Croeso

Escaping to the workshop

I spend some very pleasing hours today hand cutting dovetails for the drawers of our Pearwood cabinet . They are made from swiss pear and dutch walnut with rather an interesting old English style of narrow sides, rounded runners and a solid wood base (also pear).

Even though I have a Woodrat machine that cuts perfect dovetails, hand cutting them in the old traditional way, with a dovetail saw, coping saw and chisels, is very pleasing. Albeit it took me most of the day to cut 6 of the 8 joints required. There is something quite special in working in this way, it's a pity the global economy and mass production only allows a handful of cabinet makers to make their living this way.I still find it irritating that people pay 120 euro per hour for a BMW service without a second thought, but grumble at 25 euros an hour for a fine cabinet maker, after all BMW mechanics are 10 a penny!

Anyway this fine cabinet maker did enjoy himself today, and as I don't have to find clients I could take as much time as I liked. Bliss.

Grid Computing 2

Inspired by Piers, I hooked my second home PC up to a Grid Network.

My first PC is helping my old Oxford lab analyse some quantum optics results, and as it requires the analyser to also verify the results (the model is only 63% accurate) so it's only open to learned ex alumni.

This new one is also for Oxford and helps a cancer research project, but is open to all as it takes no effort from the human only our silicon based machines

So if you have spare computing power do join and help out, you can even see the molecular/genetic structure your analysing on the screen saver (not that the spinning coloured blobs mean much to this ageing physicist!)

So that was my good deed for yesterday

Hmm you can post from Outlook too

Well not bad, fonts seem to work but categories not yet, must be a setting somewhere.

 

Thanks Piers

 I owe Piers some beers too for his suggestions –

Cheers

 

NewsGator

Just playing with NewsGator for Outlook, works pretty well, as well as being  (just like it's on-line cousin) able to read secure rss feeds (userid password protected). Thios will solve our notification issues as it will appear in Outlook.

Hmm our little 'Dark Blog' experiement might just be about to take off.

Dark blogs becoming brighter

I have found an RSS reader that can handle password protected secure RSS feeds. Newsgator online . So we are nearly there with our work blog experiment, all I need now is a notifier like bloglines have to prompt the users they have new things in the rss reader, this is important I feel for those new to blogs.

Typepad secure blogs work well, if we go ahead I guess they will host it for us.

Thanks to Martin Roel and Jack for coming back to me on this, beers are on me guys

Hah - Missed the connection but Big Yinn'in

Finally sat in the train in Amsterdam, Heiloo bound and Billy Connolly has come on, now I have eulogised about Billy for years if you ask me he's one of Scotland national treasures (Scottish Comedian for those of you who don't know). My Dutch mates who I've mentioned him to, say all he does is say Fuck all the time and talk about sex, that is partially true, but I like him as a social commentator, and for the fact that I piss myself laughing (not literally but close!) when I'm luckily enough to get tickets to his shows. I was amazing fortunate to meet him at a Bert Janch party once and we chatted for a long while about our favourite mandolin players, and he is everything in real life you (or at least I) would like him to be, what an evening that was.

O gee I'm laughing out loud on the train to the 'woman cannot keep secrets gag' !!!

And I'm smiling for 2 reasons a) the BC mp3 files I have are hilarious, but b) it reminded me of the time in the summer I actually was painted the windows on the house. I was always up a ladder at the 2nd or 3rd floor when random play delivered him, how I did not fall, drop the paint or paint the wall instead of window due to the manic giggling I'll never know. My wife would even pop out to see if I was OK as she heard me roaring with laughter!  Anke is a bit bemused as she does not understand him due to his accent, like me trying to understand Rotterdamers, but she understands my affinity for him - and is amazed how I still laugh at the same thing on the 20th play

Oh no it's the 'mate working in the mortuary story'! Ha ha ha….. (and the guy opposite is somewhat bemused at me giggling and grinning like a Cheshire cat whilst typing)

Oh well nearly home!

Are we all Johnny no mates or the social secretaries of our crowd?

Dodgy what a blast from the past - '97!

