The Geekorium

://tools.google.com/dlpage/webmmf

Why can’t we all just get along?“

Google has decided to throw its weight behind WebM, the new more “open” video format that competes with Apple’s H.264.

In a post a month or so ago, Google announced that future versions of Chrome will drop support of H.264 in favour of WebM.

Of course, Microsoft wont play ball and build WebM into IE9 (their upcoming latest browser), prompting Google to create an Internet Explorer 9 compatible plugin to enable WebM playback in that browser.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has seemingly put their muscle behind H.264, announcing their Extension for Chrome that enables H.264 playback in that browser.

So Microsoft is making extensions for Chrome to enable a feature Google left out, and Google is making plugins for IE that Microsoft left out… Why aren’t they both just working on their own damn browsers?

Thanks to Google Operating System for the story.

Unfortunately I have two movies that spring to mind when I was given this suggestion:

Review the worst movie you’ve seen this year.

The first is The Ugly Truth with Whatserface and That Bloke who always seem to be in these awful movies. Normally I would have steered clear of something like this¹, but occasionally I have to watch a romantic comedy so that my wife will keep watching SciFi with me.

Bleh

What a dreadful movie. I’m not sure there’s much to be said beyond that.

The second was Surrogates with Bruce Willis. I had heard it wasn’t fantastic, but the idea behind it intrigued me: what if everyone lived their lives virtually through robot simulacrum²?

Bruce Willis: Bored.

The movie’s conceit is ridiculous in execution though, with almost the entire world having chosen to live in little pods that feed sensory input from their virtual bodies back to them. I cannot imagine anyone but the elite and a select few ever going for it. The movie world is one where doctors no longer espouse the benefits of sunlight or fresh air, where muscles don’t atrophy from under-use, and the technology is so good that no one misses reality.

Except Bruce Willis of course.

He has that same sort of bemused look he has in every film. Except in this one it doesn’t suit. I also recently re-watched 12 Monkeys and the man can act, but when the script is bad, he just spends the entire film with a little half-smirk like he knows something the director doesn’t. Well his character hates his virtual life for some reason. He’s a cop put on the trail of a man with technology to kill someone through the surrogate. There’s all sorts of interesting questions that this raises³, but none of them are really explored or adequately covered.

Which is the essence of this film really. The premise is interesting, but the execution is flawed. About half way in the movie starts showing all its cards until there are no surprises by the end. None of the characters are “real”, so you don’t care about them in any way. The technology is so magical you just cannot believe any of it.

The final indication that this was not a good film came about 2 minutes after Bruce Willis saved the entire planet⁴ and my wife woke up. Oh how I envied her.

Cheers Zombie_Plan. Hope it was good for you too…

I always thought the advice to “live life like there’s no tomorrow” to be a bit odd. I guess people say it to convince others to take risks and try for things they might be scared to do, but I don’t get that from it.

If I was living like today was my last day, this is what I’d do:

1. Tell work I wasn’t coming in today. Or ever. Maybe tell someone my passwords so they can get to all the old InDesign documents and Word templates I’ve made so they don’t have to start from scratch.

2. Make sure my life insurance policy is sorted for Mil and Amm. Write down my email password so Mil can get into all my accounts.

3. Blog my final thoughts, for the interests of imparting my final wisdom to the world¹.

4. Play with Amelynne. Do everything she loves. Give her lots of tickles and cuddles, which I love.

5. Play with Mil. Ahem.

6. Invite everyone I know over for a party. Play the “I’m gonna die tomorrow” card to make sure they come. Cross those that don’t off my Christmas list.

7. Die. Or perish, or cease to be or whatever it is that makes it possible that I know I’m gonna die, and not be taken completely by surprise the way it should be.

None of those things, except maybe the ones with my girls are things that anyone should be doing every day. Giving out my work password would be asking for trouble, as would telling all my friends I was dying just to get them to come to a party². Maybe some of them would be good housekeeping, but I don’t think that anyone with a mortgage who’s leaving behind a family should live life like there’s no tomorrow.

Perhaps the only thing I’d regret might be that I haven’t got my name on anything “big”. You know, the kind of major contribution to society that gets you a wikipedia article.

Maybe that’s a better adage for today’s age… “Live life like you haven’t got a wikipedia article about you yet”. That sounds much more inspirational.

This photo is not relevant to the rest of this post. Cute though huh?

One of the biggest problems I face when I contribute anywhere on the internet is feedback. Often there just isn’t any.

Whether it’s Twitter, this website, First Waves, Reader, Buzz, Fizz, Flickr, Facebook, Shittr, whatever, I just don’t get much feedback at all.

It’s partly because I’m a self obsessed narcissist¹ that this bothers me so, but mostly because I just want to know what I can do better. What I’d like to know is if people find the things I share or write about are interesting, well written, useful, or pertinent so I can adjust my focus accordingly.

I started out blogging saying I was writing for myself, and I didn’t care if people found it interesting, but really I do. I want to be helpful. I want to share parts of the web that people might not otherwise find, and expose the things I’ve learned in my job or in my leisure. Now as sites like Twitter and Facebook become more mainstream, I find myself trying to be helpful and useful there as well and find myself in a (stupid) dilemma about where to put all this stuff I want to share. For a while I was using Twitter, but I didn’t feel like I was really saying anything of worth there. The most followed and re-tweeted² users were the ones who were constantly finding and posting new stuff. When I got around to doing it, it was usually old-hat or (I assume) fairly uninteresting. I say “I assume” because I only occasionally got re-shared or responded to, so I took it to mean that what I said was uninteresting or dull and didn’t warrant much attention. So I quit. Hopefully it didn’t come off in a “I’m taking my ball and going home” sorta way³ , but rather in a “I’m not sure what I’m doing here” sorta way. I’ve had more success with Facebook, because I’ve tried to share stuff I know my friends might appreciate, and I get a few more “likes” and an occasional comment there than I got the equivalent on Twitter. But my Buzz and Friendfeed streams are the equivalent of me standing on the roof of my house with a megaphone. A friend might hear me when they come over, but I could just talk to them. And everyone else who can hear it might just be getting annoyed with me.

