nocto

I was cancelling an order at Amazon and they asked me to tell them why, so I started to tell them why in the nice big box they gave me, and then…

found that they were only giving me ten characters (set with “maxlength=10″ in the source code) to tell them!

Doesn’t leave much to do apart from swear at them! Certainly no space for the treatise on international trade and the digital economy that I had in mind. I’d rather they didn’t ask at all.

Had a major wordpress outage – looks like something went screwy in the database. Am currently reconstructing the site. Hopefully I’ll stop before I reconstruct the problem…

If my family has a religion then it’s Lego. Other families dream of Disneyland but it was certainly Legoland that my siblings and I aspired to visit. When we were kids that would have entailed a trip to Denmark so we never got to fulfill our dreams. It was only last year when my daughter was old enough that I finally got to Legoland, Windsor. Our verdict on the Windsor park was that a Saturday in June was a stupidly busy time to go, that the queues were horrendous, and that we loved it, and we’re planning a trip back on a quieter day sometime.

So I was ecstatic when I saw that they’d built a “Legoland Discovery Centre” in Manchester, less than an hours drive from us. Obviously it’s tons smaller than Windsor, it’s all indoors, the tickets are a third of the price but we still expected it to have that special Lego spark in abundance.

As it only opened a few weeks ago I thought I’d write up our impressions of it for anyone who’s thinking of going.

Lego Factory – nice entrance to the centre but not that exciting. see plastic pretend to turn into lego bricks while kids in the group turn dials and spin levers. get a lego brick at the end.

Kingdom Quest – the only ride. you don’t seem to be able to go back for another go round. staff putting you on it don’t explain that you have a laser gun each to shoot things so you spend half the ride figuring that out and then trying to get the guns to work. fun but we’d have liked another go once we’d figured out what to do.

Lego Studios – 4D cinema – that’s a 3D cinema plus wind, rain etc. we liked this at Windsor and this was the same thing and just as good. pleased we saw a different film here though – this one was Bob the Builder building a roller coaster.

Miniland – bits of the north of england built out of lego. nice to see manchester, liverpool, blackpool, canals etc but there was a lot less than I was expecting and various scenes seemed to have been damaged already.

Fire Academy – bog standard playgym, didn’t look to have any lego customisation, miranda came straight out again.

Lego Racers Build & Test – build a lego vehicle and test it on the track. there didn’t seem to be enough wheels to go round. the track was neat and let five vehicles race against each other but could have done with a staff member to supervise. miranda’s vehicle got knocked out of her hand in the rush to get one of the five spaces on the track leading to tears. it looked like the same group of older kids were dominating it and we couldn’t be bothered to fight them really.

Duplo village – build with duplo. think miranda enjoyed this as much as anything as it was quieter and she could build in peace. you could also build on plates that would then shake like an earthquake which we all enjoyed!

Master Model Builder – this was a show with a leader taking you through building a lego model i think. it was full everytime we looked and the displayed showtimes were clearly wrong so we didn’t get to have a go at it. as there were clearly limited spaces some kind of queueing system would have helped.

Princess Palace – Miranda didn’t go near it but i think it was just bins of lego to build with an excess of the girly coloured pieces.

Cafe – didn’t look to be anything great. tables all taken up by adults waiting around for playing kids rather than people eating. we went over to the Trafford Centre to eat.

On the way out to the shop there was a game to play – stomping on lights on the floor to solve a puzzle. don’t think the stomping and the puzzle solving bore any relation to each other though.

Shop – shop seemed low on stock. pick a brick department looked depleted and build a minifigure section had no bodies left. prices weren’t displayed on shelves and were hard to find on the boxes. of course we left with several boxes of lego but would have liked to have had more choice and there was nothing like the range of souvenirs that they have at windsor.

Overall it didn’t make a good impression on us. At £33 for a family of three it wasn’t a cheap day out, and nor was it even a “day out” as we’d stretched our visit out to make it fill a couple of hours. Of course Legoland at Windsor costs more than that just for one adult but there’s so much more to do at Windsor that you can’t really compare the two.

Staff were wearing t-shirts saying “ask me about unlimited annual passes” and I’d like to have wanted to but there was nothing here to make us want to visit more than once every couple of years at most.

On the positive side it wasn’t too crowded, they look to be selling out on pre-booked tickets and not trying to pack in thousands, there was plenty of lego to play with, the ride and the cinema are good. It’d be a good place to visit on a rainy day and we could have spent ages building lego models, but then we could stay at home on a rainy day and tip all our lego onto the table….

We’ll make the pilgrimage to Windsor again, but the Manchester centre is a poor substitute. We enjoyed ourselves there for sure, but left vaguely disappointed at the experience.

Two and half years ago, or thereabouts, I paid very little attention to the launch of the iPhone. Smartphones seemed to be all over the place but none was the kind of mini computer that I was dreaming of.

In 2007 I’d been running a web company for nearly a decade and had spent the whole time leaping from one internet connection to the next, borrowing computers from friends and family, hulking around a heavy laptop and trying to keep connected on the move, patching together Palm organizers and Nokia phones to get a flaky internet connection and try to keep my web servers up and running at all times. I’d made myself ill worrying about my business’s welfare in the midst of moving house and I’d pretty much given up on the mobile internet malarkey and had decided that I’d had enough of the cutting edge of technology.

It was only when I began to stumble over comments like

So in conclusion, the iPhone is nice from start to finish, but Safari is really the thing that turns it from a phone into a mini-laptop.

from Matt Haughey that I began to realise that this might just be the thing I’d been waiting for.

