Mark Dalton

Well somewhat of a different start to the holiday season this year when I decided last minute to join a bunch of online friends in Liverpool for what is affectionally known as a TweetUp. I have been chatting to most of these people for a while now and when the chance came up to meet them face to face I thought it was a great idea and a brilliant way to start of the festive season.

I worked from home on the Friday as I didn””t fancy doing the commute in and out of London to then drive up to Liverpool and it was a good job I did as I woke Friday morning to a dusting of snow. I set off late afternoon and made good time only stopping a couple of quick comfort break””s and was checked in, unpacked, and in the bar by 19:30.

The weekend was spent chatting over beer, food, and the odd cup of coffee, about a variety of subjects from emerging technologies to Christmas plans. We did manage to get out and about a little bit and see a few of Liverpool””s landmarks but it was very cold and we did tend to break the touring up with beer breaks on a regular basis, so didn””t cover quite as much as we could of, but we did make it to the Apple store.

I also managed to meet up with Don McAllister the host of ScreenCastsOnline and The Mac ScreenCast Guy. Don was just as nice in the flesh as he is online and had some great insights and views on upcoming technologies. I also manage to meet up with three of my oversea””s contacts, Jane from Australia who was visiting family in the UK for Christmas, Paul Shadwell who flew in especially from Zurich who is very knowledgeable on Virtualisation and hosted services, and David Allen who also flew in especially from Barcelona, who run””s amongst other things the Mac 20 Questions website.

A great time was had by all and I think its fair to say that some good friendships were cemented in the process. Not to mention we all got a ScreenCastsOnline cap Most people left Sunday morning but I had arranged to stay another night, which in hindsight wasn””t such a good idea, although it did allow me to do a little extra Christmas shopping and see a little more of the city.

Monday morning I checked out and headed for home and made good time until I hit Newbury where it had been snowing and snowing pretty hard. As I came down the A339 it was bumper to bumper traffic and nothing was moving. It took me 7.5 hours to get from Newbury to my home in Basingstoke, 5.5 hours of that was spent crossing Basingstoke itself. I have personally never seen anything like it, and Basingstoke made the national news with 2000-3000 people affected. It took 3-4 to clear completely but luckily I didn””t have to go further than my parents around the corner, which was safer to reach on foot. I was lucky however as poor Paul Shadwell got to Manchester airport on Sunday to find it shut down, and finally made it back to Zurich on Wednesday after travelling down to London””s Heathrow airport.

So after the normal busy and non desrcript week at work I was looking forward to the weekend. The week showed promise with the sun poking its head out enough to stop wearing a jumper and brave a short sleeve shirt, although I still took a coat as the mornings were chilly. Hey comfort over fashion these days! That”s just the way I roll

The weekend didn”t fail to disappoint! Saturday was wonderful and I sacrificed getting completely hammered Friday night (called it a day after three glasses of wine) on the promise of sunshine. The boy did good! I didn”t rush up, but awoke leisurely at 09:00 ish, burbled around, and then headed out. I had most of my to-do list done by 11:00 and then took the car for a run. I do like a drive to nowhere session when it”s sunny and you can turn the music up and wind the window”s down. I popped by Mum and Dad”s to say hello and even jet washed the car (Not doing it again — that”s a rant). I am not quite sure where the rest of the day went but all I know is I didn”t stop until about 19:00. Saturday night I decided to chill in front of the TV but a million sky channels (another rant) and I still couldn”t sit still or find anything worth watching. So even though I said to myself I wouldn”t I ended up in front of the computer. I decided I still need to do *something* useful so I set about scanning more of the old family photos. I decided to concentrate on some of the ones that Mum had shown me, and as “Mothers Day” was on the horizon I couldn”t say no. It was actually quite cool as these were old black and white photo”s of my Nan and Grandads family, so as well as being interesting they gave me a chance to play as most of them were very faded and some were damaged.

Sunday morning I was awake with the birds, I did the few job”s that I had and then headed to Mum & Dad”s. I hadn”t been their long and Lisa and Andy turned up, closely followed by Katrina, Rob, and the kids. Coffee was the first order of the day and a good catchup. It wasn”t long and we started on the vino and hops. We sat around, chatted, and generally caught up. It was a very pleasant day but a little chilly and we moved between the garden and the lounge. We all enjoyed a fantastic roast beef dinner, cooked by Mum (Guilt) and sat around chewing the fat, before finally conceding to the real world and heading home to ready ourselves for work on Monday morning. Dam these weekends get shorter!

You can find the Photo”s here.

Okay so I tried Facebook many moons ago and just didn”t get into it, but recently decided to give it another chance, as a number of family members and friends were using it and kept asking me why I wasn”t.

Well, I must admit that I am struggling to get on with it again, as it just seems such a duplication of effort. I have my own website (well I kind of guess you know that) that I blog too and have integrated my Flickr account so I can share my photo”s. I use Twitter to reflect what I am currently doing and working on, and have also integrated that into the site.

Updating Facebook just seems to get overlooked and when I do remember all I generally end up doing is pointing people on Facebook to the relevant post on my site as typing up the same thing twice just isn”t me. Then there are the “Applications”. These drive my crazy. I mean I just don”t see the point in most of them and it really annoys me when I am trying to do something I think is on a website to find I have actually been redirected to another site that wants me to signup and register again.

The Facebook site itself seems like its ten sites that have been mashed together and not in a good way. Now I don”t know what I expect it to be, but if it allowed me to integrate Flickr and take RSS feeds from my own site then it would certainly be a step in the right direction.

At this point in time I am seriously considering deleting my account, but don”t want to lose the connections to family and friends that have no other outlet.

[UPDATE 06/03/09] Well they must of heard me. Facebook Redesigns to Steal Twitter”s Tweet Heat

For those of you that use Twitter and haven’t found TweetDeck yet I suggest you download it and give it a go. TweetDeck makes a much better job of displaying your posts and it a lot makes it a lot easier to follow replies and direct messages.

TweetDeck is currently in Beta so there might be the odd bug, but I find it a whole lot more reliable than Twitterific and a lot less complicated than FriendFeed. No doubt it will also improve as it progresses from Beta.

Twitter

One of many things people have said they like about my blog is the twitter window that shows them what I’m doing at a glance, especially when I haven’t blogged in a while. Now I haven’t been to good of late keeping this going, and in my defense I have a legitimate reason, but no one wants to hear that so I have reinstated it.

I did try a WordPress plugin that also allowed me to update my twitter feed from the website itself, but it just didn’t have the look and feel people were used to, so I have reinstated the one from the old site.

I must admit I like the look and feel of this much better, but would also like the ability to update the feed from the site so will be looking into ways to add the functionality to the admin section in the future.

In the meantime however I will endeavor to try and make sure I post regular updates, but fair’s fair, you also have to join twitter so I can follow you!