Life is grand

There has been plenty of buzz lately about OpenID. I think the idea is very good even though its flexibility (”decentralised”) can make getting your head around it a bit difficult. Once you figure it out though you realise how obvious it is.

Up till now though my main problem with OpenID has been getting my domain, paulmwatson.com, to be my OpenID. I want to login to your system with paulmwatson.com as my ID, username, etc. I once tried to install the server software but that went nowhere and I left it.

Thankfully Simon Willison wrote How to turn your blog into an OpenID which uses a simple (for us techies) meta tag in your HTML to redirect through to an OpenID provider. So I signed up with MyOpenID which is my identity provider but I tell OpenID accepting sites to use paulmwatson.com which routes through to MyOpenID. As Simon points out if I stop trusting MyOpenID or find a better provider all I have to do is change the meta tags and all my dependant services carry on working using paulmwatson.com.

Very nice. Thanks Simon, and thanks for OpenID.

England 13, Ireland 43. What a match, what a day.

A friend very kindly lent me his Wii for the night and Fi I spent a few hilarious hours cursing like sailors while prancing about our living room. Firstly I have to admit Fi kicked my arse in everything but the Wii Play Duckshoot. She KO’ed me easilly in Wii Sports Boxing, thumped me in Bowling (even though she has never played ten pin bowling in real life while I have done it many times) and even beat me in Golf (I birdied two holes and then double bogied the last. I even got a Chip In shot on the second hole. Argh!) I thought I was doing well in the Cow Racing but somehow Fi always ended up with more points. Who knew cows jumped?

The Wii Play Laser Hockey is just mad, mad, mad! My tactic of carefully directing the puck with subtle movements was completely defeated by Fi’s crazy tactic of swinging the Wii controller in mad circles at a frantic pace. We were literally rolling on the couch laughing at that.

We both sucked in the Baseball game only managing to get to first base once each. I hit so many foul balls I doubt my player was facing the right way. Excite Trucks was fun too though I swear the music in the background is the theme from CSI.

All in all the Wii is an awesome amount of fun.

You know the scene in Pulp Fiction. The famous one. Well here is a bit of it as set out with typography (mov file.) Absolutely brilliant. Every designer should watch it.

(Warning. It is That Scene so there is plenty of swearing.)

Google Apps For Your Domain has recently added some new features and, like my boss likes to say, opened its kimono. They are definitely gunning for Microsoft’s Exchange market now (they offer a solution to migrate away from Exchange, can’t be clearer than that.)

But what about us little guys, us geeks with our own domains who aren’t multinational environment shaggers? There are a couple of new features which are very welcome.

Firstly you can keep it free and get 2gb per account on your domain or you can pay $50 per year and get 10gb per account. The $50 option also offers some guarantees, migration tools, an email gateway and integration tools. Not much for us small guys so I think the free version will continue to be fine. You can see a comparison chart here.

The interesting bits are:

• URL mapping. So instead of http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com you can have http://mail.yourdomain.com. Very, very nice that.
• Google Docs is now available to everyone using Google Apps For Your Domain.
• Domain alias so you can control two or more domains as one.

I see you can also now register a new domain with Google. I haven’t found out yet if you can transfer existing domains.

So a nice update even for us free loaders and some useful features for bigger users.

I respect the path 37signals has forged in the path few years but I have to say they are really riding the beta hype cycle hard with their upcoming HighRise app. At this point 37signals could launch the app. at the local Bedouin Starbucks and there would be a 5 mile queue outside three days before.

So when I read about the “golden tickets” idea I nearly gagged.

Come on guys, get real.

The 2007 Cricket World Cup is coming up in March. Thankfully Ireland is such a cricket mad nation I, a cricket fan, won’t have any problem watching any of the games.

Oh wait, sorry, that’s India, not Ireland.

The Irish would rather pick up a cricket bat and beat you with it than sit through a cricket game. It is a shame really as the average Irish fella, and wan, is sport mad. They love their sport and are fiercely competitive even if just sitting at the pub counter swilling pints. I’d bet a hurling fan or an Irish rugby supporter would, were their preconceptions and love for the English set aside, be leaping off their stools in excitement during a Pro20 game.

Sadly I’d be beaten by that aforementioned cricket bat should I even suggest it.

Being a cricket fan though I am determined to get my cricket fix. Going down to the pub, even a sports pub, is not going to happen. They’ll probably rather show reruns of the Croke park massacre than show a second of cricket in an Irish pub. Local TV channels are not showing it. A mate has Sky Sports which is showing it but… he is Irish. Not going to happen.

It turns out I have exactly two options if I want to watch games from the CWC while living in Waterford, Ireland. 1: Fly to the West Indies and buy some scalped tickets. 2: Get Sky Sports.

The funny bit is option 2 would probably end up costing as much as option 1. Sky is expensive, to get what I want it would cost €64 a month. I can’t subscribe for just the two months the CWC is on either, oh no, Sky will be with me for a solid 12 months. That is €768.

Anyone know of an affordable way I can watch cricket in Ireland?

Twingly Screensaver is an interesting visualisation of blogosphere activity. It renders a turning globe with blog activity spiking out from different parts of the world. It reminds me a bit of Mapped Up.

Traditional feed aggregators are still a lot more powerful for churning through news than this. But this kind of visualisation could be useful as an adjunct for trend watching. They should really allow you to keyword filter Twingly Screensaver.

(It requires Windows and OpenGL but works OK in Parallels.)

Disk Inventory X is a handy app for Mac OS X that gives you a useful view of what is taking up space on your disk. I was running low on disk space and thought I’d use it to find out what was up. Turns out I had nearly 3gb of iGarage and iDVD files that I never, ever use. So those are gone. I also cleared up some other unused files and am thinking I need to host my Parallels VM partitions somewhere else. All in all I’ve managed to clear about 5gb of files I didn’t use, a nice saving.

I was watching pole vaulters on TV earlier. I cannot comprehend them. They must be supremely stubborn or have amazing self-denial, I’m not sure which. Think about it. The first hundred times you run at that frame with a pole in your hand you must fail and fail miserably. I’ll bet you not only don’t go over the bar but that you end up going in the opposite direction. I’ll bet the first 20 times you don’t even get the end of the pole seated in the socket, it must wang off the cushion or scrape along the run-up track before wanging off the cushion.

Pole vaulters are amazing.