I’ve been looking through some me my old posts and have realised that my procrastinatory tendencies lead to rather ineffective follow-up on many of my topics.

Also, I think I’ve pretty much lost interest in blogging recently. I can’t even use the excuse of being busy (which I am), instead it seems that my bouts of blogging peak while I’m working a full-time job. Perhaps more interesting things happen in that kind of situation than in academia, I don’t know.

Anyway, the point of this post is to guilt myself into writing a few follow-up posts, and to sharing a brilliant comment I had from someone who mistook me Phil Donohue (24 year old Masters student), with Phil Donohue (easily 60-something if not older American celebrity).

Oh by the way, I’m writing this from my new phone: an HTC Tattoo running Android OS. I’m not going to promise a review because that way it probably wouldn’t happen….

Just a quick post (which I’ll try to expand upon later) regarding FOX News host Glenn Beck and his “9-12 Project“, a ‘grassroots’ movement to “bring us all back to the place where we were on September 12 2001 … we were united as Americans, standing together to protect the values and principles of the greatest nation ever created” (btw, I know you know I’m not American, but still…).

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow makes the point that perhaps Beck is exploiting 9/11 for ‘other’ purposes (see video below), and I agree with her to some extent.

Notice the part where she wonders why Beck chose 9/12 instead of 9/11 for the project name. She suspects it might be so that Beck supporters can turn out to events on a Saturday, which I guess is a fair point. However, there was something so…. Biblical about the way that Beck presents the 9-12 project (look at his promo font for example), that I donned my google cap and conspiracy spectacles for this gem:

The Book of Revelations 9.12

The first woe is past; two other woes are yet to come.

I think Beck is in fact playing on his core demographic’s highly religious mentality, and planting the seeds of the ‘end-of-days’ in their minds. “The first woe…” would of course be the events of 9/11, but the “two other woes” could be practically anything: public health care, gay marriage, drug decriminalisation etc., all things which are indicative of the downfall of American society to a big chunk of FOX viewers. I think the end result of tomorrow’s events will perhaps be a focus on two specific  issues, intended to mobilise the religious right in America behind Beck, and a push to rally Americans to the causes of these “9-12ers”.

Further evidence of the religious content of the 9-12 movement is indicated by a quick look at the “9 principles” of the movement, as after the somewhat vaguely defined first principle “America is Good” comes “I believe in God and he is the Center of my Life”. In fact, take a look at the rest of the Principles, they’re basically a political manifesto for the religious right.

Anyway, enough of the conspiracy, I’m off to work. It’s my final day today, so I’ll be getting back on board with the blogging before the next chapter in my life starts!

Yep, it’s another post about twitter.

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be about which celebrities I’ve been almost talking to (although having said that I did get into a bit of a back-and-forth with Robert Llewellyn over Big Oil). In fact, I just wanted to highlight a rather interesting experiment in spontaneous ‘crowdsourcing’ (techie/web 2.0 speak for “getting lots of people to do the work for free”), that came about due to this weekends fairly intense winter weather.

As he describes in his blogpost, Paul Clarke came up with a quick ‘n’ dirty format to log the progress of the snow across the UK using the #uksnow tag (which people were reporting in an unstructured manner anyway). As also covered by PeeeBee in his post, the tag is trending pretty well considering it’s Superbowl Sunday.

The data continues to roll in, but as I’ve mentioned before, I think the real value of data is unlocked when you open it up to as many people as possible to use and interpret. This is exactly what Ben Marsh has done with his mashup #uksnow tweet map, which shows the location and severity of the tweeted snow reports on a Google Map.

Ben Marsh's #uksnow tweet map

It’s a work in progress obviously, but the fact that this was all thrown together in less than a day (less than an afternoon even) shows just how quickly data can be manipulated to ‘make sense’.

So kudos to Paul, Ben, and everyone who contributed #uksnow tweets. This may be the start of somethine big, as Paul says himself:

Either way, this is the closest I’ve been to a Twitter meme, and it hasn’t half made me think. And given the day job, and trying to stimulate real innovation in public information, that’s probably quite a good thing. I mean, if this did go anywhere, I can think of quite a few players in my working world who would take it Very Seriously Indeed. And that is a hint, by the way

The question is, how else can this approach be used? I’ve got a few ideas myself, but your suggestions are welcome!

I’ve been getting into twitter quite a bit these last few days. Due to the fact that none of my ‘IRL’ friends (as far as I’m aware) are on it, I’ve ended up adding quite a few celebs, politicians and journos etc., all of which has been quite fun!

