Took around a full minute for the folder to load, on an Athlon 64 3200+ clocked at 2.4GHz with 2GB of fairly quick memory.

Since when do apps alert in the tray about loading a view? If Outlook didn’t expend resources on a generally-useless tray icon (really, it doesn’t even change when you have new mail waiting), maybe it wouldn’t take so bloody long to do anything.

I’ve got a dual core 4200+ on the way, but really doubt it’ll make any difference when the fault is largely software that sucks. Not saying that it’s just Outlook at fault… I’m inclined to place a fair degree of blame on the well-known-to-be-sucky Windows Desktop Search. But it just integrates best… why does Microsoft have to produce products that suck?!

Speaking of which, my iPaq is working again with a brand new extended battery. Apart from the slow processor, it’s doing great… but I’m going to test-drive a Palm Z72 for a few days and see if it does any better. Basically, I don’t really need the GSM/GPRS functionality on the iPaq because it’s faster for me to connect via my Sony Ericsson via Bluetooth (as there’s no HSDPA on the iPaq). I’ll immediately miss the wireless, but have survived several months without it, and SDiO wifi cards are a possibility for the palm… I doubt they’re particularly common, though. Have been considering a Blackberry, but they’re pretty restricted in a whole heap of ways that PDAs aren’t. For example, ever tried getting an SSH client on a Blackberry? I haven’t. But have my doubts it could be done!

Anyway. Don’t use Outlook 2007 unless you have to.  It has nice multi-calendar/iCal support, but that’s about all it has going for it. Still no inbuilt SMS/MMS support, the renderer is a regression in the truest sense of the term (doesn’t even support background images — IE7 comes out, which is an awesome browser, and they decide it would be a good idea to force Word 2007 to be the renderer. Brilliant.), thoroughly mediocre RSS/feed-reading capabilities, and, to top it all off, it’s crap-slow (compared to earlier versions).

If it offers groupware advantages I don’t know of them (but doubt it could, it’s always been fairly comprehensive on that front), and chances are they won’t be particularly enabled until Server 2008 is released. Am guessing here, but not without some reasoning.

Avoid.

p.s. Yes, I’m probably overdue for a Windows reinstall.  Unfortunately a fairly major project cropped up just as I’d scheduled one, and I still haven’t got around to it. Will probably hunt down the right product key when the new CPU gets here early next week: that’s a large part of the problem, Microsoft apparently expect that home users either buy prebuilt systems with stupid crapware-filled restore disks, or are hardcore tech using pirates/MSDN users (same thing… the users rarely paid for the MSDN subs, mostly its their workplace). I have 5 XP Pro licenses of different varieties (not to mention previous versions of Windows), and of those a bunch are the same product type (upgrade)… which makes license management and compliance a bit of a challenge!

What I’d love MS to do is create a site-licensing product for SOHO users with flexible and transferable licensing at retail OEM pricing (that sounds dumb, but I mean still charging what us mortals pay for OEM licenses, not the volume prices that Dell, Lenovo, et al. get) — it’d be simple, web administered (not requiring a local server), and increasingly relevant in homes which are featuring more and more computers.

Either way… highly recommended editions.

Also to acquire when next book shopping: Alice in Wonderland, for some opium-fuelled holiday reading. And perhaps Hitchhiker’s Guide to see if I can endure it nine years from when I last tried… less likely fuelled by opium, but from all reports it sounds bizarre enough to warrant suspicion of the involvement of some other mind-altering substances!

Holiday reading = after June 22nd, whereupon my last exam occurs. Then, off to lead on a study camp (perhaps time for reading? I can justify Alice as being in support of the HSC English ‘journeys’ core!) for a week, three days back home in Sydney (undoubtedly to be insanely busy) before going away to New Zealand from the 4th to 16th of July. My how time flies. I may or may not be at university in an equal capacity next semester due to a whole bunch of things, primarily related to its perceived importance and myriad other opportunities that are cropping up all over the place. It would be, for example, nice to have some money in exchange for funny hours in the form of more work (which I think I prefer to regular and boring hours) and not have to pursue useless assessments (I speak of one particular subject that has copped flak on this blog over the past few months) around this.

