I own just four domains. PaulMWatson.com you are on and is my email, IM and blog domain. It needs a lot more work than just this basic WordPress installation but I keep having to do that day job thing first. Then there is Colib.com which is similar to the existing Shelfari/LibraryThing. I have spent a lot of time on it but find myself reworking it every three months such that it never launches. Jaggr.net was a bee in my bonnet I got one weekend. It is supposed to be a Job Board Aggregator and the code and design is all done. When I came to launching it though I got caught up in getting Ruby on Rails working on the Blacknight Hosting, got frustrated and left it. You have to do a support call to get your Rails app server recycled which is a pain if you made a mistake in your YAML. Finally there is WebTwoZero.com which I meant to be a TechCrunch style site only less hyperbolic. But I have that day job thing and I decided to put the domain up for sale rather.
What domains do you have you are not paying due attention to? How do you get an idea, keep it and get it launched before you get bored an move on?
I am a foreigner in Ireland, on a yearly work-permit to be exact. Buying a house is easy. All you have to do is have the price in cash and the rest is paper work.
Getting the cash though is another matter. No mortgage provider I have spoken to will loan me something that will take 35 years to repay. I see a bit of logic in it but at the same time I see an opportunity for a mortgage provider willing to back foreigners who plan to live in Ireland.
I should clarify “foreigner”: I am from Africa, South Africa to be precise. Thus something that may work for EU foreign-nationals (e.g. Polish) probably won’t work for me.
My two options are; wait 4 years until I become a citizen and then get a mortgage. Or, go 50/50 with an Irish citizen who I trust since it will be their name on the deed.
Anybody have any other options? Anybody know of a mortgage provider who backs foreigners?
The day I have been dreading for nigh on a year has arrived. Since Yahoo! bought Flickr there has been the impending merger of not just their cash coffers but of their sign-on systems. That day will be the 15th of March and from the looks of it you must comply.
Like Photub I am stuck in the unenviable position of not having my ideal Yahoo! sign-on. I used to have it but since I rarely used Yahoo! I ignored it and eventually forgot it. I spent a good few hours trying to convince Yahoo! to couch up the account but it all hinges on an uncomfirmed postal code that I cannot remember. All the other details I provide to Yahoo! are correct, it is just 4 digits of a postal code which are preventing me.
Why Yahoo! can’t just send a new password for that account to the email on record which I know and own and control and check every 5 minutes, I don’;t know. They won’t. They want a piece of irrelevant data (Yahoo! have never posted me anything, why do they need my postal code?) Not too mention the account has been inactive for at least a year now. Can’t they kill it?
It isn’t the end of the world and it just means I need to sign up some bastardised Yahoo! account name but it isn’t ideal either.
A bitter sweet day for Flickr. It will feel strange signing into it with YahoosChihuahua411Pwned.
I’ve just spent two hours trying to figure out how to get the next match from a string using regex in Ruby. I then found out about the scan method. Doh!
Scoble got a bit upset today about people not linking to him. My humble opinion, and one that perhaps only pertains to me, is that video is rarely the best way to initially present information. Scoble had a video about Intel’s plant and their new chips but after waiting 5 minutes for it to load and then getting through all the introductory bits I closed the window and went in search of the New York Times article instead. A minute later I had found it and read most of it, skimming the paragraphs that were not interesting to me and focusing in on the ones that mattered.
Scoble’s video, at 40 minutes long for part 1, is a good piece of content but frankly I am just not interested in sitting through 40 minutes of CPU talk. It isn’t for me and I doubt it is for most of Engadgets readers either. Those who do want more detail and some looks inside the Intel plant can watch the video, no problem.
Sadly Scoble’s love of video has been why I have switched off to him. It takes far too long to get any information out of him these days.
Scoble can air his opinions on his blog and Engadget are free to link to whom they please. No demands, no rights, no expected behavouir.
I think all the proponents of DRM free music, the ones who say eMusic and AMIE St. and co. are great even though they don’t have 3/4 of what is in my CD pile, the ones who refuse to buy from big labels… these people should admit that, rightly or wrongly, the past few decades have seen a very successful campaign by music companies to shape our tastes and make us want what they sell. I bought the Arctic Monkeys because I like them. I can’t get them from eMusic or AMIE St. I have to go to iTunes or my local CD store. Or I have to pirate, but I won’t do that, it just gives the RIAA more ammo.
Yes, I want DRM free music. Yes eMusic has some great content. No eMusic does not have everything I want. Right now a lot of the bands I like are DRMed up to the hilt. In a decades time DRM will be a joke, a historical blip and a free market will reign. Till then keep your eyeballs from rolling please and be patient.
Perusing the Oscar nominations list I realised how living in Waterford has pole-axed my cinema habits. Back home in Cape Town I had the choice of 7 or so cinema complexes all of which were good quality. Here in Waterford we have one dingy complex that I have been to two times too many. I saw more films at the cinema during my months holiday to South Africa than I have seen in over a year here in Waterford. Supposedly Dungarvan has a nice cinema but driving 45 minutes for a cinema is crazy.
Waiting for DVD is now my habit.
Of the Oscar list I have seen just 8; The Devil Wears Prada (good), Cars (entertaining), Pan’s Labyrinth (brilliant), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (entertaining), Children of Men (very good), United 93 (good), An Inconvenient Truth (very good) and Superman Returns (disappointing.)
I haven’t spoken to a single person who likes the Snap Preview feature that is sweeping many blogs. I’ve read endorsements from quite a few sites but whenever I talk to real people trying to use one of those sites their first question is; How do I get rid of them?
Today a friend was setting up a WordPress.com site for his course material and, through a co-worker, asked me what the thing that kept popping up on links in his new site was. It was the Snap Preview. Apparently it is has been added to WordPress.com and turned on by default for not just new sites but existing sites too. The official line is that there was such a good reaction to an initial test that they decided to let everyone have it, auto-enabled. My cynical side says Snap approached WordPress and paid them money to have it included. Turning off the feature means digging through your Presentation options, it took us a good few minutes to find it.
A quick Google search shows plenty of dissent on the issue. The thing is annoying to a lot of people.
You might like it, your friends might like it but not everyone likes it. Make it a client choice. When someone visits a site make it either very easy to turn off or easy to turn on (the latter please.)
