69,081 Words later ...

After a rather seemingly unsuccessful attempt to reboot my blog a couple of months ago it would be easy to assume that I haven't been writing anything. This couldn't be further from the truth. Around the same time I was motivated to fire up the blog again I discovered a rather unusual metal exercise (for want of a better word) that I have taken to with surprising ferocity.

750words.com is a beautiful website created by a budding technologist in the US, that has taken the existing concept of 'Morning Pages' and completely retrofitted it into Buck Roger's century - well our 21st century at the very least. The idea is you dump your thoughts, concerns, successes, fears and triumphs on to paper - preferably daily. Well that was the "old skool" version anyway. Buster's version (as I affectionately know him from his update emails) removes the need for paper and replaces it with a very comprehensive web portal. Rather than write you rambling's, you type them; and while the core concept is perfectly intact, Buster has improved it with some incredible innovation.

I'm not sure exactly why I've continued with it to be honest, but today I will have contributed yo my own 750 words journal for ninety days in succession. The tag line of the site is "Private, unfiltered, spontaneous, daily" and couldn't be more articulate. The original creator of the concept, Julia Cameron describes the exercise as the minds wake up call, or a mental morning shower. I concede it does sound pretty cheesy, but as a convert to the exercise I have to agree with this analogy.

Some of the innovation that Buster has brought to the table with the website 750words.com are blatant 'hooks' to give you a feeling of obligation to return each day and dump your words. Simple yet brilliantly implemented features such as monthly score boards in association with achievement milestones in the shape of badges can be earned over continual usage of the site. I think these are wonderful additions as self discipline can only motivate people so far. I can think on a couple of occasions after I'd amassed a streak of over thirty days or more in a row. I didn't feel like adding my days entry, but instantly turning that thought around when I pictured the streak being broken and having to start again.

So over the last three months - yeah it has been that long - I've been writing vigorously to myself about all manners of topics, all of which I'll keep private as per the nature of the 750words.com site. However I've also realised that I like writing to an audience, no matter how small and hence the second re-boot of the virtualsteve space. Like last time I've still got plenty of topics that I want to cover but haven't been making the time. This post is simply a public declaration that I still want to contribute to virtualsteve regardless of my daily electronic dairy commitments. For a long time I've felt that writing to myself was adequate but have slowly discovered that they are similar but distinctively different ventures to writing to an audience.

So while I've written 69,081 words to myself in the past 90 days its long time I re-begin to write a couple of words to everyone else ...

A short high-pitched sound or whistle

Prior to 2006 the word ‘tweet’ had a very distinct and universal meaning and was about as topical as ‘Yawn’. In a few years what was once used to teach young children animal sounds has exploded into a social networking and micro-blogging service sensation.

If you’ve never turned on a computer before let me explain. Twitter is a web application that attempts to answer the question. “What are you doing?” Basically, it’s the away message feature of Instant message clients all by itself. Each entry has become known by the websphere as a 'tweet'

Twitter is synonymous with Facebook, MySpace and YouTube to name a few. Together they are single handedly (the irony of that expression isn’t lost on me) reengineering the way we communicate with each other, particularly the younger generation.

It is this reason I suspect in the aging geek equivalent of a mid live crisis I’ve joint the party and signed up on twitter. I have a handful of friends already on the service and the twitter site itself is quite polished, extracting possible twitter candidates to follow from my Google email account seamlessly.

It’s amazing how much of a PR tool it has become with companies and celebrities hoping on board to flog their wares under the guises of doing everyone a favor. The scary thing is this fresh medium works as we haven’t been over exposed to its loop holes. Not ever 48 hours old on twitter and I’ve already subscribed to Samsung, Xbox and Essendon FC marketing is some form or another.

Despite all this I’m going to stick with it for the time being, having run this blog for over six weeks now. The time necessary to output a 140 odd character message versus crafting a four to five paragraph blog entry is considerably appealing. I think the two services complement each other and with a little nerd gadgetry I hope to integrate one with the other ...

Liskula to the left, Rosemary to the right, Google stuck in the middle of you

I'm really quite ashamed to make a post about the 'skank' blogger incident but at the heart of the issue is a confounding prospect. In the name of completeness I guess I better paraphrase the back story in order to kindle any debate.

Put simply it is a little name calling between a pair of young ladies that don't particularly like one another, however the precedents set are far more noteworthy. A professional writer summaries everything here, here and here - but read on for my amateur hour version of events.

