Ed’s dream was to live it out alone for 3 months and to try provide most of his sustenance from the land, and this is where circumstances became not a little precarious.

Alone in the Wild  far exceeded my expectations of it being a typical ‘survival’ show. Ed was completely and utterly alone; switching his camera on periodically to record the highs and lows of life in the vast and empty Yukon, trying daily to source enough food to survive. After some success fishing, it was Porcupine that was next on the menu. It wasn’t much.

Able only to supplement his diet with some meager supplies he brought with him, his physical condition deteriorated sharply over the 7-or-so weeks. Eventually the hunger, and consequently the aloneness, started to grip him. Spending sleepless nights terrified by thoughts of wild bears entering camp couldn’t have helped much.

The reality is that being alone and having to fend for oneself is not something we are accustomed with. I suppose Ed isn’t alone in his dream to try living in the wild and provide sustenance off the land. Such a challenge would inevitably provide you with some understanding about what primeval man, or even early explorers, had to endure to survive.

In Isolation

In his own words, being alone in the wild meant:

“making decisions that would affect my safety, my wellbeing, and whether I’m going to make it though the next three months”

Luckily for Ed, he never did have the close encounter of an unwanted kind, that with a bear. However, I was inspired to see how well he dealt with the isolation despite there being many occasions where the emotion was overwhelming. By and large, Ed tried to retain a positive outlook on finding new sources of food and continuing the challenge. This became an increasing struggle highlighted in part of the documentary where the camera shows ‘BE STRONG’ written across his arm and hand, with Ed stating the phrase to the camera repeatedly.

One of the other highlights of this series was the unintended dark humor that came through in the coping mechanisms employed by Ed’s sub-conscious. ‘Hello Bears’ was one frequently used phrase which Ed spoke so as to ‘not surprise the bears (a piece of good advice, apparently).

He’s a braver man than I, that’s for sure, and he probably took one of the all time most extreme adventures one can still take on earth. But it pays to know your stuff, as we mere humans are not tuned to our real environment anymore. That much was clear.

Supplemental things

There is a twitter account which Ed used to get messages out while the whole adventure took place (just one-way, I should note) and these were cunningly used as sub-titles on the documentary film itself. Admittedly, I’m sorry I didn’t catch this on twitter as it was happening, but the account is still active (is it really Ed or Channel 4? Couldn’t say..). Incidentally I watched the documentary on the Channel 4 micro-site for Alone in the Wild, again having missed the entire series on TV itself. Furthermore, I bought the series pass on iTunes for a couple of bucks (<£5) so that I could watch it without the appalling pixelation on Channel 4’s site.

I do like putting my stuff up on flickr but I tend to see it as a stream-of-consciousness thing, and what I post tends to be the best pics I’ve captured in the past week/month. Not necessarily great photos, but I try my best to keep it varied and interesting.

My Photoblog

Yup, I decided that the time was ripe for me to start a photoblog: http://fotally.sublimed.be. The only thing different betweet it and flickr is that I’ll add more background to the image, as I’m never really motivated to post a description on flickr. I know some people do the double-post thing, but that’s certainly not the de-facto way I’m going to use both from now on. No, I’m looking at them as separate entities with a common thread.

I hope people enjoy it. That’s the reason I wanted to start it, but also because friends and relative sometimes ask if I’ve got a website and I never really feel comfortable giving them this blog address, just in case there’s something incriminating here. Well, suppose I shouldn’t have used a sub-domain of this blog and linked them both up, eh? Well, truth is I think people can connect with images more than words, especially so when you waffle on about list-posts and they haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. Well now I have a site they can visit if they want it.

One last thing, I totally love what Opera Turbo does to this blogs background image when running. It almost looks cool.

The investigation

Needless to say it, but I was extremely agitated by this event. I happened to have a few spare minutes to re-set the DNS to the Media Temple account before I left for work. I quickly sent in a support request with the host that I use to manage my domains (that’s not Media Temple, by the way) at the same time. I simply could not understand how my account had been compromised since I used a cryptic password and had committed that to the memory banks since I conceived it two years ago. That simply didn’t add up, given that only one domain was affected.

