Escape
This tune reminded me today – with rain pouring down outside, coursework on the laptop and the logistical requirements of my imminent house move gnawing away at the back of my mind – that there's a big world out there with a beautiful soundtrack.
I need to get my arse to Ibiza this summer, before I get too old to enjoy it ;o)
Posted by Alex on Sun 27th May 2007
I wonder…
… if there's enough room on the UPSU.net homepage for “What is UPSU?” and “Take a tour of UPSU.net” links? There's certainly a good argument for both; how many students at the University of Portsmouth – or outside of it, for that matter – know that the Union is in fact two companies – UPSU and UPEL – and they do two very different jobs under the same roof, for largely the same target audience?
And also, while we're on the subject, how many people really know how huuuge a website UPSU.net is, and what it can offer students?
I think it might be time to reassess how well the Union promotes what it actually does: there's a helluva lot going on at the Union throughout the year, and pretty much every student – whether they're resident in Pompey or a distance learner – can benefit from at least something going on here.
In the meantime, I'm trying to figure out how we can a) streamline the galleries so they're as simple to use and update as, say, Flickrdotcom (or, for that matter, whether we should just invest in a Flickr account and put all our photos up there instead?) and b) really expand peoples' public profiles into something useful and interesting to wander around.
/al – reading standingonthebox.blogspot.com
Posted by Alex on Sat 26th May 2007
A bit of a summery house mix for ya – funky, chunky, rough-round-the-edges house nuts
I haven't done much in the way of recording mixes lately, but I did have a chance to have a play about on the decks last week while I was setting up Lux for Orange Fridays. It's a bit/very (delete as applicable) rough round the edges 'cos I was trying to rush around doing other things at the same time, so if I was grading myself I'd probably rate it somewhere around “could do better”.
Hope you enjoy it ;o)
How to listen
If you can see the player below, then all you have to do is click “play”:
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… or you can right-click and “save as” to download it.
Tracklisting
Posted by Alex on Fri 25th May 2007
BT Mobile make good on their promise
It looks like I'm stumbling (further) down the rocky road to a bad credit rating – BT Mobile have made good on their threat to cut my mobile off for my huge outstanding debt of…
Posted by Alex on Wed 23rd May 2007
Tabs, tags and groups
(Health warning: this post is very boring…)
The last couple of weeks, and this weekend especially, have been a geeky code-pushing time for me as I try to cram in some much-needed site development.
I've finally turned on the tagging system, which lets you find blog entries, web pages, news articles and members by keywords, and I've been working for the last couple of days to tidy up the code that creates peoples' public profiles so I'm ready to start writing the tabs code (which lets you see all the content a member has created on UPSU.net). I've also just finished working my way through the 5,000-ish-lines of code that make up the UPSU Groups system, ready to incorporate group management into the site.
I'm going to ramble on a bit about each of these three features, because they're quite important to how UPSU.net is going to grow as a community site over the next 12 months. I hope…!
Tagging
The tagging system has been in development for over a year now, and it's more-or-less finished, bar a couple of bugs that mean some results don't show up when they should.
“Tagging” is a way of adding keywords to your content – blog entries, web pages, news articles, your profile, and photos, to let other people search for your content – and everyone's content – about a particular “thing”. For example, this blog entry is tagged with “development”, and you can find other blog entries by me about development by clicking the tag link at the top of this blog entry.
This also means you can search for other members of UPSU.net by their interests, and once the new profile pages have been finished, this should make a lot more sense.
The best thing about the tagging system, though, are tag clouds, which graphically represent the top 100, 200, or however many tags which are the most popular in a given area. You can see what I mean by taking a look at the tags homepage.
One other benefit of this is how the tagging system works with blogs: your blog's web address is something like “upsu.net/blogs/johnsmith”. If you tag a few blog entries with “football”, you can find a list of all these blog entries at “upsu.net/blogs/johnsmith/football”, and a miniature tag cloud – the top 15-or-so tags used in the blog you're viewing – is shown on the right of every blog page belonging to that author.
I've also tried to make it as easy as possible to tag blog entries – you simply have to type a new tag on each line in the “Tag this diary entry” box (when you write or edit your blog), and your tags can be more than one word, e.g. “top 40 chart tunes”.
Anyone who's a member of UPSU.net can start a blog – just sign-in and go to upsu.net/profile/content/blogs to find out more.
- More information on the tags homepage.
Member profiles
Everyone who's a member of UPSU.net has a member's profile. This lists as much – or as little – about you as you like, and also lists your UPSU.net content, including your forum posts, any comments you've made (but you can still leave anonymous comments if you'd rather simply by logging out when you want to post a comment), your blog entries, and – coming in the near future – your UPSU.net friends and group memberships.
Your profile also has a “contact me” page which lists your contact details – if you've specifically said you want them to be visible – and, for signed-in members, an “e-mail me” form which sends an e-mail to you without the sender finding out your e-mail address, as well as a “my picture” page if you've uploaded a photo of yourself.
If you're a contributor on UPSU.net, you can also create web pages and news articles, and upload photo galleries – these will also be shown on your public profile so you'll have an easy way to find all the work you've done on the site.
