boreders

I seem to have spent a good part of the weekend snagged up in the seedy world of the Internet. No, I have not been knee deep in porn or wading through pixelated orcs in a raid. I have been participating in the honourable pursuit of “working out what the heck makes something tick”.

I now seem to have spent the last month trying to move my old web presence from a hosted package to a virtual server. One of the things this has involved is a learning curve rather like K2. When you have to slog so much, you appreciate a helping hand – so, I tried loading a piece of pre-installed software to run an image gallery. Alas, the accuracy of the automated install seemed to be rather poor. I ended up with something that, at best, didn’t fail completely, but that obviously wasn’t working properly either.

So, I set about working out what needed to happen to get it working. This was akin to someone giving me a paragraph of text in a foreign language and asking me to translate, accurately, merely using reference books. At first, I spent a while going through support forums and searching for likely causes of the error, then I tried resetting permissions and re-install elements of the setup. Finally, I decided to run through the whole configuration and installation procedure from scratch. Each error that arose was cross-referenced and fixed, a painful and gradual process of trial and error.

Finally, at 9.40pm yesterday evening, I completed the re-install and the gallery worked “perfectly” (within acceptable tolerances). My weekend had vanished, but the work had been done.

I ponder, was this weekend lost in translation, or did I gain something from the experience. Perhaps, my knowledge increased just a little along the way, though probably not by much.

I’m sitting in the garden right now writing this blog entry, having already twittered, Boo’d and updated my Facebook status.

Despite approaching social networking with uncertainty from the outset, I now embrace Facebook, Twitter and similar outpourings like old friends. In many respects they are just that. I chat with more old school friends and ex-work colleagues than ever before. Yes, some of those “friends” are tenuous, but I do know them from Adam (something Facebook members with thousands of friends certainly can’t say!).

The business of social networking induces me to chat regularly, if only with myself. I should write more and I should write regularly… and this may be a reasonable route in to achieving that. A dozen Tweets in a day is more than I have likely set down to paper in the last week on any creative projects. It shouldn’t be that way, but small steps might make all the difference.

I now Tweet as @boreders, Facebook as myself, and Boo too! Boo is basically audio twittering or blogging, which allows for a little more spontaneous content generation. I allow my mouth to do all the talking (funnily enough).

I’d like to find any angle on this outpouring now to make more of it… So, if anyone has any clever ideas they’d care to share, I’d love to hear from you!

Having gone through the newest batch of trailers and seen the likes of ‘Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer‘, I have to say even the campest bloodfest of a horror has nothing on this disturbing guide to turning your kids into a Halloween pirate over at YouTube:

Relevant reading:

Why, oh why did this make me giggle so much? What could it have been? Sour-faced old Paxman really does ask for this sort of thing… cheer up man, it’s not the end of the world.

(Amusing page layout provided courtesy of the TV Guide)

I suffered my first significant exposure to Windows Vista a couple of weeks ago, and I’m still bemused by the experience. I was roped in to help someone make an old piece of software work and it seemed like a simple enough task. I used the Internet to identify the problem and identified I needed to alter a .dll file somewhere. So, the next step – find the .dll file.

Now, in Windows XP, I choose Search from the Start menu, stick the name in – perhaps with a wildcard – and off it goes. Vista – simplicity seems to have got lost somewhere amidst all the fancy Apple-esque graphics. I tried to use the quick Search, which sits within the Start menu, but it couldn’t find what I wanted. Is it something to do with Vista wanting to set up some fancy index? Anyway – I managed to find the more involved search facility and just stared… tapping pathetically at the various options, dropdowns and radio buttons (or something along those lines). Maybe someone intended it to be easy and intuitive, but it wasn’t. I don’t expect to read an online manual or help file to use something as basic as a search facility. It took me about 10 minutes to fathom out without assistance, poking and pushing options that looked promising.

I’m not impressed.

The fact I had to suffer this experience because Vista uses a non-backwards compatible version of Direct X simply tells me that this operating system doesn’t belong anywhere near a computer I own… I shall manage with XP until I finally have the time to spend loading up an instance of Linux in some form or another. I have no desire to go there… unless Microsoft start producing software that brings the user back into the frame rather than simply trying to amuse people with resource-hungry eye candy.