Status-Q

Your Status-Q quote for the day comes from Norman Lewis's eTel talk:

The search for acknowledgement is the key to most online activity.

Yesterday I signed up for a Twitter account, to see what all the fuss was about. I was more interested in it as a social phenomenon than because I actually wanted to use it. Which probably indicates that I'm getting old. For those who don't know it, Twitter is all the rage amongst the youth of today. You can type out a few words saying what you're currently doing, and anyone interested in watching can keep up to date with your exciting life. Twitter is to instant messaging what blogging is to email; it's chiefly a broadcasting mechanism rather than a conversation. This is very convenient for the youth of today, who would otherwise need to send the same updates to their 15 simultaneous IM conversations. You can send Twitter updates using your mobile, via the web, using an IM client, or a dedicated application, and you can keep track of your friends in a variety of ways including via RSS. To clarify things, here's the 'History of blogging': (Many thanks to Dave Briggs, who found this on Mashable.)

Got interference on your wifi? This looks like a cool toy:

Quote of the day comes from Stephen Uhler of Sun, who, in his talk at eTel, said:

Cellphones have reduced peoples' expectation of the phone system to the point where VoIP is now viable.

He's quite right - it wasn't that long ago that you would have been very surprised, upset even, if a phone call were just to hang up unexpectedly... Now, as a friend and I once discussed, there's a problem. We need a new social convention. When the line drops, who should re-initiate the call? The person who made the call in the first place? The person with the cheapest outgoing charges? We decided that it was probably the person who was on the move, assuming at least one party was mobile. Because they're the ones who will know when they're back in a good coverage area. Of course, we also realised that in an ideal world the service provider, or the phone, would do this for you. "Press 1 to have the call reconnect automatically when possible..."

Ha! John and I managed simultaneously to post pictures of daffodils yesterday. But if you'd been walking around Cambridge with a camera, you would have done so too, I promise!

My commute to work is a short walk, past hedgerows like this. I'm a lucky guy.

Extremes of colour everywhere...

Hard disk space can be a problem for those of us who depend on laptops for our day-to-day life. It's now easy and relatively cheap to install a terabyte in a desktop machine, but my Macbook Pro has a 100G disk and I seldom have more than about 2G free. I only achieve that by shuffling stuff onto a portable Firewire drive. And now I have a camera that shoots RAW images I'll need to reorganise things again! Slowly, however, the capacities of laptop drives are increasing. Hitachi now have a 200GB drive and people have successfully installed it in a MBP. But I can't help feeling that I'm going to have to start basing my life on desktop machines soon and use my laptop as a cache of the bits I need to be portable...

A new toy. Photographed using an old toy. It's been great having the little Ixus 750 on my belt all the time, but I love having a 'real' camera again.

Mind you, don't you think 30D sounds a bit like the size of a lady's undergarment?

Most of North America switches to Daylight Savings Time today. They're extending the period this year, so it starts earlier than usual. (You can search Status-Q for 'EDST' for more info.)

British Summer Time doesn't begin for another two weeks, so for the next fortnight London & San Francisco are 7 hours apart instead of 8, for example.

Back in June I mentioned that I'd installed my variation on the 'Related Entries' plugin for WordPress. Newer readers may have missed this, so I thought I'd mention it again - it's really quite good.

As well as being on the front page, each Status-Q post has a page of its own in the archive. You can get to it by clicking on the post's title. After the text, you'll see a list of possibly-related previous posts. It's remarkably good at finding relevant ones, so you can browse through the archives by following a chain of topics, should you be so inclined...

Have a look at the bottom of this recent post if you'd like an example.