Back soon
Just when this blog seemed to be springing back into life, this happens!
I'll be back soon, I promise.
Just when this blog seemed to be springing back into life, this happens!
I'll be back soon, I promise.
A friend mentioned to me today that he was sorry I'd given up blogging.
"I haven't given up blogging," I spluttered, insofar as it's possible to splutter on IM. "I've just been busy."
He seemed even less impressed when I went on to add that, anyway, his assertion that Blogging and I had parted ways wasn't even true - my tumblelog, horreo.org, is anything but inactive.
"But that's just links..."
*
This chat got me thinking about what had prompted me to start a blog in the first place, back when I hand-coded my very first post at this domain in September 2001.
I'd been a blog reader myself for a few months. Choice wasn't so wide in those days, but I did enjoy my regular visits to Sylloge, to kottke.org and to notsosoft (which is no longer online but whose writer now blogs at meish dot org). This seemed like a party I wanted to gatecrash, even I wasn't sure exactly why.
There was the writing, of course. The discipline involved in putting my thoughts into written words on a regular basis certainly appealed to me, as did the idea that I could write more creatively than I was able to do at work at the time.
There was also the community. In the dark ages, many sites didn't have a mechanism for leaving comments on individual posts, but that didn't stop us all from frantically linking to each other from a list of "Sites I like" in our sidebars, and we gradually built up our little communities that way. Many posts I (and others) wrote were often little more than, "I've found this new blog, it's really great: <INSERT LINK HERE>". When the person I linked to discovered my blog through her log files, she would undoubtedly come and see who was linking to her -- and often return the favour if she found we had something in common that she could share with her readers in turn.
And this leads me on to my final point, to what I have come to believe was and still is my main motivation for blogging: a desire to share. The web is home to many wondrous things, and having a blog seemed to be a way for me to point my friends towards some of those things that I considered worthy of their attention.
That's still the case today, really, both here - where I can be more wordy if I choose - and at horreo.org - where I simply point and say, "Go!"
At the end of the day, as my friend observed, it's just links.
I'm experimenting with the quick-and-dirty posting style of a tumblelog over at horreo.org.
I'll continue posting longer entries here if I ever have to anything to say that can't be summed up in a pithy sentence or two.
... the news in Latin.
I think I can safely say that this is the first football match report you've ever read in Latin!
--
Found via the freshly re-launched Idiomatika Blog
OK, so Jack Schofield may be hoping that Twitter might go away, but I know a bandwagon when I see one so I'm giving it a try.
There's now a Twitter badge in my sidebar, and you can also follow me at www.twitter.com/smudie
It's been a while since I've linked to a Carnival of the Mobilists, but Rudy De Waele's done a great job this week hosting Carnival #64 at m-trends.org. I mean, he even manages to mention Jean Baudrillard for goodness sake!
(In a related post at Click Opera, Momus also has an interesting comparison of the difference between the French obituaries of Baudrillard and the Anglo-Saxon ones.)
Our book, The Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista, has received its first review on Amazon - and it got four stars out of five!
When reading this guide I was struck by a remarkable difference from other books about operating systems and the more complicated computer software. The authors not only give you the technical information, but also include background information on how changes and the current state of the feature set came about. This really shows that the authors have been a part of the community surrounding this software.
Thank you very much, David Lawlor. Your kind words are much appreciated.
On a day that sees business podcaster Neville Hobson rocking out, my own musical career also took a step forward as I signed the papers required to register one of my songs with the French performing rights society SACEM.
The song in question - You Could Be A Boy - can be heard on Electric Factory's obligatory MySpace page.
Don't worry, you won't hear me singing - I only wrote the lyrics!
I'm just back from spending a week visiting friends in Galicia, north-west Spain. We flew via Oporto, which is a lovely little town that I discovered for the first time - along with the delights of the francesinha.
Here are a few of my holiday photos until I get back into my blogging stride again.
Some research tangentially related to a project I'm currently working on for a client led me today to a blog on BioHacking...
You may say there is Genetic engineering and Biotechnology. Yes, they are there but they are just the beginning. I am talking about grander things such as bacteria playing chess, farms of algae providing energy for inter-planetary journey, microbial intelligence replacing AI, E. coli on seek-and-destroy cancer missions in our body, merger of biotechnology, information technology and nanotechnology, and many other futuristic bio-things.
All these things are grand yet achievable. And the art/science (it doesn't make a difference yet) of achieving them is BioHacking.