It sounds sad, but these 140 character messages do really make you feel connected to people you’d usually have no chance / reason to communicate with. For example, I’ve always thought that the (rightly) popular show ‘Mythbusters‘ was a clear rip-off of ‘Hollywood Science‘, a show co-hosted by Robert Llewellyn a few years earlier. Obviously, this isn’t a big enough concern to warrant writing a letter / email to Robert to ask him what he thinks, but it’s an ideal thing to just pop in a tweet thusly:

tweeting bobbyllew

“Done!” I thought, “At least I got that thought out of my head, I’ll go about my life now, he probably gets loads of people asking that, and he’ll be way too busy to respond….”

bobbyllew tweets me back!

I can’t really explain the reaction I had when I saw this, although it was something along the lines of :

“Wow! Robert Llewellyn, Kryten (!), actually responded to me and my silly little remark! In 10 minutes no less!”

Sad eh? Of course it is, and my little Red Dwarf fanboy moment soon passed. What remained however was the clear realisation that it was that easy to communicate with someone who I’d previously only known as a distant face on the telly, someone whose work I’ve been a huge fan of for years, and someone I’d never thought I’d have any contact with at all.

It’s an odd experience. Maybe I hold a somewhat exalted and ‘old-school’ view of ‘celebrities’, but I have to admit that twitter is definitely breaking any of those old boundaries down.

That’s just been one of the delights of twitter. Just tonight: Graham Linehan, the comedy god that co-created Father Ted (as well contributing to other delights such as Black Books, Brass Eye, (Blue) Jam etc.), posted a running critique of the movie Pineapple Express; Lib-Dem MP Jo Swinson revealed that Parliamentary authorities have banned putting footage on Youtube and other streaming sites (and, indeed, launching her Facebook campaign against it); and the genius writer / broadcaster Charlie Brooker was brainstorming Oprah Winfrey action figures.

Does any of this matter? Probably not.

Is any of it interesting? Some of it is.

What’s the point? I dunno, but it’s there for anyone to read it.

I can imagine I’ll be spending quite a bit of time on twitter. I recommend you at least give it a try. In the words of Doctor Pepper: “What’s the worst that could happen?”

I’ve just come across Google’s brilliant In Quotes (part of the ever-evolving  suite of apps from the boffins at Google Labs).

Google 'In Quotes' US

I’m still having a play around with it, but there seems to be plenty on offer for bloggers and journos who don’t want to wade through online clippings to find the perfect “Hang on, didn’t you say….” ammunition, as Google does the hard graft for you by searching through Google News articles for your specified topics. It seems fairly tweakable so far, allowing you to pit the obvious ‘people of the moment’ against each other:

Google 'In Quotes' UK

Or better still you can set up your own fantasy presidential debate (if you’re that much of a geek)….

Palin v Paul 2012!

(The tongue-in-cheek inclusion of the ‘Spin’ button, which generates a new quote at random, is a nice touch.)

Anyway, do check it out and let me know if you come up with any corkers!

My luggage has just arrived safe and sound, with (as far as I can see) contents intact.

I can carry on with my life now. Yay!

UPDATE 1 (7.40pm): Still no delivery, plus no communication from either BA or Express Baggage at all. I called BA myself and they informed me that now that they’ve handed over my cases to Express Baggage it’s their responsibility. A call to the automated phone number (with no option of speaking to a human) yields nothing further, and I’m still slightly steaming from the tone of voice from the BA chap, who seemed to think that the fact that Express Baggage was experiencing a ‘backlog’ at Manchester Airport was somehow cause for sympathy on my part.

Clearly that 4-8 hour delivery time is pure fiction. It’s now nearly eight and a half hours since Express Baggage picked them up from the airport, so now I have even less of a clue as to where my stuff is….

Some of you may be aware of my delayed return to the UK and my Heathrow Terminal 5-related nightmare of my checked-in cases not making to Manchester at the same time as me.

Seeing as this is the most interesting thing that is happening today, and I am exceedingly bored right now, I thought I’d write a post about it to hopefully summon the rapid arrival of all of my decent clothes (mental note: that whole “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” thing has near universal connotations).

Thanks to the all powerful glory of the internets, British Airways has a nifty tracking page to follow the progress of your damaged, delayed and lost luggage. Having recently been informed that my luggage had been upgraded from ‘lost’ to ‘delayed’, I’d thought I’d try it out. Once you enter the details, you are presented with this:

Personal details artfully removed.

