The miracle of the net... again

Pete and I went to lunch at the top local restaurant yesterday.  It was Pete's brother's girlfriends birthday.  The almost-four-hour meal was fantastic.

During the meal, Pete's brother mentioned that they had spent the day in London on Saturday. During a loooong trip to Harrods, they saw someone famous.  People were asking for autographs and taking photographs with them.

The problem was, neither Pete's brother nor his girlfriend recognised the man!

So they just said he had dark skin and good looking wife/girlfriend.  Not a lot to go on.  So I went on Twitter and and typed in a few searches:

- seen in Harrods
- saw in Harrods
- with wife in Harrods

After a couple of minutes and wading through spottings of an Indian film star and someone from a girl group, I found it was probably Dutch International footballer John Heitinga and his wife.

Finding a picture on Google confirmed it.  Isn't the 'net amazing?!?
 

Friday and the changing world

Thankfully it's Friday and time for a glass or two of wine I think.
 
I had to travel to a village (nice) near Bracknell (not nice) today to see a client.  The company I visit is small, but the owner is a really nice guy - very loud and funny with it.
 
I was a little early, so parked up and saw a few people taking their dogs for a walk in the morning mist.  I took this picture as I waited.
 

Yesterday I was in the Gherkin in London for a team meeting. I had been "volunteered" to present a short session on social media. I attended a fascinating 3 hour seminar on the topic last week and it blew my mind to be honest. The world of marketing is changing rapidly and the way that we will be "sold" to in future is changing too.

I ended my session with this video clip. To say that the information it contains is staggering would be a slight under estimation!  Watch and enjoy - my colleagues loved it.

43 Things

A couple of years ago I stumbled upon a website called 43 Things. You simply list the things that you want to do with your life, whether they are short term or long term objectives. The site then tells you how many other people want to achieve the same things and there are stories and feedback from people who have ticked them off their own lists.

This all appealed to me as someone who (a) likes writing lists and (b) is very good a dreaming and (c) also good at putting things off.

Here is a small selection of my 43 Things...

• Visit New York 
• Learn to meditate 
• Visit Morocco 
• Drive around Europe in a campervan 
• Get a lizard tattoo 
• Write a radio play 
• Need less sleep 
• Learn and practice speed reading 
• Go to the driving range and play golf 
• Visit the Cerne Abbas Giant 
• Busk 
• Make the front page of a newspaper

I'll get round to them one day I'm sure. I also have my blog-based Kitchen List to push me (update soon).  It's worth going to the site just to see the front page and the random dreams of people around the world. There are some very strange ones I noted...

Go for a midnight picnic, learn to draw caricatures, be selfish, get my tongue pierced, Learn to pick locks.

Weird huh?!

Online backup

A while ago I saw a feature of The Gadget Show (one of only a few great shows on Channel 5) all about backing up personal computer data.  Your data can be lost due to virus infections, accidental deletion, hardware/software failures, power failures, etc.

I personally have a huge file of photographs, documents and music that would be awful to lose, especially the photographs.  A while back our computer died and it might have been possible to get someone to trawl the dead hard drive for the data, but I had a separate external hard drive as a backup so the files were readily available.

However, what would have happened if there was fire or theft?  I would be stuffed!  Therefore, I researched online backup facilities and decided to use the one recommended on The Gadget Show - it's called Carbonite.  For $50 a year, all my data is backed up - I think it's a small price to pay to protect memories and to avoid potential hassle if you lose data.

If you don't backup your files, you are mad.  If you don't use an online system as well, you may be taking risks - so consider it by doing some research yourself... please!

Ten steps of Wikipedia (copyright Stephen Chapman 2008)

I'm trying to be clever with this posting - it's actually Saturday afternoon, but I am going to pre-publish so that it appears on Tuesday, while I am on a course in Edinburgh... so here goes....

When I first looked at Wikipedia, I found clicking on links and seeing where they took me could be enlightening. So I thought I'd make a game of it and I have therefore just invented Ten Steps Of Wikipedia. You start and finish with chosen words or names or things and have to follow links on the wikipedia entry to the next entry.

On my shelf is a DVD of Harry Potter, so that can be number 10.

The starting point is a random word generated on this site - and the obscure noun produced is (1) Panguingue - which is a gambling card game similar to rummy particularly popular in (2) Las Vegas - the most populous city in Nevada and an internationally renowned major resort city for the gaming, shopping and entertainment and was named by (3) Antonio Armijo who found it after following a tributary up the (4) Colorado River - which features a dam finished in 1936 called the (5) Hoover Dam. The first concrete was placed in the dam on (6) June 6, 1933 - the 157th day of the year , and the day in 1906 that (7) Paris Métro Line 5 was opened. One of the metro stations on the line is (8) Gare du Nord. This is the terminus where you can catch a high speed Eurostar train to (9) St Pancras International station which is used for the exterior shots of King's Cross station (which is actually next door) in the (10) Harry Potter films.

And that's how you go from Panguingue to Harry Potter in 10 steps!

Badoo, iphone, but no Britney Spears

This week, I did a little research into search engines and how my blog could show up on searches. It's really complicated!!! I've been exposed to crawlers, bots, sitemaps, atoms, rss and other terms that make no sense to me at all. I am no internet code wizard.

However, in the unlikely event that keywords and tags in this site will get a googlebot interested, I thought I would see what the world was searching for. The latest Google stats are from 2007 and although there are peaks in the year - the World Cup being one, here are the top 10. I had to look some of them up to find out what they were.

1. iphone - I would have been surprised if it wasn't there.
2. badoo - To my surprise I don't know what it is! Well, badoo is a "multi-lingual social networking website".
3. facebook - Doesn't everyone have an account already on this social networking website?!
4. dailymotion - Not what I first thought it might be... it appears to be a Youtube ripoff.
5. webkinz - Yet another site I'd not heard of. This time webkinz is a toy that also has it's own virtual web presence. All looks very clever and a marketing dream!
6. youtube - We all know this one.
7. ebuddy - Is new to me and is a web and mobile messenger.
8. second life - It's for sad loners who want to escape to another world isn't it?
9. hi5 - Yet another social networking website and is huge is some countries.
10. club penguin - This is a Disney site that is a virtual world aimed at kids, who will one day become sad loners who want to escape to another world.

So it seems that social networking and video are big on the 'net at the moment. In 2005, Britney Spears and 50 Cent were tops on every search engine - how times change. With all these great keywords now in my blog, I'll be a top search on Google right??!?.... errrm no, I don't think I will somehow.