I had to wait until the phone arrived in the UK in November 2007 when the iPhone became the first gadget I ever went out to buy on release day. This was the original 2G version before the launch of the app store. A pretty looking mobile phone with a standard set of apps on it. Safari however was all I wanted. The web in my pocket – more than that – my web in my pocket. I loved it and have barely been separated from it since.

It’s difficult to explain to people who don’t live in a web based world, or even a web based small business world how much this working mobile connectivity means to me. It’s not just a fancy gadget. Pretty much everything I need to do on a daily basis I do in a web browser and having my iPhone in my pocket has kept me sane and improved my life no end over the past couple of years.

As the iPhone has developed I’ve added apps and upgraded. My little phone that can is now my satnav when I’m driving, my music player (I never saw the point in the iPod after an early encounter with a Diamond Rio player), my main email sorting client, my main news reading device, my main games machine, my recipe book, my notebook, and I could keep adding to this list for some time.

I was quite excited about the launch of what everyone hoped would be Apple’s stunning new tablet PC. What I thought I wanted was jazzy new software to make the iPhone better. I don’t like the “search through the icon laden desktop” style of app organization and use the Spotlight search to find what I want 95% of the time. I don’t like not being able to do two things simultaneously. I want multitasking so I can keep an iSSH terminal session open while I check web pages in Safari. I don’t mind being limited to 8 open web pages in Safari, I wouldn’t mind being limited to 2 or 3 open apps.

The iPad as oversized iPhone initially underwhelmed me. I wanted a more powerful, better looking operating system and I didn’t want another system that was locked down to only running Apple approved applications.

Despite this I still want an iPad. Why? It only took a little thought for me to realise that a good web browser is really all I want. And a bigger screen will make everything that much easier. Easier for me to write my own personalised web apps to do exactly what I want to do. Back to where I started with the iPhone really.

Another minor detail that makes a difference: Chargers have been the bane of my life when travelling for too long. I’m really pleased to see that the iPad uses the same little charger as my iPhone – no big chunky plug to drag around. My MacBook’s charger is small-ish compared with the huge bricks previous laptops have had but is still a pain to transport.

One thing I’m not happy with is that it doesn’t look like the iPad will support a Dvorak keyboard layout. My iPhone supports a shed load of foreign keyboard layouts but not this variation on an English keyboard. It doesn’t make any difference on the iPhone as you can’t touch type on it but it will make a difference to typing on an iPad.

There’s been a lot of talk about the iPad – good talk, bad talk and indifferent talk – and I’m looking forward to seeing what really happens when people start to get their hands on them. Including me, I think.

I found this fabulous map of my photos using flickr’s new app garden.

I’ve always found flickr’s own map of your pictures frustrating as it seems to just present a smattering of my pics from places no matter how I fiddle with it. This app is far more what I envisage when I think of a map of my pictures. I like how there keep being more blanks as I zoom in – which sounds backwards but it makes me think how many more places there are to visit and enjoy, not just on a “there are whole continents out there!” level but right down to the “walking distance from home” level.

Virtual info informing real world enjoyment – that’s what I like.

See in fullscreen mode

Hooo-blinking-ray! I have finally figured out a way to direct the notes I can add to links with Google Reader into this website. I’d already been using Feedburner to sanitise out a lot of the over the top content from the shared items feed before channelling it into the FeedWordPress plugin. Now I’ve discovered Yahoo Pipes which lets you do fancier things with messing about with RSS feeds. Lovely.

I think I’ve about finished messing around with the site for now. I’m quite happy with the way the new theme has worked out and given me new ideas about what should be here and how it should look. A major reason I wanted to get the whole Google Reader notes thing working properly was because I’ve never really been happy just posting “here is a link” – I much prefer to say “here is a link and here is what I think or why I find it interesting”. After all that’s the whole reason I started a weblog to start with. Without commentary it’s very difficult to post something you disagree with too – it’s like you confer your blessing on anything you link to.

And I’ve got my scrapbook over at Tumblr linked in as well. I always quite liked the service but it was a bit stuck out on a limb.

Plus I’m getting through writing up the reading backlog which also makes me happy. Having things written down about everything I’ve read in the last decade is fabulous and it’s not a habit I want to break.

So now I just need to return to normal service levels – at the moment I want to write everything all at once, link to everything I find good – but I don’t want to end up burnt out with a ghost of a website again next week or next month.

Right. It’s been quiet here. This weblog got kind of abandoned when I turned it into a mish mash of things I was doing in other places. I turned it into a mish mash of things to stop it being completely abandoned with weeds growing through the cracks in the stylesheet.

Now I think it might be time to come back over here and start looking after things a bit more often. I keep having thoughts that I can’t squeeze into 140 characters for Twitter. I’ve been wishing I had somewhere to post these – like I didn’t know I already had somewhere.

So, I’ve given the place a bit of a mini-makeover – excuse anywhere it’s not looking quite right as I haven’t quite tweaked the rather lovely wordpress theme into my own ugly concept of how I want things yet. Better to get going with it more or less working than sit around manicuring it forever and never getting back to the writing I think.

I have a huge backlog of books read to add to the weblog. I declared bankruptcy on book posts back in June and then promptly ran up another series of reading debts. Ho hum.

Anyway – I just wanted to say excuse any mess while I redecorate really!

So what is happening this morning? All across twitter on a saturday the british (in england, scotland, ireland and, hmmm, germany), especially in cities like manchester, derby, sheffield, birmingham, london, edinburgh and brighton woke up with a hangover on a bloody lovely morning, talked about whether the weather was snowy, sunny or icy, and settled down to breakfast of toast with tea or coffee and the guardian before getting dressed and going to the shops, the footy or the six nations rugby if they can get there given the cancelled trains or the conditions on the roads.

In short, everyone British on twitter just posted the same message. (Then they decided to stay home and play MMOs.)