In a similar vein, there's also Biohackery, a blog about "do-it-yourself biology".
If you thought the fight between free and closed software was bruising, wait till the gloves come off between free and closed wetware...
I could spend hours reading this stuff!
Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking at the annual conference of the French chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. (Feel free to download the slides from my talk, "Beyond Technical Communications: Moving from Technical Communicator to Author", to learn a little more about how I got into this computer book writing lark.)
This was only my second public speaking engagement, and I'm sure it showed - not that I was nervous exactly, but I still need to learn to project myself better (and not forget some of the points I wanted to make). I only hope at least some people in the audience got more out of it than the gentleman who came up to me at the end and told me, in French, that he'd found my Scottish accent hard to follow and had missed about one word out of every five!
My new hobby, started last night, is Shotokan karate.
I'm pleased to say I haven't been left with any bruises after my first lesson, but my left shoulder is feeling rather stiff today, which probably has more to do with the fact that I haven't done much physical exercise in such a long time than any violent blows I may have suffered (or inflicted).
I tried to impress my daughter this morning with a pivoting kick I'd learned, but she seemed to find the sight of me spinning round - and nearly falling over in the process - too hilarious for words. As did her mother, for some reason.
Clearly, Master Funakoshi Gichin wasn't joking when he wrote in his Twenty Precepts of Karate that "Karate training requires a lifetime".
I'll be spending a night in Porto next month, and I've just been looking for a hotel online. While I was looking, it occurred to me that - in certain circumstances at least - a slick and polished presentation isn't always the best.
Take one hotel, for instance - the Residencial Pão de Açúcar.
And soon that the OPorto Wine became it known has two centuries behind, have been many the illustrious travellers who we have received.
On the one hand, a professional communicator like me should be offended at such a massacring of the English language. On the other hand, it just makes the place seem so much more charming, homely and quaint, which is exactly the kind of thing I look for when travelling to a foreign city.
So, I've written to ask for their prices. But I had to do so by email, since it was impossible to book directly online...
Sign up now for MobileSunday Barcelona 2.0!
When I attended the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona last February, I thought it might be fun to get together with a few mobile bloggers beforehand and "have a chat about all things mobile". I put up a wiki page for the occasion (which I decided to call MobileSunday), invited along two or three friends, and sent out a couple of emails to set the word-of-blog wheels in motion.
Frankly, my only real goal for the evening was to have a beer or two with Rudy De Waele, who helped me find a suitable bar for our gathering since I'd moved away from Barcelona in 2001 - which meant that his knowledge of the nightlife in the Catalan capital was much more contemporary than mine. As it turned out, more than fifty of us ended up squeezing into Café Schilling on Carrer Ferran, where the fun lasted until well into the wee small hours.
And that was just the beginning of a great, great week.
*
So, 3GSM is almost upon us again. While work commitments mean I won't be able to make it to Barcelona this time round, Rudy has convinced me that our little event was fun enough to be worth repeating.
If you want to kick off your week at 3GSM by attending "an unofficial, informal and generally cool and funky gathering of mobile bloggers and their chums", simply add your name to the MobileSunday Barcelona wiki and turn up on the night. Don't tell anyone, but I hear there may even be some free beer this time round - courtesy of MyStrands.
*
As I said, I won't be in Barcelona this year, but I still hope to participate on the night in a non-presential, 21st-century mobile kind of way. Stay tuned for more details.
Tech PR blogger Drew B has set up a Flickr group entitled "Bloggers' desks".
Since I just spent the best part of the last two days cleaning up my own (very compact) workspace, I was more than happy to contribute a photo of my desk as a way of recording my achievement for posterity.
As Derek announces on our Unofficial Vista blog, "we're a top 5 Windows Vista resource", according to PC Magazine.
Nice!
If you know me at all well, you'll know that I'm never one to miss a chance to mention (or drink) Irn-Bru.
With that in mind, have "a phenomenal Christmas"!
--
Via edublogs
Today our little tour is visiting Relaciones Públicas, the blog of Madrid-based PR blogger Octavio Rojas, where I've written a short post on how feedback received from the blogging community may or may not have helped shape the final version of Vista.
I wrote my post in Spanish - with a couple of corrections from Octavio - but I've provided an English translation as well in case any anglosajones happen to drop by.
Today's stopping-off point on the Unofficial Vista blog tour is Naked Translations, where I discuss how IE7 uses Punycode to help protect users against domain spoofing. There's even a version française.
