Category Archives: Procrastination

Talk about fun or random stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else

Virgin Money Press Junket

Me, Procrastination, , ,

Back in December 2011 the Virgin Group did a very obscure blog post asking for bloggers, tweeters and YouTubers. Needing a good excuse to get out the (home) office nowadays I figured an evening out would be nice.

Yes, I know this is free publicity for them but hey, if I’m going to publicise any large corporation then I can’t think of anyone better than Virgin (comments in the box below please)! Virgin Money Giving were very helpful to us when organising the Goodwood Roller Marathon.

Anyway, the evening was very nice, free soup, got to say hello to Richard Branson and treated to a 270 degree projection on three sides of a courtyard building. Unfortunately it wasn’t possible to move back far enough to get it all in frame and had to shoot in portrait which isn’t ideal but you get the idea :-p

You can see the professionally shot video (from across the street I may add) here.

Maybe still not as good as the Gadget Show projection though, that had more 3D 😉

Everything is a Remix

Procrastination, , , ,

If you haven’t already seen it I would encourage you all to check out Kirby Ferguson‘s excellent video series Everything is a Remix.

I have been helping Kirby source some of the video footage and edit some of the reference material that he has used which has been a great honour.

Parts 1 & 2 are embedded below but do keep an eye on his site for parts 3 & 4 as they come out later this year.

https://vimeo.com/14912890

http://vimeo.com/19447662

Dave Cornthwaite and his Aquaskipper

Procrastination, , ,

This week the adventurer Dave Cornthwaite made the following request…

Always interested in what he was up to next (Dave was the first person to Longboard from John O’Groats to Lands End) I set the TiVo and whacked it up on YouTube a few days later for him and others to see…

BTW, does anyone know the piece of music used in the middle of this video?  Pirates of the Caribbean?

N.B. This is a backdated post as I take some of the things I have been doing elsewhere on the interwebs and add them to this site 🙂

The Gadget Show project onto Marble Arch

Procrastination, , , ,

After many tweets from Jason Bradbury that something was going to be happening this evening at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park we decided to check it out. OK, we were up there for the LondonSkate anyway so it would have been rude not to!

“#gadgetvader” turned out to be a projection onto the side of Marble Arch to promote the new series. They were selling it as 3D, it really wasn’t but still impressive…

I filmed the entire thing on my phone (HTC Desire) which Jason then borrowed for a photograph with the Sun!  It was fun to see my marshals vest and arm holding my phone in the entire official Gadget Show footage too.

N.B. This is a backdated post as I take some of the things I have been doing elsewhere on the interwebs and add them to this site 🙂

Beware of vouchers that expire

Procrastination, ,

I just wanted to warn people that if you got any vouchers for Christmas to be very careful about checking the date when they expire. I was shocked to find that vouchers I was given for my birthday expired less than four months later with no chance of a refund. Lost money and not just lost but they have the money for providing nothing!

Perhaps it is my fault for not reading the small print. I don’t get narked by many things but this has really gotten to me and the service was appalling. So much so that I have set a website to try and warn others (and make me feel a bit better). You never know, it may do something!

I have no problem with vouchers expiring, companies have to do this, prices of the experiences they sell will go up etc. however having a voucher that expired in less than four months with no other option is ludicrous in my opinion!

Update: The website worked!  A very irate company got in touch and offered me a refund!  I have now removed the link to the site that was in this post.

Silicon valleys, Germanium hills…

Computing, Procrastination, ,

Some things stay with you forever and I would like to think that the following little poem helped shape me.  You see, the first computer I ever played with was the family Archimedes 310 and way before I had ever even heard the term “hacking” I was poking around in some of the library files trying to see how things worked.  One of the first library files I looked at contained the following poem stuck in the middle of the code!  I still don’t know who wrote it so I’m going to credit the author of the library.  Surprisingly I can’t find this poem anywhere on the internet!

Silicon valleys,
Germanium hills,
Digital journeys,
And virtual thrills.

Greetings, O hacker,
Feeling unwell?
Microchip tracker,
Welcome to hell.

Jon Ribbens – DoggySoft

The next big thing

Procrastination,

I’m always looking for the next big thing however my father always tells me that you don’t want to be the first to do something, you want to be the second. It’s true too, I can’t think of many original conceptors that are still doing their ideas. Those that have made a go from it have mostly been through selling the patent however in this modern Internet world it’s very difficult (although not impossible) to patent an idea.

Take Google, not the Google you see now but the original startup Google. They didn’t invent the idea of crawling Internet websites, Digital had done that years earlier with Alta Vista.  Google was however the site/company to launch the concept to the masses!

So… if I want to be the next Google, what exists out there today that I could improve on?