Fast-forward now to when a reply came in, and it transpired that when I had requested to cancel my bulk hosting package and revert to a basic plan around 4 weeks previously, the host had also cancelled all my domain name renewals!

This was the cause of the domain being released from my ownership (for about 4 days) while my site went down and thereafter took a nosedive in Google’s SERPs. So I wasn’t paying attention, duly, but I could just have easily been on vacation. What was even more infuriating is the fact that the re-renewal date in my control panel lists November 2009 as the expiry!!! The steam was coming out of my ears at one point.

"It’s my precious… they stole it from us!"

That site has been up for nearly two years, and although not a majorly busy website it still is arugably the best place to find out information on Shantaram and it’s Author. IT may be a moot point but if some unscrupulous person had scooped-up that domain (not sure if there’s a minimum period after a domain expires in which it continues to be held?) then everything I’d worked on for that site in those two years would have been lost, forever. Until I could have got a new domain, because I sure as hell wouldn’t buy it back from a speculator. Even then, it would take months to rebuild its SERP ranking. Either way, there was something at stake, even if it’s not a huge successful site.

The good news is that of today, almost one week later, the site is back in its proper position on Google. So a word to the wise, never underestimate how stupid people can be. If you said to me cancel my hosting and I cancelled your domain renewals too, wouldn’t you think I was stupid? You can weigh up many “ifs’ and buts’” regarding this but the fact remains there was an assumption made, and it was the wrong one. #FAIL, as we like to say.

Although in part this little occurrence was the result of timing as well as bad communication, you just can’t change someone’s DNS settings to point at a spam page. It appears to me that this is an automated service of some kind, given the DNS was something like ns1.updateyourname.net. If anything at all, a final notice should have been sent to me to notify me that the domain had expired and I should either a) Do nothing or b) Do something else.

I’m left wondering if I can trust this host with any of my digital assets, as the hosting itself was below par and caused me to switch to (mt), and now another problem: An easy mistake to make, but one which could have had detrimental consequences for me, a customer.

It’s simple really. A list post is useful if it contains new information, or information presented in a helpful bullet-point list. Now, I’m not judging anyone who chooses to write a list-post for their fancy. Whether it be a list of their favourite Photoshop brushes or whatever, but list-posts for the sake of list-posts are starting to grind my gears. No wait, they have ground my gears to dust already otherwise I wouldn’t be writing a post about it would I? Perhaps I needed a list-post to keep your attention this far, well…

From a blogger’s perspective, you may want to share with your cohort of readers stuff which you find interesting and to organise it into a single post with a snippet or two of comment. That’s not really the problem, what is, is all those mega-epic list-posts.

If I come across a list-post these days that has more than 10 such items, I’m generally more than likely to kill the tab off and just get on with life. Sure, there maybe something in that post which I’d never heard of, or which is really cool, but in amongst the rest of the same old stuff I’m less likely to find it or even care what you’re saying.

If that one thing I might find in your list post is so great, I will probably hear about it at some point anyway. I’ll just leave that up to life’s synchronistic duality. I have, or I have not. Either way, it isn’t going to significantly change my life and magically solve all my problems and fulfil all my dreams. It might make a slight blip in the way I operate, and maybe for the better, but what is certain is that a list post of 20 where the focus on one would do isn’t going to change much.

Sure Kuler is a great colour picking app, but I don’t want a list of 20 great AIR apps if what I’m looking for is a good colour picker. Ah, but what about a list-post of great colour pickers? Sure, it might make for a list-post, but between 5-10 is probably the most you need to go, and the less the better. Far better to focus on the few good ones you like rather than write a short sentence for each of 50.

So then, list-posts. They are and they aren’t, useful. I would request a genie to grant me three wishes then one wish would be to control all list-posts and the second would be to employ a genius to figure out what is crap and what can stay. The last of my third wishes would be to stop social media eating its own faeces with list-posts.

