Suddenly, from nowhere... an update !

Ok, three people commented on the lack of posts here - which is a lot in the micro-world of blogging. Besides, one of them was my mother, so what kind of son would I be to ignore my own mother ;)

I am assisted with getting today's blog going with the handy firefox plugin ScribeFire, which offers you a little pop-up writing panel, which allows you to quickly start typing when the mood strikes, as well as easily adding links to the page you are looking at. Recommended to all firefox bloggers out there... yes, both of you :) - or maybe not - I just finished this blog post, clicked the wrong thing, and lost everything without a warning message. So it's a power tool without a safety catch :(

Today's post will be sidestepping my #1 project of weight-loss with a simple "click the Traineo link" comment. Things are going pretty well, I'm feeling healthy, and have gym sessions, cycling to work and now an occasional swim at weekends going for me. I have also signed up for the BUPA London 10,000 run next May, which is the furthest I have ever ran (and then that was almost 6-7 years ago !)

Moving on to more important housing news. Mimi has moved in with me, and along with Jon and his girlfriend we are cosily filling our 2-bed / 1-bath house. Not TOO cosy yet, although occasional morning waits for bathrooms and tripping over drying suggests that 1 month is the longest we can sustain this these days ! At the end of this month, Mimi and I move onto out new rental place in Barnsbury (which is located here). It's a basement flat with a large bedroom, kind of modern interior, good storage space and a large shared garden at the back. There is also a large park space infront of the house, which might be fun next summer. The garden is shared with the house above, which I am led to believe has a lady occupying it who is often away and quite friendly, so that sounds like things should get on fine. We have men and large vans hired for the move, otherwise it would be just me lifting the heavy things, which wouldn't be great, not with my back...

Yep, more back problems for me. Nothing major, just a slight stoop which was quickly "popped" out a large and brutal Aussie Physiotherapist. It has caused me a bit of neck pain, which became aggrivated at a recent trip to "the electric ballroom" rock / metal club in Camden. I probably didn't need to be rocking out TO THE MAX, but when in rome... Anyway, it's all on the mend now, and I'm sitting much straighter at work, the threat of a post-rugby victory trip back to the defeated antipodean physio filling me with dread. All that neck twisting, if done a little too hard, might... <shudder>

Well, I had some more here (before losing it) about writing (still ticking along a little), coding (not ticking along at all) and finaces (£240 mystery transaction with Tesco being disputed - people, check your bank statements every 2 months, it can pay off !) but they will have to remain part of my signing off paragraph for now. Apologies for the break from blogging, hopefully I'll have some more news closer to the BIG housemove. And once Royal mail stop sitting about drinking tea, they might deliver my camera from the repair shop so I can get pictures too !

Stepping up to the web 2.0 challenge

Whilst I regard myself as quite technical and internet focused, I have allowed myself to "slip behind" the curve a little recently. I think GMail was the last thing I was up to speed with, after that it all went a little soft. Certainly in recent times I forced myself into using RSS, which I now cannot live without - imagine having to revisit news pages and rescan them looking for any new articles ?!! And then moved onto "semantic tagging" over bookmarking - principally as I had too many (700+) bookmarks to not put them in folders, and I couldn't come up with a hirarchy of folders that consistantly worked for me.

So with my webmail(via Gmail), RSS (via Bloglines) and tagged bookmarks (via del.icio.us) setup, as well as a host of other new "web 2.0" services such as a todo list (via Remember the Milk) and a more general simple list service (via tada lists) I was truely setup to get more of what I wanted out the internet.

But the final piece of the puzzle that clicked into place recently was a site called netvibes. This is now my homepage, and is a customizable page with various panels sorted into columns (bit like portlets, for those who know what they are). Each panel contains one of my web 2.0 services so the overall effect is that of a dashboard or command console, where I can in one look see what unread mail I have, which RSS feeds have updated, what my upcoming week's todo list is and a host of other stuff.

If you are scratching your head here, then I might put up a laymans description of all this techno-babble soon ! If you are thinking - hold on, Outlook does all of this, what is so great about your setup - then you havn't been bitten by the web 2.0 bug. Everything is much more easily accessable, updateable and useable as rigid Outlook components, and I can mix these services together in different ways as I need, as well as change services should a better one come along. The mark of a great web2.0 application is one that will help you migrate to a competing one, but you simply don't want to :)