The CYIADA thing is progressing nicely. Michael came on board about a month ago as chief code monkey, which has been nice coz I’ve been spending a bit more guilt-free time in Photoshop. There is a two-fold reason for that, first of which being I don’t feel like I need to try and prototype anything on my own, and the other is that now he’s developing stuff, there’s an imminent need for front-end to make this thing saleable! We’re close to landing on a new name that doesn’t sound like something you’d use to gas people with.

There’s a meeting tomorrow arvo wherein we will speak of many things (except perhaps for shoes and ships and ceiling wax and cabbages and kings), involving a progress update, an extensive argument about names and inclusiveness, prayer, another argument about launch dates and where/how it’s going to be hosted, who’s providing SMS, how much money we’re planning on losing and for how long, how we’re going to promote it, open sourcing things we write, and lots lots more.

I should really update the CYIADA project blog, too, but we haven’t got staggeringly good readership over there anyway (well, not compared to here, though perhaps more after Southern Cross’ coverage — at the end of that article, which is effectively buried online, though less so in print… ironically we need online readers far more than print ones!) so hopefully that will wait until we settle on a new name (and associated domain name acquisitions take place).

Oh and in unrelated news, my camera turned up. It wasn’t in Selo’s car. This is a good and a bad thing… good because I have no money to spend on a still camera right now, bad because I have no reason to buy a new one even if I did :P It’s still got another six months of life left in it I think, though it’s looking pretty abused. Still takes decent pictures. I’m so happy with its performance over the last two and a half years (link goes to first photos I took with it), seriously. I will struggle to make up my mind when it dies about what kind of camera to get… a larger SLR would be more useful for production stuff and night time things, but this is so portable… I don’t know.

And there is a decent sized blog update.

Now, I should stop procrastinating and prepare to kick off some fairly pressing freelance work when I get back from uni tonight! Uni assessments, also, are proving to be rather worthy of procrastination. Ahhhh… I keep remembering “one more thing” to write about: 28 Weeks Later proved to be a seriously scary zombie flick. Saw it with Ben and Tori last night. Was ultimate year 10 flashbacks, only with added alcohol and late nights without concerned parentals! We went to Pizza Hut all you can eat afterwards… its so disgusting but such good fun :P

As for the movie… it’s quite messy. But it was spectacularly produced… I need to re-watch the first one, but I’m pretty sure it was much more in-your-face suspenseful. It sets up for a third film at the end, which vaguely irritates me, but… well, rumours have it that it’ll be capped at a trilogy only. And this was a really good sequel, so I don’t think it’ll matter too much. Wikipedia has full spoiler detail for 28 Weeks Later… See the film first instead if you can normally handle that sort of thing.

Please be praying we find someone good (or, suitably sinful but repentant and appropriately talented, because there’s nearly no such thing as a good person).

Ad proper after the break:

A Christian youth organisation (Anglican Youthworks) is looking for a programmer to commence immediately as part of a small team.
This is a project-based role in which you will be equipping youth ministries across Sydney with web-based communication/publishing tools and quality evangelical content.

If you have experience in:

• building dynamic websites using MVC-style PHP, Python or Java
• with a relational database (MySQL/PostgreSQL preferably, but it’s a clean slate!)
• publishing PDF documents securely online
• creating AJAX-powered interfaces securely
• connecting to 3rd party service providers using APIs (payment gateways, SMS, etc.)
• using code versioning systems (Subversion or CVS)

We’d love to hear from you.

Knowledge of frameworks such as Django, Struts or similar would be beneficial.

Learn more about the project at http://cyiada.com/

This high-visibility project would suit a young developer with a passion for sharing Christ and building up his disciples through the Internet.

Interested applicants please email joinus.code@cyiada.com

Josh Street
Anglican Youthworks | CYIADA Project

Take, for example, e-mail & SMS communications.

Respondents were asked how much the youth they lead use mobile phones/e-mail services. In one case, a respondent said that “nearly all” youth used mobile devices, whilst “about half” of them had an e-mail address or used MSN/other IM platforms. Frequency of use was not polled.

The same respondent, when asked about their existing communications, said that whilst they sent out e-mail messages, they did not use SMS at all.

There are less cases in the opposite direction, which is encouraging. There does appear to be an underreporting of mobile usage occurring in some instances, but this is only verifiable where multiple respondents from one church give data. Generally, the higher figure will be accepted as authoritative, as higher figures are — for the most part — those supplied by more knowledgeable respondents, measured according to exposure to podcasting/use of video, and awareness of existing church web activity.

