Holiday season, and playing around with Google
So I'm on my three week year-end holiday - had some extra holidays to use up, go me :)
Christmas was fun: had turkey for Christmas for the first time ever, then played the role of "Dr Doris Johnson" in a murder mystery game with the family plus sister's new boyfriend and her flatmate. I certainly have the hair for the role, given that I haven't had a haircut for almost a year...
Had an awesome New Year, too - a repeat of last year's geek-fest at M+M's flat a few streets away. Ten people, two 360s with four controllers and copies of Halo, lots of movies (both great and terrible) on a big TV, lots of interesting bottles of ale (and even some champagne for the bells!), plus two roasts and a huge home-made chicken pie (my contribution :) ) to feed ten hungry people on New Year's Day.
New Year's Resolution: keep the flat tidier. Things had been building up a bit since both Nate and I had had persistent colds in the lead-up to the holidays, but we've blitzed the place clean... all we have to do is keep it that way!
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I'm playing with Google Calendar - very impressed so far, especially with the free SMS reminders. It's very slick. I also downloaded Mozilla Lightning and the Google Calendar plugin, which lets me see my calendar events in an Outlook-style Today Pane, which I've grown to love through using Outlook at work.
Since I was playing around with Google, I decided to Google 'camtarn' out of curiosity, to see how things had changed since I last did it a few years ago. The random short story I found ages ago which featured 'the Camtarn, a race of feline humanoids' has disappeared, to be replaced by a slew of my social networking site profiles. I also found a true blast from the past: The Junkyard, a website I ran way back in the day. Thing is, that page wasn't even the Junkyard as I left it: that's the site as it was when I moved it off GeoCities and onto a subdirectory of someone else's hosting. The last news update is from 1999... one decade ago, when I was fourteen o.O
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I usually Twitter by posting status updates on Facebook, which then gets them to Twitter via some intermediate site that I've forgotten the name of. Unfortunately, Facebook status updates are longer than Twitters, which leads to truncation...
"Andrew had a great office xmas party... curry, beer, cynicism awards, LAN games, Rock Band and ping-pong :3 And nobody photocopied their ..."
:)
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Also played around with Spotify, an ad-supported streaming music site. Very impressed - the interface is really slick, and it's got free-to-stream MP3s of pretty much everything, including one album which isn't on Amazon MP3, and another album which I can't even find a CD version of. I hope this one gets big... I love the idea of just being able to say "I want to hear that song", then having it playing a few seconds later.
Christmas was fun: had turkey for Christmas for the first time ever, then played the role of "Dr Doris Johnson" in a murder mystery game with the family plus sister's new boyfriend and her flatmate. I certainly have the hair for the role, given that I haven't had a haircut for almost a year...
Had an awesome New Year, too - a repeat of last year's geek-fest at M+M's flat a few streets away. Ten people, two 360s with four controllers and copies of Halo, lots of movies (both great and terrible) on a big TV, lots of interesting bottles of ale (and even some champagne for the bells!), plus two roasts and a huge home-made chicken pie (my contribution :) ) to feed ten hungry people on New Year's Day.
New Year's Resolution: keep the flat tidier. Things had been building up a bit since both Nate and I had had persistent colds in the lead-up to the holidays, but we've blitzed the place clean... all we have to do is keep it that way!
---
I'm playing with Google Calendar - very impressed so far, especially with the free SMS reminders. It's very slick. I also downloaded Mozilla Lightning and the Google Calendar plugin, which lets me see my calendar events in an Outlook-style Today Pane, which I've grown to love through using Outlook at work.
Since I was playing around with Google, I decided to Google 'camtarn' out of curiosity, to see how things had changed since I last did it a few years ago. The random short story I found ages ago which featured 'the Camtarn, a race of feline humanoids' has disappeared, to be replaced by a slew of my social networking site profiles. I also found a true blast from the past: The Junkyard, a website I ran way back in the day. Thing is, that page wasn't even the Junkyard as I left it: that's the site as it was when I moved it off GeoCities and onto a subdirectory of someone else's hosting. The last news update is from 1999... one decade ago, when I was fourteen o.O
---
I usually Twitter by posting status updates on Facebook, which then gets them to Twitter via some intermediate site that I've forgotten the name of. Unfortunately, Facebook status updates are longer than Twitters, which leads to truncation...
"Andrew had a great office xmas party... curry, beer, cynicism awards, LAN games, Rock Band and ping-pong :3 And nobody photocopied their ..."
:)
---
Also played around with Spotify, an ad-supported streaming music site. Very impressed - the interface is really slick, and it's got free-to-stream MP3s of pretty much everything, including one album which isn't on Amazon MP3, and another album which I can't even find a CD version of. I hope this one gets big... I love the idea of just being able to say "I want to hear that song", then having it playing a few seconds later.