{Cheese and Beans}

The next sentence is going to cause a number of people to slap their own foreheads with their hands – perhaps the entire readership – you know, all six of you. I’m just warning you in advance so you don’t try and blame me for personal injury.

I’m considering buying a domain name and webspace to build a “proper” blog.

If I’m going to live up to my word and put effort into the words I share, I may as well attempt to do so properly. This whole crackpot plan will of course mean moving everything again, and will probably cause a number of people who have half heartedly followed my various utterings to throw their arms in the air, and wander off to do something more interesting – you know, like cutting their toenails.

A little voice on one of my shoulders is shouting something about the platform not being important. Apparently it’s all about content – or rather words – and they better be damn interesting if an audience is going to be enticed towards them.

I have no problem writing – with a little application I know damn well I can compose far better words than I typically spew out.

If I do this, I’m going to have to lower my guard significantly. People are most interested in really weird shit – the deep, dark thoughts you wouldn’t normally share. The controversial opinions. The personality hatchet jobs you might normally keep to yourself. Without the honesty, the words lose their power, and the story becomes mundane.

I’m aware that since having children I’ve been busily building walls. Those will have to come down. If I do get the wrecking ball out, it will be scary as hell to start with, but might also be rather fun.

Oh crap. If I do this, I have to think of a name…

After much thought and deliberation – at least a twenty minutes during the cycle home from work – I have decided that it might be prudent to resurrect “cheeseandbeans.com”, which I already own. Truth be told, I can’t think up a better name than “Cheese and Beans”

“kingoftheidiots.com” is available, if you’re interested, as is “secondtotheleft.com”

I haven’t laughed so hard in ages. Here’s the new Star Trek “Enterprise” (from the forthcoming movie);

… and here are some of the comments;

I am disappointed that Mr Abrams failed to stay true to the design of the Enterprise NCC-1701. Perhaps, he will impress those who don’t care about that sort of thing, but I suspect there are many who will see the ‘new’ as ‘not improved’. Paramount made a similar mistake with ‘Enterprise, the series’. The NX-01 was supposed to predate the NCC-1701, but was base on a design from TNG

they should have left the Enterprise alone. I mean, honestly whats wrong with using the same design as the original just update so it looks all nice, new, and shiny.

The fans of TOS will raise hell when this comes out. The Original ship is Canon. The new one is not, therefore it sucks! No matter how cool it looks.

Ruined! Ruined! Ruined! What Have You Done???!!! This is not what StarTrek is supposed to be.

Please excuse me while I carry on laughing.

Even though new media mouthpieces have been shouting for some time about the end of print newspapers, it still comes as quite a shock when perhaps the biggest name in print newspapers admits they are in huge trouble.

While being interviewed a year ago, the editor of the New York Times stated that there would be no print version within 10 years. At the time people laughed and branded the comments maverick, and purposely attention getting.

Nobody guessed that the New York Times might not survive for another 10 years.

While it’s terrible to see such well known institutions fall, it’s also tremendously exciting to be present during times of enormous change. As laughable as it may seem right now, our grandchildren will not understand the concept of printed newspapers. Devices such as the Kindle and Sony eReader are just the start.

The future is exciting, complex, and ultimately unknowable. People often write about information overload – I don’t  think that quantity of information is necessarily the problem – the problem is the intelligent delivery, selection and presentation of it.

The next few years will see the development  of tools and techniques to filter, massage and present the growing torrent of information. Really Simple Syndication might be seen as Leonardo’s sketches. At some point over the next few years somebody will reinvent the printing press, and the book. The appearance of the hideous Kindle on Oprah recently was an early indicator.

We are privilaged to live in such exciting times.

The ASUS EEE PC 1000H arrived today from Amazon (via Pixmania), so this evening I set about unboxing it and installing all the software I will typically be using on it.

Enjoy!

The box the 1000H comes in is pretty small and light. The machine is held inside within cardboard padding. The box was shipped within another box (three times the size) surrounding it with air filled packing.

Here’s the contents of the box – the machine, battery, power cable, books, software installation media, licenses, a cleaning cloth (?!), and a surprisingly good neoprene zipped bag to protect the machine. I had to buy a 3rd party one for our Macbook…

Here’s the machine – out of it’s protective wrapping. Notice the high gloss finish to all surfaces. That explains the cleaning cloth!

The keyboard is about 80% the size of a standard Dell desktop keyboard. Although I have only used it while logging into various websites creating bookmarks, it is easily big enough to touch type, and doesn’t seem to cramp my hands (and I’ve got huge hands). The right shift key has been pushed out of the way slightly, but it’s more than worth it to have a huge enter key – something I hated on the EEE 701.

Firing the 1000H up for the first time, it goes into the standard Windows XP installation routine, and completes painlessly.

I cannot emphasis enough – the screen on the EEE PC 1000H is fantastic. Really sharp, vibrant, and non reflective. If anything, it’s better at shallow viewing angles than the 24″ Dell screen sat next to it on the desk.

After an hour or so of installing software, the above image shows us nearing the end of the installation story – running Windows Updates. I will admit to being surprised at so many updates being required; it has XP SP3 installed on it after all.

So what do I think so far?

I’m incredibly impressed. For the price, the ASUS EEE PC 1000H is perhaps the best machine I have ever seen or used. It’s worth doing some mathematics – it costs less than a third the price of a Macbook, and two thirds the price of a plain vanilla 15″ Dell laptop.

The installed crapware wasn’t too bad at all. One application EXE was left on the desktop – I spirited it away to a folder in Program Files. I removed Star Office and installed Open Office 3 instead. I also installed TweakUI in order to remove “non removeable” BlueTooth icons on the desktop.

I’ll write a more in-depth review of the machine in a week or so – when I have found out how long it lasts on a full battery charge, how it handles high quality video files, and how it stands up to being carted around the place.

You may recall a month or so ago I mentioned about “starting something” once more on the internet, and wondered if anybody else was interested in helping.

In recent days I have been re-acquainting myself with “Joomla” – the open source content management system, and a pretty good platform to build dynamic content based websites upon. I have also been listening to various podcasts – one of which had Jason Calacanis making an interesting point. The best time to start something is when the economy is in trouble – when everybody else is failing.

Throughout the time that formerly successful operations are in trouble, you run a belt and braces startup – building good will and value as you go. I think this is a very persuasive technique, and I’ve experienced it before – quite unintentionally, a writing website I used to run caught the imagination of the online community, and we had thousands of daily visitors before knew how to handle them.

So we now have the tools, the long term ideology, and the skills (me) to build something good. Something that will survive. A direction and a team are still missing.

Perhaps the idea needs to percolate a little longer.

Any thoughts?

Postscript… I have had the domain “thoughtcafe.net” festering away, unloved for the last couple of years. I am in the process of moving it to new servers. Who wants to write for a new internet based magazine called “ThoughtCafe” ?