Either alarmingly or encouragingly (encouraging given the state of some of these websites), respondents’ awareness of their church’s web properties is, speaking generally, quite low. This is not only for reasons of stale content — some websites, despite aesthetic deficiencies, have up to date content but apparently little in the way of visitors. This could be taken to suggest that the content is up to date but remains irrelevant!

One website visited had as its most recent forum post a declaration that it had been three years since the last post was made on that forum.

Youth websites have been slightly under-reported but not significantly so, and this may be attributed to the wording of this question: “Does your youth group have a website (separate from your church site)”. There may be instances where there is a website separate in design and maintenance but existing under the same domain name in a folder or something, where this has not been reported. One or two cases of this have been detected.

Further, there was no question on Myspace/SocNet presence (for reasons of simplicity as much as anything — the aim of the survey was emphatically not to confuse!). Usage of these is not even moderately common, but enough are popping up to make me wish I’d at least left space for it somewhere (“Other web sites of note:” type question).

Still got about a third of responses to process still. This will be reposted at CYIADA.com when I setup a blog there (probably this weekend, or early next week… depends somewhat on what’s happening in Fiji the next couple of days)

Went down pretty well methinks. Praise God! I managed not to talk too long or garble words too much, as evidenced by the fact that people managed to write down what “CYIADA” stood for when I explained it was nothing to do with cryptosporidium or Sydney Water — some surveys had “Christian Youth in a Digital Age” neatly penned across the top next to my cryptic “CYIADA” acronym, which brought great joy! Obscure acronyms worked well because the previous spot had opened with “What does CMS mean?” (no, not the web developer’s idea of a CMS), so I was able to follow that up with something no-one would guess, and use that as an excuse to launch into a little rant about what it was. I’m pretty sure I took under three minutes.

That three minutes was basically: for people like you (youth leaders); early next year (2007); gives blog, podcast, email & SMS tools; lets you get resources you need online instantly; best used to link back to real world ministry/promoted in real world ministry; we want to know what you think about it/how you’d use it.

I had planned to read from a script but kinda got up and changed my mind, for whatever reason — we were running a couple of minutes behind, the audience seemed more intimate than I’d thought (hadn’t seen the venue before), and I didn’t really like what I’d already written, anyway. So yes. Punchy apparently worked well enough.

Enough people were excited about it to make me immensely happy, and I got more than 50 survey responses (from 130 printouts, probably 120 participants as predicted, but it let me cover empty seats when papering the room before the session) which is so so useful. A few seemed very disinterested or generally negative about it, which did hurt a bit but really, there’s no way I was going to get 100% positive feedback.

By positive I mean supportive rather than “yes, we would use something like this” — I got a lot of positive responses that even fall outside the product’s scope, which is frustrating in an entirely different way — I’d not even considered there might be people who only did kids ministry at the conference, but discovered two lovely responses from people that had added primary school years to my question, “Leading kids in school years…” and circled them, instead. They were interested in none of the contact functionality, but were keen on perhaps starting to use video to support what they were doing. Of course, that’s outside the scope of what CYIADA is trying to do, but there’s no where else for them to get that in the same way (there are DVD-based resources for this, but not any videos available online under a micropayment model).

Aggregate results might get published sometime. Not tonight, I think the last week has just set in (or maybe I drank a bottle of V this afternoon and it’s worn off? Shrug.) Either way, I’m sitting at work completely exhausted and need to go home and sleep muchly.

(Still need to setup cyiada.com domain name quickly, before anyone sees it! Sigh… I’m so organised…)

One thing we’ve noticed (“we” is myself and a handful of others with an interest in the web) over the past twelve months is an uptake in web usage by youth ministries — for obvious reasons: that’s where kids are spending their time, and it’s a great communication tool, and everyone else is doing it.

When I say everyone else is doing it, I actually mean everyone else is trying to do it. Everyone has, for the last six to twelve months, been writing the same applications, integrating the same software, paying for the same software, attempting to train the same people, and generally doing a lot of the same stuff, separately. With no point of intersection or sharing or intelligent resource management.

This is understandable: afterall, the web presents a relatively new front for churches in general, and whilst kids have been wasting time online for years, only with the relatively recent advent of social networking websites (I refer to it as ‘SocNet’ in these parts — no-one else seems to, but I like it, so whatever) have the less computer-inclined began spending significant amounts of time in front of a keyboard.