This is quite a lot of content so, to make it easier to sift through it all, I've begin splitting the profile pages up into “tabs” of content. At the moment you'll probably only see the three that are working – “about me”, “e-mail me” and “picture”; you can get a sneak preview of how things might look below:
Posted by Alex on Sun 20th May 2007
Action Camera – I want one!
This is very, very cool. Definitely on the Christmas list.
Posted by Alex on Sun 20th May 2007
End of days
It's half one in the morning, and I'm standing in the glare of a spotlight so bright, people watching me should be able to tell what I had for breakfast (a healthy sandwich, by the way. Who needs cereal?). In front of me, four boys and four girls are downing pints in a battle of the sexes boat race, and to my left, DJ Mark and Sidekick (sorry, don't know his name) are egging them on.
Yes, I'm back playing ents monkey – doing a bit of sound engineering/light operating/DJing/whatever-it-takes-to-make-it-work – for one night only.
Back to the present and, of course, responsible licensing being what it is – and for added comedy value – the teams are downing pints of non-alcoholic soda water – useful as a mixer in your vodka and soda, and highly effective at cleaning bars at the end of a particularly messy night. Oh, and it's low in calories… ;o)
Looking out over the crowd, I realise this is a variation of a scene I've probably witnessed almost 200 times since I've worked in the Union to help pay my way through my degree. It's also one of the last times I'll be seeing it as a student, with the end of the year fast approaching, and I can't help feeling a tiny bit of nostalgia. Granted, being up on stage is just a bit isolated sometimes, but only if you stop long enough to worry about it, and given the in-built self-destruct mechanisms of the kit in use, there's always something to be fixed, bodged, gaffer-taped or knitted back together.
Next year, while I'm playing Sabb and upsetting more people than I ever though possible (one of my best in-built abilities is winding people up, usually unintentionally), I hope I'll have a chance to do some shifts on ents and maybe even the bar because they're both two of the most enjoyable jobs I've ever worked, even if they won't make me rich, and even if I actually have to do work. If I do work some shifts, it'll also be a good opportunity to meet the students who pay my wages
as a Sabb face-to-face, even if they just want to hurl abuse at me. ;o) To give them their due, the bar and ents staff who work at the Union do a bloody good – and a very hard – job: I never slept better than I did after a shift on the Lux bar in my first year.
I'm looking forward to the end of the year – and my degree – for many reasons, but a long summer without a Union full of fun-loving students is going to be pretty boring. Luckily, PWs DJ Alistair Ritchie has just the solution – join up, you know you want to…
/al
p.s. The boys won the boat race, although I think more soda water ended up on the floor than in their mouths…
Posted by Alex on Sat 19th May 2007
Channel 5 is to get Neighbours. Oh. Yay…
Apparently, Channel 5 have signed a deal to show Neighbours – that long-standing corner-stone of British teatime telly which deals with realistic and informative storylines. Or something…
Can I just be the first to say a resounding “woopdedoo”. This news has made my life just a tiny bit better… That, just to clarify, is because I never, ever watch channel 5. Ever. So long, Neighbours! ;o)
(That said, Pepper is undoubtedly the best reason for ever watching the show – fan club group on Facebook here, but it's not entirely safe for work…).
/al – pretending to be a sound engineer at Orange Fridays in Lux in the presence of possibly the shortest mini-skirt in the world. I love Fridays… ;o)
Posted by Alex on Sat 19th May 2007
WebGuide4 – very damned cool
(Click pic to enlarge)
Ok, so the Media Center (a bit like Sky+, but it does DVDs and videos, downloads movies off the internet, records Sky – or freeview, or cable, plays and organises music, burns recorded TV to DVD, and a fair bit more, too) is up and running. I can log into it from anywhere in the world and run Azureus (err, to download non-copyrighted stuff, obviously), and it's got just over 1.25 Terabytes (1,250-ish Gigabytes) of recorded TV, videos and music on it.
But one thing I – or anyone else – couldn't do was schedule TV recordings and watch recorded TV over the interweb.
Until now.
I'm trying out WebGuide4, a program which adds a website to your Media Center to let you view the TV listings on your Media Center, schedule recordings (or change them), cancel recordings, etc etc yada yada yada.
Basically, it's like the Sky+ Remote Record service with knobs on (and, in my case, a bit of a knob operating it…).
Another really handy feature is that you can set up users with different privileges; I've set up an account for me that can add and delete recordings and administer the Media Center remotely, and another one for everybody else in the house that can only add and cancel recordings to prevent any, err, “accidents”.
You can also watch live TV streamed over the web to your PC, wherever you are (as long as you have a fairly fast broadband connection).
Posted by Alex on Thu 17th May 2007
You’re threatening legal action over *how much*, exactly…?
I've just arrived home to find this little paper package of joy on my mat (click to enlarge):
… That's right kids – BT Mobile are threatening to send in the debt collectors, issue a Default notice, and incur the wrath of the gods on me, for a debt of (drum roll please):
1 penny.
Oh yes, it's three for the price of one (penny) on this BT Special Offer: for all you attention-starved, loveless people out there, you can have the attention of BT's Bad Debts department, a swarm of bailiffs, and even – for the lucky few among you – the loving attention of a Magistrate. Ho hum.
… Of course, the biggest irony here is the cheque I also received in the post from BT today – for the same account – as partial refund of the
Posted by Alex on Wed 16th May 2007