Knowledge-exchange can be likened to ripples emanating from a stone’s contact with water, where it hits, the water knows it is there, thereafter the water is less and less affected by it, but there is still some effect. The same applies to list-posts, the challenge is to write to your audience with what they might not know about, not to include everything related since the internet began. Those who see the latter as the challenge of list-posts miss the point entirely. If you throw the same stone into the same pool long enough, people will question the value.

Now I present to you the list post to kill all list posts. www.google.com . Just enter your term and search. Thanks for listening. This broadcast was brought to you by the List-Post Adjudication Party. Please vote for us at your next election. We’ll do nothing about it. That’s your job.

I’ve just picked up the scent of a really cool looking browser add on that pulls web content from pages into a neat coverflow style visual interface. At present, it only works with non-beta versions of Safari, Firefox and Explorer.

You can use it on supported sites only, but with the list growing by day and already counting sites such as Youtube, Flickr and Current in the mix, it’s already a ripe tool for an alternative way to browse and discover website content. Needless to say, it works best with images and videos, since it is primarily a visual interface.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to use it completely in-browser yet, as it auto-defauts to full screen mode. That’s not such a problem right now, as most people will probably only use this as an experiment, and will as a result play with it for a time and then leave it be.

What I think is most interesting about this kind of app is that the kind of interface it has could be adopted to many other mediums. If you’ve tried it already, then you’ll probably agree with me that viewing your RSS feeds in such an interface would greatly advance the experience tenfold. It’s easy to say that, but even if you take regular written content out of the mix, if you subscribe to those sites that push out tons of visual posts such as we love typography or FFFFOUND! then you’ll immediately see the possible benefits of a non-typical interface.

The ‘discovery’ feature of the app also allows you to browse through aggregated web content on a number of topics, and it’s well worth having a fiddle with it. You can also choose from shopping or even browse through files on your machine. For example you can enter ’shopping’ and use the inbuilt search to visually browse Amazon. That, in addition to browsing your own files as mentioned, is completely complimented by a favorites section too.

Well, if I haven’t rambled enough just go and try it out http://www.cooliris.com/ . Did I mention it also works in the iPhone? and that there’s a freaking cool Wordpress Plugin too? These guys have the corners covered, I’ll give them that tip of the hat.

What say you?

Logo & Logotype used via Cooliris media pack

Here’s a list of my favorite ones. Viewer discretion is advised, as these movie quotes are peppered handsomely with colourful language (as all great movie quotes are) and definitely Not Safe For Work. That is, unless you’re like me and have some earphones always handy. If that’s you, then rock on.

Pulp Fiction Kinetic Typography

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels cinema typography

Reservior Dogs kinetic typography

The 8 rules of Fight Club – Kinetic Typography

V for Vendetta in Kinetic Typography

Kill Bill Kinetic Typography / Motion Type

The Matrix

Choose (Trainspotting)

And that’s it. A marriage made in Heaven; Movie quotes and cool text animation.

Fancy yourself as a bit of a kinetic typography genius? Just shell out however much Adobe are asking for their After Effects program and you’ll be ripping up the intertubes in no time. Minus the time you take to learn typography and video animation.

Is this stuff cool? Let me know what you think.

I could be just as easy to overlay a grid image with CSS, but just like everything in life there’s gotta be a FireFox extension that does it better. This tool ‘GridFox’ is just to damned handy to not deserve a mention. On the subject of Opera, I’m sure this could be added as a user.js file, or perhaps a widget, but I couldn’t find one similar to this.

And here’s a little screen shot of GridFox in action.

GridFox in action

In the past you could have considered me as an Opera Default user, which means for any task that is supposed to be easier in FireFox with a particular extension installed, I would still default to Opera and get the job done. Considering this, recently I’ve tried to be browser-agnostic when coding, so with that in mind I have been using Firefox alongside a number of the FireFox extensions for webdev since I feel it’s always worth checking them out. Now I’m even starting to prefer working in Safari’s webdev inspector over Dragonfly and FireBug included. Even though Opera is still the browser of choice for me, I readily admit to enjoying working with other tools and browsers.

