General

1. We don’t know what’s in the Box.
2. The Antagonist has the most irritating face lips.
3. The swinging pendulum of death was weak.
4. The acting was poor.
5. I paid £8 for the privilege.

Let’s face it, Jigsaw hasn’t been the same since he stood up.

UPDATE:

I’m not alone.

Put it this way, I work all day in tech so when I get home, I want a break from tech. This blog was mostly about tech, but now it’s just a blog, my blog, bad grammar and all.

My boy Clint is back and looking great in this new flick Gran Torino.

 I love you.

Last week I brought myself a new toy, the Bamboo Fun. And boy I’m really having fun doodling with it, what you see above is my first rather poor attempt at drawing Angie.

Click the image for a larger view if you want. Drawing while looking at the screen is really strange, but the Bamboo itself is awesome and cheap too.

I brought the Bamboo because I wanted to get back into drawing a little bit, I really enjoyed art at school amongst other things like drama. These subjects were the only ones that brought me any happiness.

Speaking of drama, excuse me for blowing my own trumpet here but I was a bad-ass actor in school. Not only did I lead in various plays, but I directed and scripted them too. Did I mention I also played the part of Jesus?

Which leads me onto my second new toy. Celtx is a open source i.e ‘free’ tool for writing screenplays. Celtx is Windows and Mac compatible which is great for me.

I have a bunch of short stories ideas and scripts, written in everything from my old Nokia phone, to notepad and the now defunct Sophocles. I’m hoping to write a couple of short scripts and upload them to Celtx’s Project Central for the critics to marvel over.

More on that later.

I don’t know about you, but my daily news feed is pretty much full of Chrome right now. I feel almost sad writing this post because it’s as though I’ve become part of the collective by writing a post simply with the word Chrome in it.

As sad as that may be, it led to an interesting conclusion. And that is, the smaller blogs that I’ve subscribed too didn’t mention the word Chrome at all. In fact they did exactly the opposite! And you know what? It was a breath of fresh air and made me think about values.

Adding Value

How does one add value to their blog? Well the first thing that sprung to mind was not to regurgitate the same tosh the top blogs do. This is something I’ve tried to do since the beginning, only downside is my posting schedule is not as frequent as I would like.

Secondly, I realised in order to achieve this value I needed to do a lot more research, and that means adding a lot more blogs into my RSS Rolodex. So lets start by sharing with you some of the more interesting topics I found around the web this week.

• Book Trailers

We all know about movie trailers, but how about trailers for books? That’s exactly what COS Productions have done over at You Tube. I think the idea is the rather cool, some of the trailers are kinda tacky but it’s an interesting concept.

• The LFL

More commonly known as the Lingerie Football League. I think this is out right hilarious, is there anything America wouldn’t do?

• Bill Gates & Jerry Seinfeld in New Microsoft Ad Campaign

To commission a $300 Million Dollar advertising campaign and not even mention your company’s name ‘once’ seems rather odd. Perhaps Bill assumed everyone knows who he is, other than that the Ad was pretty cool.

Update

Actually Seinfeld mentions Microsoft once, now that’s value for money.

For the last couple of days I was away on a business trip to Bristol, and subsequently I haven’t had the opportunity to update here. After Bristol I have to say I’m pretty happy about being back in London.

On the plus side the hotels where super in Bristol. I was surprised to see an iMac in my hotel room, it was also connected to satellite-TV which was a nice touch.

My next trip will be at Microsoft’s Reading campus for training. I’m pretty excited about this as my technology background is primarily Microsoft based. And yes I’m a MS fan-boy, the macbook was just purchased to extend my knowledge beyond the Microsoft o/s.

Other News

I was planning to participate in Pro Bloggers group writing project. Unfortunately time did not permit, however you can read the latest submissions here.

Two of my favorites where What Harry Potter Taught Me About Writing An Article Series… and Are You Raising a S…. I witnessed this remarkable phenomenon in Bristol and it ain’t pretty.

Not bad for two weeks worth of SEO. Sadly the same cannot be said about Google, come on! Hurry up and index Jonny Tokyo.

One of my common Internet pastimes is reading up new and successful business ideas. Check out the “Free Idea Bank” there you will find #178 business ideas, most wacky but it’s an entertaining read non the less.

Secondly take a look at “Unusual Business Ideas That Work” for fully comprehensive case studies of unusual business ideas that worked.

Technorati Profile

It took someone like Tim O’Reilly to finally make TechCrunch stand up and take notice of how frustrating the constant linking to CrunchBase was and still is for their readers. If you are a long time reader of TechCrunch, you would know that traditionally the logo always linked to the company covered in its stories.

Then the all singing all dancing CrunchBase came along and totally changed that policy. Somewhat alienating a large majority of its readers by redirecting them to CrunchBase instead of the companies’ independent website.

After a few noticeable complaints TechCrunch apparently discontinued that policy and instead started distributing a lightweight widget beneath each cover story that enabled users to make an informed decision as to whether or not they visited CrunchBase.

Problem solved? Well not quite. In addition to the widget now embedded in each post, TechCrunch started randomly linking between CrunchBase and the companies’ external website. After awhile it became a lottery as to where you would actually end up after clicking on a company link.

Let’s be honest, we all know why TechCrunch are doing this, where not stupid. But don’t get me wrong either, CrunchBase is a great resource and I fully commend them for making it available to us free of charge. But your readers are your bread and butter, and this embarrassment could have been avoided if you just stuck to your original promise.

Browsing through the comments it looks like the majority are with Tim on this one. Maybe now TechCrunch will add some consistency when linking to CrunchBase, if they do we all have Tim to thank for saving our sanity.