(Note: I’ve been meaning to post this for ages. Now, finally getting around to posting…!)

There is a huge difference between sticking photos into a photo album and the amazing service offered by Blurb.com

I originally found the site through Flickr.com - they have links to various printing companies and Blurb was one so I decided to check it out.

The process involved couldn’t have been simpler - the final product, couldn’t be better.

To start, download the “BookSmart” software, which is currently only available for Windows XP/Vista & Mac OS. I will forgive them for not offering a Linux version of the software.. But ideally this should be sorted sooner rather than later.

The BookSmart software is used to build a photobook from scratch, allowing you arrange photos and text in a number of pre-defined templates. It’s very customisable but I kept it simple for my first book.

I chose the best photos from my trip to Toronto and New York and compiled them into a 40 page book. The result is like I said before amazing, it’s a professional quality book. I got 4 printed and gave them to the guys we went on the trip with for their birthdays, the ultimate in personalised and unique gifts I’d say.

There are five different sizes of book you can create and an option is given for soft back or hard back and the inclusion of a dust jacket etc. Pricing of the books is done on how many pages the book will contain, starting from as little as £10.

You can view my final product or at least the first few pages of it at http://www.blurb.com/books/366876

The only real let down for me was the ink used is pretty dark, when I do my next book I’ll try to adjust the photos and make them a little bit lighter to compensate. Obviously the higher quality photos you use the better quality the final prints are and as such it takes absolutely ages to get the thing uploaded to their servers once you’ve finished the layout. Having said that, I used some photos taken on my old Nokia 6680 which is only 1.3MP and they came out alright - the images taking up the entire page though were 7.1MP from Kat’s Pentax Optio M30

It does say to get 1 book printed first on it’s own if you’re going to do a bulk order - so you can check how it looks. I opted not to and just went for it… then found when I received them through the post that I’d used one photo twice. Oops.. But luckily hardly anyone notices! It’d suck if you got 20 printed and they all had a typo on though. So make sure you double triple check it before you upload…

Happy book making!

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Have you ever seen someone who, instead of putting a web address into their browser address bar as you’d expect, chooses to put the address into Google and do a search on it, then click the first link?? People who do this bizarre series of actions to view a website I now call “Google Surfers”.

A chap phoned me at work the other day to ask where all his websites had gone… I didn’t really get what he meant so I got his screen up and asked him to show me and he proceeded to type “www.” into the Google search box which, with Google Suggest being turned on immediately starting suggesting results such as www.facebook.com www.bbc.co.uk etc. and the chap said he’d never even been on Facebook before! It turned out what he was after was his auto-complete history because that’s how he browses the net.

And it’s wrong in so many ways. Why not press the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button which would accomplish the same as clicking Search then clicking the first result? Why not actually type a web address into the address bar in the first place!? Why not bookmark frequently visited pages so you don’t even have to type anything in at all?!? What if the first result on the URL searched for isn’t the site they’re after by some random occurrence on Google which could happen? The mind boggles.

What’s gone wrong in the way people are taught to use the Internet which makes them think that’s the way everyone does it?

Mobbler is god’s gift to users of Last.fm and Symbian S60 devices.

Only a short while ago it was just an app which sat in the background and collected tracks played on the built-in Music Player of Symbian phones like my Nokia N95 8gb. It would queue up and scrobble the tracks to your Last.fm profile when you told it to. Even then, it was much better than other Last.fm scrobbling apps for Symbian because they all worked off their own players but personally, I don’t find anything wrong with the default Nokia player. So I was chuffed to find an app which would scrobble tracks I listened to on my phone. Useful, pretty cool but not worth writing home about… Till now.

After being offline for a while last month I was pleased to see news there’d be a few updates to Mobbler, currently at version 0.4.5 - always preferring to be up to date (even when it lands me in the shit, but that’s another story!) I installed the new version to find it now does so much more.