I’m trying not to be sulky about this. What I’m hoping from this post is not pity, but an answer. From the people who DO actually follow me (via my feed, or on Facebook, or who just come and visit when they think of me), what sorts of things do I do well, so I can keep doing more of that? The most lovely suggestion I’ve had so far is that I continue to do more posts about my family and bubby girl. And if those are the ones people like the most then maybe I will. But I named my site “the Geekorium” for a reason - I am a geeky fellow, with geeky tastes and by far the things outside my family that interest me the most are geeky things. I like sharing such things, but am fairly certain that the majority of people who read my site regularly are family and friends who have no interest in what the latest gadget can do slightly better than that last gadget I said was awesome. Writing about my family is hard though, not because they aren’t worth writing about, but because I don’t want to be one of those people who are always exposing their love one’s lives on line for their own gratification. If I could find a way to do it without it coming off that way, I might.

I also do large run-on sentences and start a lot of paragraphs with “I”, so I know I’m not the greatest of authors, so if it’s my actual writing style that bugs you, then maybe I should know that too⁴.

Should I keep my posts small? Talk about one topic only? Use words no bigger than two syla? Try and be funnier? Keep my sentences smaller? If you read my stuff and find it’s not quite what you’d like to read, tell me in my comments (or on Facebook, or via Buzz, or in the “suggestions” tab over there, or in an email) and maybe I can get better at it. They say you should write for your audience, and I’m not sure I’m doing such a bang up job at the moment, so please let me know.

I’d like to think that I’m getting better at this writing thing. I’d like to know what I can do better though. Stats and analytics software can only tell me so much - they can’t give me feedback about why one throw away post about Fred Basset gets more feedback than any of the other things I write about. So please help me out. Talk to me. Write to me. I’m listening.

This is a test of th emergency broadcast system.

And by emergency, I mean Google Wave

As I hit publish on my last silly post, I realised I could use the same template for a number of things. Namely:

My wife is . She . When I and it dawned on me **, I wanted to marry her all over again.

Thus:

My wife is amazing. She carried and gave birth to my daughter Amelynne. When I first saw my little girl and it dawned on me that I now have my own clone, I wanted to marry her all over again.

See how that works?

Why don’t I just learn, once and for all… if I’ve not seen someone in ages, and want to talk and hang out and drink… DON’T GO TO A MOVIE. Unless the movie is the greatest movie ever, I’ll just be disappointed.

Stupid life doesn’t have do-overs if you do it wrong the first time.

When I started writing in my blog (infrequently as it is), I never expected anyone to read it outside my friends and family. And I’m talking across the span of my life - I expected family and friends to visit my site occasionally and get maybe a few visits a year. Primarily, NunnOne is so that I have a place on the web that embodies ‘me’ when someone Googles my name.

Of course, I kinda wished deep down that other people would find my little home and derive some small pleasure from reading about me and my thoughts, but I never seriously thought that it would happen. It still doesn’t really happen, but I do get a small number of visitors here that find me (mostly through Google) via a couple of topics that people seems to care about. One of them is Hercules Returns for which I still get many visitors (but few comments or repeat readers), and the other is my commentary on Fred Basset. These two topics are my most heavily found/read/commented-on posts but for different reasons.

Hercules Returns: PLEASE! was a post about a service I was trying to provide - getting Hercules Returns on DVD. Once that service had been given and visitors found their way to a copy, they no longer cared about my involvement or what else I have to offer here. That’s fine - I’m not complaining just illustrating.

My Fred Basset post was a rant on how pointless I find the comic Fred Basset. It’s entirely opinionated and completely rude, but it isn’t anything that my friends and I haven’t said to each other in private conversation - just that now it’s on the web. And I stick by the sentiment. On the other hand, I wasn’t writing the post entirely seriously and I don’t think that the author is a terrible person for writing a comic that they obviously enjoy writing (for some reason).

What I didn’t expect is how many people I would annoy by stating my opinion. I’ll re-iterate that I never expected people to read anything I write here, but thought it would be nice if people did. I just wish that they left opinions on posts that I actually bothered to think about before posting, and not some silly throw-away rant.

It makes me realise why so many people write ridiculous inflammatory stuff on their web sites - because not only do people read it, it makes them care enough to write! And when people write, the commenter feels like they are being heard. And it’s a nice feeling - being heard. It’s the typical negative reinforcement problem: being nice doesn’t get attention as quickly or in such volume as being naughty. Children learn it, trolls learn it, Dvorak learnt it.

I realised this myself after the most recent comment on my Fred Basset post:

also you dont need to make a friggin thesis on stupid comics. we all have our own opinions. if ur not happy with anyone elses then shut ur mouth and keep it to urself. so clearly ur thesis was ur own opinion. u were not necessarily ‘correct’
emma - dumbarse

I toyed with the idea of doing it again. Not specifically with Fred Basset, but anything else. Just saying shit for the sake of the traffic it makes, and the comments it could generate. But it’s not me. I usually only say what I think (maybe I go over the top sometimes but it’s normally a warped distortion of what I really think) and I want people to know me by what I say. I’d love to be able to share things with my readers that I’m passionate about and not have them wonder if I’m just taking the piss.

So rest assured gentle reader, that Fred Basset was a once off. I still think it stinks, but I don’t care enough about whether some random person who’s actually searching for Fred Basset to begin with disagrees with me to write about him or anything else I don’t enjoy again.