Author: rob

All your friends in one place?

Have you ever done that thing where you have a party and you invite lots of different friends from different parts of your life (job, university friends, social club), many of who don’t know each other that well, or have perhaps never met?

Sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn’t and, on those occasions when it doesn’t, you think afterwards, “good job that doesn’t happen very often!”

Well, now a similar thing is happening online. With the likes of Facebook, Last.fm, MySpace, Bebo, Virb (I could go on), people have lots of different personas and can be different with different groups of friends. But for some people, this is too much effort and various start-ups are suggesting the idea of having all your social networking buddies in the same place

Are you kidding? Why? I love the fact that people who know my music taste, don’t really know much about Friday Cities and the accompanying community there. As for Facebook – well, almost everyone is on there already.

I also have some friends, who just “don’t do” social media. So they won’t be part of my online life and that’s fine and dandy.

Quit trying to “synergise” everything!

Moving…

They say that moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do – having done it for the third time in five years, I can wholeheartedly say this was the worst yet.

Hiring a man with a van and getting him and his mate to do the shifting for you isn’t the difficult part. The worst bit is being left with all the unopened boxes stacked in the precisely the wrong part of the rooms you want them in, and then having to find new homes for all the things that used to fit so neatly in a drawer, under the bed, or in the loft.

And then you have to do all this unpacking with a curious toddler who wants to put her fingers and nose into everything. It’s exhausting in so many ways. A week on and we’re still not 100% straight, in spite of going at it hell for leather.

One good thing, though, was the switch of broadband supplier. I now use Sky and can thoroughly recommend them. The wireless router and other gubbins was sent in advance of the activation date and the broadband was turned on when they said it would be.

What’s more the set-up procedure was so easy and slick and, best of all, they’re Mac compatible, which is more than can be said for some of the big ISPs!

After a week of no internet access, it’s definitely good to be back, although I must say, it was  quite refreshing to ignore the rest of the online world for a few days!

Silly season: “Lord Lucan” spotted

Surprise, surprise, it’s a quiet news month, so a story that Lord Lucan is alive and well and living in a van in New Zealand as “Roger”, with only a possum for company takes centre stage…

This man who was thought to be Lucan has admitted that he’s on the run, but is not the former ennobled Englishman.

The real disgraced peer vanished 33 years ago and has sparked interest ever since, with rumoured sightings occurring almost every year. He’s alleged to have been living in South Africa, Kenya, Australia and New Zealand, from what I can remember, but none of these have ever been confirmed.

I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that the story was believed and managed to be front-page news of The Evening Standard, or the fact that people still think Lord Lucan is still alive. Talk about the silly season.
Reports that Lucan was riding Shergar and while Elvis rode pillion at the same time have yet to be substantiated!