I’m going to show what I do in Opera that is kinda similar to the Reference Accelerator. Ok, it ain’t as fancy as the IE stuff, but it works almost the same.

Custom Search in Opera

Firstly, for in-page search, I use a custom search engine. Custom search engines are an amazing feature once you get to know how to add them, and you’ll even find creative and awesome uses for them too. So to add a ‘custom search engine’ in Opera, you can start by going to the relevant website, and right-clicking on the search bar… in the pop-up menu, right at the bottom you’ll see ‘create search’ – a click on that and you’re already on your way:

When you click on the create search function, you’ll be asked to enter a keyword, which can be used from the address bar- for example, typing ‘g sitepoint’ into the Opera address bar searches Google for ‘SitePoint’. Except in this case, we could use ’spr border’ to search the SitePoint Reference for the border property.

Opera Panels

The final sweet thing is adding the SitePoint Reference as a panel in Opera. Hit shift+F12, or open the tools menu and click on ‘appearance’, then look at the Panels menu: [ Note, that you should be on the page you want to add the panel for, just to make it even easier. ] Click on add panel, and you’ll save the page you are on as a bookmark. Opera then adds that bookmark as a web panel.

At the end of all that, you can click on the panel from the Panel Menu [F4 toggles the Panels menu]. Just remember then to check the box under the ‘View’ Menu, which allows you to set the panel to appear as ‘Small Screen’.

As you can see from this clipped screenshot, the reference shows up just like it would on a mobile device, so theoretically has all the same functions. Search is near the top, but scroll down and you’ll find the links to the three sections of the SitePoint reference.

In-page custom search

Did you know you could search using your custom search engines in-page with Opera? Just like this:

And that’s all there is too it. Mighty-useful if you want a quick way to grab info’ from the SitePoint reference in Opera. Hell, you could even set the reference as your default search engine if you wanted too..

A famous quote once supposedly to have been said by Andrés Segovia. It probably wasn’t clear to Segovia back when he said it, that the Electric Guitar would become a proven musical force. But if we return to his word, abomination, then let me tell you one thing. Segovia is much revered in the world of Classical Guitar, and for one reason: He was a mystic who made playing the guitar seem like an unachieveable height, that would only ever be known by the few. That attitude and practice is the abomination.

Segovia and his transcriptions brought the guitar into more general acceptance as an instrument in its own right, but the positional and finger markings in his music show him to be a mystical time-waster.

I couldn’t even say with accuracy that he definitely played the music like the way he transcribed, but if he did, then he did nothing worthwhile for guitarists and their own struggle to become better players.

The over-complex fingerings, unnecessary slurs and other such markers:- it boils down to one thing: I think Segovia knew that the secret of the guitar was not the complex way one can choose to play it, but the damned simplicity of it -once you’ve built a solid grounding. If you were to try and learn guitar, using Segovia’s transcriptions and his fingerings, then as a beginner a brick wall of complete and utter failure is heading your way.

You can throw away the years trying to emulate the playing style of Segovia, perhaps believing that in doing so you will attain some higher state of playing effortlessly, in a impressively complex manner.

This is a gross, miscalculated assumption. In fact it:

1. Requires many years more work
2. Does not ground any real technique into your playing
3. Has very little reward (no progressive technique)
4. Makes results hard to come by
5. Turns playing the guitar ‘well’ into a whim, on which you’ll have good days and bad ones.

I could go on and on, but the simple fact is that such attitudes are harmful to the enjoyment and satisfaction that many novice players will receive for their efforts.

To counteract such mysticism, and if you have encountered it elsewhere perpetrated by your guitar ‘tutors’ and have struggled with your playing without being able to identify why you are unable to chart your progress, then read on:

Firstly question why you have to play pieces in certain positions and fingering patterns just because they are established by some tradition. Clouding the mind [and the muscles of your body] with nonsensical complexity will waste many hours of practice.

