meet the press
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I’m listening to meet the press by NBC and it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking as the governor. It’s quite amusing.
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The night before Christmas
Byrichard
It’s the night before Christmas day and it’s been relaxed.
With the thermal inversion it’s easy to get above the clouds, simply get in a car and go to the mountains and you’ll get a nice view of the sunshine. We went to the vallée de Joux and that’s where you find many of the watch factories. This includes Audemars Piguet amongst others.
Tomorrow’s Christmas day, then 6 days till the new year.
There Are Two Parts To The World Wide Web
Byrichard
the future of the web
the search engine was the king, now it’s social networking.
People had their own home page, now it’s grown to their own website. The blog was grown and grown, replacing webrings
to be developed
For several years the search engine was king. This was the place where everyone went to find content because all the information was so disorganised. Recently though this has changed. The way people use the world wide web has evolved. Whereas people in the past would create just one webpage with a little content people are now creating entire websites.
These websites are not websites in the sense that they were back in the late nineties, rather they are profiles. It used to be that you’d create a static HTML page that would need to be updated manually through the hot metal code. With CGI-bin and later technologies, the nature of the homepage has changed.
Remember Geocities? It’s been replaced by myspace. Remember the discussion about web portals and yahoo and google were trying to corner the market to get the highest audience. That has changed. Look at Digg, Facebook, Bebo, twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. All of these websites are about one thing. Community. They are only interesting as long as your friends are members; no friends means no way of using it. I was a member of myspace for months before anyone I knew joined and by the time had joined I re-created a profile having forgotten the other profile.
It’s the same with Facebook. I joined it a few months before anyone from my environment started using it but recently everyone has started using Facebook to communicate. Not just this, they’re also uploading their lives to the web. So am I. There are two issues that are interesting to look at. For anyone wanting to do a dissertation why not look at the changing nature of privacy with the rise of the social networking website. When I was studying for my HND privacy was key and release forms were essential. Now it’s as though everyone is a publisher and the nature of privacy has changed. It goes along the lines of “Don’t upload anything too compromising or embarrassing”. Your network of friends can see everything. Friends from your high school days can see all your university friends and vice versa.
This promotes the expansion of social circles. Whereas in the past networks of friends were mutually exclusive due to location they are joined online. Take some videos of when you’re at a party in Switzerland and those in England can see it, and so can their friends if you so choose. It’s a shame you can’t select for only one network to see videos rather than others, for example, only London friends can see the London videos and Switzerland friends can see those. It would make uploading certain videos possible.
Anyway, the web has become personal. Within the last 6 months or so I’ve seen the web go from being about avatars and nicknames to being about real names and real networks. It’s about bringing the offline world online and vice versa. This is where I believe for there to have been a shift in perception of what the web is for. Almost everyone I know and see regularly is now on Facebook. It’s amusing to see how it’s become mainstream.
It’s as though Facebook has become a portal although not in the 1998 sense of the word. There is a new part of the internet. If you imagine the web to be like drupal then imagine that Yahoo and Geocities are the old gateways to the World Wide Web whilst various social networking websites are a new ad important portal with one major difference. These portals aggregate and distribute your content to your friends around the world. You’re no longer going online for research. You’re going online because you’re socialising. It’s replaced, at least partially, socialising in the real world whilst nonetheless providing a great way of sharing content. Both “user-generated” and “interactive” have become keywords in describing what the web is today.
In summary, whereas two or three years ago the Web was somewhere people came to find information for future use the web has evolved into an interactive user-generated medium. As a result of this, I think the world wide web has added another node to what purposes it serves.
Web 1.0: static and hard to interact anonymously vs web 2.0: highly interactive user-generated content where real names are now used, especially in places like Facebook.
Pay-to-win Futility.
Byrichard
Several years ago a friend told me about Clash of Clans and I began to play the game. The game is an enjoyable distraction for when you have a minute or two three. You perform a few actions and then you get on with your other tasks. When you play for free patience is an asset. You have to wait to get enough gold, elixir or gems before you can complete certain actions. The game is designed in such a way that you can play for years and still progress.
