Nerd ADD.

They say men can't multi task, but do Nerds count as men? Tell me to rub my belly and pat my head & I'm already thinking about what's for dinner and how to improve my gym work out.

The media age we live in, and its constant endless flow of information is too much for most of the population. So they end up with spyware riddled PCs suffering from winrot after a year, when all they did was surf for a little porn, and chat on facebook a bit. See most people look at the PC as a big fat phone. It is functional, but to Nerds? It's a window into the bit of the brain our memory isn't good enough to deal with.

What was that song I wanted to listen to? Oh yeah NP: Lamb of God - Reclamation.

rands explains it better.

Stop reading right now and take a look at your desktop. How many things are you doing right now in addition to reading this column? Me, I’ve got a terminal session open to a chat room, I’m listening to music, I’ve got Safari open with three tabs open where I’m watching Blogshares, tinkering with a web site, and looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I’ve got iChat open, ESPN.COM is downloading sports new trailers in the background, and I’ve got two notepads open where I’m capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to do lists. Oh yeah, I’m writing this column, as well.

See, if I do the same task here is the answer. Two firefox windows. One has facebook, this blog, lifehacker, BBC News, a better writing article & rands in repose article. The other has a bunch of windows about java mobile application development. I can't bring myself to close those, because they're not quite worthy of bookmarking. I have my email inbox open, and tweetdeck feeding my live updates. uTorrent is downloading a few things, I have a log file with todays thoughts and ideas as well as winamp entertaining my ears.

The truth is, without those distractions, I don't work as well & can't get through any task. Sharing my time between each of them results in me hitting this zone where round pegs do your bidding and nestle right into that square hole. Good little round peg.

New music, New Social Networking, New Cloud?

Yes, I do love the new TI & Justin Timberlake song. The production is stunning, it has strings and hippety hop all in the same song. It's well done, catchy and has a good message. Still there are a few things in there that are annoying. Hip hop has this whole "eyyyyyyy, ohhhhhhhh" thing going on which could be more annoying than stubbing your toe.


After a month or so on Twitter I think I finally get it. By blogging about it, I also join the ranks of the millions of people who do nothing but twitter on about twitter. It's brilliance is that people actually write what they are interested in or up to. With blogs people try to be interesting, or at least have enough content to fill a blog. The character limit and the the URL linking you can be on the bleeding edge of any subject within a matter of seconds.

It got me thinking.

Doesn't email seem like a long time ago now? Why don't all my other services work like twitter, with lots of interesting apps and ways to organise data streaming from what is otherwise pretty unorganised. My MP3s are sorted by artist, my movies by year... but if the Cloud netowork or Semantic web is so smart... Why can't it join up all my data too and sort it in the way twitter does.

The beauty of the cloud is that it works with tripples. That means that we have more than just data and it's title. We know how it relates to other data instantly. A cloud network knows the difference between an MP3 and an avi. It could then sort that data for you, or search it... or tell you who of your friends also has it. Or what they thought of it if they blogged, tweeted or posted on a forum about it.

Services like glue are heading in that direction... but until someone joins the dots. We have a lot of floating data that isn't working as hard is it could. If I want to learn about a subject, or have been given a task I don't know how to complete as a competant net savvy member of Generation Y I would have gone to google or wikipedia and found something

Now I'm including twitter in that search. That shift is seismic and it's coming.

The stuff we do.

So today I installed OSX the Mac operating system on a spare bit of hard disk space I have. The problem is, that spare bit is quite small. So installing anything else isn't going to happen. On a PC I'd just install that to another drive or partition. But noooo, its a Mac, it just FAILS. I mean works...



I was even going to do something as simple as change where firefox downloads files to. Then it dawned on me. What no file menu? What kind of a sick OS doesn't give you any options for customisation.

Macs do "just work" provided you are going to do nothing but use software. Start doing anything creative, add in some more powerful hardware and it fails. No wonder Apple always made their own hardware. Microsoft did something incredible with Windows. They made it work with 95% of hardware out of the box.

So why would I embark on such a strange task you ask? Well I wanted to develop an iphone app and have a play. I may just concentrate on the blackberry side to start with. Why? Because it's not Apple nazi-fied.

Splitter!

I know my destination, I'm just not there...

Not as bothered about it as I used to be though. Business suddenly makes sense. Nobody told me the corporate world was 100% political. It may seem stupidly naive but when people told me how business worked & that it's safe to speak your mind, I believed them.

This blog may split 3 or even 4 ways in the near future.