My guest post at Petite Anglaise, written as part of the virtual blog tour I am currently undertaking with Derek Torres to promote our book The Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista, has provoked some pretty strong reactions from her readers.
As I understand it, their main objection seems to be that I have taken advantage of Petite's audience to try to sell a product (did they notice the Sponsors section in her sidebar before accusing her of selling out by publishing my post?). Some commenters also seem to confuse Derek and me, two humble technical writers, with Microsoft, the company everyone loves to hate - a fact which clearly doesn't help matters, not least because it makes them think I'm promoting Vista itself rather than our book.
Surely it is up to Petite what she decides to publish on her blog, be it paid advertising, giving a helping hand to a friend or whatever else she chooses to write about.
Also, let me be clear about one thing. I am visiting five blogs on our tour, and I know each of the bloggers who are hosting me personally. Every single one of them, including Petite. That's what I'm taking advantage of - some of the many online and real world friendships that having a blog for over five years now has allowed me to form.
Finally, rather than clashing with the content that the readers of these blogs are used to finding (in the case of Petite, "a slice of life and a serving of self-indulgent navel gazing"), it was my intention to write posts that would link the topic of Windows Vista with whatever each host blogger normally writes about. Fortunately, at least some of Petite's readers seemed to find what I wrote worthwhile. One commenter even said she was going to forward the post to a friend, which, I hope you'll agree, more than makes up for being called "a cheap slime".
Today I'm visiting Neville Hobson's blog and trying to defend the indefensible in Does IE7 suck?
I'm flogging The Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista over at Petite Anglaise today, where I've written a guest post to tell a fellow parent how we can use Parental Controls in Windows Vista to stop our kids doing naughty things with our PCs.
I mentioned that I was ill.
In fact, I'm recovering from pneumonia.
While pneumonia is not quite the fearsome disease it once was, it's still quite a debilitating illness and it's left me feeling really tired, too tired to even spend much time in front of my keyboard (which, as anyone who knows me will attest, must mean I'm in pretty bad shape).
What that means is that, in between naps, I've spent most of the last couple of weeks reading trashy novels, watching lots of bad TV, and coughing.
I feel a little embarrassed to be admitting this in public, but I can't wait to get back on the Internet. It's got to be better than MTV.
The schedule has been been announced for our Virtual Blog Tour to promote The Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista.
I've been ill for the past few days and probably won't be properly back in the saddle for at least another week, so apologies if I owe you an email. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
Be good while I'm gone.
I wonder if there is anywhere like this cool coworking space in Paris.
Anyone know?
Last year, I put together a list of nearly all the RSS feeds from the blogs belonging to everyone who attended Les Blogs 2.0.
This year, for Le Web 3, they're doing it themselves at Planet LeWeb3.
Herman Dune are playing at La Cigale in Paris on Saturday 4 November, promoting their new album Giant, and Madame and I will be among those in attendance.
We bought our tickets from digital ticketing service Digitick (they sent me my tickets via WAP Push, no less) and, after completing the order, I discovered that they're currently giving away an additional ticket with every purchase, which may be a nice promotion, but also means we're left with a spare ticket.
If you'd like to take it off our hands (not literally, since it's stored on my phone and that means you'd have to walk in with us), make me an offer. We paid €19.80 for each of ours.
Update (01/11/06): Here's a bonus link - Herman Dune playing in a laundrette, just round the corner from where we used to live on Boulevard Voltaire.
While I may earn my living as a technical marketing writer and occasional tech author, over the past few months I've started writing something else in addition to the web copy, technical brochures and press releases that make up my usual output.
I am now a lyricist too.
OK, so I've been writing songs on and off pretty much ever since I was a teenager, but earlier this year I finally decided to start taking it more seriously. I am now working with several different artists, including Paris-based electro-pop collective Electric Factory, folk/jazz singer EliotE (who's just about to take off to San Francisco for a few months) and a gang of Belgian indie upstarts called The Next who are so busy making music that they haven't had time to build a website ... even on MySpace.
I've even gone so far as to record some guide vocals to help these real singers get to grips with my words - but don't worry, I won't be inflicting my voice on the unsuspecting (undeserving?) public just yet.
Or will I?
My co-author and I are planning a virtual roadshow as part of the promotion of our upcoming book The Unofficial Guide To Windows Vista.
