Archive → October, 2008
Atheist Bus – Some Cheeky Insider Insights
I don’t really want to talk about fundraising on this blog. However, I can make an exception this time.
‘Atheist Bus’ has dominated my working day since launch on tuesday morning. We’re in the enviable hotseat where we can see where all the traffic is coming from, with our all our awesome dashboards of win. Here’s a couple of interesting tidbits I thought were worth sharing:
- BBC News is still the biggest referrer. Although they’ve now taken down the original link, since according to their jolly editorial team, it’s an advert. Yeah. OK.
- Google is next. Big G. No surprise there.
- Facebook is third. Also, not surprising. Facebook generates a huge percentage of mainstream social media, despite the cool kids trying to hate on it.
- A couple of blogs have produced quite an insane amount of traffic. We’ll cover those in more detail on the JG blog tomorrow.
- Quite a number of people have donated more than once.
- The helpdesk dudes have had to edit offensive comments all day, which is rare for our site.
- Nobody has fire-bombed the office yet.
- The new shiny expensive servers haven’t croaked.
I’m most looking forward to seeing what the digg effect looks like tomorrow.
More to come folks. I’m off to do a Quarry show in Kingston.
Why can’t I trade-in my MacBook Pro?
As I write this, my sysadmin and his line manager at work have both made a pilgrimage to the Apple Store. So it’s been about three days, and I’m man enough to admit that I really, really want one of the new MacBook Pro’s.
Glossy screen or not.
My current machine is 11 months old now. It’s kind of upsetting just how much the basic spec has moved on in that time.
Why can’t I trade in my not-that-old-MBP for a new shiny one, and just pay a few hundred quid to deal with the depreciation and upgrade kerfuffle?
I can understand the economics behind Apple wanting everyone to just buy a new machine (at least once a year, looking at the release intervals), but it’s not a great end-user experience.
Of course I only whinge now because I know there’s more chance of me building my own laptop than convincing the aforementioned sysadmin to buy me a new shiny ’08 MBP.
Sigh.
FOWA #1 – Where’s the .net community at?
Me and most of the London tech collective attended the Future of Web Apps conference in a cold and desolate part of docklands this week. I’m going to post a series of thoughts on it over the next week or so.
On the way from crappy hotel to Excel on Friday morning, I shared a bacon sandwich with a guy from Microsoft. They had a booth in the corner of the expo floor with some 360s, a Microsoft Surface table (underwhelming, over-expensive) and some marketing guff about Expression Web, Visual Studio and other bits and bobs. Not a peep about asp.net anywhere to be seen.
He told me that Microsoft came to these events now because they want to be more associated with the web2.0 crowd that attends these shindigs. Working for a Microsoft-driven house, I thought this was interesting, so as we shared the ketchup I picked his brains on a few bits and pieces.
Firstly we talked about Apple evangelism, a bit about the upcoming fall dashboard release for the XBox 360, and we ended up having a long chat about .net and it’s perceived shortcomings in relation to rails, php and other ‘groovier’ frameworks that are evangelised among big tech communities.
I said that MSDN is all well and good for achieving its goals, but compared to php and rails in particular, there is no decent community around asp.net. He readily agreed with me, and I told him that really since they’re the only true commercial framework, it’s their responsibility to nurture a grassroots community of .net evangelists and to help properly showcase some of the good work that’s being done with web apps using MS technology, beyond their shitty PR-heavy press releases.
He totally agreed with me. Hiring .net developers is a great deal trickier than finding a php fanboy. Comparatively, they’re concealed behind a wall of underinformed recruitment consultants and don’t contribute to the same kind of projects as their open source brethren.
They need to sort that out. Let’s hope they do.
More FOWA posts on the way.
iPhone iNnoyances – pt. 2 – Rainy Sunday Edition
Hello.
I’m an iPhone.
I’m outside in the fresh air.
It’s raining, because it’s autumn and I’m in the UK.
Where it rains. Quite alot.
Especially in October.
Actually, scratch that, for most of the year.
I was designed in California where it only rains about twice a year. Look how dry it is there!
Me and Ma in the Panamints, CA
I am useless when I’m wet.
Touchscreens and water don’t play nice together.
