Soho Village

Share Print Comments KDE 4.1, released last month, brought a great number of improvements to the popular desktop environment. It’s the best desktop I’ve ever used — but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be better. 2009 will see the release of KDE 4.2. Here are 10 features that would be great additions to a future KDE release that I hope the developers

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Exclusive Arab/Tunisian Shaggy interview
Shaggy will be interviewed live by Hédi on Corniche on Tunisian radio station Radio Mosaïque. The program is broadcast between 21-23h local time, Shaggy will probably be on between 21.30-22.00h. You can listen to the program here. By the way, the site also has a webcam, so who knows, you might catch a glimpse of Shaggy.

Source.

Energy TV
Shaggy was interviewed by the German Energy TV and performed for them. Here’s a video!

Shaggy appearance on London Fashion Week MOBO Awards 2007 Pre-Party

Two 77 Splash, Summerjam videos
Click here for more videos of these reggae festivals!

More Strenght of a Woman on Two Sevens Splash 2007 at the Heineken Music Hall, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Shaggy’s entrance and Boombastic live at Summerjam 2008 video

More Feel the Rush on Summerjam 2008 in Cologne, Germany

Carsonified has been adding the videos of all the Future of Web Design talks to Vimeo and they’ve finally added my favourite of the day: Daniel Burka on iterative design.

From Austin Powers to Superbad, this is relentlessly funny.

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That was last year’s Halloween theme at Chessington World of Adventures and surprisingly, this year’s also. Hmm. Have they been recycling witches?

Last year, my nieces and I were at their theme park branch in Surrey a week before Halloween. It was a nice treat from cousin and her husband. We were up earlier than usual, drove to the place not exceeding the 30 mile blinking speed meter and got off the car to embrace the cold wind of autumn. I thought my ears would explode.

I was asked to write down a spell the Charmed way and threw it into the “boiling pot”.

Our tickets had been paid for online at roughly 20GBP per head. There was a lane for those who printed their confirmed passes from the website. Inside, we took turns in touring the girls around and passed by those trees where “witches” pitched their tents and posed for photographs in their spooky wardrobe on top of white long-sleeved shirts with silk ties. I envied those talents wearing mascots. It was warm inside.

Posing with the bat in shades

Chessington World of Adventures is a spacious theme park, probably double the size of the local Enchanted Kingdom. There were all sorts of rides, a zoo, theatres, game centers and fast food outlets visitors could choose from. My fear of heights was challenged when we took the Dragon Falls at the Mystic East that sent me screaming during the deep plunge while my niece simply looked cool. Other death-defying rides, like the Rameses Revenge, could probably send me early to the grave. I’m happy and content in those carousel rides.

Rameses Revenge and the waterspouts

KFC and Pizza Hut swarmed with people during lunch time. No one dared to eat out in the cold unless left with no choice but have a picnic on those cold benches. Inside those heated restos were people sharing seats and floor spaces, too.

Lunch at KFC and Pizza Hut

Probably it was my lack of sense of adventure that made theme parks land at the bottom of my must-see list. It’s nice to go to these places from time to time but I would rather embark on a trip where I would learn something really interesting other than send my vision on a swirl.

People have a love and hate relationship with file hosting sites. Some file hosting sites are really handy and make sharing data even simpler than sending a file via email while other services spam you with countless pop ups and forced membership options to simply download a file.

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It’s always nice on long flights when the one or two seats beside you are empty. You can stretch out, eat the fine airline dinner, then pass out across all the seats and wake up fairly refreshed on another continent. Well imagine each passenger getting not two or three seats each, but an average of 44 seats.

A few weeks ago American Airlines flew a 777, which has approximately 220 seats between First, Business, and Economy classes combined, with only five passengers on board from Chicago O’Hare (ORD) to London Heathrow (LHR). Apparently they tried to rebook passengers on other carriers, but could not accommodate five passengers. But more relevantly, the aircraft was needed in London to carry a planeload of passengers from LHR back to ORD. So regardless of the number of passengers on the outbound, the plane had to fly no matter what. (Environmental groups were not surprisingly outraged at the carbon emmissions produced for just five people from the 22,000 gallons of fuel burned.). In addition to getting 44 seats to yourself, each passenger probably received his/her own flight attendant as well, for I’m sure, impeccable service.

Who’s complaining about crowded planes?

I’ve been doing a bit of research this afternoon on the daily commutes to the four main places I go to: Paddington, Royal Oak, Romford and Brixton.

Paddington
I can either get the overland train from East Croydon to Charing Cross and then the Bakerloo Line direct to Paddington (45 minutes), or go to Victoria and get the 36 or 436 bus to Paddington (50 mins).