Take your pieces of music, throw away the idiotic patterning, and start over. Learn to play the piece as simply as the notated music allows. Find a suitable position and fingering for the music that does not require any undue complexity and can be played in the simplest manner. This is your key to a solid, grounded technique that will serve you a thousand times more robustly than the mystic’s technique.

The secret of playing classical guitar, which is not commonly told, is that once you have grounded your technique and have learned to play a piece simply, you will naturally begin to look for more personal ways to play the music, choosing different positions, fingerings that suit your level perfectly. Once this starts to happen, the music you play and the manner in which you play it becomes that complex, individual technique you tried to achieve from day one. Do you want to be just another ‘Segovia’ and to struggle to play his way, just because he was a past master? Why – when you can build a foundation of solid technique and develop your own uniqueness?

The appeal

To get you right up to speed, Current TV appeals to me because it brings the best of its online user-submitted video into the living room, and using the online voting polls to quality-filter the content (ala digg-style). Most of the video I had been watching on the channel was documentary, which is again something which appeals to me, and I happened to catch the ‘Tribes’ series over the weekend, which was interesting but I won’t be going in to that in this post.

I hadn’t previously been aware of the current.com site, and this was one of the few occasions where I went to the website after hearing about it on the TV, of all things! The website itself is what I would describle as a media community. Some of the features there are clearly geared towards documentary film makers, and part of the site’s attraction for those people must be that if their work is voted on enough, then it makes it to the TV broadcast.

I signed up and noticed a couple of things which kind of prove my above point.

As you can see, in my ‘doctored’ screenshot there is a right side bar which has a few interesting things:

1. First up is user activity, and this little box tells me that I’ve done nothing yet. Cool.
2. Second is the achievements, which tells me if any of my submitted stuff gets on TV. This is where you’ll see that for film makers or other contributors, getting your stuff on TV adds a little kudos to your profile.
3. Lastly is a little round-up box which generally sumarises my account activity.

So you can see immediately what the website is trying to do to engage its visitors, adding a little bit of cool and competition to get people involved.

Why is this cool?

Each user-submitted piece of content has its own page with blog-style comments, and those are also kept track of in the User Profile where you earn kudos for cool comments.

Overall, the user controls are quite complex, and have origins in a number of different media sites but I think once you aquaint yourself with the site these become less of the problem and more of the purpose of the site – you can for instance, follow themes such as ‘politics’ ‘tech’ and even people who submit good content that you can ‘follow’, and all this will show up in your own ‘My Current’ section. With most websites, complexity like this is shunned for one reason or another – usually for fear of turning the user away- but in the case of Current, it’s absolutely the magic which holds the whole thing together. I think this is going to be the kind of website we shall see more of in the future, and this could be a move away from the short attention span that plagues the use of the internet in general.

Actually, Since first drafting this post a while ago, I’ve had several submissions make it to be on the TV news. This sort of participation is very similar to digg, and the easiest for regular non-documentary maker members can contribute.

A couple of problems still exist with the Current.com mode however.

1. The main page encourages voting based off a one quick eyeball of the content, much like judging a book by its cover. See below for a pic.

2. There’s no way to check for duplicate content such as digg, since news is reported on many different websites all with their own pictures and commentary. Occasionally, you’ll see the same piece of news crop up several times submitted by different users. I’ve even found the search a bit difficult to use in checking recent submissions.

So, have you viewed Current TV or used their website? What is your verdict on their approach? Personally I really enjoy the Vanguard Journalism topic, which the pods are usually created by the channel producers. It’s one to watch out for, because the topics they cover are out of the main stream media. At least for that part, the title of this post becomes not an oxymoron, and for that I feel TV can still have relevance to play in real media output into society.

Edit:
Current.com recently teamed up with Twitter to feature ‘Hack the Debate’
You can follow Current on twitter here.