There’s also a bit of a catch-22 when it comes to building these things. People ask, what are the benefits? We’ve never had someone come along to youth group because of our website! — well, no, you’re right. But you also don’t have a website, so that’s hardly fair, is it? Nine times out of ten people will not come along to church (generically) because they’ve searched for a church in a particular suburb in Google (though, speaking of that, I’ve got to do a bit of SEO work on the Matthias site — it’s not on the first page for a “Church in Paddington” query. Changed the title, it’ll be a while til that kicks in. We’ll see.)

They’ll come because a friend asked if they wanted to, or they were walking past and heard people inside, saw them going in, and wondered what it was all about.

But this is hardly exclusive to having a website. If they have those points of contact, a website is a great way to invisibly investigate further without needing to make themselves uncomfortable. It’s easy to find these sorts of websites through search engines — you walked past a church and noted its name, you remember the name of your friend’s church, etc.

The same goes for youth groups, obviously.

People have just been starting to realise this, or at least think of it at all and decide “yeah, we could do that”. So, there’s the rationale for it all. Most people with decent websites already may not have considered rationale in any great depth — they’ve got a good website because they know someone who makes them, and volunteered their time (maybe they’re a leader), throwing something together with Xoops in an afternoon. It’s quick and dirty, but effective.

We’re trying to spend a small but not insignificant amount of money to equip people to do these sorts of thing, so it’s only sensible that some more time is spent considering what on earth we’re trying to achieve. Hence the lengthy prelude to what it actually does.

Now, the features. We have too many target audiences for it to be an altogether comfortable project, but that’s half the fun of it. The product is being marketed to churches (who pay for it) through leaders (who want to use it) and for youth (who actually aren’t the centre of the universe on this one, but we need to give them UX that says they are). Outside of these three, there are also the friends of the youth already in the application who are just checking out the youth group page.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. We’re also marketing this to camps, high school scripture groups/lunchtime bible groups, and maybe bands/events. Which is great and technically only a small step, but it does pretty horrible things when you try and explain who’s paying for what in a concise business-like fashion. If you’ve read this far, chances are you’re well aware that concise-ness has never been my strong point.

So, with these targets in mind, we are (firstly) going to equip them with websites. Big woop. WordPress.com and Blogger eat your heart out. Cue yawns.

No, seriously. We’re going to give them (‘them’ being the various entities described above, not individuals so much — there’s no way I’m positioning this against other SocNet sites because I reckon it’s too fragmented to last… Facebook or Myspace or Bebo or.… yes.) web pages. Welcome to 1999.

They’re going to have web pages with calendars they can chock full of the schedule for the term, though. So that’s exciting.

And everyone’s going to have their own username, so they can leave comments on the inevitable blogging element with identity — this is wonderful for comment– and generic form-spam. Incidentally, I read a few blogs that Wild St people are writing and was really excited to see they’re actually enthusiastic about doing it. There’s quite the bunch of them on Blogger these days, and it’s all completely autonomous — so far as I know, no-one has pushed them to start doing it. I was so proud of their keenness and innovation for building up community and spreading the gospel! Another aside, my copy hasn’t arrived yet but I believe there’s something about blogging in The Briefing for December (it’s not on their website yet, either). My copy arrived today, and I discovered the current issue is in their webstore, just not on the main site. It’s The Briefing #339, if you’d care to read it.

Anyway. Blogs will feature. Calendars will feature. All the stuff you’d reasonably expect to be able to do with a CMS tool these days will feature. Blogs, calendars, galleries, contact forms, static pages. Yay. So that’s the boring stuff that we’ve just got to do the grunt-work for at some point (I’m sure it can be fun, but, just between you and me, I’m not really looking forward to the couple of weeks we have to spend on that bit).

Now, for interesting and innovative features — because, let’s face it, the above is hardly enough to convince anyone to switch their existing website (if indeed they have one) across to a hosted platform for a nominal (to be determined, but probably only payable by church groups, and not for camps/events on account of these being once-off) monthly fee.