You can see data from your account on the phone such as your shoutbox, friends, playlists etc, you can listen to any Last.fm radio station you want (but I wouldn’t listen unless it’s on a wifi connection..) and it’s got a sleep timer which switches itself to offline mode after a set amount of time. For example, I usually put the “sleep” tag radio station on for half an hour when I go to bed.

So if you’ve got a Symbian S60 device and a Last.fm account - definitely check this out, have a play with it and see what you think. Top marks from me though.

Gutted. It was the *first* night I’d parked my car outside my new house and woke up to find this…

I hadn’t taken out windscreen cover on my insurance policy, I even recently asked the company if I could add it on now and pay the extra but they were having none of it. Too bad! So, some w&*^#r had cost me roughly £90 worth of damage and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

I strolled down the cop shop anyway and had a word, got a lift back to the scene of the crime in a police car with a friendly bobby who told me he reckoned someone had a go at it with a handful of gravel, hence the small white marks visible in the photo above, but they must have been disturbed and ran off. Bloody b*$£!%d! Not the cop, the guy who done it! There’s not even anything worth nicking in my car!

Anyway, as “luck” would have it, the locksmiths who were in changing the locks on my house used to work for a windscreen company and gave them a quick call and got me a quote, they said they could fix it in a couple of hours. A nice chap came along a little later from Windscreens Direct and had some fun smashing the rest of the glass out before fixing the new one in. All done and dusted on the same day.

I don’t park directly outside any more, much as I’d like to.

^ Click for a bigger version.

It’s time for another car related story…

This happened a few weeks ago, about a week after I’d passed my test.

I’d gone to Kathryn’s for dinner and she wanted me to pick up some wine and other bits from Tesco, so I drove down there - got the wine, got the other bits and went to pay. I got ID’d for the booze… Apparently they got caught selling alcohol to a minor recently and the bloke got fired and the shop had a massive fine etc.. That was when I realised I’d left my passport at Kat’s house and hadn’t yet got my new driving license back from the DSA so had no ID on me. Ugh! Typical.

I drove back to her place to pick up my passport and went all the way back to the shop, it’s not that far but it was a wasted journey - went back to the till, showed my passport which proves I am infact 21 years old and thus got the wine. Fantastic. Bit frustrating having to to and fro though. Got back in my car, turned the key in a bit of a hurry and…. *snap*. Argh. The key had broken off in the ignition.

I panicked about for a bit and wondered what the hell I was going to do. After sitting around for a while I calmed down and actually tried to turn the key - the broken bit still connected to the bit lodged inside and it still started the car. Luckily. I was able to drive back to Kat’s place with the rest of the key on the passenger seat.

In the end I had to drive all the way back to my house, get my spare key so I could lock the car door for the night. Went over to Kat’s parents place the following morning and her Dad being the genius he is managed to get the bit of the key out of the ignition slot with some tiny screwdrivers… And the above photo was taken after he’d managed to shift it out slightly. Got a new key cut for £7 and it’s been fine so far!

On Monday 9th March 2009, Tom Reynolds of Random Reality wrote:

Monday’s question - In your own work, or day to day life, what events give you joy? [...] I’d think that even if I worked in an office there would still be something that would make my day, so, what is yours?

And by way of a reply…

One of the things I will probably miss most about working at Specsavers when I start my new job next month is also the thing which makes me smile.

The place I normally stand at work is quite central to the store. I am close to 3 or 4 dispensing desks where patients are measured up for their glasses or fitted when collecting.

When you see a young child, especially with a really high prescription, putting on their sponge bob square pants glasses for the first time - their face is an absolute picture. They just kind of stare, dumb-struck and blinking at everything… Usually whomever is fitting their glasses being the first thing they look at. It’s hard to imagine but from having been unable to see much at all and not knowing any better; they’ve suddenly and unexpectedly been given the gift of crystal clear sight… So Tom, that is what makes my day.

This is the story as told by me to countless people.. Sorry if you’ve already heard it, but it’s now immortalised forever on the web.