Hmm I'm in Dordrecht and it's raining - I hope | make my tight connection at Sloterdijk I don't fancy standing out there for 30 minutes

One thing I've been doing recently is following some heavyweight bloggers, you know those who post tomes , know everyone in the blogoshpere and read 500 feeds daily, they are fascinating creatures and they really do live a great proportion of their time in their blogs (or through their blogs maybe a better description). It got me thinking if they are all one type, single, young ish, geeks, does any single race dominate, grads, massively connected (loads of mates) - Hey Howlin Wolf - yea man!, or Johnny no-mates, deeply frustrated would be Paperback writer as Lennon and McCartney put it. I'll scout around and see if there are any profiles - I really have no idea.

Yes The Manics! And now John Renbourn - dude

Writing Blogs

I did not finish my review of blogging in 2004 for the TI crew due to the Xmas break so here we are.

Finding your voice

This was not hard for me as I thought it was a little like an interactive diary, with an easy interface, mind you I started with blogger Pro and their support was terrible, their early interface a struggle for the only partially html literate, and when it seized (I changed my login details to contain a '@' so it matched my others)  it took them 5 months to fix it for me - I mean I was paying for that, not any more! Type Pad Pro is a dream with help ticket resolution within 2 hours! Super.

Who am I talking to?

Well I think the answer to that is Willo the Wisp, St Elmo's Fire, The Elliad, i.e. a non describable yet real something, that omnipresent object on the front of the Presence Album by Led Zeppelin (best band in the world man!) you know what I mean, after all I am talking to you at this moment in time - right! (Hmm just got a beer of a nice French speaking girl - bendigedig!)
Occasionally I blog to particular people but that is rare , I.e. my call for blog techy help yesterday was to Euan, Lilia, Suw, Ton and anyone else whose better at the tech side than me)

What to blog and what not to?
This is an issue for me, as blogging came from Lilia who works with us on our KM R&D program, so I was interested if it is a KM tool, I am convinced it is, but my KM is about KM at work and so have the IP secrecy issue to deal with, we save masses of €'s Kming so why give it away. Anyway I've blogged about this previously. And I still like Rogier's analogy of standing in your underpants! Spot on RB!

Thinking out loud

Lilia and Peers find blogging helps them frame their arguments and help refine logic and ideas, this only partially works for me, I find this really works for me when I need to explain verbally concepts and react to people, the reaction via blogs is too asynchronous for me (slow), and the act of writing is not the same as speaking in this sense well at least not for me, Lilia feels differently. Hey Suzanne Vega and then Annie Briggs - what an old folk hippy I am!!

Trackbacks/Technorati

Seeing people link to your posts via their trackbacks or Technorati is super and very pleasing, albeit Technorati confuses the hell out of me I got, Lilia to show me how to add the RSS feed from Technorati to Bloglines. I should go back and explore the other useful functions

Comments

Are great but their integration is not there yet, when someone comments on my postings, and I get an email telling me I have a comment, I would like to reply via email to them and this lands in my blog as a reply to the comment as well as emailing the commenter, I think the comments section should be more like a little discussion board with threads and tied at the back end to emails and the blog automatically. But they are a good thing and you can overcome the above by replying in the comment but then cut n pasting it to email. Maybe this is a TypePad limitation ?. Comments spam is also a problem, but Google are on the offensive to help, so that may quell the problem for a while, after all I'm only 40 I don't need an Viagra just yet! Gee Supper's ready by Genesis I am definitely a hippy!

Posting pictures,

One thing I do a lot is post pictures of my furniture making activities, this receives lots of hits from my buddies on the UK Workshop Internet Discussion Forum and fellow furniture enthusiast in NL, but the picture section does not have a RSS feed which is a pity, and I do not want to clog my blog with it. TypePad have just launched some new multimedia templates which show recent photos on the front page better, but the templates don't seem to be editable, hence I cannot do that within my look and feel, hmm maybe I'll ask TypePad helpdesk about these issues

Hit maps - fascinating

I use the UK Open Universities service of hits maps where they geographically identify IP addresses and plot those on the world map, mine being a minor occasional blog does not have too many , but hey it's growing and I can even track people travelling (Aldo or Lilia may have logged in from Hawaii! recently) see right column low down. It's a bit scary seeing this map grow and grow, Lilia says she got scarred when Bloglines started to publish the number of subscribers you have, I feel a little of the same and my blog is hardly read compared to those power bloggers out there.

