Posts tagged as "wifi"

Deliciousness: megalomania, logos, Tube map, paper abstracts, location, Freud and tech mistakes

It's been a while but odd, weird and even occasionally interesting stuff continues to fall down the back of the internet and gets captured in Delicious along the way. Here's the pick of the last few weeks.

  • Today I was caught red handed trying to blow up the world ... mwah hah hah hah.
  • A well known Irish budget airline found that its blue and yellow "harp" logo had suffered an, unasked for, logo makeover.
  • The London Underground Tube map regains the River Thames and gets a version for tourists.
  • Are you the sort of person who shouts at the screen "that's not right" when watching a film? You're not alone.
  • Looking for a nearby wifi hotspot? A low tech approach can help.
  • Microsoft's new Windows 7 OS has inbuilt location services; but are they up to the challenge of managing location safely, securely and with sufficient flexibility?
  • Submitting a paper abstract for a conference? This might help.
  • You've probably heard of a Freudian Slip; now you can wear suitable slippers.
  • If Jack The Ripper was alive today, would he use Twitter?

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

On Conferences, Chairs, Breakfasts and Wifi Crashes

Think about the following three scenarios for a moment ...

Scenario One. You go to a conference. It doesn't matter where or what the topic is but you turn up because you've been invited or because you've paid to attend. Breakfast is included in the conference package. There's 400 people attending the conference but when you get to the breakfast table, there's none left because they've run out of food. When you ask the conference venue why there's no breakfast they throw up their hands and say "The company who provides our food assured us there'd be enough for 400 but only enough for 200 turned up. What can we do?".

And now Scenario Two. Same conference. Same venue. But this time there's only 200 chairs in the venue and you've got 400 people trying to cram into those chairs. It's getting pretty cozy and people are ending up standing or going home. You ask the conference venue why there's no chairs and they throw up their hands and say "The company who provides our chairs assured us there'd be enough for 400 but only enough for 200 turned up. What can we do?".

The Future of Web Apps? Bad Wifi, Booth Mobbing, Geo and Lots of Schwag

(This post was originally written for theYahoo! Developer Network blogand was published there on October 5th; it's duplicated here for posterity.)You're stuck in a room on the first floor of a venue with no natural light, people keep expressing surprise that you're there, there's a bizarre voucher system operating for getting a cup of coffee and the free public wifi is holding up far better than the venue's net connectivity which is buckling under the strain of multiple laptops, iPhones and Androids.It can only be a tech conference; this one is in London and it's called FOWA, or the Future of Web Applications to give it its full name and it was held in the rather grand sounding Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall, near High Street Kensington tube station.There's a booth with some strangely comfortable sofas and chairs, a purple orchid, loads of purple swag, "geoballs" and a free wifi point called yahooligans.

Deliciousness: data, licensing, WordPress autosaves, cheese in space and lots of Nutella

More intriguing, interesting and just plain bonkers stuff from the information hose pipe we call the internet:

  • Starting off with a serious note, Ed Parsons, my opposite number at Google, wrote a great blog post on the knots that data licensing can tie you up in and why you end up paying more for a leased digital version than you do for the physical paper version.
  • WordPress started bugging me about an auto-saved version of a blog post I didn't want to keep but couldn't get rid of. Turns out there's no way to do this from the WordPress dashboard but some MySQL hackery did the trick.
  • "I am, and am VERY badly affected by being in close proximity to WiFi and other microwave transmission sources. Not that I’d expect you or anyone else who isn’t adversely affected to believe me". The rest of the story on the Daily Telegraph blog is priceless.
  • Ofcom confirmed what anyone with the UK ADSL line already knows, that the average UK broadband speed is just over half of what's being advertised and paid for.
  • A US highway exit sign got every word misspelled, apart from the word "exit".
  • Forget putting men on Mars or getting the Space Shuttle working; we put cheese into space, tracked it, lost it and found it again. Makes you proud to be British.
  • Someone likes Nutella. A lot.
  • And finally, if your iPhone gets a text message containing a single square character. Turn it off. Turn it off now.