I like to joke that the Pay  to Win model is both encouraging and training people to bribe their way through life. If you’re impatient you pay a little supplement and you complete the action. Instead of taking a week for an action to be completed it takes seconds. Supercell has made millions this way as individuals spend more than a thousand euros. Those who are willing to pay get to the top of the leaderboard.
Two factors that discourage Paying To Win.
The first reason is that I come from the early days of computer games when you paid for a game once and you could play for as long as you had free time. It was a time when Civilization 3, Gunship 2000, Doom and other games were around. With games like Clash of Clans, you spend more than you would spend on a good meal and you only progress a little.
The second is that accounts are or at least, were, platform specific. I started playing Clash of Clans when I had an iPhone. When I switched to Android I lost my progress and had to start again. It has taken more than a year to get back to the same level. If you pay on ios your progress is not reflected on Android and vice versa. It’s nice to have two level50+ games but imagine if I had paid to get the game on both platforms to be at the same level.
Clash Royale
Recently they came up with Clash Royale. This is another Pay to Win game and as you can see from the screengrab above it is currently the top grossing app on the play store, at least in Switzerland.
They released the game to a restricted number of countries at first. Some players were at an advantage. They could play and progress in the game. We were easier to beat as we arrived later.  Now we find it easier to beat the newcomers, as we have learned strategies to be victorious more often.
People who are less patient, less humble have obviously paid a lot of money to progress. I prefer to wait and progress for free.
On dissapointment
Byrichard
Student unions are one of the best places to meet people and make new contacts. It’s a place where drinks are cheap and normal rules no longer apply.
At least that’s what they’d have you believe. The undercroft is one of the worst student bars in the United Kingdom for a number of reasons, firstly the prices, highest in the UK, secondly the location, a basement with rats scurrying about. thirdly poor management, the reason for which many of the staff quit the job.
For over two months now I’ve been unable to go due to the management, not the staff, taking a dislike to me.
I went in today, not planning to get anything to drink because a friend wanted to drop down. The manager took a minute or two before he asked me to leave. I had not had the time to do anything of any sort.
I’m disappointed because tonight is the first night that everyone is back from holiday and I can’t go to be with those I’ve studied and had fun with for two years. I enjoyed the convenience of that bar being so close. After tonight the bar is so empty there is no reason to go anyway but tonight could have been different.
On the positive side, I’ve just started my six-day weekend and one friend in the same year is wondering what to do to occupy all our free time. Shall we find work, shall we live at home and commute only for the lessons? Shall we spend three or four days a week on dissertation work? I think so.
I need to find work. I need to carry out phase two of the research, interviews, and discussion groups before starting phase three, the first draft, and subsequent copies.
Last night I watched the Nile DVD and it’s interesting to see how different it is. It’s an anthropological documentary, taking time to speak first about the geography of the place, secondly about the people and thirdly about how they’re affecting the environment. It’s an interesting documentary that lasts about 100 minutes, 50 minutes per part. Already I’ve written notes about it and I’m getting closer to seeing how it’ll fit in as one of the case examples for what I’m talking about.
I still need to read through the two dissertations I have. It’s going to be interesting to have so much time to work on one project. A documentary about the differences and similarities between the two documentary genre.
Hours of fun as long as I organise my time so well as not to feel any pressure.
Cooking at the table
Byrichard
It’s a wooden tray with two sauces on the left, a dish to the right with chips, at the back some vegetables. Front and centre you find a slab of stone. It’s very hot. That’s because it’s Entrecote sur ardoise, similar to a steak. There’s a hot slab of stone and you use it to cook your meal on top. It’s delicious.
snow fight at 3am
Byrichard
Snow began to fall this morning at 3 am and a group of those living in halls went out to enjoy the fresh snow. it was falling for several hours and everyone was enjoying it. There were snowball fights between the premiums and the standards.
That’s Premium block and standard blocks.
Some people were continuously pelted with snow whilst others simply enjoyed being out in the snow.
A remote-controlled car was there driving around but struggling. The tires were skidding. When will these people learn that you accelerate slowly in snow and gradually build up speed?
I’ve got a video of this morning but I still have to capture it.