Contact tools. Yummy. We’re going to give them mailers that make it easy to send a message to, say, all the kids in year 10. Or just guys. Or girls in year 8. Or only to your co-leaders (we’ll have a resource area where they can share files — Word documents, PDFs, slide shows — on the site, too: that’s some of the fun CMS stuff). But email’s been done before. Everyone’s used email. Admittedly, sometimes you just wish there’s a better way to store and manage lists of people, and this tool will certainly do that, but it’s a little boring still.

So we decided it’d be a good idea to throw SMS into the mix. It’s not just a gimmick: again, this is in response to what people are already doing. The only difference is it’s paid on a shared account (used by the leaders — the youth kids won’t have access to these tools, for fairly obvious reasons) and integrates the same contact management features as the mailer app. We’re hoping convenience will draw people across to this tool. Use scenarios are basically just that you’d use this tool to inform people of what’s going on this week at youth group, or reminding them that the group is on bringing supper this month, etcetera. The originating number will be that of a single leader, or it could even be that of that person’s own leader.

For example, one message is sent to all kids by the group co-ordinator, but that message is altered depending on who the individual recipient’s bible study leader is, so that it appears to originate from them. Obviously common sense would say that you wouldn’t do that without consultation, so we’d probably have a check box in the leader’s “my account” page that would say “Allow messages from other senders to originate from my mobile number”, or something to that affect.

Beyond contact tools, we want to take advantage of the fact that this is a service-based product and entirely a hosted solution. Part of the reason we’re strongly pursuing that is it gives an opportunity to equip and direct in a way that decentralised sites can’t be. So, a few things we’re thinking of doing are centralised offerings like weekly newsletters (sent to leaders two days in advance so they’ve got an opportunity to see it first) and global blog properties that give reviews, current affairs commentary, etc.

That’s the end of the universal features that are great for kids and leaders alike, but there’s lots more for leaders. As I’ve already said, we want this to be self-funding. Part of this is selling electronic versions of dead-tree products, as DRM’d PDFs, or as unencumbered PDFs with watermarks/obviously time-sensitive advertising (so violation of copyright is glaringly obvious). The other part is (for me at least) far more exciting, and that’s reselling user generated/contributed content (UGC) under an iStockPhoto-esque model (Basically, profit sharing).

This isn’t just about words on a page — I want to get plenty of video stuff happening, too, because (especially in reformed evangelical Anglican/Baptist/Presbyterian, etc. churches) that doesn’t get nearly enough of a work out as is. It’s a really effective tool for supporting preaching/bible studies, and it’s been largely overlooked until probably early this year (I had my first conversation with someone about video resources for small group bible studies as late as July or August this year, I think! They had used a Matthias Media resource which I haven’t encountered, and thought it really helpful).

Pricing models for all that are still a little up in the air, but, from a consumer’s point of view, it’s definitely going to be affordable. The project will ultimately sit on a server maintained gratis and depend largely on volunteer labour to administer content. The only “costs” are those to the established Youthworks publishing division, but hopefully we can transition the way they do their high-school level content effectively, so they’re commissioning content for the web and selling it there. Something that’s really exciting is the possibility that, instead of commissioning content, it’s possible to purchase it directly and already created from a pool of resources on the website.

There’s definitely a workable model here, somewhere.

Prayer is greatly welcomed for:

• wisdom trying to figure that model out
• energy and resources to make it happen (in whatever form)
• adoption and enthusiasm from youth leaders and kids
• effectiveness in web strategy as we attempt to use it as an evangelistic outreach tool, and a tool for the growth of existing ministry
• and, hand-in-hand with that last point, that God’s will be done and if He wills it, that growth would be given!

This next couple of weeks will be fun… shooting a short film Saturday, Katy’s birthday that evening, somehow bidding in an eBay auction on Sunday morning whilst at TACKLES (might need to delegate that one!) to pick up some cheap lighting bars, continuing shoot Sunday afternoon, then I’ll be at work all week to catch up on the time I’ve been out of action because of exams/assessments, etc., and chase up all kinds of exciting things that have been on hold (including SMS stuff, yay!) for a conference in early December.

Then, next Saturday, there’s the FEVA Promoting the Word through Text and Image conference, which is plenty exciting and all the cool kids will be there, so get along to it if you can (it’s cheap for a media conference or about average for a Christian conference — worth it either way!)