Improvements that would help me

Autotrackbacks, allow me to set in TypePad's interface when I type a particular word it automatically associates it with a URL set by me, i.e. every time I type Ton it adds the hyperlink to Interdependent Thoughts - I can always take it away if don't always want it, but I'm forever cut n pasting URL's, RSS feeds per category/channel, templates that don't require a programmers knowledge of the coding, and fully TypePad compatible off line web blog poster (w.blogger is pretty good but not 100%)

To sum up

So overall even though I have my Hema (Dutch version of M&S) underpants flapping in the wind, I'm very positive about finding my voice, talking to the Elliad and seeing who reads me. And see blogging as a long term project. Even the sad story of Waterstones sacking their employer recently because of slightly critical blog entries, does not deter me (All write to Waterstones stating how they won't get any more trade from you as I have done, I even enclosed a photo of our 3 x Bookcases that are 7 shelves each 1.2m wide and 2.5 meters high! Just to make my point. I am also very interested to see what the kids make of it in the years to come. This really can be a digital oral history we are all building here. And contrary to what Ton is feeling I do not feel blogging to be a lonely activity absolutely the opposite, it has very much widened my circle of friends, and here Euan is spot on with his BlogRoll as a village analogy

Ah another beer has arrived and Om Kalsum is half way through the 58 minute piece - Anta Oumri. Merci Bien

Brussels

I like Belgium a lot, nice people, great food, super beer, stunning fashion, and they are not gravity challenged as NL (they have hills, and great climbing), but I'm not so fond of Brussels. That French speaking enclave in the Flemish part of the country,  it has all the above (except hills naturally), but its crowded, busy, always full of road works, and 3.5 hours away from home, even with the Thalys which I'm on at the moment. Mind you I just afforded my self a small smile, I just had a munch at Quick that ever so French competitor to the big Mc's (or 'citadel of evil' as my old aussie veggie mate Jo calls them). I like supporting the underdog and the munch wasn't too bad either bacon that tasted as bacon should and a burger that seemed to emanate from a bull - hot fries and a jus d'orange with bits in it- tres bien!

I have been sharing my previous experiences with my Brussels based colleagues on the only part of business where we can ethically and professionally be sneaky - Competitive Intelligence - great fun.
Now I'm tuned into the MP3 jukebox (loads of Brel today - (how the bloody hell does it know I'm in Belgium - whoops paranoia again) but Max Boyce is playing at the moment - oh the days when we were great at Rugby!) sat on the Thalys in first class with a power socket and apparently a wifi connection (pity my work pc is radio silent so to speak). So thought I'd blog a bit via email . Hmm just had Cecelia Bartoli and now Metallica, what a great thing random play is!!!! Now Catatonia!

Help from you expert bloggers out there?

Well it's been a while since I blogged, the awful events that have happened in the Indian Ocean have been pre-occupying my mind and so my personal responses have been taking my creative energy.

Now to my question, I want to host a couple of blogs for work purposes but we want them to be private 'dark blogs' as Suw would call then and we want people from different companies to join in. So we cannot host them on our intranet, but internet hsoting is a of course public.

Now we can password protect blogs in the TypePad service - but that password protects the RSS feeds too and I don't think Bloglines or other aggregators can handle that.

Is that true?

I thought of a wiki but I think they are clumsy to use, we really want journal type blogs so these people can follow each others days at work.

So any suggestions on how to host 5 blogs, so no-one and no-thing (Google) can access them or see them apart from the five, but an externally hosted RSS aggregator (e.g BlogLines) can somehow read the feeds from them  - via user-id passwords?

Help much appreciated and beers (or beer quivs) will be bought for all useful contributions.