comedy music NaBloPoMo twitter · 350 words
When I was a fresher at university, Mitch Benn played the union. I don't remember why I didn't go. I do remember being woken up by the guys in my halls banging on my door telling me that I'd missed a brilliant evening. The CDs that they bought back from the gig were hilarious - the perfect antidote to looming finals. Since missing him play 10 years ago, I've caught up with him on The Now Sh…
Continue reading →africa barcamp bcafricauk09 NaBloPoMo · 2 comments · 850 words
I met Ethel Delali Cofie at BarCampBrighton. She was telling me that she wanted to run a BarCamp called #bcAfricaUK09. I pointed her towards the BarCampLondon 09 organisers and told her that I'd see if she could use the Vodafone Group HQ. I woke up on Saturday morning after a long and difficult week at work. The last thing I felt like doing was making the trek into the office. I just couldn't…
Continue reading →advertising mobile NaBloPoMo reuters · 2 comments · 400 words
How do you indicate that something on the web is "clickable"? The W3C - the body which sets the standards for the Web - recommend you don't use "Click Here" for link text. Normal text is usually underlined and / or a different colour when it is a hyperlink - images don't have any specific decoration to indicate you can click on them. In this animated GIF, an advert for Lexus, we see a call to a…
Continue reading →advertising boycott nestle flirtomatic m2r mobile NaBloPoMo pepsi · 850 words · Viewed ~2,932 times
Organised by CamerJam, this was the first MobileSQUARED Roadshow. I was extremely proud to be ask to represent Vodafone on the "Operators' Panel" - but I'll let others review my slot. I want to concentrate on the four aspects of the day I found fascinating. As ever, these views are my own. Mövenpick As some of you know, I boycott Nestlé. So I was unable to try any of the sponsor's ice-cream. …
Continue reading →blackberry fail irony mobile NaBloPoMo · 400 words
HTML is a complex beast. Especially when it comes to languages. I don't mean the difference between English and French but between UTF-8, Windows-1252, and all the other methods for encoding text. When it goes wrong, you can come a cropper - take a look at this advert for the BlackBerry. Somehow a character has crept in to the text which can't be rendered by the browser. BlackBerry? Advert? …
Continue reading →NaBloPoMo oauth security twitter usability · 38 comments · 550 words · Viewed ~5,624 times
Twitter has a gaping security hole. Changing your password won't stop malicious users logging in as you! I received a rather worrying email from Twitter. Apparently they thought my password had been compromised and needed to be reset. Reset Your Twitter Password After checking to see if it was valid, I went and changed my password. Any site which relied on a cookie to post to Twitter would h…
Continue reading →Boffoonery BPark comedy NaBloPoMo · 1 comment · 350 words
It's been a rollercoaster year for Bletchley Park. Studiously ignored by the Government for so long, the British home of cryptography and computing is finally getting the recognition it deserves. However, it is still badly short of funds. Looks like they need.... A Benefit Gig! Thus was born Boffoonery! A comedy gig to raise money for Bletchley. Starring Robert Llewellyn, Robin Ince, Ri…
Continue reading →films movies NaBloPoMo · 450 words · Viewed ~542 times
Last night, thanks to the lovely people at SeeFilmFirst, I went to see a free preview of Harry Brown starring Michael Caine. Harry Brown is an unremittingly violent film. Utterly devoid of sympathetic characters, it offers a terrifying glimpse into the fear, violence and sadism on an unnamed council estate. Every scene is wired with tension - nervous tension which often culminates in bloody…
Continue reading →advertising google language mobile NaBloPoMo · 750 words
One of the joys of the Internet is that it is international. Anyone, from anywhere, speaking any language can visit any page on the World Wide Web. This makes life difficult for advertisers. Not only do they have to ensure that what they're showing is applicable in the viewer's country, but also that it's legal and written in the correct language. If they don't, at best they've wasted their…
Continue reading →NaBloPoMo · 1 comment · 800 words
When I was a child of six or seven, a kindly Aunt bought me an orange-plastic recorder. I'd never previously shown the slightest interest in music - but I loved that recorder. I joined the school's music lessons, I performed for my parents, I even tried to learn what a treble cleft was and what those splodges on a stave meant. My Key To Musical Genius Then, one day, I lost my recorder. I was…
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