Romford
I can get the overland train from East Croydon to London Bridge, and then either get the Northern Line to Bank and change for the Central to Stratford, or get the Jubilee Line to Stratford, and then an overland train to Romford (1 hour 13 mins via Jubilee, or 1 hour 8 mins via Northern and Central).

Royal Oak
Overland train from East Croydon to Victoria, and then the 36 bus to Royal Oak (58 mins).

Brixton
East Croydon to Victoria, and then the Victoria Line to Brixton (39 mins), or from East Croydon to Herne Hill, and then overland to Brixton (35 mins).

Of course, if I’m working at the Law Centre in Croydon on Park Lane, it’s about 10 mins altogether! ;o)

A young boy’s wardrobe contains a time hole. Through this hole an assortment of short people (i.e. dwarfs) come while escaping from their master, the supreme being. They take Kevin with them on their adventures through time from Napoleonic times to the Middle Ages to the early 1900s, to the time of Legends and the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness where they confront Evil.

Social media is currently big news in, well, social circles. There are now multitudes of sites on the net which are dedicated to the social aspects of the web. There are so many different sites - Facebook, MySpace, Digg, reddit, Twitter, del.cio.us, and many many more - it is hard to know what each site is for and really how useful each one is.

In the web age there is so much information, produced at a staggering rate, on the internet that keeping up is hard. Signal-to-noise ratios make it difficult to know which information is worth your time and which is, simply put, noise. Social media sites can help here, they can act as a kind of filter for the information out there by allowing you to essentially listen to others, be they friends, colleagues or industry experts, in order to promote content which hopefully should be relevant. Potentially a great solution, problem is that now there are so many social media channels that once again the signal-to-noise ratio is interfering again.

I use quite a few social media sites so thought I would show how I use each service for a particular function that keeps me up to date with industry chatter but also allows me to keep in touch with some of the noise from outside work.

RSS

First off is not a social media site as such but more of a service that the majority of sites now offer. RSS allows me to subscribe to regular content from a large number of services which I consider to provide high quality material. My RSS reader of choice - IE7 - looks after everything for me and notifies me that there is new content from a good source which I can read at my leisure. I have gone for a desktop-based solution rather than a web-based solution as I’m mostly desk bound but there are many different solutions out there.

Digg

Digg is a site I have been visiting for a number of years and it pioneered the social news movement. Stories are divided into a large number of topics and people vote on what they consider to be a newsworthy story. When enough people have voted a story becomes popular and is promoted to the front page. If you read the front page you can almost guarantee the stories are good quality and worth your time, comments are usually worth a laugh or two as well.

Digging stories yourself can act as a kind of bookmarking system however I don’t tend to use the service for this, I digg stories more as an expression that I found a particular story good. Digg also allows you to follow friends on the site, the idea being that if your friend found it interesting that you would probably find it interesting too. If you choose a select few like minded friends you are essentially promoting content to each other.

del.icio.us

Like I said I don’t use digg for book marking, for this I use del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site. I use this service not for content discovery but more as a store of sites which has specific information that I would find useful for my work. If I book mark something it will usually be for a page I would visit more than once.

Again with del.icio.us you have the opportunity to make friends and follow each others bookmarks. This for me is not an important feature so I just have a select few friends but I don’t follow their bookmarks too closely.

twitter

Twitter is a microblogging platform and it is only just recently that I have found a good use for it. Twitter allows you to make small statements on a very regular basis, it could very well be likened to the status update on Facebook. There is however a much better use of this service. I use it to follow the industry experts who often use the service to highlight newsworthy material. I don’t find it very useful to follow friends, but people who I have never met, and am unlikely to ever meet to call them friends. In turn I would like to use the service myself to highlight high quality material, with the occasional update on how I’m feeling

Facebook

Probably the most hyped site for the past year, this is the site where perhaps you can be the most social. Hundreds of friends (I wish!), a way to keep up with people you don’t see often enough because of hectic lifestyles! This is the service where I can switch off from the professional uses and use simply for fun. I have a MySpace page as well but I never got serious about it, Facebook is where it’s at! A true social network, in the social sense, but not much use to me in my professional life.

friendfeed

So as can be seen from above there are so many sites which I and some of my friends use on a regular basis. Some people may use alternative services for a similar function, how do you keep up with what everyone is using, and how do others keep up with you? Friendfeed provides a summary view of everything you publish on the net. It also allows you to follow others to see everything they are doing in a summary view. I once again use this for a select few friends, I don’t want the signal-to-noise ratio to be destroyed here as well!

So as can be seen there are a lot of facets to the social landscape, but they are important tools for me and could be for you too. I recommend getting involved in them - join the social revolution. I’ll leave a few links to my profiles below, feel free to follow me or become a friend!

• http://digg.com/users/cs96acb
• http://del.icio.us/suicide_al
• http://twitter.com/suicide_al
• http://friendfeed.com/suicideal