Wednesday week there’s a performance on at Matthias by the drama kids (it’s a thing we do for networking with kids and parents in the local area more than anything, but it’s run by the kids ministry people at our church.) that shouldn’t be too high stress (at least for me) but I’ll be off work for a day for, then the next evening web-blast06 is being put on by the fine folks from WIPA (I’m going courtesy of hearing about it through WSG, not part of the elite that forms that organisation at present ;-)) at the Old Fitzroy, which is a fun little pub (and theatre) in Woolloomooloo. Which is all fun and games but weirdly suspended between high-priced real estate and the dodge-the-syringes bits of Sydney… shrug.

After that, I’ll hopefully cruise steadily towards the end of the year (December 14 for me, pretty much, coz I’m away til Christmas and it’s basically the New Year after that), finding a programmer and hammering out a bit more stuff for the early early parts of 2007 when development will (God willing) kick off in earnest. Last web thing for the year for me is going to be Webjam on December 12 at Hotel CBD (right down the road from where I used to work, actually) which should be a great deal of fun. I was tempted to try and present something but figure I’m in such a state of permanent verbosity I’d find it hard to do anything useful with three minutes. So I’ll be there heckling in the crowd :-) Should be great fun. If you’re keen to come along to either web thing drop a comment after you’ve RSVP’d (web-blast is full already, but Webjam appears to be open still) and we can arrange to meet up beforehand or something.

But I can’t get any work done until this exam is over because it makes me feel too guilty about not studying. Sigh. Incidentally, reading a great book on Tennyson and Madness (if only it were Madness and Modernism, but perhaps they’re occasionally synonymous!) by Ann Colley.

Colley, Ann C. Tennyson and Madness. The University of Georgia Press. 1983. if you’re interested — got some great stuff on his Maud monodrama which is the reason it got borrowed in the first place!

A very useful programme for when you just can’t be stuffed reaching across to the phone sitting a few centimeters away from you on the desk ;-) Or, for those of us who manage to not notice a phone going off less than a meter away from their head, but will be instantly bugged beyond belief by a popup alert on their screen into responding. My SMS response rate has got nearly as bad as my email followups this last couple of weeks, so it’s probably helpful.

Oh, and it’s also useful for ‘backing up’ (yeah yeah, onsite = bad, etc.) /copying/pasting URLs, etc. in SMS. Jeyo doesn’t do MMS/PXT at all which is a bit of a bummer but it’s quite cool apart from that. I’m still deciding if it’s worth twenty bucks (Australian).

It operates through ActiveSync so you’ve got to have that going as well… which you probably would anyway if you own a PDA in any way associated with a desktop PC (weird *nix/mac types excepted — but as if Mac users would use anything other than a Palm! Well, maybe Blackberry have a foot in there, but it’s probably too corporate for them hippies — tongue firmly in cheek). It kinda bugs me that this functionality isn’t available for free from someone, actually, but whatever.

I can now send SMS for ~15¢ Australian through Skype, for ~5½¢ (real cost) using my mobile through Outlook 2002, or wait til people are on MSN and then send them whatever for free. Clearly, we pay for convenience. And don’t really value sub-gold-coin amounts of money.

*growls at corporate types*

I can have plenty of fun with realtime vis from video inputs, but depending on how much light there is in the room it’d be nice to have stock to fall back on.

The occasion is nothing too serious… it’s an end-of-studycamp party for a Crusaders camp, so my ambitions are entirely my own and hardly out of any great need to impress… toy lights do a good enough job of that without video’s help. Just pushing myself a bit for kicks. I picked up a vision mixer a few weeks back for cheap that doesn’t have inbuilt TBC but can fade one source and has a positioner on black (well, positioner on another layer if you’ve got genlocked sources) which will hopefully perform okay. Despite it not having TBC it will say when sources are in sync, which is kinda nifty. I’ll eventually invest in a decent vision mixer but at the minute they’re still a little out of my range. If it’s not a horrendous failure, I’ll report how it works out :-)

Lighting will be lame party gear that I’ll hopefully mount significantly off the ground (there are four places in the room I can use) at least in part and then probably have one or two larger fixtures in corners/on a T-stand. Lighting, as always, will be largely forgiven by copious quantities of fog. Projection should improve matters in the room somewhat (in terms of visual quality) BUT will probably be rendered ineffective by the fog. If it’s too bad then I’ll just switch to visualisations, which is totally not a big deal at all… I just don’t get to be quite as creative *dreams of a plasma in every corner instead of a sole projector*.

