Month: April 2007

I recently missed, or am about to miss, my last graduation. I was supposed to be conferred with my masters some time during the last two weeks or in the next week. During the time I’m in California, anyway. I’ve never been keen on graduations, but there is a slight chance that I’ll regret having missed it at some point in the future. Not as much as I’d have regretted not coming to San Francisco though.

Is anyone using Jaiku? I signed up a day or two ago and so far it seems a lot more useful than Twitter. Jaiku has a similar idea to Twitter—to post brief (140 character) snippets about what you’re up to so that people can keep up with what you’re doing without you having to compose a full blog post. People can subscribe to your updates so that they’re sent notifications when you post something new.

Like Twitter, you can post to Jaiku by SMS or from the Web. There doesn’t seem to be an instant messenger option yet (though Twitter’s IM is down most of the time anyway) and I don’t see a way to receive updates by phone, which is definitely something they’ll want to work on.

The big advantage of Jaiku though is that it will pull in feeds from elsewhere to keep all of your updates in one place. I have it pulling in my Soylent Red feed, my Flickr photos, my Last.fm music information, my del.icio.us bookmarks and even my Twitter feed.

Jaiku doesn’t pull the full content from all of these feeds. It shows just enough for you to know that there’s new information from one of those sources.

If you’re interested, here’s my Jaiku.

In the ever-popular spirit of I’m-busy-so-I-want-you-to-keep-my-site-alive-without-me, I’ve decided to take part in this meme. And by “I’ve decided to take part”, I mean “I’ve decided to ask you to take part.” For the non–link-followers among you, the spirit is this: post a comment mentioning a memory you have of you and me. Then, optionally, continue the meme on your own blog.

A photo I took back in March at the Cliffs of Moher featured on This Is Broken today. I’m a bit annoyed that they didn’t give any sort of hypertext attribution, despite me giving them the Flickr URL for the photo and my own URL. Oh well, I guess not everyone’s a conscientious Web citizen.

I’ve just payed to renew this domain for the next year, so I guess I better start using it. It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me, what with starting work, Good Good Friday in Nottingham, and now I’m in Mountain View, California.

Yesterday I took myself on a self-guided walking tour of San Francisco. I wholeheartedly recommend walking across the Golden Gate Bridge (photos to come). On the other hand I cannot in good conscience recommend walking to the Golden Gate Bridge from downtown San Francisco. My feet hurt. I’m reminded of this story. Here’s a map of my approximate route, though I actually took a more up-and-over approach than a go-around approach to the hills.

I set out from the Caltrain station at 11:30 and got back there at18:30. That’s local time. In GMT those times translate to some time next Thursday. Of course I managed to get a Golden Gate shot glass, not to mention reams of photos of the bridge, of Alcatraz Island and of some really steep hills.

There’s a joke or a comic to be made of the phrase “These boots are made for Walken”, but for the life of me I can’t think what it is.