Way back in January Liskula sued Google under the guise of alleging defamatory comments after somehow coming across a blog that was bad mouthing her on the popular Blogger service hosted by Google.

Liskula then recently won the right by court order to discover the identity of the anonymous blogger who had allegedly posted derogative remarks on the Google hosted blog titled "Shanks in NYC".

Upon discovering that the blogger was an irrelevant person in her life and not a friend or family member Liskula after a little song and dance with the media, dropped her defamation charges.

Now Rosemary, yeah you guessed it the not so anonymous blogger plans to sue Google for $US15 million for breaching her privacy.

First of all I feel a little sad for anyone who suspected family or friends be behind the negative comments but the real issue is around whether or not we should be allowed to remain anonymous. Personally I think the entire anonymity of the web is its current shortfall.

I've been and are a member of a number of online communities in varying capacities and typically the more you know about the participants the more civil people behave. Xbox Live is a perfect example of an excellent service that suffers a snide underside due to the foolishness of a small percentage protected by an epic blanket of anonymity.

Rosemary had an interesting argument though it does dull her original actions in the first place. She claims that before Liskula took the issue to the courts the number of visitors to the allegedly offending blog was likely to be two people - herself and Liskula. Obviously with world media taking an interest in the case the words 'skank' and 'Liskula' are common matches now.

I'd argue that if you are placing it in the public domain that everyone has access to then you should assume that everyone has viewed it. I guess my bugbear is that while the tiff is essentially between Liskula and Rosemary Google have somehow been blamed for the entire fiasco.

I guess its classic tall poppy syndrome and if you are trying to take over the world one web click ad at a time, you're going to get lots of odd ball challenges ...

AFL Ladder OpenSocial Gadget

It has been a week since I finished developing the first version of my AFL Ladder Gadget. A full round of games have been won, lost and drawn and like clock work the ladder is still up to date. I know it may not look like much but its doing a fair bit or work behind the scenes. Parsing an xml document of the ladder and then rearranging the data into the html table you see on the side pane.

It's uses the OpenSocial Gadget API and is hosted on my MobileMe site. Gadgets are written in a module language using XML that wraps HTML and JavaScript. Sites such as iGoogle, orkut and you guessed it blogger are all containers that support OpenSocial gadgets.

I'm yet to decide if I will submit my gadget to Google and need to make a few tweaks here and there before I do regardless.

For anyone who is interested in using it on their own site please get in contact with me and I can provide the existing url or the code base if you'd like to host it yourself.

Go Dons ...

Your eBay item sold!

Well it might have taken me three years and four months but I've finally joint the millions of people worldwide to sell something via eBay.

The argument I had with myself when I decided on a whim to buy an iPhone 3G S at launch, was that I must immediately sell my original iPhone 3G to compensate the cost. It seems 'immediately' is a month long process but in fairness it took me two weeks to list and the default auction length is 7 days so it doesn't take long to add up. I'm pretty happy with the iPhone's ability to keep its value selling it twelve months later for around 60% of its original cost.

But enough about the iPhone, lets talk about the selling process. It really is a wonderful service but it doesn't come freely, I'm an advocate of you get what you pay for so while I'll highlight the cheeky charges I won't go so far as feeling hard done by.

I should point out that the eventual winner opted to pay via credit card with PayPay and from a seller point of view I think this incurs the most handling charges. To list an item with four images on the listing page and a duplicate image on the gallery page ended up costing me $4.84AUD. I was then charged an additional $15.43AUD from eBay once the item sold. If I add to this the $12.50AUD that PayPal charged me to accept the credit card payment I'm looking at a cost to sell of $32.77AUD

So for a national and even worldwide audience I sold my item at a cost of 6.5% commission to third parties and I don't think anyone can complain to much at those numbers.

A final word for those planning to sell something be very wary of the international buyer trying to purchase your item for a son in a different country. They are pretty much scammers and should be avoided at all costs ...

New life for an old beast

Only the very keen observer of my gdgt widget or friends and family would know I have an old HP laptop and the old girl is about to get a new breath of life. It’s noisy and heavy and the track-pad doesn’t work but I maxed out the RAM a while ago and it still has enough grunt to be useful. So I’ve ordered a new battery online and am keenly anticipating delivery in a fortnight or so.

It’ll be lucky if it gives me two hours and that is really laughable compared to the seven hours my wife’s new MacBook Pro can churn out, but it is a damn site cheaper than buying a new rig. Besides it will give me more time to find ways of justifying a new laptop and what is more convincing than using your old one in to the ground ...