So yeah, I am mildly excited. Will be staying up there overnight unless I’m feeling particularly energetic and in a driving-mood late that evening… the camp is at Galston which is slightly north of Hornsby. Doesn’t have to be a particularly long drive, and it’d undoubtedly be less susceptible to peak-hour traffic if I went back that night instead of Friday morning, but still… it’d be late. We’ll see.

And I find this to be true of most other blogs I have perused in the past, with the obvious exception of completely simple statements/one-line commentaries to be found on posts that consist solely of a link to another site, and a summary comment/quip. Those aren’t blogs, though, they’re link-logs. Or whatever you’re going to call them.

Finally, I’m engaging with LJ people and am increasing perplexed as to how one is expected to interact in such an environment. All is normal, mundane, drawing a-heck-of-a-lot-of-comments; then there is a pebble (it is only a pebble) dropped onto the placid surface of a tightly strung membrane, pulled taut by dozens of interactors (commenters) who play a role in the blog context. It bounces.

Crack.

I picture it like ice, because that’s a dramatic image that appeals to me… shards, stress-fractures, moving across its surface at incredible speed. It’s not really like that, however. The surface is simply released from the edges. It’s like those parachute games you’d play as a kid… imagine people letting go of the edges — the pebble, or author (actually in my original metaphor it was the author’s pithy-one-liner post: either analog will suffice), is left in the middle beneath sheets of canvas.

Perhaps I misconstrue the response. Even beneath that canvas there is, perhaps (again), a subterranean response that goes unseen — that is, email, phone calls, SMS, IM conversations… I speak of an electronic communciations ecosystem only, for it perplexes me to think that anyone could or would use a letter to deal with such things: this, however, betrays my personal context: I am male and no longer at an age where I encounter my closest friends at school everyday.

But, it appears, this pebble bounces and causes those who were active to fall silent. Respectful.

That’s how I feel about it. That’s how I excuse it in myself.

As an alien, it is not my duty to respond… it would be inappropriate, engaging too much, likely to attract disdain, scorn. So afraid we are of being seen to reach out.

And I can’t help but wonder what would happen if I were to start posting the same kinds of one-liners I see all over those kinds of very-age-specific social networks, here. Would something explode, scaring all commenters away? I like to think I mix it up enough here that I scare everyone away equally… or rather, there are occasionally things that will interest all, but I have somehow managed to free myself from the constraints of writing for an audience. This is post 966, by the way. That’s developed writing… not good writing, just developed. Hopefully as I do so more I’ll understand the medium better… for me, yeah, there is a medium. Blogging is not useless (anymore).

Even LiveJournal is useful in its own (different to this) way… it’s chiefly social. That’s the thing about hosted services over DIY jobs. DIY jobs are the best. Yeah, WordPress counts as DIY. The point is, there’s no social facilitator in place. This isn’t Facebook or MySpace or LiveJournal. It doesn’t have any hooks into them (exception: LJ’s awesome OpenID is delegated to from this page), there’s no way to build links. I’m still an outsider technically, if not otherwise… LJ blow-in that I am and have been. But they’re outsiders, too. They’re outside every other social network on the planet. It’s that which I find most striking about social networks… they continue to facilitate fragmentation! Each cries out, “join our clique!” … and they often do.

Some are using Blogger, or even (MSN) Spaces. There are no social networking hooks between services. None of that group of friends uses RSS: they’re still manually checking (if, indeed, they do) these blogs. No convenient index-login-screen to say friends have posted new things. No attention-drawn to pithy one-liners to be ignored (or responded to in some hidden way?) The whole situation is utterly perplexing. And now I feel how I imagine a sociology student must.

Orange today informed us that they’ve become 3. High-powered marketing blitz to existing customers of Orange has begun, and is expected to continue in force. This line typifies the level of crap I’ve come to expect 3 (and most other 3G telephony — not data, that’s okay — networks) to spew:

So, on our 3G network, you can enjoy the same great value, plus international roaming, Bluetooth™, picture messaging and more.