It was Thursday 12th February 2009, the day after I passed my driving test. I was driving home from the pub after closing time and surprise surprise there were no parking spaces down my road. There never are any in the evenings. I turned at the end and went down the next road, no spaces there either… So I went down the other road near my place and a car pulled in behind me. There was a space there but I figured I’d loop back round and let this other car go past. I turned left at the bottom and took off towards the city centre, went onto the main road and the other car followed me and kept following me for the next 5 minutes or so. I thought I’d just go for a random drive around, why not - I wasn’t doing anything wrong. But the car was still behind me all the way to the ring road and back round.

Now I was getting worried. I didn’t know what to do in this situation when you’re being followed by a car; was it friends from the pub playing a joke? Was it a car full of chavs waiting to jump me when I parked up and steal my car? The true reality didn’t cross my mind for even a second…

Just as I was getting back to my road I saw flashing blue lights in my rear view mirror and the car behind me pulled over. So did I to let them past, except they didn’t go past. One police car pulled in front of me, one behind. About half a dozen police officers got out. I was extremely freaked out at this point.

I got out of my car, left the engine running… It turns out the car following me was an unmarked police car who weren’t allowed to pull me over so had to call the cavalry. They asked if I’d been drinking, of course I hadn’t - I’d only had two diet cokes at the pub. I took a road-side breath test which confirmed this and they also said I’d been driving erratically which personally I didn’t think I was but that was what lead them to follow me. I explained how I’d just passed my test the previous day, which was also the reason why I didn’t have my license on me at the time. They then explained that because I was driving slowly around the roads at this time of night they thought I was looking for a “lady of the night” and once I’d explained that I was just looking for a parking space they realised their error and let me go.

The moral of the story? Don’t drive too slowly when looking for a parking in my area of Norwich…? Well it makes for a good anecdote anyway.

Just plugging some seaside snaps I took on a lovely valentine’s trip to Weybourne with Kathryn. We stayed at a great B&B in the small Norfolk village. They had a hot tub and a notice in the room saying “Swimsuits optional!” - when we got back from dinner they said Charlie the owner was in there, so we thought we’d give it a miss for that night anyway. Maybe next time!

The red circle indicates when I really got on top of my 68 RSS feeds in Google Reader. I’ve already dropped back to the usual levels of hardly reading anything.. It might be time for an RSS feed spring clean, instead of adding new content all the time.

So, if reading a bunch of RSS feeds is difficult to do, it’s even harder to post to my own blog - let alone upgrade to Wordpress 2.7 which was released quite some time ago now..

—

In other news, I passed my driving test on Wednesday 11th February 2009. Just after 1:30pm, I started the test by correctly answering the ’show me / tell me’ questions. I drove with the examiner and it was less than 5 minutes before I bumped the kerb going round a corner and thought I’d failed the whole thing. Carried on regardless, what else was there to do?! And came out of it at the end with only 4 minor faults. One of those being the bump on the kerb and 3 others for trivial mistakes. So I am very pleased and have been out driving in my car pretty much every day since.

There is much in store for this site, including better integration with all the other sites I tend to spend most of my time on. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter etc.. But all in good time.

For now, good night. And check back soon to read about my first encounter with the police…

Now I hate online advertising as much as the next man, but…

I find myself clicking on Facebook adverts, the targeted ones they have down the right hand side on some pages. I mean, they really are targeted quite accurately. How about this one which I saw the other day??

That’s just an example of a few I’ve seen and this particular one couldn’t be targeted better. Facebook knows I run Linux because it’s probably listed on my profile from when I first set it up.. My eye was immediately drawn by the Tux icon. I keep seeing more and more adverts which are of interest or are relevant to me on the side of Facebook, which proves that “social advertising”, or whatever they want to dub it, is the way forward. To get me, someone who actively blocks adverts online, clicking is an achievement in itself. I’d say the money the company spent there was well worth it despite me not buying anything from them.

Having spent some time studying marketing at university, it’s quite clear to me that Facebook and the like have an edge over other advertising mediums because they can deliver adverts to those who are most likely to click them.. In fact I’d much rather see adverts which might be relevant to me, even if I don’t click them, than this random flashing distracting nonsense which you see on most websites.