PigPog

And I found myself thinking…

If Fido Dido had a scrap with Purple Ronnie, who’d win?

I’m sorry, but this is yet another reason why we blog. To record odd brain farts like that.

"I was in a pissy mood. And determined to stay in a pissy mood, if for no reason other than to demonstrate how good and utterly convincing I can be at pissy moods." said Tom Peters in a recent blog entry of his. I can relate to what he means, as I have taken such a shine to life on Pissy Mood Island that I ought to buy property there.

Anything at the moment seems to put me in a pissy mood. Like people who’d rather ask me about their meeting than read the plethora of signs displayed on the path to their conference room. The taxi driver arriving to take my mate Darren home when I wanted 10 minutes to natter with him. Michael commenting that my snoring was so bad he contemplated calling the British Geological Survey to tell them not to worry, it’s not an earthquake, it was just me snoring. Apparently I am, to quote John Lennon, a ‘Window Rattler’.

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p>Pissy moods are a lot like bourbon biscuits. I’m not really keen on them, but I can’t stop having them.

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So I’ve been on eReader and bought another self help book. But I think it’s going to take more than that to get me off Pissy Mood Island, where the sullen evil twins of Ricardo Montalban and Herve Villechaize try to keep their guests’ pissy moods going for as long as possible by feeding them lines to keep them paranoid, insecure and pissed off.

"De plane! De plane!" – if you have no idea what I’m on about, search TV Cream for Fantasy Island, then go and berate yourself for being so damn young.

I’m thinking of putting together a Pissy Mood Survival Kit, but continuing the new PigPog blog technique of trotting off ideas as they appear, (see Michael’s blog for more info), I’ll leave this post here for the time being, and maybe continue when I decide what should go in the kit.

In keeping with my promise to post early and often, this isn’t all that well thought out, or even really finished, but I’m going to post it anyway. I might add more later if more occur to me…

• Notes – different to Outlook, treats every note as a file. Well, they had to do something to improve on the crapfest of Outlook notes.
• It’s damn pretty in VGA, though I actually pretty much guessed that.
• Wireless networks are handled pretty neatly (at least on the iPaq).
• Steer clear of third party software for a while, if you can. Just like with Palm, half of it has never been tested on your model, and it’ll crash a lot and waste memory.
• Filesystem. Weird.
• Cards appear as folders.
• Apps usually see every folder on all cards, but not in any way that makes sense. If you want to limit the spewed mess of folders, create a ‘My Documents’ folder on each card, move the folders you actually want to show up in apps into there, then delete the file ‘ignore_my_docs’ in the root of each card.
• The built in file manager isn’t too bad, but you’ll need RESCO File Explorer if you have cards, especially big cards. It also does zipping and unzipping, encryption, and FTP. Ignore what I said about steering clear of third party software. This one is pretty good.
• iSilo works just as well as it did on the Palm. It even ignores the usual PPC crappy filesystem view, and lets you see all the subfolders as you’d expect.

(Hey, a blog article about blogging – does that make me a Real Blogger now? Or do I have to take up the top half a screen with a huge logo and cram all the content into a two-inch wide column in the middle of the page first?

It struck me recently that there’s two main ways of blogging…

• Big posts, well written, but take time to write, and so only published occasionally.
• All thoughts posted quickly, not assembled into a real ‘article’, and not necessarily very thought out.

I tend towards the first. The problem with that is that a post takes quite a bit of time, so something has to keep my attention for quite a while to get written, and I have to find a fairly good block of time to be able to work on something. I posted a couple of times recently about getting an iPaq. Now I have an iPaq. I like my iPaq, and I want to blog about it, but I’ve not had a big enough chunk of time to write the sort of article I think it should get. I need to get more into doing the second type of posts, so I can actually share something without it taking half a day to write.

Maybe I’ll still want to do bigger, better written articles sometimes – but there’s a couple of ways of bringing the two types of posts together…

• Gapingvoid style – write articles, but keep editing and revising them each time you have more thoughts about it – kind of ‘growing’ articles, as referred to by Mark Forster.
• Just keep posting lots of little posts, then make a separate ‘big’ post built out of those thoughts.

The first means almost the same article getting reposted time and again, and people with feeds don’t want to re-read it every time you change a few words. The second means the big article will mainly be stuff people have seen before if they read the feeds, but ‘tidied up’ a bit. Probably best with a bit of a mix of the two. When there’s a clear ‘article’, post small, and keep editing and growing with time. When it’s just little thoughts and ideas, post anyway, and if they grow into a real ‘article’, do that too.

So, I’m going to try to post early and often. That means more half-baked crap, more gibberish, more spelling mistakes and typos, but on the plus side (debatable , more content.

In fact, to show my commitment to this idea, I’m not even going to bother to complete this arti

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p>“I was in a pissy mood. And determined to stay in a pissy mood, if for no reason other than to demonstrate how good and utterly convincing I can be at pissy moods.”

Tom Peters on the contagious effects of Enthusiasm!

Lovers spark emergency response: “Their dishevelled appearance was soon explained – it seems the physical activity taking place had been of the amorous rather than violent kind.”

Oh yes. The NorthEasterners are a passionate bunch. As I well know…

Gizmodo : Galactika LED Toilet Seat: “I’m not sure what’s better: the fact that someone finally developed a toilet seat filled with LEDs or the fact that they named it GALACTIKA. There are those who believe… that what we do here… began out there. Far across the apartment. In the kitchen.”

I really can’t decide on this one – do I want one or not? It looks cool, but the idea of my arse glowing blue as it decends is not a pleasant one. Hmm. It needs multi-colours and chasing patterns.

Wired News: Inventor Rejoices as TVs Go Dark: “For 10 seconds, Li kept looking, waiting, not blinking through his glasses. At last, he left his stool, trashed his plate and emerged into the cool autumn night.

Leaving, he passed 48-year-old Mitch Altman, who was twiddling a matte-black plastic fob on his key chain. Altman’s blue and purple hair reflected the pizza shop’s neon, and he was smiling excitedly.

‘We just saved him several minutes of his life,’ he said.”

Techdirt:Upside Down Fax Costs 100 Million Euros: “People make mistakes all the time, but how often can you think of a simple mistake that cost in the range of a 100 million euros? It’s even more impressive when you realize that mistake was putting important documents into the fax machine upside down.”

Whoopsie.

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Ad Graveyard: “A COPYWRITER DIES, and Saint Peter offers him a choice of Heaven or Hell. The writer asks to see both. Leading him to a doorway, Saint Peter says: ‘Here in Hell, we have a room just for copywriters.’”

A selection of ads deemed too tasteless for public consumption. If you have an email address and friends, you’ve probably seen at least 5 of these ads before.