Okay. Let’s analyse this a bit. My call rates are going up, even though the volume of users on Hutchinson’s 3G network “is now larger than our CDMA network” (cost/volume should go down, but hasn’t). I could get international roaming with Orange, albeit only in places with CDMA: no-one should ever choose CDMA without being aware at least to some degree how the technology works/is applied globally (if that’s something they care about — I don’t, global roaming is still way too expensive + I don’t go overseas often enough). Bluetooth is the pinnacle of crap in this line, having absolutely nothing to do with the network — unless it’s a provider-supplied phone with Bluetooth disabled because they’re scumbags. I don’t need to elaborate on this point, suffice to say I sincerely hope no-one with any technical knowledge copy-proofed this. Picture messaging is arguably the most useless thing that ever happened to telephony.

As for the other crap HT have spun, I especially love this line from their FAQ:

What happens to my Orange contract?

Your Orange contract will remain valid, however, as a special offer we are allowing a full waiver of all remaining handset instalments when you upgrade to 3G.

Marvellous. Not only am I being forced onto more expensive plans + call rates (call rates matter for where I’d like to take my mobile phone usage patterns — at present, I’m price-conscious to the point of making less calls than I otherwise would, and SMS usage is trivial at 11c to any mobile in Australia. With 3 I get some free SMS, but I’m not at all helped on the call rate front), there’s also absolutely no exit option.

Effectively, HT would love to change my contract so I’m on a volume-economics-powered 3G network on which they have higher margins and I see no real benefits. Get this:

Can I keep my current phone when I upgrade to 3G?

Yes. The phone is yours to keep, however we will not be connecting any new services to Orange and this phone will not work on any other network, including our 3G network. We have developed fantastic upgrade offers that include a free handset within the plan. We are in the process of setting up a recycling program to take all old mobiles.

The phone is mine to keep, but there aren’t any CDMA networks left in Australia (WCDMA is actually nothing to do with CDMA and has no interoperability with it). “Fantastic upgrade offers” refer to marginally reduced SMS costs (which, so far as I can gather, is the most profitable part of non-business-account telephony services in Australia: namely, Orange’s core market. They never made a big impact on the business telco scene, and their flagship product — before they ditched it — was a landline-replacement plan) and increased call costs if I were to choose a plan based on my current usage. “Include a free handset” refers to the ability to get a free phone if I agree to be shunted onto a new contract term. Not terribly likely. In fact, I’m going to see this contract term out, then switch to another telco.

Or maybe not, but I’d certainly like to. Anyone have recommendations for a $35–40 plan, preferably with cap? Yes, even Telstra is an option if the cap is good enough. It’d mean we could get rid of our landline, still have a discount on Internet (two or more Telstra services on one bill), and switch to VoIP. Sure, Telstra are still getting our money but they’re shooting themselves in the foot doing it! I just want the family to get past the “learning curve” of VoIP so they’re hooked on the idea and then we can find a more compelling ISP, pick the cheapest possible landline rate with a non-Telstra provider, and then they’re only getting ULL money from us.

Did I ever mention I hate telcos?

In fact, so prolific is this campaign that the two often collide in spectacular style, as I discovered on my (prolonged, courtesy of the Cross City Tunnel stupidity that gripped Sydney today) bus trip into the city this morning.

It wouldn’t have been so tragic if their campaigns weren’t so similar… but they are. The only difference, apparently, is the strength of execution: note the SMS components of each campaign vary slightly, with Sensis using a regular number (presumably to add unsuspecting commuters email addresses and phone numbers to a database for on-selling) whilst the Yellow Pages have at least gone to the trouble of acquiring a dedicated promotional number.

As a side note, their index is heavily commercially geared, and seems to leverage “Australian” results purely on the basis of domain namespace (that is, .au). As a developer, I’m not terribly impressed with it, but, unlike Ansearch, this is a force that may have to be taken seriously into consideration in the months and years to come.

And yes, the name is a typo, again one that stuck. That kind of thing seems to happen a lot. *Josh glances at domain name, then at Katy*

I took some video with my little digital Pentax Optio that I quickly cut together tonight and then uploaded it to Ourmedia (hey, it worked once, why not again?). Vaguely amusing stuff, even if the quality isn’t technically great: hey, I shot it on a still camera and edited it in Windows Movie Maker because it’s quick and easy and free(-as-in-beer), so purists and professionals can shut up already!

For obvious reasons, that means it’s only available in Windows media format for the minute. You can download the short clip (all of 1 minute 41 seconds) from Ourmedia. (roughly 4.6MB)