December 2008 Archives

Well, merry Christmas all.

The water was extremely cold today but there were no heart attacks or sinking eccentrics... Funny that the RNIB lifeboat goes up the coast in 60-minute steps as crazy people all along the south coast rush into the freezing waters :-)

• DOPPLR: Add trips by Twitter
  required string to add via twitter
  (tags: dopplr travel)

• YouTube Chromeless Player Example page
  fun with the developer api key :-)
  (tags: chrome chromeless player video youtube)

Je trouve quand même étonnant que le dico internaute propose une définition du verbe "blackbouler" sans en expliquer l'étymologie anglaise.

Le mot vient de l'anglais "black ball". Cela viens d'une façon de voter dans les associations privée où l'on admettais ou rejetais un candidat en déposant sa bille dans un chapeau. On avait le choix d'une bille blanche ou—pour rejeter le candidat—une bille noire (black ball)

Darn, I've just this second dropped the last of my beautiful Salins-les-Bains coffee bowls:-(

Of course I've still got a bunch of coffee bowls but this particular crop of bowls dates back to my eighteenth summer when I worked as a runner on the Franco-American Films SA production of a 30-second spot for Banania (The prop-master had bought a bunch of different bowls for the shoot and I was given the surplus ones).

Anyways, it's just a bit of crockery but for some reason I never thought I would break it. Funny to feel sad about a pot, but over the years, I've had many wonderful (mostly pyjama-clad) moments drinking steaming, milky coffee with friends...

Well, not exactly... I wish Nokia all the best, but I've got a couple questions:

• In my experience, v1 Nokia Symbian firmware is always rough (I suspect there is internal pressure to release new devices from groups that think more in terms of hand-feel and physical device than software-led user experience). Both my N73 and my N95 were essentially unusable out of the box (unusable = requiring a hard reset more than one per 15 minutes). They do get better but if you want to go after iPhone customers you're going to need the software to work pretty much straight away. In the case of the N97, an early-ish 2009 launch in restricted markets (USA) means that in reality, us Europeans won't have a good N97-based user experience until Q1 2010 by which time Android will have a wider developer pool and Apple may well have come up with even more challenging goodies
• I'm surprised to read that Nokia can't use multi-touch and that Apple has a patent on the process. I thought the system was developed by Jeff Han at NYU and later developed into a shippable product by his own company? I guess not, if anyone can fill in those blanks I'd be curious to hear.
• How social is the social? I'd love to hear more about the value-creation network Nokia is proposing to set up with the N97 as a hub. Also, will the social survive the firmware? I guess we'll see.

The ever-groovy Mark (@redeye) links to this funky service. I've just received my D from Twitter and apparently it will take " Mr. Tweet would take roughly 4.4 days to be ready to serve you. We know this sounds long, and we are working hard to speed things up!" so lessee now...

The Slideshare link

Well, this is one way of becoming an internet business ;-) So I wonder what those clever chaps at Nokia are up to?