Here we learn that my bags were cleared for delivery at 9pm last night, a good six hours after I made it into Manchester (which itself was about 7 hours after I was supposed to, but that’s a different story). There isn’t really much else to see, other than the swanky colour schemes involved and the fact that Express Baggage collected them this morning at 11.22 am.

For any further details I have to visit Express Baggage’s own website and input my details there, after which we get this page:

I'd forgotten how basic Microsoft Paint actually is....

As you can see there isn’t really that much useful information here, and rather ominously the ‘ETA’ field has been left blank. Gah….

They do, however, give an indication of a possible delivery time quoting 4-8 hours for deliveries 0-50 miles from the airport. Let’s take a look at the distance at stake here (‘A’ being Manchester Airport, and ‘B’ being Blackley, the chunk of Manchester’s metropolitan sprawl that I call home):

View Larger Map

Google Maps gives me a distance of 20.8 miles, which it says is “about 29 mins” by car.

I know I’m not the only person who will have lost luggage in the last 24 hours (in fact at the complaints desk I saw a family with two young girls who seemed more than a little upset that a case containing “all our Christmas pwesents!” hadn’t made it either), so I’m aware I’m not the only stop on their delivery route.  However, it is now over four and a half hours since they were picked up and I’m getting increasingly frustrated, not least because I was keen to test-run the new Windows 7 beta at some point today (which is on a USB flashdrive I’d foolishly packed away). That and the fact that I was supposed to be heading to London today.

Ho hum. C’est la vie. I guess I’ll keep you posted….

P.S. I’m aware of the fact that this post is probably of absolutlely no interest to anyone, other than myself, whatsoever. I’m just getting it out of my system….

If you have a few spare minutes this Christmas, I highly recommend spending them playing the fantastic little shooter, ‘Left 4k Dead‘.

It was created by a chap named Markus Persson (aka Notch) for the Java4k competition, an annual contest where entrants must cram as much awesome gameplay as possible into only 4k (that’s 4096 bytes) of pure Java code!

Loosely based on Valve’s ‘Left 4 Dead‘, this has managed to eat up a ridiculous amount of my time since discovering it this morning. You have been warned….

P.S. Markus himself seems like a lovely fella (seeing as he took the time to email me back to confirm I could link to his site), so check out his other projects and show him some love!

Congratulations Mr President-Elect!

p.s. For all of you who aren’t Barack Obama, I’m back in the UK next week.

As you’ve seen by now, my blogging has become stupidly irregular. I put it down to a lack of constant access to the internets since I noticed that I’ve so far been charged over 30 quid for roaming data rates over here in America, but also I’ve been pretty busy!

Last week’s Palin rally was an interesting experience (I’ll post photos and a write-up later), and yesterday I was in Indianapolis for Barack Obama’s speech before he headed off to Hawaii to visit his sick grandmother, again please do expect a report once I manage to get the right drivers to get my bluetooth dongle working to transfer piccies from my phone!

Anyways, I’m currently at Purdue University visiting some of my girlfriend’s uni chums and I managed to snatch a few minutes of reddit time and caught this story earlier today.

A campaign worker who claimed she was the victim of a politically-motivated attack in which she was beaten, kicked and cut, now admits that she made the whole story up. 

According to Pittsburgh police spokeswoman Diane Richard, Ashley Todd, 20, told investigators today that she “was not robbed and there was no 6′4″ black male attacker.” 

Todd initially told police that she was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield Wednesday night and that the suspect began beating her after seeing a John McCain bumper sticker on her car. 

Todd claimed that the mugger even cut a backwards letter “B” in her check. 

But today investigators say Todd confessed that the attack never happened. 

She’s now been charged with filing a false police report, but if it already wasn’t bad enough that a volunteer for the McCain campaign was making this stuff up, it now seems that the McCain campaign actually fed this story to the media itself.

John McCain’s Pennsylvania communications director told reporters in the state an incendiary version of the hoax story about the attack on a McCain volunteer well before the facts of the case were known or established — and even told reporters outright that the “B” carved into the victim’s cheek stood for “Barack,” according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.

John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain’s Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, “You’re with the McCain campaign? I’m going to teach you a lesson.”

Verrilli also told TPM that the McCain spokesperson had claimed that the “B” stood for Barack. According to Verrilli, the spokesperson also told KDKA that Sarah Palin had called the victim of the alleged attack, who has since admitted the story was a hoax.

The KDKA reporter had called McCain’s campaign office for details after seeing the story — sans details — teased on Drudge.

Oh dear.