I pinched the idea from Octavio Rojas, who squatted several blogs (including Blethers) around the launch of his book Relaciones Públicas: La Eficacia de la Influencia. Basically, the plan is for Derek and me to write a series of blog posts that in some way combine the subject of Windows Vista with whatever our host bloggers usually write about. For some of the blogs we intend to visit, that may be quite a challenge - but we like a challenge.
Before we start contacting people directly, I thought I might ask whether any of you would like to have us drop by your blog on our tour. Don't worry if your blog is not tech-oriented; if anything, we'd prefer if it isn't, since our book isn't really aimed at hardcore geeks.
We promise to be respectful guests. You'll have the final say over what - if anything - gets published, and we can also write in French or Spanish if your readers aren't used to seeing English-language posts on your blog.
If you're interested in hosting the Unofficial Vista Roadshow, send me an email at smudie@gmail.com.
Update (1 December): Here's the final schedule of our tour, with links to each post.
I'm just back from presenting "The Impact of Windows Vista on Technical Communications" to the Society for Technical Communications' Region 2 Conference in London on Friday.
My co-speaker and I may have mentioned that we have a book on Windows Vista coming out shortly; I can't quite remember.
It was a fun experience, turnout at the event was much higher than I'd expected, and it was particularly gratifying to have someone come up to us afterwards and say that she had found our presentation "very funny". If the book had already been published, I would have given her a free copy there and then!
I just had an article published on Microsoft's Windows Vista Community site, in which I explain how to determine if your current computer is capable of running one of the many editions of Windows Vista and then go on to describe how to transfer files and settings over to Vista when you do decide to make the move.
- Are you ready for Windows Vista?
(Those of you who know me well - and have good eyesight - may spot that I managed to sneak my father-in-law's name into one of the screenshots.)
In the Cory Doctorow novel Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom, the author introduces a concept he calls "whuffie", which Wikipedia describes as an "ephemeral, reputation-based currency".
How it works is simple. Do good things to other people, or help someone out, and your whuffie goes up. Let someone down (or worse) and your whuffie goes down. The higher your whuffie, the more likely strangers are to want to interact with you in a positive fashion, based on the assumption that the community considers you to be a good individual. It's a step up from "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" to "you scratch my back, someone else will scratch yours".
The areas of application for such a system are limited only by our imagination.
Needless to say, it was just a matter of time before someone got round to implementing the idea in real life. Visit The Bitchun Society to find out more.
As Mr Torres announces on our book blog, we have now completed our work on the Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista.
Phew!
And for my next trick...?
Whar's aa the blogs in Scots?
(Matthew Fitt, ye up fir it? Mibbe yersel an ane or twa ithers?)
If you didn't know Dilbert creator Scott Adams had a blog, his post on the Pope's recent faux pas is as good a place as any to start discovering The Dilbert Blog.
Today, my home town of Dundee, Scotland is nothing like the place you can see in this bleak YouTube video, Dundee My Dundee by the Scrotum Poles, but I do remember it being like that when I was growing up.
Nice music too! There's more here.
Spotted on the metro this morning - a guy wearing a t-shirt that read, "Go away or I will replace you with a very short shell script".
Today is my birthday.
I was given three new CDs:
For what it's worth, they're all excellent - even Charlotte Gainsbourg!
I was also treated to a beautiful rendition of "Joyeux Anniversaire" from across the courtyard by our wonderful neighbours, including my daughter's four-year-old chum Tudy (who may well be making his Internet debut in this post). Trugarez!
I'm cleaning out my bookmarks.
I've been asked by quite a few people whether I've given up blogging. In response to the most recent enquiry, I even replied that I wasn't sure myself. There's been a blog at this domain since September 2001, so surely after five years I was entitled to a short sabbatical, but still... it's been a while.
"I don't think it's over between me and blogs," I said defensively, but I couldn't contest the fact that the time since my last post was getting longer by the second, and the hiatus was starting to look less and less like the temporary break I had originally planned to take while I was "extremely busy with work".
Yes, I admit, even I was beginning to suspect that Blethers.com was about to become yet another dead blog clogging up the web. But here I am. The lure of the blog has proved too strong to resist, and I'm back with a new design and, hopefully, with something worthwhile to say.
Currently
I twitter and I have a flighty tumblelog. Try to keep up!
Who reads this stuff?
Blethers?
Blethers.com is the personal weblog of Stuart Mudie, a freelance writer and editor based in Paris, France.
Stuart is co-author of The Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista and is currently working on the snappily-titled BusinessObjects XI Release 2 For Dummies.
- Email: smudie@gmail.com
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