Splitting is never fun, especially since I'll have to go through the archives and do that. But I'm such a scatterbrain, it will make a lot of sense. Lots of ideas :)

Any Given Monday

Sup?

Despite hurting my back this weekend & the occasional bit of shooting pain. I feel pretty good today. It's been a weekend of healing & resting.

I'm not after fame and fortune, I'm after you.
When I've served my time, I swear I'll come back for you.

Just got a call from the benefits lady in Leeds city council. If they process the stuff in time, I should be ina position where I can live & work up to my first pay day without borrowing a penny. That would ROCK so much.

Scandal-Mouse

So guess who went to see Russell Brand on Wednesday, 5 rows from the front? Be jealous.

Or wait for the DVD release... either way. The whole thing is brilliant from top to bottom, especially the live crowd interaction. I was surprised by how he is just how you expect him to be. Quick witted and a bit bemused by the whole circus that goes on around his quaff of hair. Renaming leggings "testosterousers" is a good effort as well as the observation that his look doesn't really work without fame. Heh...

Now I'm free, free fallin...

So sick of waiting to start work. I want to earn money & enjoy the perks that come with it. More than anything the sensation of having achieved something. Success is what I crave, the rewards are a perk.

The sun is shining. I'm thinking what LA will be like for my 25th birthday & who could be convinced to join me out there. *guitar solo*

Lined up for another interview on friday, decent job based in the center of Leeds. Wonder what happens if I get it? It's fun being able to attend an interview with no pressure. Could very realisitcally see myself turning around to TSYS and saying "I needed the extra cash". Who knows. Either way, get the sense I'm not long from climbing the ladder pretty rapidly & enjoying the journey.

Skipping to the last page of a book ruins the ending, doing a level skip cheat ruins a video game & the end of a song is pointless without the full build up. The same is true of life.

Scatterbrain

Things running through my head:

Watching the new season of 90210 was weird. The old show looks so dated and kitsch now, but this new one has bright colours and looks like entourage. So I'm thinking "woah it got good", but then it has the perfect family in the middle and can't resist being cheesy. Heh.

Progress huh? There is this one girl who is mixed race, has amazing eyes. Anyways, her whole weekend was put on hold so she could hang out with her dad. Who turned up, gave her a car and left. She later founds out, he left because he's having an affair on her mum. I just thought. OUCH. Take that materialism.

I promise myself and the universe. I'll never be the guy that values money over my time. Time with people is all we have.

The new Rise Against album is amazing. I'm a huge fan of the band. It's pretty easy to see why people wouldn't be straight away. They sound like a lot of bands in there genre. Put them next to NoFX and they could be a clone. But there is something about the harmonies & the lyrics that is a different class. The patterns please me in a classical way, marry that with brilliant lyrics and you have yourself a good combo. Shame their politics are left of Mao.

We’re all ok, until the day we’re not
The surface shines, while the inside rots
We raced the sunset and we almost won
We slammed the brakes, but the wheels went on

Word to the Jen. Bowie is so smart she can like trashy tv ironically.

Is it just me, or do you ever get so stuck into something that seemed brilliant yesterday... that just isn't today. Midnight mania is always best tempered with dawn doubt. Amazing how the time of day affects creativity, emotion & your reactions.

that's when I told her
I love you girl
but I'm not the answer for
the questions that you still have

I get to see Russell Brand tonight. You'd be suprised how difficult it's been to get people to come along with me. Spare tickets, may even go to waste! Shocking.

I need money :(

Cloudy

Somethings you don’t forgive somethings you don’t forget
Sometimes the fate you suffer is so much worse than death
We’re way off course now and we’re drifting out to sea
So cut the anchor on your heart to be set free, set free, set free

Spin out of control
Spin out of control
We try to recover, but collide with each other
We spin out of control

Spin out of control.



So I've spent most of the day learning about cloud networking, and the various layers of abstraction involved with it. It is needless to say quite interesting for a geek like me.

Unquestionably the future of the wibbly wobbly is centered around "trust". Also known as security. The easiest way to achieve trust is with a brand like Google or Amazon. Which is why companies like that are opening up their platforms as a cloud network, and then leasing those out as required.

Still, if we can't decide what a cloud is (beyond the concept) or should look like. How can we trust it?

We're reaching a point where it's becoming difficult to profit from creating the structure of a cloud network. A lot of the non profit organisations don't have corporate support, and the corporations want you to pay them. There are a lot of interesting visions for how to get the web from a data management tool, to an information based tool. The ability to link together not with key words but by the relative similarity between two pieces of information.