Heartland

If you're paranoid then so am I. "Cloud" storage strikes me as a fantastic way to have your data stolen. Witness the recent malarkey with Sony.

If you have sensitive data, keep it on your own hardware and back it up.

today's google logo, celebrating les paul's 96th birthday

http://www.google.co.uk/

turn your speakers on and wave your mouse over the 'strings'

alternatively, click the icon of a keyboard and you can play a (sort of) piano scale using your qwerty keyboard

anyone handy with sorting dry ice photo fuzz with photoshop?

outta focus and fuzz is outta focus and fuzz, very little can be done

it's beautifully in focus... just damn dry ice in it. arse.

what, too 'progressive rock' for you?

i love it, unless taking sodding photos through it! there wasn't even that much, but i have fog on my pics. waaah.

http://imageshack.us/g/695/dsc00269rg.jpg/

= sort of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z86V_ICUCD4

i've been asked to give a talk at this, in 4 weeks:

FutureCommerce2011 - http://is.gd/xsrs8Z

Your company’s website is its shop window, but just how well is it working for you and how much better could it work for you? This major one day conference on 12 July brings together outstanding digital professionals from IBM, Microsoft, Apple and others from across the UK, who will provide delegates with an insight into how your website should be the focal point of all business development activity.

These leading professionals will share their thoughts and experiences relating to the latest developments in online research, digital marketing, social media integration, web technology and evaluation and search engine optimisation.

This one day conference at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester is being delivered in partnership with the Manchester Evening News and is sponsored by Ci Research, Code Computerlove, Lakestar Media and Return on Digital.

details are still sketchy, but i assume they want me to do to this bit:

Usability and User Experience – Strategies and Techniques for better website performance

eeek

slightly nervous...

Quiff Boy wrote:
slightly nervous...

I know the feeling - I'm due to deliver some training sessions to our technical trainees.
I rather expect that I am supposed to be able to display an intimate knowledge of my job.

Trying to decide if this would be a worthy successor to my old Technics system.
Would probably require a phono preamp as well to hook up my turntable.
The Luddite in me keeps thinking I should have separate speakers and lots of cables.

Quiff Boy wrote:slightly nervous...

here ye go Boss - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpvgfmEU2Ck
that's you sorted

James Blast wrote:

Quiff Boy wrote:slightly nervous...

here ye go Boss - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpvgfmEU2Ck
that's you sorted

i've lost count the number of times i've watched people do ppt presentations and fail on #s 1 & 2

James Blast wrote:

Quiff Boy wrote:slightly nervous...

here ye go Boss - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpvgfmEU2Ck
that's you sorted

better do the chicken method:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk

Erudite wrote:Trying to decide if this would be a worthy successor to my old Technics system.
Would probably require a phono preamp as well to hook up my turntable.
The Luddite in me keeps thinking I should have separate speakers and lots of cables.

Nice!

extra fifty quid for thee "Midnight Black lacquer" version, natch

quick one -

LCD
LED
or
Plasma
?

i dug out my bass guitar last night and had a bit of a play around for the first time in a couple of years

i'd forgotten how much your finger span deteriorates if you don't keep practising... and christ, the first two fingers on my left hand are sore today

note to self: must start putting in at least an hour every evening

James Blast wrote:extra fifty quid for thee "Midnight Black lacquer" version, natch

Must be getting old, but I resent the idea of paying for a colour option.

Then again, it never stopped Madonna.

James Blast wrote:quick one -

LCD
LED
or
Plasma
?

LED.

Image on a plasma looks nicer, but your TV will have a shorter lifetime, LCD uses a whole lot more power than LED does.

James Blast wrote:quick one -

LCD
LED
or
Plasma
?

There is no LED - it's just LCD using LED as backlight. The expensive ones have hundred LED's spreaded behing the LCD panel that can be dimmed individually to enhance the native in-picture contrast (with limitations). The cheaper just use LEDs around the border of the panel that can dimm only the entire screen at once. Of course both are quite energy saving and long-living.

Plasma delivers still the best native contrast (fact) and "film proof picture quality" (my opinion) but the overall brightness is lower compared to LCD TVs that's why they may appear weaker in heavy illuminated rooms or.

All in all it really depends on what you're watching most. I think any LCD based TVs are the best allrounder but if you prefer to watch movies/tv shows in a shady cinema-like atmosphere, I'd go for a plasma.

Maybe you know a dealer where it's possible to compare plasma vs. lcd in a living-room like athmosphere (in terms of illumination) - that's important - and get your own test DVD/BluRay like a movie with some decent night (and day) shots (Batman Dark Knight is a good one).

thankee gents

I've been roadtesting a 32" Toshiba LCD for over a week now and I'm very happy with it, it's even dropped in price since I bought this one (for The Mum) by fifty quid to £199. I'm not particularly happy with the Spamsung Blurray upscaling as most movies just don't look as clean and sharp as they did on my old 21" CRT (also a Toshiba) using a conventional DVD player.
I ken the consensus is that 3D is a gimmick and will die out pretty quickly, hell that's exactly the way I felt until I saw a demo, but I think I really want one. The Spamsung 51" Plasma has even dropped in price since I first started looking at it, I'm a cheap Scotsman so if I'm laying out near seven hundred quid for something, it better feckin' last!

wanders off to look at 32" LCD/LED 3D TVs...

Quiff Boy wrote:slightly nervous...

Yep, I'm there too at the moment. Alongside everything else we do our team has been writing 75 technical manuals (ouch!) for internal use that we were under the impression would only be seen by our own engineers that already have some knowledge of our hardware and software.

Now a handful of them are being sent over to another company we work with with no prior warning to us as guidance for when they encounter our kit out in the field.

Yikes indeed.

James Blast wrote:I ken the consensus is that 3D is a gimmick and will die out pretty quickly, hell that's exactly the way I felt until I saw a demo, but I think I really want one.[/i]

as long as you don't do this...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mediamo ... edon-3d-ad

i think the couple at the end look a bit, erm, simple...

ain't you seen a 3D demo Barry, not a 'stuff flying out the screen' one but a regular movie movie?

I wasn't prepared to be impressed but I was