Bizkit style: headphones, red hat, baggy jeans and middle fingers up.

Random conversations I’ve had this week: the different noises made by bees, birds, flies and fish; New Era ball caps and fitted hat sizing; video hoe therapy; working in a pharmacy and selling people condoms (the secret is not to make eye contact).

Anyway, I leave you with this footage of my bro’s 21st birthday. I’ve missed ya bud. Tuesday night is game night!

#WWWYKI

Post tune: Mann, Buzzin

Greatest of all time

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Okay, this post was inspired by a conversation I had with my friend Chris a really long time ago, that I had again with my bro recently. This is my list of the top 10 MC’s ever, the greatest of all time, or GOAT. Feel free to hit me up in the comments section whether you agree or disagree – like I said, this is just my opinion.

10. T.I. – So many of today’s rappers are releasing weak albums, one good track, probably one good verse and that’s it. Not T.I. His albums are packed full of sick beats and sick lyrics. The King has made mistakes in his life, but he’s man enough to admit them, take his punishment, dust himself off and start over. Articulate, intelligent and charismatic. Managing to make a video *whilst* locked up in jail – hilarious. [Check out: What You Know, Big Shit Poppin', Top Back]

9. KRS One – If you could learn hip hop at university KRS One would be the professor. You won’t see him on MTV and you won’t hear him on the radio. He is true hip hop, for the hardcore fans. He has been very vocal in his disregard for video rappers, but not outspoken, he has earned the right to call out whoever he wants. Yeah Nelly, this means you. Nelly might sell a million times more albums than KRS, but KRS is on a totally different level. [Check out: MC's Act Like They Don't Know, Sound of Da Police, Step Into a World]

8. Tupac – I don’t think we’ll ever know who killed ‘pac, or why, but he was taken too early. He was the epitome of mid 90′s gangsta’ rap, but he was real, he wasn’t a pretend thug, he really was one. I’m not saying this is a good thing to aspire to be, I’m just highlighting that he wasn’t faking just to sell records, he was telling the story that he lived.  [Check out: 2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted, Hit Em Up]

7. Snoop Dogg – The gangsta’ your Mum likes C-walks his way into the top 10. Gang affiliations aside, he is possibly the coolest man on the planet as characterised by his unique laid back flow.  [Check out: Who Am I?, Gin & Juice, Drop It Like It's Hot]

6. Big Punisher – If he hadn’t died so young I’m pretty sure he would be at number one, he really was *that* good. He had a flow that was both relentless and devastating. [Check out: Dream Shatterer, Capital Punishment]

5. Notorious B.I.G – Big Poppa had the smoothest flow of any emcee and his effortless style made rapping seem easy. If he hadn’t died so young, he would likely have been higher on this list. [Check out: Hypnotize]

4. LL Cool J – The self proclaimed GOAT has been going platinum since 1985. When most rappers were putting out cookie cutter gangsta’ rap records, LL stayed true to his style, choosing music over easy money and fame. Just because he wasn’t copying the gangsta’ rap routine doesn’t mean he wasn’t going hard and bodying emcees at will: Kool Moe Dee, Ice-T, MC Hammer, Canibus, LL put them all away. Plus, he’s a rapper who can actually act!? [Check out: Mama Said Knock You Out, I'm Bad]

3. Jay-Z – The hardest working man in hip hop, he built a dynasty up from nothing and earned the respect of everyone in the game, including Nas. Did Jigga change up his style and end up sounding more like Nas? Yep. Has he jacked lines from other rappers? Yep. Does he need to jack lines from other rappers? Nope. He may have been bested by Nas in their early 2000′s beef, but he took it close and he does it better that 99% of the other rappers out there. That beef was one of raps high points for me, they brought out the best in each other and made some of the best records ever. His beat selection is impeccable. [Check out: 99 Problems, The Take Over, Big Pimpin']

2. Nas – Queensbridge’s finest is often imitated but never duplicated. Yeah Jay-Z that means you. Powerful themes, powerful words. King of the beef. I think he’s a poet and a genius. He has mastered his craft to the level where he spit a rhyme backwards?! [Checkout: Ether, Got Ur Self A, Nastradamus]

1. Method Man – The most under rated, overlooked guy to have ever picked up a mic. Quite simply the dirtiest, grimiest emcee in history. Whether it’s his work as part of Wu-Tang, his solo successes or his collaborations with Redman, he has shown himself to be one of the dopest, realest, lyrically on it rappers ever. I’m guessing my choice might be controversial as Meth rarely makes most people’s top 10, but this is my list and when I stopped and looked at all of the areas where I was scoring rappers I realised that he was the only guy to appear in the top 5 across the board. [Check out: M.E.T.H.O.D Man, Da Rockwilder, Bring The Pain]

Post tune: T.I., What you know, King.

echo “Oh shit!”

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I spent the back end of last week sorting out the RPM creation process for some projects I’m working on. We tend to use CheckInstall to generate the first cut spec files and then manually update them. I had done all of the hard work; I had the spec files down for the various RPMs and I had bash scripts set up to generate them. I asked a colleague if he knew the switch to pass to CheckInstall to have it select RPM automatically, just to make the process completely fire and forget. He didn’t know off the top of his head, but said that he would look it up. I Ctrl+C’d the script and watched as CheckInstall cheerfully entered it’s clean up routine. Did I not mention that CheckInstall has a helpful clean up routine built in? It tidies up (deletes) everything in the $BuildRoot directory. Unfortunately CheckInstall hadn’t got far enough into it’s execution to reinitialise that variable, which I actually also use in my own scripts. It points to the root of my workspace. CheckInstall very cheerfully nuked the whole thing. You have been warned.

Post tune: Gold Cobra, Gold Cobra, Limp Bizkit.

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!

Browse like a ninja

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If the only metric you use to make your choice of internet browser is performance then you are a fool. The security of your personal data must surely be at least as important as how quickly you can render a page? I should explain that this post has been coming for a while, articles about Evercookies and Firesheep were worrying, but it was a piece on internet security on The Gadget Show [that completely failed to mention browser choice] that was the ultimate catalyst.

Firefox is my browser of choice because it is the safest, thanks largely to the security and privacy on offer from some of the myriad of awesome third party add ons. I have previously explained why NoScript and AdBlock Plus are must haves for me, but I have recently come across two more add ons that have quickly found a place in my personal hall of fame.

BetterPrivacy provides an easy way to manage super cookies (LSO Flash Objects, DOM Storage Objects – cookies that never expire). You set it up, in my case this meant telling it to delete everything when Firefox is closed, and then you forget about it.

Ghostery allows you to see exactly who is tracking you using web bugs, beacons, hidden pixels etc and then control which ones you allow. In fact, it offers you a profile on the source of each tracker to help you make your decision.

Go on, check them out and start browsing like a ninja!

If you are interested in browser security then you may be interested in this article about changes in Firefox 4.0 to prevent abuse of the CSS :visited selector.

Thanks to James Hugman for pointing out Ghostery to me!

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.